Method, Structure, and Development in al-Farabi's Cosmology

Although there has been sustained attention paid to the works of Islamic philosopher al-Farabi (d. 950 CE) in the Western world, his cosmology has been relatively neglected, according to Janos (a research fellow at Georg-August-U., Germany), in spite of its influence on the works of Ibn Sina (or Avicenna), Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, and the Ismaili tradition (as exemplified by Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani). His exploration of al-Farabi's cosmology draws on Greek and Arabic sources and provides a dual-tracked approach to the subject. It considers the roots of al-Farabi's cosmological and metaphysical concepts such as celestial substance, causation, intellection, and motion in ancient Greek philosophy and as they were adapted and transformed in early Arabic thought; thus to elucidate the new meaning they acquired in the thought of al-Farabi. At the same time, it seeks to describe al-Farabi's thought as a contextualized expression of the particulars of 10th-century cosmopolitan Baghdad. Emphasis is placed on the relations between astronomy, physics, and metaphysics and on how these disciplines interrelate in terms of the methodology and content in al-Farabi's cosmology. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Damien Janos, PhD (2009, McGill University), is presently a research fellow working at Georg-August-University in Gottingen, Germany. His research focuses on the history of Arabic philosophy, especially cosmology and metaphysics, about which he has written several articles.