Islamic Peripateticism

Islamic Peripateticism (falsafa, or the mashsha'i tradition) is the school of philosophy that developed within the Islamic world from the ninth century CE by adapting the logical and metaphysical framework of Aristotle, transmitted through Syriac and Arabic translations, to questions raised by Islamic revelation. Al-Kindi initiated systematic engagement with Greek philosophy, al-Farabi developed a Neoplatonic-Aristotelian synthesis on emanation and political philosophy, and Ibn Sina (Avicenna) produced the tradition's most influential system, distinguishing necessary from contingent existence and arguing for God as the Necessary Existent from which all else emanates. The tradition provoked sustained controversy within Islamic thought, most famously in al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers, which charged the falasifa with unbelief on points including the eternity of the world and the denial of bodily resurrection, a critique Ibn Rushd (Averroes) answered at length in Islamic Spain in his Incoherence of the Incoherence. Islamic Peripatetic philosophy declined as an independent tradition in the central Islamic lands after the twelfth century but survived through Averroes's commentaries into medieval Latin and Jewish philosophy, where it shaped Scholastic engagement with Aristotle for centuries.