THE ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY 



Moslems through the translations from the Syriac. 

 In this manner they became familiar with the works 

 of Aristotle, whose empiric teaching accorded much 

 better with their needs than the idealism of Plato. 

 They valued, at first especially, the practical utility 

 of Aristotle's works on medicine (in which their own 

 knowledge soon far exceeded that of Europe), on 

 physics, and on astronomy. The latter two were 

 so closely allied to philosophy that they soon felt its 

 need, especially in the use of dialectics. Thus, while 

 the schools opened by Charlemagne in his empire 

 were struggling over the primers of the language, or 

 at the utmost with the grammar as then taught, the 

 schools of Baghdad were in possession and in familiar 

 use of many of the works of Aristotle that did not 

 reach Europe until the latter part of the twelfth cen- 

 tury. Many of these books, as well as numbers of other 

 ancient writings, have only reached us through their 

 preservation in the Arabic version. The Arabic 

 philosophy was thus almost exclusively the peripa- 

 tetic, more or less tinctured by neoplatonism. Thus 

 Avicenna (Ibn-Sina, b. 980) sought to reconcile the 

 existence of the Absolute the Unapproachable with 

 the sublunary world by establishing a chain of inter- 

 mediate spheres or links by which the pure energy 

 was communicated to all the varieties of matter.* 



* S. Munk: Philosophic Juive et Arabe. P. 445. 

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