Unlike the term ‘‘Neoplatonist,’’ which is commonly received among Hellenists to refer to the Alexandrian School, Arabic philosophy scholars have till recently debated whether we should refer to the latter and its members as Aristotelian, Neo-Aristotelian, Neoplatonizing Aristotelian, or representing Neoplatonized Aristotelian-ism. As for the latter two denominations, possibly coined by McGinnis and Reisman (2005), they seem a fitting description of the reception of the Alexandrian commentary tradition on Aristotle into Arabic. But none of these terms would befit qua qualifications of the Alexandrian
School itself, unless one ignored that Alexandrian philosophers also wrote commentaries on Plato and almost certainly acknowledged the authority of the Chaldean Oracles. What thus possibly characterizes Arabic philosophy in its first stage does not apply to its Alexandrian sources. Historically speaking, the main question to address is what happened between the departure to Constantinople of Stephanus, the probable last headmaster of the School, at the beginning of the seventh century (about 610), and the very beginnings of philosophy in Arabic, which can tentatively be traced back to the time of Ibn al-Muqaffa' (c. 720-756). Doctrinally speaking, a related issue to address is how Neoplatonism became Neoplatonized Aristotelianism. Both questions have received various and sometimes contradictory answers.
This problem of appellation not only reflects the debate among specialists of Greek philosophy about the comparative assessment of the doctrinal trend within each one of the Neoplatonist Schools of Athens and Alexandria, but also reflects the lack of agreement on the nature and proportion of Neoplatonism which entered the first doctrinal elaborations by Arab or Arabic-speaking philosophers during the ninth and tenth centuries. Among the global appraisals which currently prevail in Arabic scholarship, I will content myself with sketching out those that have something to do with Alexandria and its influence. As far as I know, there are two.
The first significant global assessment was documented by Endress in some of his studies. Endress considers that the Arabic philosophers’ progressive realization of the autonomy of philosophy vis-a-vis the only other, religious, form of knowledge, viewed at that time as the knowledge par excellence, occurred alongside a growing emphasis on philosophy’s rigorously rational and demonstrative nature. In other words, as Greek philosophy was being translated, Arabic philosophers became increasingly aware of what might separate them and their discipline from the religious sciences practiced by clerics. That all Arabic Peripatetic philosophers considered religion a lower rhetorical or dialectical form of knowledge also originated in this conception of philosophy as a demonstrative science.
The second assessment was by Wisnovsky (2004:151) who helpfully described it as follows: ‘‘In one sense Avicenna stands as the culmination of the ‘Ammonian synthesis,’ which I take to be the attempt by Ammonius son of Hermeias, and his successors such as Asclepius (fl. 525), John Philoponus (d. c. 570), and al-FarabI (d. 950), to fold the broader, Neoplatonic project of reconciling Aristotle with Plato, into the narrower, Peripatetic project of reconciling Aristotle with himself.’’ Wisnovsky’s studies on
Avicenna show firstly how a wide range of Neoplatonic texts, many of which belong to the Alexandrian tradition, influenced Avicenna’s interpretation of Aristotle; and secondly, why a correct assessment of Avicenna’s achievements in metaphysical inquiries can only be accounted for if one assumes that he in some way knew Ammonius’ interpretation of the Metaphysics, as reported in Asclepius’ and Philoponus’ respective commentaries on Metaphysics and Physics. Recently, Bertolacci (2006) also drew attention to the influence of Ammonius’ metaphysics on al-Farabl. And Vallat’s study (2004) is entirely devoted to the impact of the School of Alexandria on al-Farabl’s understanding of philosophy as pedagogy.
In order to further characterize the Alexandrian tradition and the way Arabic philosophy inherited from it a part of its salient trends, one must not only take into account the tenet of the concordant reading of Plato and Aristotle, but also the role ascribed firstly to Aristotle and then to Plato within the Alexandrian curriculum of studies. Roughly speaking, one may state that Aristotle stands here for the logical and physical method of inquiry, and Plato for the dialectical and theological approach (see, e. g., Elias, In Cat., p. 124, 17-23: sentence known in Arabic) as well as for all the doctrinal elements related to the salvation of the human soul. Thus, although Plato as an author disappeared from the very conception of the Arabic curriculum of studies for lack of translations, this articulation between rational physical science and theological knowledge lived on in the form of the connection between discursive or dianoetic understanding and an intuitive kind of knowledge. In other terms, even though the juncture between these two kinds of perceptual activities no longer applied to Aristotle and Plato but to Aristotle and his Neoplatonizing interpretation, the fact remains that a great deal of Arabic philosophers, and especially all Peripatetic philosophers, whatever their religion, admitted the need for articulating science with theology and, ultimately, for ordaining both of them to the eudemonic state attained through the conjunction of the perfected human intellect with a metaphysical entity, whether God, the Agent Intellect or a Celestial Intellect. Albeit schematic, this survey shows how Alexandrian Platonism mainly survived in Arabic philosophy through the Aristotelian texts and therefore beyond. In one unique case Platonism also meant politics (on this, see the entry on al-FarabI in this volume).
World History
