al-Kindī | |
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Portrait of al-Kindi
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Born | c. 801 Basra, Abbasid Caliphate |
Died | c. 873 (aged approx. 72) Baghdad, Abbasid Caliphate |
Era | Medieval era (Islamic Golden Age) |
Region | Middle East, Arab world, Muslim world |
School | Islamic theology, philosophy |
Main interests
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Philosophy, logic, ethics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, psychology, pharmacology, medicine, metaphysics, cosmology, astrology, music theory, Islamic theology (kalam) |
Influences
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Abu Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq aṣ-Ṣabbāḥ al-Kindī (Arabic: أبو يوسف يعقوب بن إسحاق الصبّاح الكندي, Latin: Alkindus) (c. 801–873 AD), known as "the Philosopher of the Arabs", was a Muslim Arab philosopher, polymath, mathematician, physician and musician. Al-Kindi was the first of the Muslim peripatetic philosophers, and is unanimously hailed as the "father of Islamic or Arabic philosophy" for his synthesis, adaptation and promotion of Greek and Hellenistic philosophy in the Muslim world.
Al-Kindi was a descendant of the Kinda tribe. He was born in Basra and educated in Baghdad. Al-Kindi became a prominent figure in the House of Wisdom, and a number of Abbasid Caliphs appointed him to oversee the translation of Greek scientific and philosophical texts into the Arabic language. This contact with "the philosophy of the ancients" (as Greek philosophy was often referred to by Muslim scholars) had a profound effect on his intellectual development, and led him to write hundreds of original treatises of his own on a range of subjects ranging from metaphysics, ethics, logic and psychology, to medicine, pharmacology, mathematics, astronomy, astrology and optics, and further afield to more practical topics like perfumes, swords, jewels, glass, dyes, zoology, tides, mirrors, meteorology and earthquakes.