Why medieval thinkers ranked al-Farabi second only to Aristotle
Later writers gave al-Farabi a remarkable nickname: the Second Master, with Aristotle as the first. He built the earliest full philosophical system in the Islamic world, wrote a vast treatise on music, and poked holes in alchemy's dream of cooking up gold, yet almost nothing reliable survives about his life.
Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi, called Alpharabius in Latin Europe, was born around 870 and died in Damascus in the winter of 950 to 951. Biographers writing centuries afterwards had so few facts that they invented anecdotes. Even his birthplace is uncertain, because farab is a Persian word for land watered by springs or diverted river water, and many Central Asian places carried the name, from Otrar in modern Kazakhstan to a village near Türkmenabat. His ethnic origin is argued over too; Thérèse-Anne Druart noted in 2020 that recent research leans toward Persian rather than Turkic roots, and Dimitri Gutas points to glosses in Persian, Sogdian and Greek in his works.
What is secure is that he spent most of his scholarly career in Baghdad among Syriac Christian teachers. The Nestorian cleric Yuhanna ibn Haylan took him through the logic curriculum as far as Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, and he recounted how Greek philosophy had passed from Alexandria to Antioch and onward. Although mainly an Aristotelian logician, he took up Stoic ideas such as conditional syllogisms and analogical reasoning, and coined the notion of a poetic syllogism while commenting on the Poetics.
His Great Book of Music, Kitab al-Musiqi al-Kabir, treated music as something with cosmic dimensions and therapeutic power, explaining how different kinds of music act on the soul and how melody should be fitted to poetry to strengthen its meaning. He was a practising musician as well as a theorist.
In a treatise on the elixir he defended alchemy as a worthwhile science while rejecting its central fantasy: there is only the gold and silver we know, he argued, and no educated person should believe ordinary stone can become either. He wanted would-be alchemists to study mineralogy, and philosophy before that. His influence ran through Avicenna and Averroes to Maimonides and Albertus Magnus, and modern scholars still dispute whether his political vision of a utopia led by prophets and imams reflects Shia leanings.
Source: Al-Farabi
