He commissioned a translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and...

He commissioned a translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and commented upon some of Aristotle’s logical writings, such as Categorize, De interpretation, Analytica posterior and Analytica priora - and also on De caelo, as we are informed by Ibn al-Nadim. He had before him even the otherwise lost Aristotelian dialogue Eudemus, a fragment of which he transmitted.

Al-Kindi was eager to intgroduce Greek philosophy and science to his Arabicspeaking “co-linguists” (ahl lisanina), as he often stressed, and opposed the orthodox matakallimun who rejected foreign knowledge. As long as he enjoyed the caliphs’ protection he was free to do so and did not feel compelled to defend his philosophical stand as was the case with so many later scientists who came under pressure at the hand of the orthodox legalists.

As long as al-Kindi clung to tenets held by Late Greek Neo-Platonists, mostly Christians, who believed in one God who had created the world out of nothing, he was in apparent harmony with the divine law of Islam. But as soon as he adopted pagan philosophical doctrines, especially those of Aristotle, he openly deviated from the revealed truth of Islam.

His view adduced in the name of Aristotle - that one should gratefully accept any contribution to truth, wherever it comes from, even from Greek philosophy - is incompatible with the exclusive postulate of Islam as the sole mediator of truth. Al-Kindi’s own philosophical stand reflects the doctrines he found in Greek Classical and, above all, Neo-Platonism sources. His treatises On Definitions and Descriptions of Things may be accepted on the whole as the base of his own views.

He supposedly extracted the definitions from Greek literature with the intention of giving a summary of Greek philosophy in definitions. As I have shown elsewhere, many of these definitions from Aristotelian works and his predilection for Aristotle cannot be ignored even where he extracted from spurious sources which were at the time attributed to Aristotle. The lemmata and their arrangement correspond to a Neo-Platonist source.

God is referred to in the first definition as the “First Cause”, similar to Plotinus’ “First Agent”, an expression al- Kindi has likewise made use of, 26or to his “the One is the cause of the cause”. 27The subsequent definitions in al-Kidi’s treatise are arranged in an order that distinguishes between the upper world and the lower world.