Ibn Hazm...

Ibn Hazm, in his studies of logic emphasized sense-perception as a source of knowledge. Later Ibn Taymiyah, refuting the Aristotelian logic showed that induction was the only form of reliable inference. It was the method of observation and experiment which led Al-Biruni to the discovery of reaction time, al-Kindi to the formula that sensation is a response of the organism proportionate to the stimulus, and Ibn Al Haitham to his findings in optics.

Briffault, inThe Making of Humanity, (London, 1928, pp. 200-201) wrote: “the debt of our science to that of the Arabs does not consist in startling discoveries of revolutionary theories; science owes a great deal more to Arab culture, it owes its existence.” The ancient world was pre-scientific. The astronomy and mathematics of the Greeks were a foreign importation never thoroughly acclimatized in Greek culture.

The Greeks systematized, generalized, and theorized, but the patient ways of investigation, the accumulation of positive knowledge, the minute methods of science, detailed and prolonged observation and experimental inquiry were altogether alien to the Greek temperament. Only in Hellenistic Alexandria was any approach to scientific work conducted in the ancient classical world.

What we call science arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry, of new methods of investigation, of the methods of experiment, observation, and measurement, of the development of mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs. C. Humanism, philosophy, scholasticism. Muslim philosophy influenced Western thought in several ways.

It mainly initiated in the West the humanistic movement and helped the Western scholastics in harmonizing philosophy with faith. Muslims gave a humanist bend to the Western mind. They revealed to the West that outside the prevailing catholic church it was not all darkness and barbarism but immense wealth of knowledge. Before any direct contact between the Greek intellect and the Western mind was established, Arabs had captured and further developed all the intellectual achievements of Greece.

It was also due to their influence that men outside the Christian West began to be considered as human and even possessors of higher civilizations.