Essay Questions

How does Alfarabi draw on the works and ideas of Plato and Aristotle?

Being thoroughly educated in philosophical tradition, Alfarabi was quite familiar with the works of both Plato and Aristotle, two highly influential philosophers from ancient Greece, and the evidence of their impact on him can be seen in almost all of his works. Some of them actually explicitly deal with the works of these two thinkers, such as "The Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle." In this work, Alfarabi takes the seemingly disparate philosophies of these two influential thinkers and attempts to prove that they are essentially compatible, saying that the foundational principles of philosophy between the two are actually held in common. He also wrote a book called "Summary of Plato's Laws," which is, as the title suggests, a summary of the first nine books of Plato's Laws, as well as explanatory analyses.

Other works in Alfarabi's corpus draw on the ideas of Plato and Aristotle more subtly. "Selected Aphorisms," for example, claims to summarize the ideas of "the Ancients" in its pithy statements, and a quick examination of the contents is enough to prove the identities of these Ancients, as Alfarabi is drawing on both Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in these aphorisms. "The Political Regime" is another nod to Plato, as it incorporates the use of an imaginary city ("the virtuous city") as an illustration of the human soul. Plato was the first one to do this, as he did in the Republic. References like these are everywhere in Alfarabi's writing, and his philosophy is so similar to that of Plato that some experts have labeled him a Neoplatonist.

Explain the large-scale analogy of the body and the soul Alfarabi uses in "Selected Aphorisms."

In the first aphorism in the work, Alfarabi compares the health of the soul to the health of the body: both rely on maintaining equilibrium between all present elements. He goes on to develop this analogy further: just as the physician has the responsibility to heal the bodies of his patients, so does the statesman (ruler, king) have the responsibility to heal the souls of his subjects. This analogy is used in many different ways throughout the work (and even in other works, such as "Book of Religion"). The body is an easily visualizable concept, and it helps the reader substantially to be able to tie Alfarabi's intangible theories to something tangible and applicable in real life.