The Death of falsafa as a Self-Description of Philosophy

Abstract

Al-Ghazali’s Precipitance of the Philosophers (Tahafut al-falasifa), published in 488/1095, changed the way the label falsafa was understood in Arabic scientific literature. Falsafa is a calque from the Greek word philosophía, and before al-Ghazali it was widely understood in a sense similar to the Greek word, namely as a reference to the scientific discipline and discourse that began with the works of Plato and Aristotle and continued in Arabic with al-Kindi or al-Farabi. Based on an earlier use of the term in kalam literature, however, al-Ghazali understood falsafa as a reference to a particular set of teachings put forward by one particular group of philosophers, namely the followers of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, d. 428/1037). Scholars of the sixth/twelfth century largely adopted this meaning of falsafa, so that in subsequent Arabic and Persian scientific literature the word was mostly used as a reference to Avicenna’s teaching and to Avicennism and not as a reference to the discipline and discourse of philosophy as such.