The Influence of Aristotle and Neoplatonism on Eastern Philosophy

The Hellenic influence, contrary to this theology, spread mainly through translations from Greek into Syriac by Nestorian Christians, who, first at the school of Edessa (431-489), then in the cloisters of Syria, and finally, in the seventh century, at Kennesra on the Euphrates, translated, in addition to Aristotle’s Organon, the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise On the World and the works of Galen. In the nineteenth century, after the founding of Baghdad, many translations were made into Arabic, either from Syriac or from Greek, and the caliph himself founded, in 832, a sort of translation office in his capital. Towards the end of the 9th century, an Arab possessed in his own language almost the entire work of Aristotle (except the Politics), with the commentaries of Alexander, Porphyry, Themistius, Ammonius, and John Philoponus; he could also know some of Plato’s dialogues such as the Timaeus, the Republic, and the Sophist; Greek doxography was accessible to him, thanks to the translation of Plutarch’s Opinions of the Philosophers, not to mention the forgeries of Empedocles and Pythagoras; finally, medicine, with Galen, and astronomy, with Ptolemy’s Almagest, were known to him.

How did they use these materials? Their interpretation of Aristotle was dominated by two treatises falsely attributed to him. Around 840, a selection of excerpts from seven treatises from the last three Enneads of Plotinus was translated into Arabic under the name Theology of Aristotle; The translation is preceded by a preface which is a summary of the Neoplatonic theory of hypostases; to the triad God, Intelligence and Soul (where each term derives from the previous one), he adds a fourth term, Nature, which derives from the soul; and he makes each of these four terms correspond to the four causes of Aristotle, final, formal, motor and material. Among the extracts is the entire second treatise of the fifth Ennead, which contains in short form the entire doctrine of Plotinus. The second treatise, falsely attributed to Aristotle, is the Book of Causes, which contains extracts from the Elements of Theology of Proclus.

Under these influences, Arab philosophy, insofar as it follows the Greeks, is essentially constituted by a Neo-Platonic interpretation of the entire work of Aristotle, in which appear in the foreground, with the two treatises we have just mentioned, Book A of the Metaphysics and Book VIII of the Physics, which contain Aristotle’s speculations on the driving Intelligence of the two, as well as Book III of the Soul, which treats of the nature of intellectual knowledge. Now one cannot conceive of anything more different, in certain respects, than the spirit of Aristotle and that of Neo-Platonism: on the one hand, a rationalist empiricism, a logical technique, a positive orientation; on the other hand, a sort of mythology of spiritual forces in which the universe appears bathed, and which one grasps by intuition.