Al Kindi, Arab philosopher of the Middle Ages

Al Kindi, the first famous Muslim philosopher, lived during the ninth century, in Basra and in Baghdad. His life coincided with the cultural heyday of the city of a Thousand and One Nights in which he worked on the translations entrusted to him by the Caliphs.

He was an encyclopedist of all the knowledge of Greek such as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, optics, music, medicine, logic and psychology. What my students call; "A Cappo, man." 

Al Kindi wrote the commentary to the first eight chapters of Ptolemy's Almagest: Book on the major art in which he exposes the achievements of Greek scientists in their search for truth.

In addition, Al Kindi wrote about the books of Aristotle in which he incorporates distant thoughts of Islam because he considered philosophy as a knowledge consistent with the revealed truth, thus continuing the Neoplatonic tradition.

He considered reason as the source of knowledge that settled in the soul and in reasoning. Al Kindi was the first Muslim philosopher to try to relate philosophy and science.

In his work on the first philosophy he maintained that; "The knowledge of the true nature of things is included the knowledge of divinity, the knowledge of the uniqueness of God and the knowledge of virtue And, in addition, a complete knowledge of all that is useful."

It happens that, Al Kindi believed that the understanding is always in action being as an intelligence or spiritual substance distinct from the soul, superior to it to become "intelligence in the act."

The philosopher sustained the "existence of two worlds." One of them was the intelligible world and the other the sensitive. One would be a mere shadow and reflection of the other. Al Kindi was born to heaven in 873.

Lía Olga Herrera Soto