Al-Kindi Quotes on Knowledge
Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Isḥāq al-Kindī (c. 801–c. 873), the principal philosopher of the Abbasid translation movement and conventionally called "the Philosopher of the Arabs," gave the early Islamic philosophical tradition its founding programmatic statement in On First Philosophy (Fī al-Falsafa al-Ūlā). The framework defends the systematic appropriation of the Greek philosophical inheritance — Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Pythagorean, and the corresponding mathematical sciences — as the proper instrument by which the rational human soul attains the genuine knowledge of first causes, against the suspicion that non-Muslim philosophical learning was religiously suspect or epistemically inferior to the indigenous Arab linguistic and poetic sciences then dominant.
Quotes
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“We ought not to be ashamed of acknowledging truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples.”
Fi’l-falsafa al-ula ("On First Philosophy") in M. A. Abu Rida (ed.) Rasa’ il al-Kindi al-falsafiyya (Cairo, 1950), p. 103; trans. R. Walzer in Greek into Arabic (Oxford, 1962), p. 12; reported in Albert Hourani , A History of the Arab Peoples , 2nd ed. (2005) ch. 4 -
Attributed to Al-Kindi:
“Philosophy is the knowledge of things in their realities, insofar as is possible for man.”
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Attributed to Al-Kindi:
“Knowledge of the cause is more excellent than knowledge of the effect.”
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Attributed to Al-Kindi:
“There is nothing more excellent for the soul than the acquisition of knowledge.”
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“Ibid. , trans. Alfred L. Ivry, Al-Kindi's Metaphysics (SUNY Press, 1978) p. 58”
We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. For the seeker of truth nothing takes precedence over the truth.