A recepção de textos neoplatônicos na civilização islâmica da idade média

Abstract

The reception of Plato in the Islamic world, and especially in philosophy (falsafa), occurred mainly through the teachings of the schools of late antiquity, grounded on the writings of Plato - though without access to most of the original works - and on works of Aristotle, as well as of peripatetic and neoplatonic commentators. In 2005 Cristina D’Ancona pointed to a “close relationship between the rise of falsafa and the way in which philosophy was conceived of in the Neoplatonic schools at the end of antiquity”. The philosophers of classical Islam have customarily seen Plato under the influence of Neoplatonic interpreters such as Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus, though they were often unaware of the true origin of the ideas they analyzed and discussed, and often attributed them to Aristotle. The Platonic theory of Ideas (Forms), known by the philosophers of Islam mainly through late Neoplatonic interpretations of the works of Aristotle, had a very special fortune in the medieval Islamic civilization. A paradigmatic case is that of Al-Fārābī, in whom, according to ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Badawī, all subsequent currents of thought of Islam find their source. Al-Fārābī oscillated between the Aristotelian opposition to transcendental Ideas and the Neoplatonic ontology, suggesting that a proper interpretation could eliminate the apparent contradictions.