Muhamad Abdelmageed: Decoloniality and the Fārābian Logical Tradition – A Re-Appraisal

Rather than approaching Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī as a political philosopher or a pioneer of a so-called “Arabic Neoplatonism,” theories of decoloniality may be helpful in engaging Fārābī’s Arabo-Islamic intellectual legacy within the epistemic contours of the late ninth-century onwards ʿAbbāsid World, along with the princely dynasties of the Islamic East. As a consequence, Fārābī’s input as a philosopher/logician reclaim the center stage in assessing his intellectual contribution to the formative ‘Arabic’/Arabo-Islamic philosophical tradition. The probably overemphasized extent of the late antique Alexandrian commentaries’ influence on his dialectical thought is counterbalanced by examining the continuities and ruptures between the Second Master and the circle of interpreters/philosophers of Bayt al-Ḥikmah. In ‘epistemically reconstituting’ Fārābī as the logician who arguably laid the foundations for much of the dialectical logical terminology used by his illustrious predecessors, possible Fārābīan paths of influence on the later philosophical tradition are hypothesized.