The Vitality of the Sky Spheres in the Two Founding Names of Islamic Philosophy: Kindi and Farabi

Abstract

In the issue of the formation of the cosmos, which has been discussed since ancient Greece and is an indispensable subject of ontology, the position and characteristics of the celestial spheres occupy an important place. The idea that the celestial spheres are living beings with souls and even intelligent beings that can think has been expressed in various ways by both ancient Greek and Islamic philosophers. Each philosopher has used different arguments to substantiate this idea and has put forward different ideas about the characteristics of life. For example; while the philosophers of the Milesian School accepted life as an inseparable feature of matter, in the Pythagoreans and Heraclitus this atomistic idea of ​​life evolved into the view that the universe as a whole is alive. Plato, on the other hand, reached the conclusion that the cosmos must be a living and intelligent being through more logical inferences. When it comes to Aristotle, he stated that in providing the movement of the First Celestial Sphere, he saw God as the object of Love and that the celestial sphere moved with longing for Him. Plotinus examined the event on a more mystical basis and argued that the spirit overflowing from the mind gave life to the celestial spheres according to the theory of emanation. In Stoic philosophy, the universe itself was considered alive as the body of a divine being. The idea that the celestial spheres were alive was also present in the first Islamic philosophers, Kindi and Farabi. However, they also based their ideas from different perspectives. For example, while Kindi evaluated the issue entirely in the context of the obedience of the heavens to Allah, Farabi approached the subject more along the lines of Aristotle and in the context of emanation. Since Kindi and Farabi drew from the same sources, there are similarities between them, but there are also important differences. In this article, after tracing the traces of the vitality of the celestial spheres in Ancient Greece, its reflections in Kindi and Farabi were discussed, and then; a comparison was made between these two philosophers and the similarities and differences were revealed. In the conclusion and evaluation section, the reasons for these differences were tried to be expressed.