
HoP 131 - Deborah Black on al-Farabi's Epistemology
History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Is There a Platonism in Aristotle?
Farrabi, Avicenna read Aristotle through the lens of neo-Platonist commentators on Aristotle. Farrabi doesn't know a lot of Plato's dialogues directly or doesn't seem to, so the amino example sort of gives you a flavor of that. It's clear he knows a lot about the dialogues but he doesn't really fully know their content. So I think there's a lot of Platonism in the sense of a very strong hierarchical ordering of the lesser modes of cognition to demonstrative science.
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