Al-Rāzī By Peter Adamson

Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 313/925) is commonly recognized as a rather exceptional thinker among other major figures of the formative period of Islamic philosophy. He held philosophical views that peers of highly varied persuasions unanimously condemned, and notwithstanding the veneration he enjoyed as a physician, Rāzī is frequently repudiated as one of the worst heretics the Islamic world has known, some even judging him a downright atheist. No doubt partly due to his notoriety, many of his works are lost, and even central aspects of his thought are only available in the paraphrases of his critics. The scattered sources have usually been taken to yield a portrait of an insightful, if somewhat unsystematic thinker who tends to mix solid philosophical argumentation with myth. A notable case in point is his cosmological theory of the generation of the world, which revolves around a pre-existent soul’s precipitation to pre-existent matter and compares rather unfavourably both with the Peripatetics’ rigorous arguments for an eternal world and the more cogent creationism of the mutakallimūn

Art · Psychoanalysis · Historical Astronomy and Related Studies · History of Science and Medicine · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Psychology · Philosophy