Ibn Ṭufayl

Moorish philosopher and physician
Also known as: Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṭufayl al-Qaysī, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṭufayl al-Qaysī
Quick Facts
In full:
Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṭufayl al-Qaysī
Also called:
Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ṭufayl al-Qaysī
Latin:
Abubacer
Born:
1109/10, Guádix, Spain
Died:
1185/86, Marrakech, Morocco

Ibn Ṭufayl (born 1109/10, Guádix, Spain—died 1185/86, Marrakech, Morocco) was a Moorish philosopher and physician who is known for his Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān (c. 1175; Eng. trans. by L.E. Goodman, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓan by Ibn Ṭufayl, 1972), a philosophical romance in which he describes the self-education and gradual philosophical development of a man who passes the first 50 years of his life in complete isolation on an uninhabited island. Ibn Ṭufayl also wrote a number of medical treatises in Arabic verse.

Ibn Ṭufayl was influenced by the works of Avicenna and Avempace, the latter of whom was instrumental in introducing the Islamic philosophical tradition to Spain, and was a contemporary of Averroës. He served as the court physician and general adviser to the Almohad ruler Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf from 1163 to 1184.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Or:
Arabic philosophy
Arabic:
falsafah

Islamic philosophy, doctrines of the philosophers of the 9th–12th century Islamic world who wrote primarily in Arabic. These doctrines combine Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism with other ideas introduced through Islam.

Islamic philosophy is related to but distinct from the theological doctrines and movements in Islam. Al-Kindi, for instance, one of the first Islamic philosophers, flourished in a milieu in which the dialectic theology (kalām) of the Muʿtazilah movement spurred much of the interest and investment in the study of Greek philosophy, but he himself was not a participant in the theological debates of the time. Al-Rāzī, meanwhile, was influenced by contemporary theological debates on atomism in his work on the composition of matter. Christians and Jews also participated in the philosophical movements of the Islamic world, and schools of thought were divided by philosophic rather than religious doctrine.

Other influential thinkers include the Persians al-Farabi and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), as well as the Spaniard Averroës (Ibn Rushd), whose interpretations of Aristotle were taken up by both Jewish and Christian thinkers. When the Arabs dominated Andalusian Spain, the Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Hebrew and Latin. In Egypt around the same time, the philosophic tradition was developed by Moses Maimonides and Ibn Khaldūn.

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Islam: Islamic thought

The prominence of classical Islamic philosophy declined in the 12th and 13th centuries in favour of mysticism, as articulated by thinkers such as al-Ghazālī and Ibn al-ʿArabī, and traditionalism, as promulgated by Ibn Taymiyyah. Nonetheless, Islamic philosophy, which reintroduced Aristotelianism to the Latin West, remained influential in the development of medieval Scholasticism and of modern European philosophy.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Zeidan.