Islamic philosophy, orArabic philosophy, Arabicfalsafah, doctrines of the philosophers of the 9th–12th centuryIslamic world who wrote primarily inArabic. These doctrines combineAristotelianism andNeoplatonism with other ideas introduced throughIslam.

Islamicphilosophy 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 amilieu in which thedialectic theology (kalām) of theMuʿtazilah 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 onatomism in his work on thecomposition 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.

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Islam: Islamic thought

Other influential thinkers include the Persiansal-Farabi andAvicenna (Ibn Sīnā), as well as the SpaniardAverroës (Ibn Rushd), whose interpretations ofAristotle were taken up by both Jewish and Christian thinkers. When the Arabs dominatedAndalusian Spain, the Arabic philosophic literature was translated into Hebrew and Latin. InEgypt around the same time, the philosophic tradition was developed byMoses Maimonides andIbn Khaldūn.

The prominence of classical Islamic philosophy declined in the 12th and 13th centuries in favour of mysticism, asarticulated by thinkers such asal-Ghazālī andIbn al-ʿArabī, and traditionalism, aspromulgated byIbn Taymiyyah. Nonetheless, Islamic philosophy, which reintroduced Aristotelianism to the Latin West, remained influential in the development ofmedievalScholasticism and of modern European philosophy.