Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's "Laws"

Abstract

Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's by Joshua Parens. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995. xxxviii + 145 pages. Notes to p. 178. Bibl. to p. 186. Index to p. 195. $17.95 paper. Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. A.D. 950) is generally regarded as the first systematic philosopher of Islam and the founder of Islamic Neoplatonism. His two leading predecessors, Abu Yusif Ya'qub al-Kindi (d. ca. A.D. 866) and Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariya al-Razi (d. ca. A.D. 925), were essentially moral philosophers. In addition, al-Farabi was the first genuine political philosopher of Islam and the leading Aristotelian logician, both in the East and the West, during the period separating Anicius Boethius (d. A.D. 520) and Pierre Abelard (d. A.D. 1142), in the West. Al-Farabi was thus a versatile philosopher, and his thought was truly complex. In metaphysics, he was a Neoplatonist of the emanationist type; in logic and ethics he was an Aristotelian; and in politics he was a Platonist. Inevitably, the complexity of his thought, not to say his eclecticism, has given rise to serious problems of interpretation. The major thesis of Joshua Parens's wellresearched book is that for both Plato and alFarabi, metaphysics has an ancillary political function; hence the title of his book, Metaphysics as Rhetoric, by which Parens appears to mean metaphysics or rhetoric. The arguments adduced in support of this thesis are not always convincing. Thus, the passage from Aristotle's Metaphysics XII, 1074 f.-which is a purely narrative account of the way the ancient astral religion of the Greeks, derived originally from the Babylonians, passed into anthropomorphism in which the cause of legal and utilitarian expediency was well served-is used by the author to support his thesis of the ancillary character of metaphysics. In the more specific case of al-Farabi's Summary of Plato's on which the discussion actually turns, the chief interest is that it is one of the few Platonic texts to have reached us, with any measure of completeness, in Arabic. Learned opinion, however, has tended, since its publication in 1952, to play down al-Farabi's Summary as uninformative or even spurious. For Parens, on the other hand, its chief significance consists in enabling us to understand how Farabi read Plato's Laws, as Leo Strauss had expressed it in his 1957 article bearing that title.' Both Parens and Strauss appear to hold that al-Farabi's purpose in the Summary is not to expound the but to reveal Plato's and his symbolic or secretive method of presentation in that work. Rather than denigrate al-Farabi for omissions of, or deviations from, Plato's text, as some reviewers have done, Parens argues that such omissions or deviations are meaningful and are part of al-Farabi's design to interpret Plato's intentions rather than expound his views. In the process, Parens also attempts to refute the claims of some critics that the Summary is a summary of Claudius Galen's (d. …

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