Quiz: Al Farabi

When was Al Farabi born?

• About 872, Farab, in what is now Kazakhstan.
• About 801, Kufa, Iraq.
• About 480, Rome, Italy, into an old senatorial family.
• 980, near Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan.

When did Al Farabi die?

• About 950, Damascus, Syria.
• 524, executed at Pavia after imprisonment on a treason charge under Theodoric.
• About 873, Baghdad.
• 1037, Hamadan, Iran.

What is Al Farabi known for?

• Commentaries on Aristotle and Plato, and The Virtuous City, on the perfect state ruled by the philosopher.
• The claim that atman is brahman, that plurality is illusion, and commentaries that made Vedanta the dominant Hindu philosophy.
• The Canon of Medicine, the distinction between essence and existence, and the flying man thought experiment on self awareness.
• Over 260 works on metaphysics, optics, music, and medicine, and the first known use of frequency analysis to break ciphers.

Which school of thought was Al Farabi part of?

• Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, with Platonic political theory.
• Advaita Vedanta, absolute nondualism.
• Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, reshaped by his own metaphysics.
• Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, from Aristotle and Neoplatonism.

True or false: Turkic born Islamic philosopher from Farab, in modern Kazakhstan, who worked at Baghdad and died at Damascus.

• True
• False