Quiz: Al Kindi

When was Al Kindi born?

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

When did Al Kindi die?

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

What is Al Kindi known for?

• Over 260 works on metaphysics, optics, music, and medicine, and the first known use of frequency analysis to break ciphers.
• The claim that atman is brahman, that plurality is illusion, and commentaries that made Vedanta the dominant Hindu philosophy.
• The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison, and translations of Aristotle's logical works that the Middle Ages studied for centuries.
• Commentaries on Aristotle and Plato, and The Virtuous City, on the perfect state ruled by the philosopher.

Which school of thought was Al Kindi part of?

• Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, from Aristotle and Neoplatonism.
• Islamic Peripatetic philosophy, reshaped by his own metaphysics.
• Late ancient Platonism, transmitting Aristotle to the Latin West.
• Advaita Vedanta, absolute nondualism.

True or false: Arab thinker of Kufa, in modern Iraq, called the philosopher of the Arabs, the first major Islamic philosopher.

• True
• False