ABSTRACT

Two factors helped to place it in a position of eminence among the intellectual disciplines that reached the Islamic world from Greece, viz. the classical and the religious. Aristotle had justified it in the short opening phrase of his own Metaphysica on the basis that 'all men by nature desire to know.' Philosophy springing, in his view, from primitive wonder and moving towards its abolition through an understanding of the world, was an effort 'to inquire of what kind are the causes and the principles, the knowledge of which is Wisdom'; particularly of the first and most universal causes. And a single supreme science of metaphysics, devoted to the study of the real as such was possible, he maintained, and may be fruitfully pursued.