ABSTRACT
According to a commonly held view of relations between Islamic culture and the Latin West, the Arabic philosophers absorbed, preserved, and retransmitted Greek thought, notably the legacy of Plato and Aristotle, to Europe during the Middle Ages, thereby ensuring the continuity of the Western philosophical tradition. Though helpful as a starting-point, this curiously teleological account is misleading in three ways. Firstly, the reception of Aristotle and Plato amongst the Arabs was not a matter of mere custodianship but of opposition and transformation. Secondly, in light of this fact, European philosophers from the seventeenth century onwards were increasingly concerned with separating original Aristotelian doctrines – the pentimento – from Arabic overpainting, a concern which had a political and religious as well as a scholarly basis. Thirdly, one aspect of the Arabic contribution to European philosophy was the heightened standard of philosophical discourse. The “Socratic rationalism” and logocentrism which is supposed to characterize European thought, whether or not it sprang from Greek soil, acquired its characteristic intensity and precision in the Muslim countries between the ninth and thirteenth centuries.
