ABSTRACT
Orientalists and historians of Arabic and Persian philosophy have, for the most part, ignored much of the scholarship on the systematic side of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy. The Illuminationist tradition, founded by Suhrawardī in the sixth/twelfth century, represents the principal advancement in Islamic philosophy immediately following Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā). However, the period from Avicenna’s death in 429/1037 to the death of Averroes (Ibn Rushd) in 595/1198 encompasses three distinct types of philosophical attitude and style manifest in Arabic and, to a lesser extent, Persian texts. Each of these “schools”, or traditions of philosophical thought, tends to be associated with the person considered to be its founder or another scholar who epitomizes that philosophical attitude. The three traditions are as follows.
