ABSTRACT
The Islamic philosophers of the Middle Ages did not share the radical doubts expressed by their modern European colleagues about the scientific character of metaphysics. Although they often adopted positions that we tend now to regard as “empirical,” and anticipated key concerns of the so-called “Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth century that ultimately led to the expulsion of metaphysics from the family of the exact sciences, they regarded metaphysics, to all intents and purposes, as a properly scientific enterprise. Without hesitation, they referred to it by means of the term they usually employed for “science” (ʿilm), and inserted it in an overall classification of knowledge together with disciplines that have, to our eyes, much stronger credentials to be scientific, such as logic, natural philosophy, and mathematics. How could they be so optimistic? How could skepticism concerning the scientific nature of metaphysics, so convincingly formulated by a philosopher like Kant, be so alien to them? Their confidence was not due to a blind acceptance of inherited stereotypes—a commonplace still operative in contemporary interpretations of medieval thought. Their philosophical background surely played a role in their high consideration of metaphysics, namely the long and prestigious intellectual tradition, starting with Plato and Aristotle in Greek philosophy, that saw metaphysics as the culmination of the philosophical curriculum, without any sharp distinction between the respective fields of philosophy and science. But the Islamic philosophers did not simply inherit from their Greek predecessors the conviction that metaphysics is a science, nor did they merely preserve this discipline’s already-established scientific profile; they also decisively contributed to the transformation of traditional metaphysics into a science in the true sense—in their opinion, at least—of the word. This transformation was possible only when, passing from the Greek to the Arabic cultural environment, reflection on metaphysics freed itself from transmitted models of interpretation and conventional ways of exposition, and experimented new possibilities of original elaboration. The resulting reshaping of the Greek heritage represents the greatest contribution of Islamic philosophy to the history of metaphysics.
