ABSTRACT
Islamic philosophy was given impetus and direction in the eighth century CE by the surge of translations of Greek writings into Arabic that began to be made at that time. Numerous Greek works, many of them on medical subjects, had been translated by Christian Syrians into Syriac in the fourth and fifth centuries and it was a group of Syrian scholars who were invited to the Baghdad court in 750 CE to undertake the translations into Arabic. In the ninth century a school of translators and scholars, known as the House of Wisdom, was founded at Baghdad. It was largely through the work of these men that the writings of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists became familiar to Arab thinkers and, subsequently, to the western world.
