ABSTRACT
Al-Kindi’s circle of the translators also produced a similar paraphrase of Proclus’s Elements of Theology, which went first by the name Book on the Pure Good in its Arabic version and later, in its Latin version, by the title Liber de Causis. Translations in the Baghdad circle were made from both Greek and Syriac. As in the Neoplatonic translations, for al-Kindi this analysis of being in the case of complex, created things is linked to a conception of God. Al-Kindi follows the authors of the two paraphrases in saying that God is being. A believer in simple being holds that a subject must be distinct from its predicate, as al-Kindi is distinct from his rationality. The insight behind the notion of being as unlimited is that if the subject is identical with the predicate, then predication need not imply multiplicity.
