ABSTRACT
The philosophers’ views on the structure of philosophy often emerge in the process of itemizing and organizing Greek philosophical works, and especially the Aristotelian corpus. According to the resulting division of philosophy, which also appears in the late Greek tradition, there are three kinds of philosophical inquiry, into the corporeal, the incorporeal that may be connected to body, and the completely incorporeal. Commitment to the epistemic gap is one of the most striking common features of the Kindian tradition. It runs throughout the extant corpus of Isaac Israeli, who says numerous times that the intellect functions by looking to itself, and not by drawing on sense-perception. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, al-Kindi and his successors go beyond a conciliatory attitude towards Muslim theology, to actually using philosophy in the service of Islamic theological debate.
