Abu-Yusuf Yaqub ibn-Ishaq al-Kindi (died 873) was the first significant Arabian philosopher to utilize and develop the philosophical conceptions of Greek thought. His work significantly affected the intellectual development of western Europe in the 13th century.

A great achievement of medieval Islamic civilization was the development of a philosophical tradition that preserved and expanded upon many of the important elements of Greek learning and outshone the contemporary philosophical and scientific knowledge of Christian Europe.

Al-Kindi and later Arabian philosophers, such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, Avempace, and Averroës, benefited from the missionary zeal of the Hellenistic Mutazilite movement, which, in the 9th century, encouraged the study of Greek philosophy and logic to combat the Moslem heretics who affirmed either a Gnostic or a Manichaean dualism. Arabian philosophy, as it developed from the 9th to the 12th century, was basically Neoplatonic in structure and incorporated large portions of Aristotelian philosophy...