SOURCE: Parens, Joshua. “Alfarabi's Platonism.” In Metaphysics as Rhetoric: Alfarabi's Summary of Plato's “Laws,” pp. 17-27. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Parens considers to what degree al-Fārābī should be considered a Neoplatonist.

This chapter treats the secondary literature on Alfarabi's corpus as a whole rather than just on the Summary, because there is only one substantive treatment of the Summary, namely, a brief article by Leo Strauss.¹ The purpose of this chapter, however, is to correct certain common and persistent misunderstandings of Alfarabi. In spite of the readily apparent anachronism involved, I will discuss the secondary literature on Alfarabi before that on the Laws, because the former provides easier access to insights that are of use in reading the latter. In particular, most of the literature on Alfarabi openly describes him as a Neoplatonist and thus as a metaphysical dogmatist...