Abū-Yūsuf Yaʿqūb ibn Ishāq al-Kindī was the first outstanding Arabic-writing philosopher. He was born in the Mesopotamian city of Basra and later held a distinguished position at the caliph's court in Baghdad, where he died shortly after 870. For about a century he enjoyed a reputation as a great philosopher in the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition. He appears to have been the first to introduce the late Greek syllabus of philosophical learning into the Muslim world. It was mainly, though not exclusively, based on the Corpus Aristotelicum and its Peripatetic and Neoplatonic commentators. Numerous competent Arabic versions of Greek philosophical texts were...