The tenth-century philosopher whom the Islamic tradition honored as 'the Second Teacher' — second only to Aristotle — for systematizing Greek logic in Arabic and working within the tradition that read Plato and Aristotle as fundamentally in harmony. His emanationist metaphysics and his Platonic vision of a virtuous city led by a ruler who joins philosophical understanding to prophetic imagination set the agenda for Islamic philosophy, shaping Ibn Sina directly and reaching, through translation, into Jewish and Christian thought.
A tradition that placed Aristotle at the summit of human reason needed a word for the man who came next. It called al-Farabi 'the Second Teacher.' First came Aristotle, who had mapped the whole of knowledge; second came the scholar in Baghdad who taught that map to the Arabic-speaking world and built on it. The title is extraordinary, and the life behind it is almost a blank. We do not know for certain where he was born, what people he came from, or how he was trained. A thinker honored above nearly all others left a record so thin that even his origins are disputed.