{"collection":"Texts of Islam","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_ath_ath13_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_ath_ath13_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_isl_ath_ath13_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/isl/ath/ath13.htm","summary":"This is a chapter from a 1922 work of intellectual history tracing the transmission of Greek philosophy \u2014 preserved and expanded by Arabic-speaking Muslims \u2014 into medieval Latin Europe. Its central argument is that Latin scholasticism developed in three distinct stages, the first and most consequential being the translation of Aristotle's complete works and Arabic commentaries from Spanish centers, particularly Archbishop Raymund's translation college at Toledo (c. 1130\u20131150), which produced Latin versions of Aristotle, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sina through a mechanical two-stage process using bilingual interpreters (often Jewish scholars) and Latin revisors. The chapter traces the institutional and political actors who drove this transfer \u2014 Raymund's college, Frederick II's Naples academy, translators like Michael Scot and Hermann the German \u2014 and documents the Church's ambivalent response, from the 1209 Paris prohibitions on Aristotle's natural philosophy to its gradual acceptance as scholasticism absorbed Aristotelian method. A notably distinctive claim is that some philosophical controversies at 13th-century Paris that *look* like Arabic influence \u2014 such as debates over the unity of souls \u2014 actually arose independently from Celtic neo-Platonism, cautioning against assuming direct Muslim intellectual causation wherever resemblance exists. The text also highlights the underappreciated role of Jewish scholars as both translators and intermediaries, and frames Frederick II's notorious free-thinking less as personal heresy than as a reflection of the Arabic philosophical tendency to treat all three Abrahamic religions as equally instrumentally useful for the common people. Written in a scholarly but accessible register, it reads as a corrective to Eurocentrism, insisting that medieval Latin intellectual culture was decisively shaped by what it received from Islamic civilization via Spain.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Arabic Thought: Chapter XI. Influence of the Arabic Philosophers on Latin Scholasticism","tradition":"Texts of Islam","translated_text":null,"word_count":4910}