al-Farabi

Abu Nasr al-Farabi (Latin: Alpharabius) was a philosopher, logician, and music theorist, later honored as the "Second Teacher" (al-mu'allim al-thani) — Aristotle being the first. He is best known for fusing the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle with Neoplatonism (a late-antique reworking of Plato that descends reality from a single divine source), and for political works imagining a "virtuous city" (al-madina al-fadila) guided by a philosopher-ruler.

Little about his life is securely documented. Medieval biographers wrote a century or more after his death, and modern scholars caution that their accounts of his origins rest largely on guesswork. He was reportedly born around 870 CE in the district of Farab (in what is now Kazakhstan); whether his family was of Turkic or Persian descent is disputed in both the medieval sources and modern scholarship. By his own account he studied logic, reaching Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, with the Christian scholar Yuhanna ibn Haylan — probably at Baghdad, the great Abbasid center of Greek-into-Arabic translation, where he taught the Christian philosopher Yahya ibn 'Adi.

Late in life he moved to Syria. Later tradition links him to Aleppo and the patronage of the Hamdanid prince Sayf al-Dawla, though these details are thinly sourced. A note in his own hand places him in Egypt around 948. He died in Damascus in Rajab 339 AH (December 950–January 951) — the one date confirmed by a near-contemporary, the historian al-Mas'udi.