Falsafa

A second cut is just as sharp. What a thing is, and that it is, are different questions. You can describe a clinic down to the hinge and still be standing in an empty field. Essence is the what. Existence is the that. Wanting the clinic, and describing it, are not the same as finding it. Later thinkers will use similar words for a different claim about human roles. This one is about being, not about a role assigned to a person.

Falsafa is the Arabic word for philosophy, borrowed from Greek. The tradition runs from al-Kindi and al-Farabi through Ibn Sina to Ibn Rushd. In Ibn Sina it is the meeting of that kind of argument with the sciences he also practiced. Reason is allowed to go where a single sense has not delivered a package, and it still owes the observed world a careful account. A proof that cannot be lived beside medicine, astronomy and the inherited books is not the school’s style.