Why Abd al-Latif Thought Modern Philosophy Was a Disaster
A Scholar Hits the Road
In 1189, a twenty-eight-year-old scholar named Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi (1162–1231) packed his bags and left his comfortable life in Baghdad. He wasn’t running from a war or chasing a fortune. He was chasing an idea. Everywhere he looked, he saw students memorizing modern textbooks without ever questioning them. Philosophers repeated clever arguments without checking whether the arguments were solid. And in the streets, people paid alchemists to turn lead into gold — a practice Abd al-Latif considered pure fraud. He wanted something different: the kind of knowledge that explains why things happen, not just how they seem.
His journey would take him to Mosul, Damascus, Jerusalem, Cairo, and beyond. Along the way he studied with grammarians, debated generals, and met the famous Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. He even stood before the great sultan Saladin. But everywhere he went, he kept returning to the same conviction: the smartest people who ever lived were the ancient Greeks, and his own generation had forgotten how to think like them.
That conviction was not a rejection of Islam or of his own culture. Abd al-Latif was a devout Muslim. He simply believed that the writings of Aristotle, Plato, and their Greek commentators contained a complete, unbreakable system for investigating the world — and that modern philosophers had wrecked it.
The Danger of Lazy Thinking
Abd al-Latif’s most famous complaint was that the “Ancients” — the Greek masters — had been abandoned. He wrote that the pages of their works were being torn out by bookbinders and pharmacists to use as wrapping paper. Meanwhile, everyone celebrated the works of recent authors, whom he called the Modern. The worst offender, in his eyes, was the towering Persian thinker Avicenna (980–1037). Avicenna’s enormous encyclopedia, the Book of Healing, had become the standard textbook across the Islamic world. Abd al-Latif thought it was full of mistakes.
He fired off a series of criticisms. First, Avicenna left out entire branches of philosophy — especially practical philosophy, the part that deals with how to live and govern. He wrote nothing about Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics. For Abd al-Latif, that was like writing a cookbook that never mentions salt.
Second, Avicenna ignored the most basic rule of investigation. Aristotle had taught that you must start with what is easiest for us to know — the things we can see, touch, and feel — and then climb toward hidden causes. Avicenna, instead, jumped around. He discussed the soul before he discussed animals, and he placed zoology after psychology. Abd al-Latif saw this as a sign that Avicenna didn’t really understand the method.
Third, Avicenna’s logic was sloppy. He couldn’t explain the category of “having” or “being-in-a-position” clearly, and he tried to define a father without referring to a son — which is like trying to describe a key without mentioning a lock. Even his famous classification of syllogisms was, to Abd al-Latif, a muddle.
He saved his sharpest venom for Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1209), a later writer he considered even worse. Al-Razi, he said, strung together sophisms — tricks that sound smart but fall apart on inspection — and lacked real expertise in the subjects he wrote about. If people admired al-Razi, it was only because they had forgotten what genuine philosophy looked like.
So what did genuine philosophy look like? Abd al-Latif turned to al-Farabi (d. 950), the great earlier thinker, to rebuild the blueprint. The proper order, he argued, starts with logic — the tool that sharpens reason. Then it moves to the study of nature, from bodies to plants to animals to the soul. Only then, after understanding the causes in the physical world, can you address metaphysics: the science of what exists beyond the senses, especially the ultimate cause of everything.
Climbing the Ladder of Causes
For Abd al-Latif, the whole point of philosophy was to know the causes of things. If you ask why a plant grows, you mention soil, water, and sun. But then you can ask: why do sun and water produce life? Eventually you climb a ladder of “why” questions until you reach something that doesn’t need a further cause — a First Principle that explains itself and everything else.
He described this First Principle in language drawn from Aristotle but filtered through later Greek thinkers. It is Pure Being, the True One, an absolutely simple reality without parts or change. It is also the First Mover — not because it pushes things with a giant hand, but because everything in the universe moves and exists by orienting itself toward it, the way a law moves a community even though the law itself is just a thought.
From this First Principle, he taught, all other realities emanate — they flow out like light from a flame, becoming less perfect at each step. First comes the intellect, a changeless knowing that contains the ideas of all things. Then the soul, then the heavenly spheres, and finally the world we live in, with its bodies, plants, and animals.
Abd al-Latif didn’t invent this picture. He stitched it together from a library of texts: Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Alexander of Aphrodisias’s On Providence, Proclus’s Elements of Theology, and a work he believed was Aristotle’s Theology but was actually a paraphrase of Plotinus. His synthesis meant that at the top of the ladder stood not a cold, self-absorbed thinker, but a provident God who orders the world with care.
The problem of evil worried him. If God is pure goodness and the source of everything, why do bad things happen? His answer, following Alexander, was that providence gives humans rational minds so we can choose to become virtuous. Evil arises when we misuse that gift. The possibility of evil is the price of freedom.
And this led to his deepest claim: the human intellect, by studying the causes of things all the way up to the First Cause, achieves its own perfection. Animals eat, sleep, and avoid danger. Only humans can wonder why the stars move or life exists. For Abd al-Latif, a life without that search was no better than the life of a beast.
His War on Alchemy and Bad Doctors
Abd al-Latif carried his obsession with causes into every corner of learning. Nothing made him angrier than alchemy — the attempt to transform ordinary metals into silver or gold through secret recipes. He called it a complete fraud. His evidence was simple: none of the great ancient philosophers wrote a single word about it. Not Aristotle, not Plato, not Galen, not John Philoponus. The Greek commentators who explained every page of Aristotle were silent on the subject. In the Islamic world, the respected translators and masters like Hunayn ibn Ishaq and Abu Bishr Matta never touched it. Alchemy, he concluded, was an invention of Jabir ibn Hayyan that had wasted the time of generations.
The same rigor applied to medicine. Abd al-Latif respected the Greek physicians — especially Hippocrates and Galen — because they built their art on universal principles. They studied anatomy, identified the internal causes of diseases, and taught therapies that made sense of the whole body. The ancient medical sects that rejected this approach, like the Empiricists who refused to look inside the body, were at least following some kind of theory. His own contemporaries, he fumed, were worse. They simply guessed.
He compared the ideal physician to an expert archer. A good archer hits the target most of the time. A doctor trained in universal medicine will usually help the patient, even if he occasionally misses. But the quacks of his own day were like archers whose arrows flew in the opposite direction. Abd al-Latif tried to practice medicine himself and admitted he was not the most skilled practical physician — he was more of a thinker than a healer — but he never stopped demanding that doctors reason from causes rather than from habit.
Why the Search for Causes Still Matters
Abd al-Latif’s world was full of shouting voices just like ours: quick fixes, trendy ideas, and promises that sound too good to be true. He responded by digging back into old books, not because they were old, but because they taught a way of thinking that didn’t cut corners. He believed that the habit of asking “why” — and not stopping until you reach the deepest causes — is what makes a human life fully human.
You don’t have to become a medieval metaphysician to follow his advice. Every time you wonder why your friend suddenly stopped talking to you, or why a ball falls to the ground, or why you feel proud after working hard, you are doing what Abd al-Latif thought everyone should do. as he put it, that the moment you stop asking is the moment you start living like a beast that only cares about its next meal.
He also reminds us that being “modern” is not a guarantee of being right. The newest opinion might be flashy and popular, but it might also be full of hidden mistakes. Sometimes the people who wrote centuries ago saw things more clearly because they built their ideas slowly, step by step, and tested every link. Abd al-Latif would tell you: before you trust someone’s big idea, check whether they’ve traced it all the way back to its causes — and whether they’ve honestly looked at the books no one else bothers to read.
Think about it
- If you had to learn about how the world works, would you rather study a 500-year-old science book or the latest internet article? Why?
- Abd al-Latif believed understanding causes makes you a better person. Can you think of a time when learning why someone acted the way they did changed how you felt about them?
- Suppose you discovered that a very popular idea today was based on a misunderstanding. Would you have the courage to speak up, like Abd al-Latif did against alchemy? Why or why not?
