Compare Personas

Al-Kindi

Al-Kindi argues at length in On First Philosophy that the world had a temporal beginning — the body of the world is finite, and an actually infinite past is impossible. Time is created alongside matter; God alone is eternal. This places him firmly in the camp of creatio ex nihilo against the Aristotelian eternalists. Non-deterministic because the rational soul can choose; God acts through will, not necessity.

Al-Kindi

Finite and substantival. Al-Kindi inherits the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic finite cosmos — the celestial spheres bounded by the sphere of the fixed stars. Space is a real dimension of created bodies, not an illusion, but it does not extend beyond the outermost heaven.

Al-Kindi

Created, finite, and hylomorphic — every body is a composite of matter and form. Al-Kindi follows Aristotle on the four elements and their transmutation but insists that matter itself is created by God from nothing, not co-eternal with the divine.

Al-Kindi

The human observer is a single embodied rational soul — an intellect joined to a body, capable of abstracting universals from sense particulars. Active agent intellect (drawing on Alexander and al-Kindi's own On the Intellect). Plural observers in a created cosmos governed by a personal God who is the True One.

Al-Kindi

Al-Kindi does not have a modern energy concept, but his physics of celestial influences and causal powers transmitted through the spheres implies a finite, conserved, one-directional flow of efficacy from the First Cause downward.

Al-Kindi

The rational soul grasps universal truths that are conserved in the agent intellect. Al-Kindi's theory of the four intellects (potential, actual, acquired, agent) implies that knowledge, once attained, is not lost — it becomes part of the soul's acquired intellect. Personal conservation follows from the immortality of the rational soul.