The Virtuous City
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The second teacher, after Aristotle, argues that the prophet and the philosopher reach the same truths, the one through imagination and the other through demonstration.
- prophecy and philosophy reaching identical truths by different faculties
- religion described as philosophical truth in symbolic form
- the best city modelled on the ordered health of a body
- a classification of the sciences that organised later teaching
Al-Farabi builds an emanationist cosmology and on it a political philosophy: the best city is ordered like a healthy body under a ruler who has achieved both intellectual perfection and the imaginative faculty that lets him convey it in symbols the many can grasp. Religion on this account is philosophy in figurative form, which secures revelation's content while subordinating its mode. He also wrote extensively on logic and on music, and his classification of the sciences shaped later curricula.
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