On First Philosophy
composition: secureauthorship: secure
The first philosopher writing in Arabic argues that truth reached by reason and truth received by revelation cannot conflict, and that taking it from foreigners is no disgrace.
- reason and revelation held to be incapable of genuine conflict
- truth from foreign sources defended as a matter of principle
- a created world argued from the impossibility of actual infinities
- frequency analysis described as a method of decipherment
Al-Kindi supervised translations and wrote across metaphysics, optics, music, medicine and cryptology. On First Philosophy argues for a created world with a beginning in time, against the Aristotelian eternity thesis, using arguments about the impossibility of an actual infinite. His stated principle that one should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source, including peoples remote from us, is the programmatic defence of the whole translation enterprise. He also produced the earliest known treatise on frequency analysis for breaking ciphers.
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