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Empedocles (Empedoklēs, variously spelt as Anbāduqlīs, Anbādhuqlīs or Banduqlīs etc.), was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, whose supposed teachings became well known in the Islamic world as a demonstration of the underlying connections between Greek philosophy and the Semitic tradition of revelation.Little is known about his actual life apart from scattered fragments of information. Our only significant source is The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (fl. 3rd century CE) (8/51–77, pp. 366–391). Empedocles is also given as the …

Abū Sulaymān al-Sijistānī, Muḥammad b. Ṭāhir b. Bahrām al-Sijistānī (al-Sīstānī), known as al-Manṭiqī (‘the logician’), was a scholar and philosopher who lived in the 4th/10th century.Doctrines and BeliefsAbū Sulaymān is without doubt one of the most brilliant thinkers of the Islamic era. He was noted for his lonely life, and for suffering a bleak and bitter fate. Nonetheless, his residence in Baghdad was the meeting place and refuge for some of the most outstanding scholars and philosophers of the time. Among these, Abū …

Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī, Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Sulaymān al-Tanūkhī (27 Rabīʿ I 363–449/26 December 973–1057), a distinguished Arab poet and thinker who was blind. His life was a relatively uneventful one, and spent mostly as a recluse, away from human contact. He was born in Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān, a small town between Aleppo and Ḥamā. He was descended from a line of distinguished and eminent individuals, the majority of whom were traditionists, men of letters and judges in Maʿarrat al-Nuʿmān. Abū al…

Dayṣāniyya (Syriac, Ḍayṣānāyē), a religious group that was formed around the teachings of the Syrian Christian philosopher, theologian, musician and poet Bar Dayṣān (Dīṣān) (d. 222 CE), known as Bardaiṣan in modern scholarship, Bardesanes (Latin) or Ibn Dayṣān (Arabic). Bar Dayṣān’s thought seems, like his contemporaries Origen and Clement, to have been one of the first syntheses of Christian teaching and Greek philosophy (Ramelli, Bardaisan, 10).Little is known about Bar Dayṣān’s biography, as our main sources—accounts found in Christian heresiographies writ…