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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2004
This is a fine, if somewhat simple, undergraduate introduction to the thought of Alfarabi—if you happen to be a student transported back to the late 1960s. There are a few entries in the bibliography dated after that, but these citations are mostly reprints of Alfarabi's published texts. Certainly, Fakhry's observations on Alfarabi's thought do not appear to have developed much beyond the scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the reader justifiably might think that this is a publication of a rather old manuscript, dusted off and given a pleasant cover. Fakhry's efforts here remind one of the recent publication of Muhsin Mahdi's Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago, 2001) in that both are rather quaint products of an earlier time in the study of philosophy and science in Islam. It is difficult to say what has prompted this resurrection of mostly outdated scholarship, It may be a response on the part of publishers eager to get anything in print since the recent renewal of interest in things Islamic, though for all the wrong reasons.