Islamic Political Thought

The Impact of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics on the Ethical and Civil Heritage of Muslim Philosophers

Document Type : Research Article (Political Ethics)

Author

Assistant Professor, Faculty of Islamic Studies and Political Science, ISU

Abstract

There has been a close interaction between post-Islamic Iranian philosophical, ethical, as well as political wisdom and Greek philosophy especially Platonic and Aristotelian trends of thought. Muslim Philosophers such as Farabi and Ibn Rushd have been among the major interpreters and commentators of the works of great Greek philosophers particularly Aristotle’s. Hence Aristotle was given the title of "the First Teacher” and Farabi that of “the Second Teacher". A main topic of discussion among Muslim scholars has been the great work of Aristotle, the Nichomachean Ethics, which addressed the author's son. The Arabic version of this book had a great impact on the ethical and civil heritage of Muslim scholars, since there was some closeness between those precepts and the Islamic ones. The present article discusses traces of this impact.

Keywords

Main Subjects

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Aristotle (1998), The Nicomachean Ethics, Trans. by David Ross, Oxford University Press.
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Seyyid Husein Nasr and Oliver Leman, (2003) History of Islamic Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge.
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Islamic Political Thought
Volume 1, Issue 1
March 2014
Pages 41-70
  • Receive Date: 23 January 2014
  • Revise Date: 23 February 2014
  • Accept Date: 23 March 2014