Islamic philosophy

Islamic philosophy is philosophy that emerges from the Islamic tradition. Two terms traditionally used in the Islamic world are sometimes translated as philosophy—falsafa (lit. 'philosophy'), which refers to philosophy as well as logic, mathematics, and physics; and kalam (lit. 'speech'), which refers to a rationalist form of Scholastic Islamic theology which includes the schools of Ash'arism, Maturidism and Mu'tazilism. Early Islamic philosophy began with al-Kindi in the 2nd century of the Islamic calendar (early 9th century CE) and ended with Ibn Rushd (Averroes) in the 6th century AH (late 12th century CE), broadly coinciding with the period known as the Golden Age of Islam. The death of Ibn Rushd effectively marked the end of a specific discipline of Islamic philosophy usually called the Islamic peripatetic school, and philosophical activity declined significantly in the west of the Islamic world, including al-Andalus and the Maghreb. Islamic philosophy persisted for much longer in the east of the Islamic world, particularly in Safavid Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mughal Empire, where several schools of philosophy continued to flourish: Avicennism, Averroism, Illuminationism, mystical philosophy, transcendent theosophy, and the school of Isfahan. Ibn Khaldun, in his Muqaddimah, made important contributions to the philosophy of history. Interest in Islamic philosophy revived during the Nahda ("Awakening") movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and continues to the present day. Islamic philosophy had a major impact in Christian Europe, where translation of Arabic philosophical texts into Latin "led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin world", with a particularly strong influence of Muslim philosophers being felt in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics.