Rhazes

Abu Bakr ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (d. 925 or 935 CE) was a past Future-One.

One of the most respected and influential physicians of the medieval period, al-Razi (Latin: Rhazes) wrote extensively on the subject of philosophy as well as medicine, viewing it as a "medicine of the soul."

In al-Tibb al-Ruhani (Spiritual Medicine), al-Razi drew upon his reading of Greek philosophy, as well as his own considerable experience as a physician, to elaborate a Platonic-Epicurean account of pleasure as the return to a natural state of harmony from a prior dislocation, which he defines as pain.

He espoused a prudential, hedonistic ethics which aims at minimizing pain through the guidance of reason, as well as the strategic use of mildly ascetic exercises.

In his Kitab al-Sira al-Falsafiyya (Book of the Philosophic Life), al-Razi proclaimed Socrates "our Imam," and sounded a cautionary note on excessive askesis.

He maintained that all human beings have the same fundamental capacity for reason (what Noam Chomsky refers to as "Cartesian common sense," since Descartes made a similar assertion over half a millennium after Rhazes) and that the apparent inequality of people in this respect is ultimately a function of opportunity, interest and effort. He took a rather dim view of prophecy as both unnecessary and delusional and criticized all revealed religion as provincial and divisive. No one individual or group can claim a monopoly on truth; each succeeding generation has the ability to improve upon and even transcend its predecessors' insights through rational argumentation and empirical inquiry.

He appears to have been undecided about the ultimate fate of the human being after death as he found therapeutic value in both the Platonic notion of the soul's immortality and in the Epicurean idea that the soul dissipates with the body. His aim in such speculation appears, however, to have been the same: to provide consolation to all who feel the weight of their own mortality.

For Rhazes, as for Epicurus and Montaigne, to philosophize is to learn how to die.

[Portions of the preceding were adapted from Peter S. Groff, Islamic Philosophy A-Z, 2007].