2014

Riggs, Timothy

This dissertation contains four original articles, either published or to be published, and a summary. The four articles are concerned with concepts of self in Late Ancient and Early Arabic Philosophy, with a special interest in the transmission and modification of the ideas involved in these concepts from the former period to the latter. The analyses are carried out the rubric of the concept of “authentic self” which describes a kind of concept of self which is common both to many, if not most or all, of post-Hellenistic philosophers and to many of the early Arabic philosophers. Taken broadly, authentic self is just the substantial and true self-identity of the individual human being which, in some way, the individual initially lacks but yet is the goal of the entirety of that person’s life-activity. It is the source of whatever unity can be discerned in the life and actions of the individual and it always has a noetic character; in other words, it always carries within it a derived intellectual content. There are almost as many formulations of the authentic self as there are philosophers who hold to such a notion. It is the primary work of this dissertation to examine the formulation of authentic self in the philosophical works of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (c.870-950 CE). Authentic self in the works of Proclus (412-485 CE) is investigated as means of providing a benchmark for discerning the innovations which appear in the version found in Fārābī. A study of the Arabic Liber de Causis, an anonymously authored produced in the late 9th century CE and attributed to Aristotle, has also been made, in order to show just one way in which Neoplatonic ideas pertaining to the structure of authentic self had been transmitted in a much modified way to early Arabic philosophers like Fārābī.