Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

I consider and examine the approach of Al-Farabi as a medieval thinker in introducing a new outlook to “language” in difference with the other views. Thereby I explore his challenges in the frame of “philosophical humanism” as a term given by Arkoun and Kraemer to the humanism of the Islamic philosophers and their circles, mainly in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Al-Farabi’s conception of philosophical humanism in which philosophy is thick and religion thin, creates agony with the other versions of humanism and also orthodox Islam. It means that his work to introduce a humanistic understanding of language should be placed in a multi-level contested environment. According to Al-Farabi, language as a universal category has relation with reason that logic should function as its proper instrument. As a result, there is no specific privileged predetermined by language but the position of any language is shaped by its relation with human reason and formal logic that is something human made. And such a conception means language in human terms.