I liked this session, but I was disappointed, because there was little to none information about Farabi’s musical endeavours. I don’t know why I expected more information about this as it isn’t really the most philosophical topic, but I feel like it would have been really interesting to see a little bit more about what Farabi did, other than philosophy. And especially because Farabi was announced as a polymath I expected less general information about his mathematics and music for example.
Of Farabi’s 8 works about music only 4 have survived. One of those is the Ketāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr, which consists of 2 parts. The first part is about the the philosophy of music and elementary acoustics and the second part is about arrangement of notes, as I assumed and commented during the lecture. I think especially the part about the philosophy of music could have been interesting and I think, although we learned a lot about Farabi, we only scratched the surface of what can be known, which is a little frustrating as we study this course to learn the most. But on the other hand I can accept that it is hard to summarise the content of over 100 books or “works” into one lecture.
I liked the way we spoke about the curriculum Farabi introduced, especially because the graphs were always similar, which gave a feeling of correlation.
I thought it was really interesting to learn about all the things Farabi investigated in his life, in a time when little of topics like physics or music was known at all. Farabi had a foot in every door from religion, to math and to law. I always thought I was invested in many topics, leaving me little time to sufficiently invest in all of them, but I guess Farabi gives me hope.
I really liked that we also spoke about Farabi’s epistemology, a topic we are all invested in right now, because it’s one of this semesters courses. Learning the opinions of other philosophers about topics you’re studying yourself is always interesting and I appreciated that.
fjs’ blog 