This is a fine, if somewhat simple, undergraduate introduction to the thought of Alfarabi—if you happen to be a student transported back to the late 1960s. There are a few entries in the bibliography dated after that, but these citations are mostly reprints of Alfarabi's published texts. Certainly, Fakhry's observations on Alfarabi's thought do not appear to have developed much beyond the scholarship of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the reader justifiably might think that this is a publication of a rather old manuscript, dusted off and given a pleasant cover. Fakhry's efforts here remind one of the recent publication of Muhsin Mahdi's Alfarabi and the Foundation of Islamic Political Philosophy (Chicago, 2001) in that both are rather quaint products of an earlier time in the study of philosophy and science in Islam. It is difficult to say what has prompted this resurrection of mostly outdated scholarship, It may be a response on the part of publishers eager to get anything in print since the recent renewal of interest in things Islamic, though for all the wrong reasons.

Despite its rather grand-sounding title, Fakhry's book consists of little more than his summaries of some of Alfarabi's major works, divided into ten chapters covering the major divisions of his thought (logic, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and politics). This summary approach could be useful in presenting Alfarabi to new readers, but Fakhry does on occasion provide some basic interpretation. It is in such castaway interpretive statements that Fakhry exposes his lack of knowledge on the impressive strides in scholarship on Alfarabi in the past two decades. Fakhry displays no familiarity with more recent studies on Alfarabi's biography, his version of the “Alexandria to Baghdad” narrative, his contributions in logic, his epistemology and psychology, or his metaphysics. It is doubtful that, with Fakhry, we need to revisit the question of Alfarabi's alleged “Shi

ism,” and it is certain that there is a great deal more to Alfarabi's “Neoplatonism” than his emanationist cosmology, which is the only aspect of his “Neoplatonism” Fakhy announces in the title of the work. If Fakhry's book were to find its way onto an undergraduate syllabus, it would have to be for a course on the history of Western scholarship in the field in the latter half of the 20th century.

Another book on Farabi was published in 2002: Ilai Alon's Al-Farabi's Philosophical Lexicon, in two volumes (Wiltshire: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial Trust). It costs about $200 more than Fakhry's contribution, but it actually lives up to its title, contains the “detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources” heralded on the back of Fakhry's book, and is a publication every scholar working on Arabic philosophy should have at hand. As for a reasonably priced basic introduction to Alfarabi's thought, we will have to wait.