He took over Aristotle’s proofs of God’s existence very much as Aquinas would do three centuries later: a chain of contingent events requires for its intelligibility an ultimate necessary being; a chain of causes requires a First Cause; a series of motions requires a Prime Mover unmoved; multiplicity requires unity. The ultimate goal of philosophy, never quite attainable, is knowledge of the First Cause; the best approach to such knowledge is purity of soul. Like Aristotle, al-Farabi carefully managed to make himself unintelligible on immortality. He died at Damascus in 950.
