This year Kazakhstan is celebrating the 1150th anniversary of the great scientist, thinker Al-Farabi, who has received worldwide recognition and is famous as the second teacher after Aristotle in the history of mankind. Al-Farabi, the major medieval scholar, mathematician, and philosopher, was a follower and interpreter of the works of Aristotle and Plato, a thinker whose ideas influenced the views of Ibn Sina, gave impetus to the development of philosophy and science in medieval Europe.
The eastern thinker who spoke dozens of languages was born in the territory of modern Kazakhstan, in the city of Otrar, which before the Mongol invasion was one of the largest cities of Central Asia.
Scientific conferences and philosophical meetings are held online in Kazakhstan. The thinker's books are republished, and new research is written based on his works. The great scientific and spiritual heritage of the philosopher in the context of social and political modernization of Kazakhstan and at the formation of value orientations of the young generation has invaluable significance.
He believed in the achievement of happiness by people in the earthly life. He expressed this idea in his works: “A Treatise on the views of inhabitants of a Virtuous City,” “Civil Policy,” “Showing the Way to Happiness,” “On Achieving Happiness,” and others. The result of al-Farabi’s many-sided scientific research was the treatise “On the Classification of Sciences,” in which the sciences of that time were listed in strict order, the subject of study of each was determined.
His works on logic include “Categories,” “Dilelectics,” “Book of Letters,” “Gems of Wisdom,” “Speeches Used in Logic,” “Analytics,” “Proof,” etc. The treatises on music and poetry include “the Great book of music,” “On the art of poetry,” “Treatise on the canons of the art of poetry.”
Al-Farabi’s natural-science treatises include “Comments on Ptolemy’s Almagest,” “On objection to Galen about his disagreements with Aristotle regarding the organs of the human body,” “On the need for the art of chemistry,” and others.