Al-Kindi

Peter Adamson is a historian of philosophy specializing in the Islamic world, and this Oxford University Press book is his standard modern scholarly study of al-Kindi, the ninth century philosopher, including his naturalistic theory of rays used to explain astrological and occult influence. Its strength is that it is a peer reviewed academic monograph from a major university press by a specialist whose work on Arabic philosophy is widely cited in the field. Its limit is that it is a study of al-Kindi's own philosophical system specifically, so a claim about how later thinkers received or diverged from his theory of rays needs a source addressing that later reception rather than this monograph on al-Kindi himself.