Why do we read Arab philosophers?

This book seeks to show that Arabic philosophy as it manifested itself in the period from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries is an integral part of the intellectual history of humanity. The success of the transmission of Arabic philosophy to the European world is attested to this same ignorance: today we use arguments from medieval Arabic philosophy without knowing that they were formulated about ten centuries ago in a world extending from Cordoba to Baghdad. We can take, for example, the distinction between essence and existence that applies in classical philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which was formulated by the tenth-century philosopher, Ibn Sina, when he was reading Aristotle''s Metaphysics.