Analysis of Farabi and Avicenna's theories of knowledge in terms of contemporary epistemology

Islamic philosophy, which constitutes a part of the history of philosophy, has produced about the main fields of philosophy. One of the fields in which it produces philosophical content is epistemology. This thesis aims to answer the question of why there are fewer studies on epistemology in Islamic philosophy, which continues to exist as an academic unit in our country, compared to other subjects. The fact that Islamic philosophers included issues of knowledge in works related to logic, metaphysics, psychology and physics led to the opinion that they adopted a distant attitude to epistemology. This study proposes to look at the issue from another point of view and builds its assumption on the claim that Islamic philosophy does not ignore the issue of knowledge because it is a philosophy. In order to prove this claim, the texts of Farabi and Avicenna, two important philosophers of classical Islamic philosophy, were read with today's epistemological problematic. The data obtained show that both philosophers seriously considered the issue of knowledge. They have intensively discussed issues such as the definition of knowledge, its elements, types, sources, structure, epistemic value and epistemic warrants. In addition to these, considering the fact that people have different levels of comprehension, philosophers have determined the areas of use of information with low epistemic value. In addition, it should be pointed out that Farabi and Avicenna included social epistemology as well as individual epistemology and sought an answer to the question of how the truth was obtained by the society. The cases mentioned are evidence of the active involvement of classical Islamic philosophy in epistemological debates. Through the example of Farabi and Avicenna, it becomes possible to say that Islamic philosophy has an epistemological dimension.Another conclusion reached by this thesis is that Islamic philosophy is a philosophical tradition that has a connection with the contemporary, and in this context, it cannot be considered as a phenomenon that has happened in the past.