Did Islamic philosophy pass Al-Kindi by?
No, but it could not rest with his achievement. As Peter Adamson remarks in his study of Al-Kindi, “the history of philosophy is a competition” (Adamson, 3).
Did Al-Kindi’s competitors improve upon his work?
That is debatable.
“The school of Kindi went in no way beyond the master” (T. J. DeBoer, 106). Perhaps there was no compelling reason to.
DeBoer’s criticism of Alkindian theology (‘ilm al-ilahiyat) applies to all theological speculation: “Man has always attributed to his God or Gods the highest of his own possessions” (DeBoer, 104).
What is invented and what is discovered is a vexed question.
What Santayana had to say about Platonism applies equally to Al-Kindi's work, insofar as Al-Kindi was indebted to Plato:
Plato's "humanistic" philosophy "expresses and fosters" the "spiritual side" of human nature. "Platonic metaphysics projects into the universe the moral progress of the soul. It is like a mountain lake, in which the aspirations and passions of a civilized mind are reflected upside down; and a certain tremor and intensity is added to them in that narrower frame, which they would hardly have in the upper air. This system renders the life of the soul more unified and more beautiful than it would otherwise be. Everything becomes magical, and a sort of perpetual miracle of grace; the forms which things wear to the human mind are deputed to be their substance; the uses of life become celestial spheres enclosing the earth. A monstrous dream, if you take it for a description of nature; but a suitable allegory by which to illustrate the progress of the inner life: because those stages, or something like them, are really the stages of moral progress for the soul" (from "Soliloquies In England," excerpted in the Modern Library edition of The Philosophy of Santayana, pp. 368-9).
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