 Fârâbî, more than any other medieval philosopher, distrusts the surface appearance of Greek philosophy as presented to him in the Arabic translations. He tries to go beyond this surface to reconstruct the ancient authors’ aims and methods, and even to reconstruct the structure of their Greek expressions, which he suspects have been badly served by the Arabic translations. In some cases the Greek texts he is interested in were not available to him even in Arabic translation, but only in translations of later ancient summaries or descriptions, but this does not stop him from trying to reconstruct their underlying thought. (He has access to translations of almost all of the texts of Aristotle that we have now, but apparently to none of the texts of Plato.) He thinks this is worth the effort because he thinks that the Greeks, especially Plato and Aristotle, developed sciences which have since decayed or have been transmitted only imperfectly to the Arabic-writing Muslim-ruled lands, but which it is still possible to reconstruct and to apply to the urgent questions of his own time.