 Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (c. 870–950), known in the Arabic philosophical tradition as the “Second Master” (al-mu‘allim al-thānī) after Aristotle, and Alpharabius/Alfarabi in the Latin West tradition, is one of the major thinkers in the history of Islamic philosophy. He wrote extensively on logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, natural philosophy, ethics, political philosophy, philosophical psychology and epistemology. His teachings had a strong Aristotelian background and at the same time a significant Neoplatonic bent. One of the greatest Islamic thinkers, Avicenna (d. 1037), explicitly admits in his autobiography his intellectual debt to al-Fārābī through whom he was able to understand the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Overall, al-Fārābī became an important reference within the Islamic intellectual milieu as a source of both influence and contention.