 Al-Fārābī tries hard to convince us that the philosophers’ questions are a natural extension of everyday questions. (Diebler 2005 draws a plausible comparison with ordinary language philosophy.) But the effort hardly succeeds. In what everyday context would we ask, about a date-palm, “What is it?” and accept the answer “It’s a body”? ([Letters] (167) 166.16) The outcome is that al-Fārābī unintentionally raises problems that are still resonant in the philosophy of questions. Compare “It’s a body” with the answer “[He] is a person who is over three inches tall” discussed by Cross and Roelofsen 2018.