 By “principles of the sciences”, al-Fārābī refers to principles such as ‘the whole is greater than the part,’ ‘amounts equal to a single amount are mutually equal,’ and premises of this kind, following Aristotle explicitly once again. These premises are the first point from which a thing is known or comes to be known (Aristotle Metaphysics 5, 1013a18). As explained earlier, the human intellect passes from potency to act through the assistance of the active intellect, and when the intellect in act becomes acquired intellect and reaches the capacity to understand on its own, this means that it already has the actual disposition to infer and reason by itself. In other words, the intellect has attained the habit of knowledge, and therefore is able to attain scientific knowledge (‘ilm). Al-Fārābī’s understanding of “scientific knowledge”, has nothing to do with the modern notion of “science”; rather he is using Aristotle’s notion of apodeixis, that is, a type of knowledge that guarantees certainty, and is confined to mathematics and metaphysics. In this respect, Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition after him are far from modern experimental science, since the main concern of the former is the attainment of absolute certainty. According to al-Fārābī, scientific knowledge is a virtue of the theoretical intellect that enables the rational soul to attain certainty about those beings whose existence and constitution do not depend on human artifice, as well as what those beings are and how they are, 