 Al-Fārābī has oversimplified the history (see Lameer 1997 and Watt 2008). But he correctly implies that his understanding of Aristotle is based on the Alexandrian syllabus and its later offshoots in the Middle East. For example, the account of logic in his influential [Catalogue] has been shown to be an edited translation of a work from the Neoplatonic teaching  materials.[1]  So for understanding al-Fārābī it becomes important to know when he is giving his own considered view and when he is merely passing on parts of the Alexandrian syllabus. As yet there is no consensus about this, or about the order in which he wrote his works.