Abu'l-Barakāt Hibat Allah ibn Malkā al-Baghdādī (Arabic: أبو البركات هبة الله بن ملكا البغدادي; c. 1080 – 1164 or 1165 CE) was an Islamic philosopher, physician and physicist of Jewish descent from Baghdad, Iraq.
[4] Abu'l-Barakāt, famed as Awḥad al-Zamān (Unique One of his Time), was born in Balad, a town on the Tigris above Mosul in modern-day Iraq.
[6][7][8][9] Isaac, the son of the Abraham Ibn Ezra and the son-in-law of Judah Halevi,[9] was one of his pupils,[6] to whom Abu'l-Barakāt, Jewish at the time, dictated a long philosophical commentary on Ecclesiastes, written in Arabic using the Hebrew alphabet.
[5] Al-Baghdadi described an early scientific method emphasizing repeated experimentation, influenced by Ibn Sina, as follows:[10] "Because of the frequency of the experience, these judgements may be regarded as certain, even without our knowing the reason [for the phenomenon].
[11]According to Shlomo Pines, al-Baghdadi's theory of motion was thus the oldest negation of Aristotle's fundamental dynamic law [namely, that a constant force produces a uniform motion], [and is thus an] anticipation in a vague fashion of the fundamental law of classical mechanics [namely, that a force applied continuously produces acceleration].
The scholar Y. Tzvi Langermann writes:[3] Dissatisfied with the regnant approach, which treated time as an accident of the cosmos, al-Baghdadi drew the conclusion that time is an entity whose conception (ma'qul al-zaman) is a priori and almost as general as that of being, encompassing the sensible and the non-sensible, that which moves and that which is at rest.
His reclassification of time as a subject for metaphysics rather than for physics represents a major conceptual shift, not a mere formalistic correction.
Ibn Sina had raised the issue of our consciousness of our own psychic activities, but he had not fully pursued the implications for Aristotelian psychology of his approach.
[3] Abu'l-Barakāt also wrote a short treatise on the intellect, Kitāb Ṣaḥiḥ adillat al-naql fī māhiyyat al-ʻaql (صحيح أدلة النقل في ماهية العقل), which has been edited by Ahmad El-Tayeb.
The influence of Al-Baghdadi's views appears especially in Al-Razi's chief work Al-Mabāḥith al-Mashriqiyyah (Oriental Discourses).