The Long ConversationA timeline of world philosophy

Philosopher

Omar Khayyam

c. 1048 – after 1124

Also known as Umar Khayyam, Abu'l Fath Umar ibn Ibrahim Khayyam

Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet whose philosophical treatises follow Avicenna, while the quatrains attributed to him question religious certainties and dwell on doubt and transience.

Omar Khayyam was born around 1048 in Nishapur, in the Iranian province of Khurasan, and died there in the 1120s; his name means “tent maker”. He travelled to Herat, Rayy and Isfahan looking for libraries and for astronomical work, and was said to be quiet and reluctant to take students. He called Avicenna “my teacher”, though he did not study with him, and his short philosophical treatises follow Avicenna closely, at a time when orthodox jurists were attacking philosophy and he had to rebut the accusation that he was a philosopher.

He was also a pioneering mathematician, with work on cubic equations, on the parallel postulate and on ratios. Yet his fame rests on the quatrains attributed to him, some of them not authentic. Edward FitzGerald’s free English version of 1859 made him famous in the West as a sceptic, sometimes called the “Eastern Voltaire”. Scholars still debate how the doubting poet and the Avicennan philosopher fit together.

Key ideas

Philosophy’s three questions
Following the Aristotelian tradition, Khayyam held that philosophy asks three things of anything, “is it?”, “what is it?” and “why is it?”, and he pursued them through God’s existence, the order of beings, the soul, evil and predestination.
Evil as a by-product of contrariety
God essentially creates contingent beings, which are good, and only accidentally the contrary relations between them from which evil follows. Since the benefits of creating them vastly outweigh the harms, withholding creation would itself have been a far greater evil.
Predestination, within limits
Asked whether the predestinarians or the defenders of free will were nearer the truth, he answered that at first sight the predestinarians were, so long as they did not push their view to absurd conclusions, and he did not defend the opposite view either.
The poetry of doubt
The quatrains (Rubaiyat) cast doubt on almost every religious belief, point to the hypocrisy of the clergy and question life after death, urging attention to the here and now. Their bewilderment at undeserved suffering sits uneasily with the rational theodicy of his treatises.
Region
Nishapur, Khurasan

Influences

Influenced by

Omar Khayyamc. 1048 – after 1124

Influenced

Influenced by

Omar Khayyamc. 1048 – after 1124

Influenced

Where these links come from
  • Omar Khayyam drew on Avicenna. Source: Seyed N. Mousavian, Suzanne Sumner, Mehdi Aminrazavi and Glen Van Brummelen, Umar Khayyam, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani studied with Omar Khayyam. Source: Muhammad U. Faruque and Mohammed Rustom, ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Key works

Sources

  1. Seyed N. Mousavian, Suzanne Sumner, Mehdi Aminrazavi and Glen Van Brummelen, Umar Khayyam, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy