When it was suggested to me that there should be a second edition of my Introduction to medieval Islamic philosophy I was initially rather hesistant to agree. It seemed to me that the book I had written some time ago might well deserve to go to its final rest without the prospect of any form of resurrection. After all, since this book I have written many other things on Islamic philosophy, and certainly changed my mind on a number of the issues which I discussed in the earlier Introduction. In addition, that book was written with a certain degree of passion and conviction which I find rather harder to summon up nowadays, and not only because I am older and possibly wiser. At the time of the earlier book I felt with some justification that the methodological paradigm for doing Islamic philosophy was firmly in the wrong hands, and that it was important to challenge that paradigm. I felt that Islamic philosophy tended not to be studied as philosophy, but more as part of the history of ideas or as an aspect of some orientalist project, neither of which accurately represented the nature of what I took the discipline to be. Within the last two decades it is encouraging (to me at least) that a much broader set of approaches has been adopted in Islamic philosophy, and many of those who work in the area now are philosophers and treat the material as serious philosophy.