Dimitri Gutas

The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy

Philosophy is considered a recalcitrant subject, and Arabic philosophy particularly so, both by historians of philosophy in general and by scholars of Arabic and Islamic studies in particular. Though naturally I disagree with this view, there would appear nevertheless to be good reasons for its prevalence. In the former case, the historian of ancient and medieval philosophy, at home with Greek and Latin, finds nothing in his education to help alleviate the estrangement that he inevitably feels when confronted with what is taken to be the impenetrable barrier of the Arabic language and the perceived otherness of Islamic culture; and when he tries to approach the subject through the mediation of the secondary literature by Arabist historians of philosophy, he finds little there to whet his appetite for more, as I will soon explain. In the case of the scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies, traditional education has taught him that philosophy in Islamic civilization was at best a fringe activity which ceased to exist after the death blow allegedly dealt to it by al-Ghazali in the eleventh century, was anyway frowned upon by a presumed orthodoxy, and, being therefore largely inconsequential-a feeling further corroborated through casual perusal of the unappetizing specialist secondary literature I just referred to-could be safely disregarded. In both cases this (mis)perception may be justified, but the fault lies not with Arabic philosophy3 itself but with its students and expositors: Arabist historians of philosophy themselves have not done their job properly and they have failed,

Theophrastus of Eresus. Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought and Influence

As part of Project Theophrastus this volume covers the material related to Theophrastus’ work on logic. As Aristotle’s pupil, he largely followed his master, but made important changes in modal logic, and some of his innovations passed into medieval logic.

Theophrastus of Eresus. Sources for His Life, Writings, Thought and Influence (2 vols)

A two-volume collection of the fragments and testimonia relating to Theophratus (c. 270-288/5 B.C.), presenting the texts, critical apparatus and English translation.

SUHRAWARDĪ AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY

John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients. Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000), xviii + 305 pp.

On Graeco-Arabic Epistolary ‘Novels’

The Correspondence between Aristotle and Alexander the Great. An Anonymous Greek Novel in Letters in Arabic Translation, Documenta et Monographiae V MIKLOS MAROTH Piliscsaba, The Avicenna Institute...

Avicenna’s Philosophical Project

Avicenna came of age in the last quarter of the tenth century, a time when the philosophical and scientific activities in the Islamic world, and the Graeco-Arabic translation movement which they fostered and sustained, had been in progress for over two hundred years. He studied the traditional subjects, the Qurʾān, Arabic literature, and arithmetic, and had a particular propensity for legal studies as well as medicine: he reports that at the same time he was studying repeatedly all the branches of philosophy at increasingly proficient levels. Equally important as the availability of the Graeco-Arabic philosophical literature to Avicenna was the structure of this philosophical knowledge which he studied and internalized. Avicenna sought to express his new synthesis of philosophy in a way that would also respond to the philosophical concerns of his age and society, and this explains his experimentation with the wide variety of compositional styles.Keywords: Arabic literature; Avicenna; Graeco-Arabic philosophical literature; Islamic world; medicine; philosophical knowledge

The Letter before the Spirit: Still Editing Aristotle after 2300 Years

The Letter before the Spirit underlines the importance for scholars to have at their disposal reliable scientific text editions – book editions or digital editions – of Aristotle’s works in the Semitico-Latin, and the Graeco-Latin, translation and commentary traditions.

A Greek and Arabic Lexicon. Materials for a Dictionary of the Mediaeval Translations from Greek into Arabic . Fascicle 2: Akhr - Aṣl

From the eighth to the tenth century A.D., Greek scientific and philosophical works were translated wholesale into Arabic. A Greek and Arabic Lexicon is the first systematic attempt to present in an analytical, rationalized way our knowledge of the vocabulary of these translations.

Julia Ashtiany, T.M. Johnstone, J.D. Latham, R.B. Serjeant and G. Rex Smith (eds.), Abbasid Belles-Lettres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), xv, 517 pp. Cloth

This is the second volume to appear in the Cambrid5e History of 4rabi’c Literature series, succeeding Arabic Literature to the End ojthe L/inaj yaa’ Period (Cambridge, 1983). It is a most welcome addition to the extremely meager selection of books on the subject available in English: essentially R.A. Nicholson’s classic but outdated Literary History of tlte Arabs (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907) and the outline treatments by I. Gold-r_ihcr (A Short History of Classical Arabic Lilrraturr, English translation and revision by J. Desomogyi, Hildesheim: Olms 1966) and H.A.R. Gibb (.Arabic Literature..4n Introduclion, lst ed. 1926, 2nd ed. Oxford, 1963). The volume covers what the editors understand to be the &dquo;belles-lettres&dquo; of the