Table Of ContentARISTOTLE
AND THE ARABS
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
a”
STUDIES IN NEAR EASTERN CIVILIZATION
NUMBER 1.
GENERAL EDITORS
R. Bayly Winder
Richard Ettinghausen
DESIGNED BY
J. Paul Kirouac
ARISTOTLE
AND THE ARABS:
THE ARISTOTELIAN TRADITION
IN ISLAM
F.E. PETERS
NEW YORK / NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON / UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS LTD.
1968
© 1968 by New York University
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-29431
Manufactured in the United States of America
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN
NEAR EASTERN CIVILIZATION
The participation of the New York University Press in the Univer-
sity’s new commitment to Near Eastern Studies—building on a
tradition of well over a century—will provide Americans and others
with new opportunities for understanding the Near East. Concerned
with those various peoples of the Near East who, throughout the
centuries, have dramatically shaped many of mankind’s most fun-
damental concepts and who have always had high importance in
practical affairs, this series, New York University Studies in Near
Fastern Civilization, seeks to publish important works in this vital
area. The purview will be broad, open to varied approaches and
historical periods. It will, however, be particularly receptive to work
in two areas that reflect the University and that may have received
insufficient attention elsewhere. These are literature and art. Further-
more, taking a stand that may be more utilitarian than that of other
publications, the series will welcome both translations of important
Near Eastern literature of imagination, and of significant scholarly
works written in Near Eastern languages. In this way, a larger au-
dience, unacquainted with these languages, will be able to deepen its
knowledge of the cultural achievements of Near Eastern peoples.
July, 1968 Richard Ettinghausen
R. Bayly Winder
General Editors
PREFACE
I have intended this work for three different groups. It is obviously
designed for the orientalist, and since he is its ultimate judge,
I have tried to make it both useful and technically satisfactory to
him by his own scholarly standards. But I have also been concerned
to place in the hands of the Western medievalist, and particularly
the student of Latin Scholasticism, an introduction to a tradition
which is of great importance to him, but before which he stands
technically and linguistically helpless. Wherever possible I have
cited translations in Western languages so that he might turn to the
texts themselves, and at the same time, I have attempted to give
him some guide lines into the scholarship of Islamic Studies. Finally,
I myself now read these lines as a classicist, and I hope they will be
of some interest and use to my colleagues.
Islamic Studies, and especially the study of Islamic philosophy,
are still in their infancy, and that fact is reflected in the present
book. It has been my design to make it as complete as possible within
its limits, but there are further levels of understanding and further
degrees of nicety which wait upon the scarcely begun work of the
editor and the philologist. The student of Aristotle has before him a
whole series of critically edited and annotated texts and all the
auxiliaries that classical scholarship has been able to devise. The
Islamicist still awaits his Ross, his Bonitz, and, indeed, his Liddell-
Scott- Jones. It 1s obvious that under such circumstances, when a
large part of the important material is still in manuscript form, some
of it even uncataloged, what follows here is in the nature of an
interim report.
Since Arabic was used as a philosophical and theological lingua
franca by all the peoples living in the Islamic empires during the
Middle Ages, I have used the standardized Arabic forms and Arabic
Vill
transliterations for all the Eastern names that appear on the following
pages, no matter what their ethnic or religious provenance. The only
exceptions are instances where an Anglicized form has become so
familiar that to resort to anything else would serve merely to
distract.
I have had to be somewhat arbitrary in other respects. There
runs parallel to Islamic philosophy and theology a Jewish version
of the same tradition which shares the same language, Arabic, and
an almost identical methodology and problematic. Although I have
averted in various places to some of the figures in this Jewish
tradition, I have, in general, excluded the Jewish version of falsafah
and kalam from my overall treatment.
A work such as this is obviously cumulative. It rests on the
labors of others, and I have signaled my debt to these scholars in
the footnotes and bibliographies in the text. But it has less easily
acknowledgeable supports as well. Most of the research and writing
of the book were sustained by generous grants from the Ford and
Rockefeller Foundations, and some of the typing costs were borne
by New York University. I am particularly indebted to the Ford
Foundation which first enabled me to embark upon Islamic Studies,
and then to travel to the Near East when this book was only an
outline.
CONTENTS
PREFACE FOR THE SERIES Vv
PREFACE vii
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xi
INTRODUCTION xvii
THE MAKING OF THE ARISTOTELIAN
TRADITION 3
The Aristotelianism of Late Antiquity 7
The Organization of the Tradition 10
Aristotle and the Fathers 18
The Byzantine Philosophical Tradition 22
I]
THE GROUND PREPARED:
THE HELLENIC AND IRANIAN
NEAR EAST 33
The Syrian Milieu 35
The Iranian Background 41
UI]
THE EASTERN TRANSLATION
MOVEMENT 58
IV
THE TRANSMISSION OF THE
NEW LEARNING 69
Philosophy and the Traditional Sciences 69
Islamic Scholasticism 79
The Eisagoge Complex 79
The Literature of Comment 87
Textual Comment: tafsir, ta‘liq 92
Epitomes: jawami‘ah, mukhtasar,
talkhis 96
V THE DIFFUSION OF ARISTOTELIANISM — 99
Epitome and Definition Literature 100
Encyclopedias 104
Doxographies and Gnomonologies 120
Nonphilosophical testimonia 129
Vi PHILOSOPHICAL MOVEMENTS
IN ISLAM 135
The Mu‘tazilite Movement 136
Kalam 147
Falsafah 156
The School of al-Kindi 158
The Peripatetics of Baghdad 160
The Medical Circle 163
Ibn Sina 165
The Platonic Tradition 168
Batiniyah Movements 174
The Triumph of Kalam 185
Al-Ghazali and Falsafah 188
The Century of Razi and Tusi 193
Ibn Taymiyah. 200
Al-lji, Glossators, and Superglossators 203
Ibn Rushd 215
EPILOGUE: THE EASTERN AND
WESTERN ARISTOTLE 221
APPENDIX: SOURCES FOR THE
HISTORY OF THE
ARISTOTELIAN TRADITION
IN ISLAM 239
Secular, Ecclesiastical, and Cultural Histories 241
Heresiographies 244
f'abaqat and Biographies 246
Bibliographies 250
The Primary Sources: Classification by Author 252
INDEX 295
