This article aims to reconstruct part of Book IV of Galen's lost treatise On Demonstration. This reconstruction is based on testimonies transmitted by Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925) in the Doubts About Galen, as well as on a source that until now has never been studied, namely the Solution to the Doubts About Galen of Abū al-ʿAlāʾ ibn Zuhr (d. 1131). This paper argues that, in Book IV, Galen maintains that no one can reach any certain conclusion regarding the eternity of the world, and that he consequently criticizes Aristotle's treatment of the subject in On the Heavens. Galen approves only of one of the arguments used by Aristotle in On the Heavens I, 3 (270b12–17), because it is based on empirical evidence. Al-Rāzī focuses on Galen's commentary on this passage. Our hypothesized reconstruction resolves some of the contradictions between the fragments of Book IV that are transmitted in al-Rāzī's report and Philoponus’ Against Proclus On the Eternity of the World. Finally, this article shows that al-Rāzī's interest in this passage from On Demonstration can be explained with reference to his own philosophical-theological goals. As my examination will make clear, al-Rāzī objects to Galen's arguments because he considers that Galen's teleology is based on a framework where the world is eternal (although Galen does not state this view explicitly), and that this framework does not allow Galen to understand that theodicy is prior to both cosmology and biology.

The extant manuscript tradition of the Kitāb al-Kašf provides evidences of three phases of redaction and revision of the treatise. This study aims to illustrate the relations between the two Arabic versions and the anonymous fourteenth century Hebrew translation, taking into account the additions and modifications that differentiate them. I conclude that the Hebrew translation represents an intermediate stage of reworking, attesting important additions to the text as well as philosophical changes, especially in arguments concerning the creation of the world at the beginning of the treatise. However, it precedes the next revision phase of the text, which leaded to the modifications of the last Arabic version, in the chapters dealing with the thorny questions of divine corporeality and direction. The analysis of additions and arguments in the matter of content, context and reasoning helps to understand the redaction phases' history and the way the treatise was transmitted.

Dans sa description de l'œuvre en langue vulgaire de Lorenzo Ghiberti, Giorgio Vasari, quoiqu'il en dénigre certains aspects, saisit bien, nous semble-t-il, les traits marquants des Commentaires de Lorenzo, en particulier ceux du troisième livre concernant l'optique: Scrisse Lorenzo un'opera in volgare nella quale trattò di molte cose, ma sì fattamente che poco costrutto se ne cava… [que l'on en tire très peu de connaissances utiles…] Né tacerò che egli mostra il libro essere stato fatto da altri [Je ne tairai pas qu'il montre que le livre a été fait par d'autres personnes]

The Andalusian mathematician and astronomer Ibn Muʿāḏ al-Jayyānī (11th century) is the author of an important commentary on the concept of ratio, in which he attempts to justify the Euclidean definition of proportionality between magnitudes – the celebrated Definition V.5 – and that of greater ratio. In addition to an analysis of the commentary, we provide a French translation and a critical edition of the original Arabic text. We also attempted to settle some problems linked to the biography of Ibn Muʿāḏ.

Le présent article revient sur la polémique entre Abū Bakr al-Rāzī et Abū al-Qāsim al-Balḫī. En s'appuyant sur le témoignage du Kitāb taṯbīt dalāʾil al-nubuwwa du Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Ǧabbār, on montre que les deux philosophes ont dû s'affronter à la cour d'Aḥmad b. Sahl al-Marwazī, gouverneur de Balḫ, durant les années 910, et que la virulence du ton de leur échange s'explique surtout par ce contexte de rivalité professionnelle. Pour ce qui est de son contenu, leur entretien a dû porter sur la question de la justice divine et sur la meilleure manière de rendre compte de la prophétie et du message coranique. Dans un second temps, on passe à l’étude du chap. VIII, 4 de Al-maṭālib al-ʿāliya de Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī et l'on montre que, contrairement à une opinion récemment émise, ce chapitre constitue un écho non pas d'Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, mais du premier argument du Kitāb al-zumurrud d'Ibn al-Rāwandī, qui opposait l'autonomie de la raison à la nécessité de la prophétie pour conclure de la première à la négation de la seconde. On suggère pour finir que la doctrine de la prophétie d'Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, comme celle des grands théologiens de son temps, tant muʿtazilites qu'ašʿarites, vise à échapper au dilemme mis en place par Ibn al-Rāwandī quelques décennies plus tôt.

Late in his intellectual life, Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī espoused a dualistic position on the nature of the soul, denying that the soul is in any sense a material body. This view, which in broad terms concurs with Avicenna’s, sets al-Rāzī in opposition to the theologians’ materialistic stance. To make his position clear, in his last work Almaṭālib al-Rāzī sets out a comprehensive case for the theologians’ materialism, before critiquing that position. This paper offers a reconstruction of al-Rāzī’s arguments for the theologians’ materialism, providing an insight into arguments in the philosophy of mind during the Islamic Middle Ages.

Both Arabic modernists and Western humanists often regard the Muslim philosopher Averroes as one of the earliest precursors of Kant and the European Enlightenment. In contrast to this reputation, this paper argues that it was Kant’s critics Herder and Tiedemann who rediscovered Averroes. Tiedemann was the first German historiographer to give an accurate account of Averroes’ thought. This was accompanied by a re-evaluation of Averroes by Herder in his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, in which he recognized the similarity between his own concept of the spirit of the age as historical reason – his alternative to the Enlightenment concept of a universal and ahistorical reason – and Averroes’ concept of a single material intellect for all individual human minds. Finally, the paper outlines the possible connections between Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s intellect and Hegel’s concept of reason in history.

Muhsin Sayyid Mahdi, James Richard Jewett Emeritus Professor of Arabic at Harvard University, died on July 9 in Brookline, Massachusetts, after a long series of illnesses.

Coming after Muʾayyad al-Dīn al-ʿUrḍī (1200–1266) and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (1201–1274), Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (1236–1311), a leading figure of the so-called Marāgha school in astronomy, presents his predecessors’ non-Ptolemaic models and criticizes them in his three hayʾa books. Since his own new models in Nihāyat al-idrāk (written in Arabic in 1281) and Ikhtiyārāt muẓaffarī (written in Persian in 1282) are not without difficulties, in his latest book on hayʾa, al-Tuḥfa al-shāhiyya (written in Arabic in 1285) he puts forward his modified models inspired from Ṭūsī’s and ʿUrḍī’s models and produces a series of new models for Mercury and the oscillation of the spheres. Nevertheless, in spite of all his attempts, the tradition of non-Ptolemaic modeling after him never converged to a series of standard models.

During the second half of the twentieth century an attention of historians of mathematics shifted to mathematics of the Late Antiquity and its subsequent development by mathematicians of the Arabic world. Many critical editions of works of mathematicians of the Hellenistic era have made their appearance, giving rise to a new, more detailed historical picture. Among these are the critical editions of the works of Diophantus, Apollonius, Archimedes, Pappus, Diocles, and others.

The only traces which remain of Abū Sahl al-Qūhī's work on centers of gravity are the correspondence he maintained with Abū Is[hdotu]āq al-[Sdotu]ābi', and the first chapter of the Kitāb Mīzān al-[hdotu]ikma, which 'Abd al-Ra[hdotu]mān al-Khāzinī attributes to al-Qūhī and to Ibn al-Haytham, without distinguishing between their respective contributions. The author of the present article attempts to confront the texts and to analyse all the testimonies which have come down to us on this subject, which are susceptible of shedding light upon al-Qūhī's contribution and the importance of his work on centers of gravity.

This article analyses Avicenna's Ḥayawān III, 1, which deals with the well-known disagreement between physicians and philosophers on the origination of blood vessels (arteries and veins) and nerves. However, the proposed analysis is not limited to this chapter and its main topic. The more general purpose of this article is to reconstruct the psycho-medical context in which Avicenna's exposition lies, that is, the soul's oneness and the consequent conditions for body ensoulment (i. e. the soul's need for a primary, unitary attachment to the body through the heart and the cardiac pneuma). The article then outlines the strategy through which Avicenna presents medical positions (heart, brain, and liver are all on an equal footing) that challenge his (and Aristotle's) anatomical model, which is coherent with his theory of the soul. In this connection, firstly, the article shows how Avicenna takes physicians’ arguments apart in a philosophical context (he usually points at their logical shortcomings). Then, it clarifies the contribution of anatomy to determine the conditions of body ensoulment and, ultimately, how to reconcile medical practice with philosophical truths, if need be.

Né le 4 février 1917 dans un village des environs de Damiette, ‘Abd al-Rahmān Badaī s'est éteint au Caire, où il avait étudié puis enseigné – à l'Universitél – avant de joindre l'Université d'Héliopoplis. ‘A. Badawī nous laisse une oeuvre monumentale, plus de cent-vingt livres en arabe et cinq autres en français. Mondialement connu, son impact sur l'histoire de la philosophie grecque, sur l'histoire de la philosophie islamique et sur la pensée arabe au cours de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle, est immense et incontestable. Travailleur solitaire et acharné, il n'a jamais été égalé pour ses connaissances tant linguistiques que philosophiques et historiques, et surtout pour l'étendue des champs du savoir qu'il a pu couvrir.

Galen's Technê iatrikê (Tegni, for short) was translated into Hebrew three times. The first two translations were executed in the Midi, around the year 1199: once from Constantine the African's Latin version, by an anonymous physician who used the pseudonym “Doeg the Edomite”; and a second time from Arabic, by Samuel Ibn Tibbon in Béziers, using as his Vorlage Ḥunayn Ibn Isḥāq's Arabic version (al-Ṣināʿa al-saġīra), accompanied by ʿAlī Ibn Riḍwān's commentary. (Samuel Ibn Tibbon's authorship of this translation has been called into doubt, but is reestablished in a paper by Gad Freudenthal in this issue of ASP.) A third translation, again from Latin and including Ibn Riḍwān's commentary, was done by Hillel ben Samuel in Rome, in the late thirteenth century, but is not considered in this paper.

We present the Tegni and discuss its history. We then ask why this work was translated into Hebrew twice, at precisely the same time and area. We show that both translators responded to the need of Jewish physicians who read only Hebrew. Doeg's translation was part of his vast project of making the greater part of the Salernitan corpus available in Hebrew. Samuel Ibn Tibbon translated the Tegni with Ibn Riḍwān's commentary both because he was responding to a social need and because he was in the process of switching his profession from physician to translator of philosophic works. Galen's medico-philosophic text was a perfect fit for his intellectual evolution from a philosophically minded physician to a philosopher-scientist.

The influence of Greek sources on the Arab philosophers is both obvious and important. What is less clear is how the quality of the translations from which the philosophers worked affected their understanding of the points that the Greek writers were making. This article investigates one small but self-contained topic from within the field of translation literature, covering the translations of poetic quotations in the Rhetoric of Aristotle in its Arabic translation, together with an analysis of the types of mistakes to be found there. In itself this is of no more than curiosity value, but an application of the lessons to be learnt here to a linguistic study of Arabic philosophical commentaries, and, by extension, to philosophical theory, will be of clear importance.

While Averroes’ work is often considered to represent the culmination of the method of Aristotelian demonstration in Arabic philosophy, a short passage of his Long Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics Γ.2 emphasizes the prominence of dialectic and calls for a re-examination of dialectic and demonstration in Averroes’ philosophical works. In this passage Averroes describes dialectic as an acceptable form of philosophy and the dialectician as a kind of scientist. In putting dialectic and demonstration on an equal, or nearly equal footing, Averroes seems to go against his own account of the dialectical and demonstrative classes of people in the Decisive Treatise. Moreover, this interpretation of Metaphysics Γ.2 also contradicts Averroes’ explanation of the same passage in the Middle Commentary on the Metaphysics as well as Aristotle's own description of dialectic throughout the Metaphysics. That is, in the Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, Averroes departs from his earlier views, and describes dialectic as a necessary part of metaphysics, even though the centrality of dialectic argumentation could call into question the entire project of metaphysics and consequently of the sciences whose demonstrations rely on metaphysical ground, i.e., all sciences. Averroes does not emphasize this view, but its presence is nevertheless unambiguous.

At the very beginning of the last millennium Ibn al-Haytham greatly contributed to the investigation of the Milky Way. Here, the only three currently known versions of his work on the location of the Milky Way are compared to each other and discussed. A comparison of the texts and an early translation into German by E. Wiedemann in 1906 reveals several differences that triggered a new critical translation of the passed down text. We give detailed comments on the work and check the validity of Ibn al-Haytham's arguments. We also discuss his work in the framework of the ‘Great Debate’ on the Milky Way that took place around 1920, more than a decade after Wiedemann's translation. We find that Ibn al-Haytham's work is certainly at the peak of the unaided-eye era of the Milky Way's discovery. Through his own argumentation and in comparison to Ptolemy's observations Ibn al-Haytham clearly identifies the Galaxy as an extraterrestrial body that is not part of the atmosphere but much further away than the Moon. With some of his statements on the stellar positions passed down by Ptolemy, Ibn al-Haytham also anticipates the concept of stellar proper motions.

Matthias Schramm, a well-known historian of science and professor at the University of Tübingen from 1966 to 1996, died in Dusslingen near Tübingen on 24 January 2005, shortly before his 77th birthday. He was born on 6 February 1928 in Paris as a child of painters. Due to wartime difficulties, most of his education was acquired at home. In spite of this, he passed the examination of a high-school prior to his matriculation (Abitur). Although Schramm's school had a pure classical orientation (humanistisches Gymnasium), he read on his own initiative Euclid in Greek.

Al-šahrastānī, who confronts Avicenna in several of his works, devoted an entire work to criticizing him, the title of which was The Struggle against the Philosophers. Although unfinished, it nevertheless includes five “questions” out of the seven which its author had foreseen. These concern themes fundamental for philosophy and theology: being, God, the world and its creation. The method according to which al-šahrastānī deals with them is both radical - he is well aware of the central and sensitive points of Avicenna's philosophy, in particular the status of the first emanated Intelligence - and analytical, as it submits Avicenna's technical terms to a rigorous semantic examination, and takes apart those which have the form of syntagmas (such as “The Being necessary by itself”). The foundation of this merciless refutation is adherence to prophecy, as opposed to the attitude of the philosophers.

This article returns to an old but not hitherto satisfactorily solved question, and aims at putting forward a new approach to the study of the sources and authorship of two contemporary treatises on agriculture: the Nabatean Agriculture (in Arabic al-Filāḥa al-nabaṭiyya) and the Geoponica. Each of them embodies a long tradition reaching from Antiquity to the 10th century in two different cultural provinces expressed in Greek / Latin and Arabic languages. But there is another common feature of these works. Both of them survived in a significant number of manuscripts, and constitute a kind of revision of previous compilations which drew their contents from more ancient treatises brought to light between the 3rd and 6th centuries AD, and to some extent could be qualified as the outcome of an effort for systematising the corpus of agronomical science. Texts and translations from Greek to Latin, from Greek to Syriac or to Arabic, and from Arabic to Armenian attest to this cultural intercommunication.