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Plato's ‘testament to Aristotle’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

Extract

Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī concluded his celebrated Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī with a string of aphorisms purporting to be ‘a chapter from the utterances of Plato of profit to the generality of men: namely, the testament that he gave to his pupil Aristotle’. In his recent admirable translation, Professor G. M. Wickens comments that ‘the aphorisms in this Section are of course not necessarily regarded as coming from one Platonic corpus: even Ṭūsī uses the term mansūb, with its suggestion of doubt. They will be recognized to have many parallels and resemblances over a wide area of time and space, but their Muslim clothing is worn with an air of comfortable familiarity’. In point of fact, as will be demonstrated in this paper, the entire section is a reasonably close translation of a section occurring in the so-called al-Ḥihmat al-khālida of Ibn Miskawaih.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1971

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References

1 The Nasirean ethics, London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1964Google Scholar.

2 See op. cit., 333.

3 Sapientia perennis, ed. Badawī, 'Abd al-Raḥmān, Cairo, 1952, 217–19Google Scholar.

4 Los bocados de oro, ed. Badawī, , Madrid, 1958, 140–3Google Scholar.