Abstract
In a recent chapter for another Festschrift, I announced that the codex Madrasa-yi Marwī 19—a philosophical anthology copied in Rabī‘ al-Awwal 1073/October 1662—contains 24 treatises and letters that are attributed to the Jacobite Christian philosopher and theologian Yahyā b. ‘Adī (d. 363/974) and that were thought to have been lost.2 The present chapter is a transcription and translation of one of these “lost” treatises, Yahyā’s Essay on Five Inquiries into the Eight Headings (Maqāla fī mabāhith al-khamsa ʿan al-ru’ūs al-thamāniyd)3.
Many thanks are due to Ahmedreza Rahimiriseh and Reza Pourjavady for bringing this codex to my attention; to Stephen Menn, Sascha Treiger, Naser Dumairieh, and the editors of this volume for their detailed criticisms and suggestions; to Taro Mimura for his assistance with the initial transcription; to Adam Gacek for his advice on some paleographical issues; to Gerhard Endress for some references; and to Keren Abbou Hershkovits for her help with Hebrew transcriptions and translations. This chapter is dedicated to my doctoral supervisor Hossein Modarressi, an example of how—as Yahyā puts it here—a teacher “in whom knowledge and goodness come together deserves to be counted as trustworthy and accepted on authority.”
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Notes
R. Wisnovsky, “New Philosophical Texts of Yahyā ibn ‘Adī: A Supplement to Endress’ Analytical Inventory,” in Islamic Philosophy, Science, Culture and Religion: Studies in Honor of Dimitri Gutas, ed. D. Reisman and F. Opwis (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 307–326.
A facsimile edition of the Marwī codex, including a comprehensive introduction to the anthology as well as an index of names of individuals and groups, and titles of books, is being prepared by the author for inclusion in the series co-published by the Institute of Islamic Studies of the Free University of Berlin. Inventories of Yahyā’s works can be found in G. Endress, The Works of Yahyā ibn ‘Adī: An Analytical Inventory (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert, 1977).
S. Khalīfāt, Maqalat Yahya ibn ‘Adī al-falsafiyya (Amman: al-Jāmi‘a al-Urdunniyya, 1988).
J. Mansfeld, Prolegomena: Questions to Be Settled before the Study of an Author, or Text (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), supplemented by his Prolegomena Mathematica: From Apollonius of Perga to Late Neoplatonism (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
M. Plezia, De commentariis isagogicis (Krakow: Archiwum Filologiczne, 1949).
L. Westerink, ed., Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1962), xxv–xxxii.
I. Hadot, “Les introductions aux commentaires exégétiques chez les auteurs néoplatoniciens et les auteurs chrétiens,” in Les Règles de l’interprétation, ed. M. Tardieu (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 99–122.
Hadot, “The Role of the Commentaries on Aristotle in the Teaching of Philosophy according to the Prefaces of the Neoplatonic Commentaries on the Categories,” in Aristotle and the Later Tradition, ed. H. Blumenthal and H. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 175–89.
The appropriation of two of these late-antique introductory topoi by medieval Arabic scholars is treated in detail by C. Hein, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie: Von der spātantiken Einleitungsliteratur zur arabischen Enzyklopādie (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985).
C. Ferrari, ed. and comm., Der Kategorienkommentar von Abū l-Farag ‘Abdallāh ibn at-Tayyib: Text und Untersuchungen (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 90–109.
See also D. Gutas, “Paul the Persian and the Classification of the Parts of Aristotle’s Philosophy: A Milestone between Alexandria and Baghdad,” Der Islam 60 (1983): 231–67.
D. Gutas, “The Starting Point of Philosophical Studies in Alexandrian and Arabic Aristotelianism,” in Theophrastus of Eresus: On His Life and Work, ed. W. Fortenbaugh, P. Huby and A. Long (New Brunswick, N.J. and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1985), 115–23.
On the Latin reception of this tradition, see E. Quain, “The Medieval Accessus ad auctores,” Traditio 3 (1945): 215–64.
This list largely reproduces Westerink’s useful synopsis, which collates the lists contained in the Categories commentaries of Ammonius (d. 517/526; see Commentaria in Aristotelem graeca [CAG], vol. IV, section 4), Philoponus (d. 570s; CAG XIII.1), Olympiodorus (d. after 565; CAG XII.1), Elias (fl. mid/late sixth century; CAG XVIII.1) and Simplicius (fl. mid-sixth century; CAG VIII); see L. Westerink, “The Alexandrian Commentators and the Introductions to their Commentaries,” in Aristotle Transformed, ed. R. Sorabji (London: Duckworth, 1990), 325–48 (at 342–43).
Ed. F. Dieterici, Alfārābi’s philosophische Abhandlungen aus Londoner, Leidener und Berliner Handschriften (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1890), 49–55; translated by Dieterici into German in his Alfarabi’s philosophische Abhandlungen aus dem Arabischen ūbersetzt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1892), 82–91.
Also ed. R. Walzer and M. Guidi in their “Studi su al-Kindi I: Uno scritto introduttivo allo studio di Aristotele,” Memorie della Reale Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Classe di Scienze Morali, Storiche e Filologiche) 6, no. 6 (1937–1940): 375–403.
K. Gyekye, ed., Ibn al-Tayyib’s Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge (Beirut: Dār al-Mashriq, 1975) (cf. S. Stern, “Ibn al-Tayyib’s Commentary on the Isagoge,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 19, no. 3 [1957]: 419–25; Ferrari, Der Kategorienkommentar von Abū l-Farag ‘Abdallāh ibn at-Tayyib).
Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1962), vol. IV; S. Harvey, “The Hebrew Translation of Averroes’ Proemium to his Long Commentary on the Physics,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 52 (1985): 55–84.
M. ʿA. ʿAbd al-Samīʿ, ed., al-Darūrī fī sinā‘at al-nahw (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-ʿArabī, 2002).
On Averroes’s openly admitted debt to al-Fārābī in resolving problems of ontology, see S. Menn, “Farabi in the Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics: Averroes against Avicenna on Being and Unity,” in The Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics, ed. A. Bertolacci and D. Hasse (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 51–96.
For detailed discussions of the history of these distinctions, see S. Stern, “The First in Thought is the Last in Action,” Journal of Semitic Studies 7, no. 2 (1962): 234–52, as well as my “Notes on Avicenna’s Concept of Thingness (Shay’iyya),” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2000): 181–221.
“Towards a History of Avicenna’s Distinction between Immanent and Transcendent Causes,” in Before and After Avicenna, ed. D. Reisman (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 49–68; and “Final and Efficient Causality in Avicenna’s Cosmology and Theology,” Quaestio 2 (2002): 97–123.
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© 2013 Michael Cook, Najam Haider, Intisar Rabb, and Asma Sayeed
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Wisnovsky, R. (2013). Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī’s Discussion of the Prolegomena to the Study of a Philosophical Text. In: Cook, M., Haider, N., Rabb, I., Sayeed, A. (eds) Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought. Palgrave Series in Islamic Theology, Law, and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137078957_10
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