The Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin Reception of Avicenna's Physics and Cosmology by Dag Nikolaus Hasse & Amos Bertolacci

Author:Dag Nikolaus Hasse & Amos Bertolacci [Hasse, Dag Nikolaus & Bertolacci, Amos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781614517740
Google: K4CbjgEACAAJ
Publisher: DeGruyter
Published: 2018-11-15T23:40:15.718521+00:00

This is the richest table of this article. Remember that the words in upright never appear in any other translator of the corpus and that those in italics appear only once outside Gundisalvi’s translations. Together the terms pile up much evidence. The evidence for Avicenna’s Isagoge and Avicenna’s Physica is overwhelming. It has been a long-standing surmise that Dominicus Gundisalvi was the translator not only of Avicenna’s De anima, Philosophia prima and De convenientia et differentia scientiarum, but also of two other major parts of Avicenna’s summa al-Šifāʾ: the Isagoge and the Physica. The stylistic analysis of small words does not leave any doubt that this is indeed the case.

The evidence of the above table is also convincing for three other texts that are considerably shorter (as compared with the 24.673 words of Avicenna’s Isagoge and the 59.724 words of his Physica): Alexander of Aphrodisias’ De intellectu (3.345 words), Alfarabi’s De intellectu (4.074 words) and the Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Liber introductorius in artem logicae demonstrationis (6.008 words). It is true that the lists of Gundisalvian catchwords in these three shorter texts are not particularly long: The Alexander translation contains 8 such terms, the Alfarabi translation 5 and the Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ translation 7. But one should keep in mind that these terms do not appear outside Gundisalvi’s translations, neither in the present corpus, which includes Michael Scot, nor in the astronomical/ astrological corpus. There may always be some stray appearances of unusual stylistic terms in a translation, such as Hugo of Santalla’s and John of Seville’s terms in Gundisalvi’s long translations of Isagoge and Physica. But in the case of these three shorter texts, sets of 6–8 Gundisalvian phrases are a significant indication of Gundisalvi’s involvement, especially since the negative evidence for the other translators is very stable: There are blank fields for these three texts in the tables for the other translators John, Hugo, Gerard, Alfred and Michael Scot, except for four single terms.904 The stylistic analysis of small words therefore points clearly to Dominicus Gundisalvi as the translator of Alexander’s De intellectu, Alfarabi’s De intellectu and the Iḫwān al-Ṣafāʾ’s Liber introductorius in artem logicae demonstrationis.

To underline the above attributions to Gundisalvi, it is worthwhile to have a look at an occurrences table for a phrase specific to Gundisalvi: opus fuit. This term translates forms of the verbs aḥwaǧa and iḥtāǧa (‘to need’):

opus fuit (translating: aḥwaǧa, iḥtāǧa)

The other translators use: indiget, necessarius est, oportet, necesse est

anonymous … 0

02-Alexander of Aphrodisias, De intellectu 1

… 0

07-Alfarabi, De intellectu 1

… 0

12-Ps.-Alfarabi, De ortu scientiarum 4

… 0

18-Avicenna, Physica I–III 1

… 0

John of Seville … 0

Hugo of Santalla … 0

Gerard of Cremona … 0

Gundisalvi + Avendauth 41-Avicenna, De anima 1

… 0

Gundisalvi + Johannes Hispanus … 0

44-Algazel, Summa 2

Gundisalvi 45-Avicenna, Philosophia prima 2

… 0

47-Ps.-Avicenna, Liber celi et mundi 6

Alfred of Shareshill … 0

Michael Scot … 0

Opus fuit is a good example of a phrase which is regular and specific at the same time. In addition, it also illustrates why the present study does not differentiate between translations

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