Studies on Plotinus and Al-Kindi by Peter Adamson;

Author:Peter Adamson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

This is obviously the passage behind section [D] of the text cited above, which, to my knowledge, makes [D] the first known authentic fragment of Porphyry’s commentary on the Physics in Arabic.22 In light of this, it would seem that al-Rāzī was rather well-informed about not only Aristotle’s Physics but also some of the Greek commentaries on the Physics; and it would seem that these commentators included Porphyry.23

IV: The Arabic context: the Baghdad Peripatetics

How did al-Rāzī get his information? Well, as we saw above, Ibn al-Nadīm, himself a resident of 10?’ century Baghdad (he died in either 385/995 or 388/998), knew of an Arabic version of Porphyry’s commentary on Physics I-IV, which would of course have included our text on II.8. And the Physics itself was well known to Arabic authors at the time. This is shown above all by the so-called Baghdad Physics,24 which is preserved in a unique manuscript held in Leiden. The manuscript contains a translation of the Physics by Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn, along with comments by several Christian members of the Baghdad school of Peripatetic philosophers. The most famous representative of the Peripatetic movement in Baghdad is the Muslim al-Fārābī, but for our purposes the crucial figures arc the Christian thinkers gathered around Yaḥya ibn ‘Adi, one of al-Fārābī’s students. Ibn ‘Adī was also a student of the Christian Abū Bishr Mattā ibn Yūnus, and he devoted intensive philosophical activity to Christian theological writing as well as to more straightforward Aristotelian philosophical work.25 Ibn ‘Adī and his school have been aptly compared in their aims and methods to the Alexandrian school of later Neoplatonists. Indeed their activity may be said to be part of a more or less continuous tradition of reading and commenting on Aristotle that stretches forward from the school of Ammonius. I want to argue now that al-Rāzī’s discussion may well have been a response to the activities of the Baghdad school.

The Baghdad Physics is an edition of the Physics made by a third generation student of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī named Abū ‘l-Ḥusayn al-Baṣrī. AI-Basrī’s version collates comments by Ibn ‘Adī himself with notes from the lecture course of ‘Abū ‘AIī ibn al-Samh, a student of Ibn ‘Adī’s.26 Of particular interest to us, of course, are the Baghdad philosopher’s comments on Book II. These include remarks by Abū Bishr Mattā, Ibn ‘Adī and Ibn al-Samḥ. Arabic versions of comments by John Philoponus and, more occasionally, Alexander, are also included. So we are in a position to see that these philosophers were aware of Alexander’s views on nature, and the senses in which it is analogous and disanalogous to art.27 One of the Alexander comments in the Baghdad Physics reads as follows:

Nature is not an efficient cause of what comes to be by chance, but rather deliberation and will are. For chance comes about through acts of will resulting from deliberation. Will is acquired and not natural, even if it is by his nature that man wills the goal of will,28 while art is external to the things; but as for the goal of nature and form, it is the same thing.

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