Walzer - Greek Into Arabic - Essays On Islamic Philosophy.pdf - Islam - michalszasz121

by the same author:

MAGNAMORALIA UND ARISTOTELISCHE

ORIENTAL STUDIES I

ETHIK. Weidmann, Berlin 1929

ARISTOTELIS

DIALOGORUM

FRAGMENTA.

Sansoni, Florence 1934

su AL-KINDI

I1 (with H. Ritter). Accademia dei Lincei, Rome 1~38

ERACLITO,

RACCOLTA

DEI FRAMMENTI.

Sansoni, Florence 1939.

STUDI su AL-KINDI

I (with M. Guidi).Accademia dei Lincei, Rome 1939.

AL-FARABIUS

DE PL~TON~S

PHILOSOPHIA

(with F. Rosenthd).

Warbzcrg Institute, London IP.f.3.

GALENON MEDICALEXPERIENCE.

Oxford University Press, 1944.

GALENON JEWS AND CHRISTIANS.

Oxford University Press, 1949.

GREEK INTO ARABIC

GALENI

COMPENDIUMTIMAEI

PLATONIS

(with P. Krazcs).

Warb-urg Institute, London 1951.

Essays on Islamic Philosophy

Richard Walzer

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

I 062

STUDI

1962 Richard WaIzer .

Islamic Philosophy

Page

On the Legacy of the Classics inthe Islamic World

UnFmmtttento nuovo di Aristotele

Aristotle, Galen, and Palladius on Looe

New Light on the Arabic Translations of Aristotle

6. Onthe Arabic Versions of Books A, a and A of Aristotle's Metaphysics 114

Zur Traditionsgeschichte der Aristotelischen Poetik

Arabische Aristotelesiibersetzungen inIstanbul

New Light on Galen's Moral Philosophy

A Diatribe of Galen

New Studies on Al-Kindi

AGFdrdbi's Tlzeory of Probhecy and Divirlation

Some Aspects of Miskawaih's Tahdhib Al-Akhlrfq

Platonism inIslamic Philosophy

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author and the publishers wish to express their gratitude for per-

mission to reprint essays which originally appeared in the following

publications:

I. The History of Philosophy, Eastern and Western, vol. 11, 120 ff.

Allen & Unwin, London 1953.

2. Festschrift Bruno Snell, p. 189 ff. C. H. Beck, Miinchen 1956.

3. Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica NS, vol. 14 (1937)~p. 127 ff.

4. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1939)~p. 407 ff.

5. Oriens, vol. 6 (1953). p. 91 ff.

6. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 43 (1958), p. 217 ff.

7. Studi Italiani di Filologia Classica NS, vol. 11 (1934)) p. 5 ff.

8. Gnomon, vol. 10 (1934), p. 277 ff.

g. The Classical Quarterly, vol. 43 (1949), p. 82 ff.

10. The Harvard Theologcal Review, vol. 47 (1g54), p. 243 ff.

11. Oriens, vol. 10 (1957)~p. 203 ff.

12. Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 77 (1957). p. 142 ff.

13. Studi orientalistici in onore di Giorgio Levi della Vida, vol. 11,

p. 603 ff. Istituto per l'oriente, Rome 1956.

14. Entretiens, voi. 3, p. 203 ff. Fondation Hardt, Vandoeuvres-Geneva

1957.

ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY

I - The Problem

- -

importance of that Greek element whose presence throughout they cannot

deny; others tend to fix their attention on the Greek sources and do not

realiie that the Islamic philosophers, although continuing the Greek tra-

dition, can rightly claim to be understood and appreciated in their own

setting and according to their own intentions which may be different

from those of their Greek predecessors.

Very little has been said about the philosophical significance of Islamic

philosophy for our own time. Only a few good interpretations of Arabic

philosophical texts are available and accessible to the general reader. It is

a promising field of research, but only a small portion of it has been

cultivated. Hence nothing more than a very provisional sketch of the main

development of Arabic philosophy can be given at the present time.

Islamic philosophy presupposes not only a thdusand years of Greek

thought about God and self-dependent entities, about nature and man

and human conduct and action: its background in time is the amalgama-

tion of this way of life ,with the Christian religion which had conquered

the lands round the Mediterranean during the three centuries preceding

the establishment of Islam from the Caspian Sea to the Pyrenees. The

unbroken continuity of the Western tradition is based on the fact that

the Christians in the Roman Empire did not reject the pagan legacy but

made it an essential part of their own syllabus of learning. The under-

i -

standing of Arabic philosophy is thus intimately linked with the study of

Greek philosophy and theology in the early stages of Christianity, the

In the present state of our knowledge it would be premature to attempt

a definitivehistory of Islamicphilosophy. Too many facts are still unknown,

too many works have been neglected for centuries and remained unread

and are only gradually being rediscovered in Eastern and Western libraries

and edited and studied. There is no agreement among scholars on the best

approach to the subject: some try to understand Islamic philosophy as

an exclusive achievement of the Arabs and accordingly minimize the

Richard Walzer

Islamic Philosophy

last centuries of the Roman Empire and the contemporary civilization of

Byzantium. The student of Arabic philosophy should therefore be familiar

not only with Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and various minor Greek philo-

sophers, but also with thinkers like St. Augustine or John Philoponus

who was the first to combine the Aristotelian philosophy and Christian

theology.

period of Greek philosophy was long since over and its light had become

din,, when it was handed on to the Arabs. It is important for those who

what Greek philosophy was like in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. ,

and not rashly to compare Plato and Aristotle with the Muslim philo-

sophers without taking all the later developments into due account and

without knowing how Plato and Aristotle were read and explained in the

Greek schools with whose late exponents the Muslims became acquainted.

The task is, in some respects, difficult, because certzin features of the

late Greek schools are known to us only from Arabic sources and were

considered uninteresting in the later centuries of Byzantine Greek

civilization.

2 - The Greek Element

Philosophy is a way of life discovered by the Greeks in the sixth

century B.C. and develcped by them in successive stages to a wonderfully

balanced and harmonious interpretation of man and the universe. It

exhausts, if we look at it from a distance, all the approaches to an under-

standing of the world and of man's position in it, which are possible from

the starting-point of an unshakable belief in the power of human reason.

The civilization of the Greeks owes much to the earlier civilizations of

the Ancient East, of Egypt and Assyria, for example; but their confidence

in human reason is something essentially new. Plato, the greatest of all

Greek philosophers and the founder of a natural theology whose appeal is

still as fresh and impressive as ever, did not overlook the irrational element

in man and gave it it!; proper place as a servant of reason, without setting

himself to do violence to human nature and throw it out altogether.

Later centuries were less cautious, and conceived rationalism in terms

which were too narrow, leading it todestroy itself in scepticism,dogmatism

and mysticism. But the tradition of Greek philosophy was never completely

interrupted, and while it declined in the West it had a new lease of life in

Muslim civilization. Greek poetry was neglected in its homeland and in

Byzantium, and almost forgotten in the Latin world, and had to be

rediscovered and revalued in the centuries following the Italian Renais-

sance. Greek philosophy, however, survived and was continuouslystudied,

and the considerable Arabic contribution to this survival is by no means

adequately realized in the world of scholarship. Had the Arabic philo-

sophers done nothing apart from saving Greek philosophy from being

completely disregarded in the Middle Ages-and they did more-they

would deserve the interest of twentieth-century scholars for this reason /

alone.

When in the seventh century the Arabs conquered Egypt and Syria

which were largely hellenized, and the somewhat less completelyhellenized

Mesopotamia, Greek philosophy had been in existence for a thousand years

and more as a continuous tradition of study handed down in well-estab-

lished schools throughout the Greek-speaking world. The great creative

3 - The Hebraic Element

Jewish thought, out of which ~hristianityand Islam ultimately

developed, is also based on the civilizations of Egypt and Assyria, but

it took a quite different turn. According to Jewish thought the authority

of the supreme God and revealed knowledge are superior to human

reason, and faith in God is considered the only true and certain good-

instead of the Greek appreciation of wisdom as the perfection of man.

Christianity conquered the Roman Empire in its entirety during the fourth

century A.D., whereas Judaism continued as the special religion of the

Jewish people. The Koranic conception of faith is, in all its essential

features, in harmony with contemporary Jewish and Christian ideas; the

exaltation of prophecy and the intuitive attainment of truth through

supernatural powers of this kind are of primary importance in Islam,

though by no means foreign to Judaism and Christianity. We shall have

to spegify the stage which Islam, as a religion of this type, had reached

by the time when we first hear of Muslims calling themselves "philo-

sophers," (using the Greek word for the new knowledge which, in full

consciousness of what they were doing, they imported eom a foreign and

basically different world).

4 -Jewish adChristian Attempts at Assimilating

Greek Philosophy

The rise of Arabic philosophy in the first half of the ninth century A.D.

did not represent the first invasion of a Hebraic religion by Greek thought.

However one has to be fully aware that it is different from previous

developments of a similar kind, in view both of the stage reached by

aim at understanding the Arabic philosophers in their proper setting to .

Richard Walzer

Islamic Philosophy

Greek philosophy in the century after Justinian and of the special situ-

ation of the Muslim religion, which had to find its bearings in defending

itself against Christian and Manichean criticism and attack. But the

comparison of the Jewish and the Christian attitudes to Greek philosophy

helps towards a better understanding of the somewhat different history

of Greek philosophy in the Muslim world. Philo of Alexandria had in the

first century A.D. tried to explain the essence of Judaism in terms of

contemporary Greek philosophy, which meant for him a not too radical

Platonism; but his attempt had been abortive so far as the future develop

ment of Judaism was concerned. Nevertheless it helped Clement of

Alexandria and Origen, who both used him widely, to build up the founda-

tions of the first Christian philosophy in the third century. Clement and

Origen were still free from the impact of Neoplatonism, which became the

dominant pagan philosophy from the fourth century onwards and hence

increasingly influenced Christian thought as is shown by such writings as

those of the man who called himself Dionysius the Areopagite. The

syllabus of philosophical learning which became more or less common

after A.D. 500 was based on Aristotle's lecture courses, selections from

Plato, and Neoplatonic Metaphysics; but the great authorities of the past

were studied according to the interpretation of the late Neoplatonic

commentators who, basing themselves on earlier commentaries like those

of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, tried to make Aristotle a

consistent, systematic and dogmatic philosopher. It was not until this

date that the actual teaching of pagan philosophy of the Neoplatonic-

Aristotelian type was taken over by Christian teachers. This created a

new problem or, at any rate, gave increased import&ce to a problem

already understood before, that of the relations between this philosophy

and Christian religion and theology. This discussion is, in our tradition,

represented by John Philoponus, a monophysitecommentator on Aristotle,

a philosophical defender of the formatio mundi against the Aristotelians,

and also a theological writer like a Muslim dialectical theologian (muta-

kallim). It is, at the same time, the historical background of Arabic

philosophy which faced the perennial problem of faith and reason, of

revealed and natural theology, in a form conditioned by this late develop

ment of Greek philosophy as part of a syllabus of Christian learning. This

late Greek philosophy was not the same everywhere but varied, however

slightly, in dierent places and at different times; accordingly the develop-

ment of early Islamic philosophy is by no means uniform either: there was

more than one route from Syriac and Egyptian seats of Greek learning

understanding of the original arguments, which on the whole comes up to i

the level of the late Greek schools. Aristotle's Dialogues, which had been

very popular in the Hellenistic age and had, because of their Platonic I

colour, appealed to some of the Neoplatonists, were not translated. But

almost all the treatises of Aristotle eventually became known, with the

exception of the Politics, which to all appearance was not studied much

in the Greek Schools of the Imperial Age. Hence a thorough knowledge

of Aristotle's thought, as the late Neoplatonists understood it, is common

to all Arabic philosophers from Al-Kindi in the ninth to Ibn Rushd in

the twelfth century, although its application varies in the different philo-

sophical systems established on this base. Aristotle's formal logic was

latterly used also by the theological adversaries of the philosophers. In

addition, most of the commentaries known to the Greeks were eagerly

. studied and discussed, and some of them are known to us only through

the Arabs. Plato's Timaeus, Republic and Laws were available and were

studied. The Republic and Laws became textbooks of political theory

in the school of Al-Fsriibi; the Timaeus was widely known, but the

within the Muslim Empire to Baghdsd, to Persia and all over the steadily

extending Islamic world.

I - Authors transmitted

The authors studied by the Arabic-speaking Muslim philosophers and,

accordingly, translated from Greek or Syriac into Arabic, are those

studied in the late Greek schools. This means that the philosophical texts

by Greek authors preserved in Arabic translations include a certain

number of Greek texts which are otherwise lost through the narrowing

interest of the later centuries of Byzantium; on the other hand it is clear

that those Greek texts of earlier times which did not appeal to the late

Neoplatonic Schools and are for this reason lost in their Greek original

cannot be recovered from Arabic translations either. Hence we find, for

example, in Arabic versions lost philosophical treatises by Galen or

sections of a paraphrase of Plotinus or unknown treatises on Platonic

philosophy or Greek commentaries on Aristotle, but are disappointed

whenever we look for writings of the pre-Socratics, dialogues of Aristotle,

works of early and middle Stoic writers, etc. The value of the Arabic

translations for the Greek text of the authors translated is not as negligible

as is often assumed, and much can be learned from the Arabic versions

about the actual transmission of the various works. The authors best

known to the Arabs were Aristotle and his commentators; we know their

translations of them reIatively well and are able to appreciate their fine

Walzer - Greek Into Arabic - Essays On Islamic Philosophy.pdf

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