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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f I SL A M IC P H I L O S OP H Y The Oxford Handbook of ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY Edited by KHALED EL-R OUAYHEB and SABINE SCHMIDTKE 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: El-Rouayheb, Khaled, editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of Islamic philosophy / edited by Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke. Description: New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. | Series: Oxford handbooks | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016002201 | ISBN 9780199917389 (hardcover: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Islamic philosophy. Classification: LCC B741.O94 2016 | DDC 181/.07—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002201 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America Contents Contributors Introduction Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke 1. The Theology Attributed to Aristotle: Sources, Structure, Influence Cristina D'Ancona ix 1 8 2. The Rise of Falsafa: Al-Kindī (d. 873), On First ; Philosophy Emma Gannagé 30 3. Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 925), The Spiritual Medicine Peter Adamson 63 4. Ibn Masarra's (d. 931) Third Book Sarah Stroumsa 83 5. Al-Fārābī's (d. 950) On the One and Oneness: Some Preliminary Remarks on Its Structure, Contents, and Theological Implications Damien Janos 101 6. Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī's (d. 974) Kitāb Tahdhīb al-akhlāq Sidney H. Griffith 129 7. Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/ 1037), Metaphysics of the Shifāʾ Amos Bertolacci 143 8. Reconciling Religion and Philosophy: Nāṣir-i Khusraw's (d. 1088) Jāmiʿ al-ḥikmatayn Khalil Andani 9. Al-Ghazālī's (d. 1111) Incoherence of the Philosophers Frank Griffel 169 191 vi Contents 10. Ismāʿīlite Critique of Ibn Sīnā: Al-Shahrastānī's (d. 1153) Wrestling Match with the Philosophers Frank Griffel 11. Ibn Ṭufayl's (d. 1185) Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓan Taneli Kukkonen 12. Suhrawardī's (d. 1191) Intimations of the Tablet and the Throne: The Relationship of Illuminationism and the Peripatetic Philosophy John Walbridge 13. Averroes (d. 1198), The Decisive Treatise Catarina Belo 14. Al-Rāzī's (d. 1210) Commentary on Avicenna's Pointers: The Confluence of Exegesis and Aporetics Ayman Shihadeh 210 233 255 278 296 15. Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274), Sharḥ al-Ishārāt Jon McGinnis 326 16. Kātibī (d. 1277), Taḥtānī (d. 1365), and the Shamsiyya Tony Street 348 17. Al-Mawāqif fī 'ilm al-kalām by ʿAḍūd al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 1355), and Its Commentaries Alnoor Dhanani 375 18. Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī (d. after 1491) and his Kitāb Mujlī Mirʾāt al-munjī Sabine Schmidtke 397 19. Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī (d. 908/1502), Glosses on ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn al- Qūshjī's Commentary on Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī's Tajrīd al-iʿtiqād Reza Pourjavady 415 20. Mīr Dāmād's (d. 1631) al-Qabasāt: The Problem of the Eternity of the Cosmos Sajjad H. Rizvi 438 21. Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī's (d. 1635) Divine Witnesses Cécile Bonmarriage 465 22. The Sullam al-ʿulūm of (d. 1707) Muḥibb Allāh al-Bihārī Asad Q. Ahmed 488 Contents vii 23. Aḥmad al-Mallawī (d. 1767): Commentary on the Versification of the Immediate Implications of Hypothetical Propositions Khaled El-Rouayheb 509 24. Faḍl-i Ḥaqq Khayrābādī (d. 1861), al-Hadiyya al-saʿīdiyya Asad Q. Ahmed and Jon McGinnis 535 25. Haji Mullā Hādī Sabzawārī (d. 1878), Ghurar al-farāʾid Fatemeh Fana 560 26. Ali Sedad Bey's (d. 1900), Kavâidu't-Taḥavvülât fî Ḥarekâti'z-Zerrât (Principles of Transformation in the Motion of Particles) Nazif Muhtaroğlu 586 27. Muḥammad Iqbāl (d. 1938): The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam Mustansir Mir 607 28. Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr (d. 1979) on the Logical Foundations of Induction Saleh J. Agha 629 29. ʿAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981), Nihāyat al-ḥikma Sajjad H. Rizvi and Ahab Bdaiwi 654 30. Zakī Najīb Maḥmūd (d. 1993), Naḥwa Falsafa ʿIlmiyya (Toward a Scientific Philosophy) Muhammad Ali Khalidi 676 Index of Personal Names Index of Terms 695 699 Contributors Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is the author of Al-Kindī (Oxford University Press, 2007) and the editor of numerous books on philosophy in the Islamic world, including Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is also the author of a book series entitled A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, appearing with Oxford University Press. Saleh J. Agha is a Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut and Senior Editor at the Mideast Mirror. His main areas of interest are Wittgenstein, philosophical logic, and ancient Greek philosophy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at Princeton University and Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Asad Q. Ahmed is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the University of California, Berkeley. His works include The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Ḥijāz and Avicenna's Deliverance: Logic. Khalil Andani is a doctoral student in Islamic Studies at Harvard University, where he focuses on Islamic theology and philosophy, Shīʿī Islam, and Ismāʿīlī history and thought. He holds a master of theological studies degree from Harvard Divinity School, and his prior publications include "The Metaphysics of the Common Word: A Dialogue of Eckhartian and Ismaili Gnosis" in Sacred Web, volumes 26 and 27. Ahab Bdaiwi is Assistant Professor in Medieval Arabic Philosophy, Leiden University. His area of research is medieval and early modern Islamic intellectual history. He examines Avicennan philosophy and its reception in Shīʿī and Sunnī circles and intellectual milieus in medieval Iran and Iraq. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Shiʿi Defenders of Avicenna: An Intellectual History of the Philosophers of Shiraz. Catarina Belo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. She specializes in medieval Islamic philosophy and more recently in Aquinas and Hegel. She is the author of Chance and Determinism in Avicenna and Averroes (Brill, 2007) and Averroes and Hegel on Philosophy and Religion (Ashgate, 2013). Amos Bertolacci (PhD in Philosophy, University of Florence, and in Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, Yale University) is Associate Professor of History of Islamic Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy). He is the author of The Reception of Aristotle's Metaphysics in Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifāʾ: A Milestone of Western x Contributors Metaphysical Thought (Brill, 2006), and of an Italian annotated translation of the metaphysics of Avicenna's Shifāʾ (UTET, 2007). Cécile Bonmarriage is Chercheur qualifié at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS, Belgium) and Associate Professor at UCLouvain (Louvain-la-Neuve). Her research focuses on postclassical Islamic philosophy, with a special interest in the transformation of the Avicennan heritage in later Islamic thought. Cristina D'Ancona is Professor of Philosophy at the Università di Pisa (history of philosophy in late Antiquity, Arabic philosophy, medieval philosophy). She is the author of Recherches sur le Liber de Causis (1995) and the author/editor of Storia della filosofia nell'Islam medievale (2005). Her book La casa della sapienza: La trasmissione della filosofia greca e la formazione della filosofia araba has been translated into Arabic (2014). Alnoor Dhanani specializes in Islamic intellectual history, in particular the interaction between science, theology, and philosophy. He was educated at Columbia University in New York, McGill University, and Harvard University, where he obtained his PhD degree in 1991. He has been a Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, a tutor in the Department of the History of Science and the Department for the Study of Religion at Harvard University, and a Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Comparative Religion at Tufts University. He is the author of The Physical Theory of Kalam: Atoms, Space, and Void in Basrian Mu'tazili Cosmology. Khaled El-Rouayheb is Jewett Professor of Arabic and of Islamic Intellectual History at Harvard University. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history, especially in the early modern period, and the history of Arabic logic. He is the author of Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900–1900 (Brill, 2010) and Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015). Fatemeh Fana is Associate Professor and Director of the Department of Philosophy at the Research Center of the Humanities (Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation) in Tehran, Iran. She is the author of numerous articles on philosophical concepts in the Encyclopaedia of the World of Islam and on the metaphysics of Avicenna and Sabzawārī, and has written comparative studies on Avicenna and Saint Thomas Aquinas. She has also edited Alīqulī Khān's Iḥyā-yi Ḥikmat (The Revival of Philosophy), a work of Islamic philosophy from the eleventh/seventeenth century (published in Tehran, 1377/1988), and Khwāja Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī's Risāla i'tiqādiyya (An Essay on Faith) (published in Tehran, 1379/2000). Emma Gannagé is Associate Professor at Georgetown University and editor of the Mélanges de l'Université Saint-Joseph. Her research interests include Greco-Arabic and Islamic philosophy. Among her most recent publications are "Al-Kindī, Ptolemy (and Nicomachus of Gerasa) Revisited," in Philosophy in Islamic Lands, edited by Th. A. Druart, and "Between Medicine and Natural Philosophy: Avicenna on Properties (khawāṣṣ) and Qualities (kayfiyyāt)," in The Occult Sciences in Pre-Modern Islamic Culture, edited by N. al-Bizri and E. Orthman. Contributors xi Frank Griffel is Professor of Islamic Studies at Yale University. He is the author of numerous articles on Islamic theology and philosophy. In 2009 he published Al-Ghazālī's Philosophical Theology (Oxford University Press) and in 2000 Apostasie und Toleranz im Islam (Brill). He is a translator of al-Ghazālī and Averroes and the editor of three collective volumes on Islamic thought. Sidney H. Griffith is Ordinary Professor Emeritus in the Department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literatures in the Catholic University of America. His principal areas of research and writing are Syriac Patristics, Christian Arabic, and the history of Muslim/Christian interactions in early Islamic times. His works include a translation and edition of Yaḥyā ibn 'Adī's The Reformation of Character (2002), as well as the monographs The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque (2008) and The Bible in Arabic (2013). Damien Janos is Ussher Assistant Professor of Classical Islamic Thought and Dialogue at Trinity College Dublin. He has worked for several years as a postdoctoral researcher in Germany (Ruhr University, University of Göttingen, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) and is presently an independent scholar. His research focuses mainly on the philosophical works of al-Fārābī and Avicenna, with a secondary interest in the history of Arabic astronomy and astrology. He has recently edited a volume on Arabic Christian philosophy (Ideas in Motion in Baghdad and Beyond: Philosophical and Theological Exchanges between Christians and Muslims in the Third/Ninth and Fourth/ Tenth Centuries, Brill, 2015). Muhammad Ali Khalidi is Professor of Philosophy at York University in Toronto, specializing mainly in the philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. His book Natural Categories and Human Kinds (Cambridge University Press, 2013) discusses classification in the natural and social sciences. He also has research interests in classical Islamic philosophy and has published an anthology of translations from that tradition, Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Taneli Kukkonen is Professor of Philosophy at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is the author of Ibn Tufayl (Oneworld, 2014) and over thirty research articles and book chapters on Arabic philosophy and the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions. Jon McGinnis is Professor of Classical and Medieval Philosophy at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. In addition to numerous articles, he is the author of Avicenna in the Oxford University Press's Great Medieval Thinkers Series (2010), translator and editor of Avicenna's Physics from his encyclopedic work The Healing (Brigham Young University Press, 2009), and cotranslator with David C. Reisman of Classical Arabic Philosophy: An Anthology of Sources (Hackett , 2007). Mustansir Mir teaches Islamic studies at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio. His main research interests are Qur'ānic studies and Iqbal studies. He is the author of Understanding the Islamic Scripture and Iqbal. Nazif Muhtaroğlu is currently a Research Fellow at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul). He received his PhD from the Department of Philosophy at the University of Kentucky. He xii Contributors is the founder of the International Society for the Study of Occasionalism. He has edited Classic Issues in Islamic Philosophy and Theology Today (Springer, 2010) with Anna- Teresa Tymieniecka, and The Logos of Life and Cultural Interlacing (Springer, 2014) with A.-T. Tymieniecka and Detlev Quintern. Reza Pourjavady is Hafis Visiting Lecturer for Religion and Culture of Iran at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. His works include the monographs Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran: Najm al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī and His Writings (Brill, 2011) and, coauthored with Sabine Schmidtke, A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: 'Izz al-Dawla Ibn Kammūna (d.683/1284) and His Writings (Brill, 2006). Sajjad H. Rizvi is Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History and Director of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. He specializes in the Safavid-Mughal period and is the author of Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics (Routledge, 2009). He is currently finishing a short monograph on Mir Damad and a comparative study of philosophy in eighteenth-century Iran and North India. Sabine Schmidtke is Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ. Her works include numerous articles and editions, as well as monographs such as The Theology of al-'Allāma al-Ḥillī (1991), Theologie, Philosophie und Mystik im zwölferschiitischen Islam des 9./ 15. Jahrhunderts: Die Gedankenwelten des Ibn Abī Ǧumhūr al-Aḥsā'ī (um 838/1434-35–nach 905/1501) (Brill, 2000), and, coauthored with Reza Pourjavady, A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: 'Izz al- Dawla Ibn Kammūna (d.683/1284) and His Writings (Brill, 2006). Ayman Shihadeh, DPhil, Oxford, is based at SOAS, University of London. He has published widely on the history of medieval Arabic philosophy and Islamic theology, including The Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (Brill, 2006) and Doubts on Avicenna: A Study and Edition of Sharaf al-Dīn al-Masʿūdī's Commentary on the Ishārāt (Brill, 2015). He serves as the Section Editor for Philosophy and Theology at the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Tony Street is Assistant Director of Research in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge, and a Fellow of Clare Hall College. He works on medieval Islamic intellectual history. Sarah Stroumsa is the Alice and Jack Ormut Professor Emerita of Arabic Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Among her published works in English are Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawandi, Abu Bakr al-Razi, and Their Impact on Islamic Thought (Brill, 1999); Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton University Press, 2010; paperback edition 2012), and Dawud al-Muqammas, Twenty Chapters (Brigham Young University Press, 2016). Contributors xiii John Walbridge received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from Harvard University in Near Eastern languages. He has taught in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Indiana University, Bloomington, since 1993. He is the author of three books on Suhrawardī and the Illuminationist school, and is the coauthor of the edition and translation of Suhrawardī's The Philosophy of Illumination. His most recent books are God and Logic in Islam: The Caliphate of Reason and The Alexandrian Epitomes of Galen, volume 1. I n t rodu ction Khaled El-R ouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke The study of Islamic philosophy has entered a new and exciting phase in the last few years. Both the received canon of Islamic philosophers and the narrative of the course of Islamic philosophy are in the process of being radically questioned and revised. The bulk of twentieth-century Western scholarship on Arabic or Islamic philosophy focused on the period from the ninth century to the twelfth. It is a measure of the transformation that is currently underway in the field that the present Oxford Handbook has striven to give roughly equal weight to every century from the ninth to the twentieth. I.1. Rethinking the Course of Islamic Philosophy Older assumptions about the study of Islamic philosophy were part of a grand narrative according to which the Islamic world preserved and interpreted the Greek philosophical heritage during the European "Dark Ages" and later handed over this heritage to the Latin West in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At this point, the role of the Islamic world in the narrative was over, and little scholarly attention was given to later Islamic philosophy. Some even speculated that, due to the disapproval of orthodox theologians, the philosophical tradition died out in the Islamic world in the twelfth century—so that, by a stroke of luck, the Latin West managed to take over the Greek philosophical heritage just in time, before the Islamic world itself repudiated this heritage and sank into fideist darkness. (Influential and older studies in this tradition include De Boer 1901; O'Leary 1922; Madkour 1934; Fākhūrī and Jurr 1957; Watt 1962.) Three pioneering figures who questioned this narrative in the West starting from the 1960s were Henry Corbin, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Nicholas Rescher. Corbin and Nasr, influenced by a very different narrative of the history of Islamic philosophy that has survived in Iran, showed in a series of studies that the Islamic philosophical 2 Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke tradition continued without interruption in Shīʿī Iranian circles down to the modern period (see, for example, Corbin 1964; Nasr 1961, 1964). They emphasized in particular the rise of the anti-Peripatetic Platonist "Illuminationist" (ishrāqī) school of Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191) and the later synthesis of Illuminationist and mystical philosophy in seventeenth-century Iran. Rescher, for his part, drew attention to the continued vigor and sophistication of Arabic works on logic in the thirteenth century, a century after the supposed demise of the Islamic philosophical tradition (Rescher 1964, 1967). The insights of Corbin, Nasr, and Rescher have since been incorporated into mainstream presentations of Islamic philosophy. The excellent Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy (edited by Peter Adamson and Richard C. Taylor, 2005), for example, emphasizes the period from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, but also includes chapters on Suhrawardī and later Shīʿī Iranian philosophy, and its chapter on logic acknowledges and develops the insights of Rescher concerning thirteenth-century Arabic logic. In recent years, however, the field has moved decisively beyond the points made by Corbin, Nasr, and Rescher in the 1960s, and it is high time for a new presentation that reflects this fact. It is now generally recognized that Corbin and Nasr unduly stressed the Platonist- mystical-Shīʿī synthesis of later centuries. Especially Hossein Ziai and John Walbridge have drawn attention to aspects of the Illuminationist philosophical tradition such as physics and logic that were of little interest to Corbin and Nasr (see especially Ziai 1990; Ziai and Alwishah 2003; Walbridge 2005; Ziai 2010; Walbridge 2012). At the same time, it is beginning to emerge that there is a largely untold story of continued philosophical activity outside Illuminationist and Shīʿī-Iranian circles. Particularly the work of Dimitri Gutas, A. I. Sabra, Ayman Shihadeh, and Rob Wisnovsky has drawn attention to the fact that the supposed demise of philosophy in the (majority) Sunnī Islamic world is a myth (Gutas 2002; Sabra 1994; Shihadeh 2005; Wisnovsky 2004b, 2013). It may be that the word falsafa ("philosophy") was typically avoided due to association with specific ideas deemed heretical by mainstream religious scholars (for example, the eternity of the world, the denial of the possibility of miracles, the denial of God's knowledge of particulars in the sublunary world, and the denial of bodily resurrection). However, a great deal of "philosophy" in the modern sense of the word was still pursued under other names. Especially the field of Islamic theology (kalām) became thoroughly suffused in later centuries with terminology, issues, and modes of argumentation derived from Greek philosophy. Widely studied handbooks of theology after the twelfth century typically devoted considerable attention to thoroughly rational discussions of philosophical topics such as the nature of knowledge, the relation between essence and existence, the soul and its relation to the body, the ten Aristotelian categories, predication, modality, the nature of time and space, physics and cosmology (see, for example, the table of contents of one such theological handbook translated in Calverley and Pollock 2002, or the contribution by Alnoor Dhanani to the present volume, on another handbook from the fourteenth century). The study of logic also became incorporated Introduction 3 into the curricula of Islamic colleges (madrasas) in later centuries, and the continued vitality of the later tradition of logic even beyond the thirteenth century has been brought out by recent research (for example El-Rouayheb 2010). The upshot is that sophisticated epistemological, metaphysical, natural-philosophical, and logical discussions in later centuries were often carried out by scholars who did not self-identify as falāsifa largely because they would have associated the term with acceptance of an Aristotelian and/or Neoplatonic cosmology. Supplementing these recent insights have been a number of further developments in the field. In the past decades, there has been a steady stream of modern editions of philosophical works, largely thanks to the efforts of modern scholars in the Islamic world. According to the older vision of Corbin and Nasr, Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1045/ 1635) marked the culmination of the later Islamic philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, recent years has seen editions of works by important later philosophers active in Iran, some of whom were highly critical of Mullā Ṣadrā, such as Rajab ʿAlī Tabrīzī (d. 1080/ 1669), Āqā Ḥusayn Khwānsārī (d. 1098/1687), and Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī (d. 1243/1826) (see, for example, Hiravī and Bayraq 2007; Iṣfahānī 1999; Bū 'Alī 2007). Furthermore, the older narrative of later Islamic philosophy tended to jump from Suhrawardī in the twelfth century to Mullā Ṣadrā in the seventeenth. Recent editions and studies have drawn attention to important figures in the intervening centuries, such as Ibn Kammūna (d. 683/1284), Quṭb al-Dīn al-Shīrāzī (d. 711/1311), Ibn Abī Jumhūr al-Aḥsāʾī (fl. 883/1479), and Najm al-Dīn Nayrīzī (fl. 928/1522). (See, for example, Walbridge 1992; Schmidtke 2000; Schmidtke and Pourjavady 2006; Ḥabībī 2009; Pourjavady 2011.) There has also been an awakening of interest in Ottoman philosophy in recent years in Turkey, with scholars beginning to edit works by important figures such as Ṭāşköprüzāde (d. 968/ 1561), Ebū Sa'īd Ḫādimī (d. 1176/1762), and Ismā'īl Gelenbevī (d. 1205/1790) (see Gül 2009; Konevi and Konevi 2012; Öküdan 2007). Later Indo-Islamic philosophy is also beginning to receive some of the attention it deserves, especially in the work of Asad Q. Ahmed and Sajjad Rizvi (see, for example, Ahmed 2013a, 2013b; Rizvi, 2011). Equally important, there has lately been a significant re-evaluation of the literary forms of commentary (sharḥ) and gloss (ḥāshiyah). For much of the twentieth century, the predominant assumption was that the commentaries and glosses of later centuries were pedantic and uncritical expositions that would not merit closer examination. However, this was largely an "armchair" assumption not grounded in a patient examination of these works. In recent years, the older view has been questioned, and more and more scholars are coming to recognize that commentaries and glosses were important vehicles for critical reflection in later centuries (see especially Wisnovsky 2004a; Ahmed 2013b). The fifteenth-century Persian scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī (d. 908/1502), for example, was arguably one of the most innovative and influential of later Islamic philosophers. Yet his major writings—widely studied for centuries in Iran, India, and the Ottoman Empire—took the form of commentaries and glosses on works by earlier figures (see Reza Pourjavady's contribution to this volume for further details). 4 Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke I.2. A New Presentation of the Field The present volume is different from earlier overviews in two conspicuous ways. First, as mentioned above, it strives to give roughly equal weight to every century from the ninth to the twentieth. Second, its entries are work centered rather than person or theme centered. In other words, contributors focus, after briefly introducing a philosopher's life and oeuvre, on one major work and give a relatively detailed exposé of it. Article-length entries on individual philosophers can be excellent, but they often have to sacrifice depth to breadth. Entries on movements would have to sacrifice depth to breadth to an even greater degree, and would risk becoming little more than a list of names and titles. Entries on themes are arguably not feasible given the present stage of research. Too few contemporary scholars have a solid command of both earlier and later Islamic philosophical literature, and thematic entries would risk being slanted toward the earlier centuries and more well-known figures at the expense of the later period and lesser-known figures. Particularly at a time when the canon of Islamic philosophy is being reconsidered and new figures and works are emerging from undeserved obscurity, a thematic approach would be counterproductive. The work-centered format is also intended to allow room for the attention to detail and sustained exposition that are often sacrificed in article-length surveys of the entire range of contributions by an individual philosopher. This should hopefully give the reader a better sense of what a work in Islamic philosophy looks like and a better idea of the issues, concepts, and arguments that are at play in works belonging to various periods and subfields within Islamic philosophy. The selection of entries has aimed to bring out the uninterrupted history of Islamic philosophy down to the modern period, and to emphasize the fact that philosophical activity in later centuries was not confined to one region of the Islamic world and was not exclusively preoccupied with a single set of issues. Works that were the product of the vibrant philosophical scene in Iran in the Safavid (1501–1722) and Qajar (1779–1925) periods have been supplemented by including less-known works from Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, and Mughal India, and later works with the expected focus on metaphysics and ontology have been supplemented with works on logic and natural philosophy. The twentieth-century works that are covered include an attempt by a traditionally trained Shīʿī scholar to solve Hume's problem of induction, and an influential Egyptian philosopher's adaptation of the ideas of the logical positivists. By covering such works, we hope to challenge a widespread assumption that later Islamic philosophy is necessarily an arcane (or peculiarly "spiritual") discipline that, for better or worse, bears little relation to the concerns of modern Western analytic philosophers. Though one of the aims of the present work has been to broaden the geographic and temporal scope of the field of Islamic philosophy, some major figures and works that ideally should have been included have unfortunately had to be left out. Inevitably, some of the scholars who were asked to contribute to the volume were unable to do so, for Introduction 5 reasons ranging from prior commitments to medical issues. Though we actively sought contributions from scholars who are based in the Islamic world, many of these scholars were not comfortable writing in English. Due to such factors, our volume has had to forgo including contributions on works by, for example, the important logician and philosophical theologian Sa'd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 792/1390), the Ottoman scholars Ahmed Ṭāşköprüzāde and Ismā'īl Gelenbevī, as well as Safavid and post-Safavid philosophers such as Ghiyāth al-Dīn Dashtakī (d. 948/1542), Rajab 'Alī Tabrīzī, Mahdī Narāqī (d. 1209/1795), and Aḥmad Aḥsā'ī. There is a long-standing dispute over whether to call the field of study "Arabic philosophy" or "Islamic philosophy." Neither term is entirely satisfactory. The term "Arabic philosophy" is often deemed offensive by non-Arab Muslims. To some extent, this might be because it is difficult to capture the distinction made in English between "Arabic" (a linguistic designation) and "Arab" (an ethnic designation) in some relevant languages. In Arabic and Persian, for example, both would be translated as 'arabī, and the term "Arab philosophy" is clearly both inadequate and offensive. But even the linguistic term "Arabic" elides the fact that especially in later centuries philosophical works were written in Persian and Turkish (and even English, as in the case of Muhammad Iqbal). At the same time, the term "Islamic philosophy" does not do justice to the role of non-Muslims in this tradition, for example the Christians Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (d. 260/ 873), Yaḥyā ibn 'Adī (d. 363/974), and Abū l-Faraj Ibn al-Ṭayyib (d. 434/1043), or the Zoroastrian student of Avicenna Bahmanyār (d. 457/1065), or the Jewish philosophers Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī (d. 560/1165) and Ibn Kammūna. Furthermore, some contributors to the tradition, such as Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 313/925), were born Muslims but came to reject fundamental precepts of the Islamic religion (such as prophecy). In light of these difficulties, some modern scholars prefer locutions such as "philosophy in the Islamic world" or even "Islamicate philosophy," but the first of these is unwieldy and the second unfamiliar. In the end, there are more important tasks than getting bogged down in issues of nomenclature. "Islamic philosophy" may not be ideal, but a choice had to be made, and it may be less unsatisfactory than the alternatives. References Ahmed, Asad Q. 2013a. "Logic in the Khayrābādī School of India: A Preliminary Exploration." In Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought: Studies in Honor of Professor Hossein Modarressi, ed. Michael Cook, Najam Haider, Intisar Rabb, and Asma Sayeed. New York: Palgrave, 227–47. Ahmed, Asad Q. 2013b. "Post-classical Philosophical Commentaries/Glosses: Innovation in the Margins." Oriens 41: 317–48. Bū ʻAlī, Tawfīq Nāṣir. 2007. Aḥmad al-Aḥsā'ī, Sharḥ al-Mashāʻir. Beirut: Mu'assasat al-Balāgh. Calverley, E. E., and J. W. Pollock. 2002. Nature, Man and God in Medieval Islam: ʻAbd Allah Baydawi's Text, "Tawaliʻ al-anwar min mataliʻ al-anzar", along with Mahmud Isfahani's commentary, "Mataliʻ al-anzar, sharh Tawaliʻ al-anwar". Leiden: Brill. Corbin, Henry. 1945. Suhrawardi: Opera metaphysica et mystica. Istanbul: Maarif Matbaasi. 6 Khaled El-Rouayheb and Sabine Schmidtke Corbin, Henry. 1964. Histoire de la philosophie islamique. Paris: Gallimard. De Boer, T. J. 1901. Geschichte der Philosophie im Islam. Stuttgart: Frommanns Verlag. El-Rouayheb, Khaled. 2010. Relational Syllogisms and the History of Arabic Logic, 900–1900. Leiden: Brill. Fākhūrī, Ḥanna al-, and Khalīl al-Jurr. 1957. Tārīkh al-falsafa al-ʻarabiyya. Beirut: Dār al-Maʻārif. Gül, Mehmed Zahit Kamil. 2009. Aḥmed Ṭāşköprüzāde, al-Shuhūd al-ʻaynī fī mabāḥith al-wujūd al-dhihnī. Cologne: Manshūrāt al-Jamal. Gutas, Dimitri. 2002. "The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic Philosophy, 1000– ca. 1350." In Avicenna and His Heritage, ed. J. L. Janssens and D. De Smet. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 81–97. Ḥabībī, Najafqulī. 2009. Ibn Kammūna, Sharḥ al-Talwīḥāt al-lawḥiyya wa-al-ʻarshiyya. Tehran: Markaz al-Buḥūth wa-al-Dirāsāt lil-Turāth al-Makhṭūṭ. Hiravī, ʻAzīz Javānpūr, and Ḥasan Akbar Bayraq. 2007. Mullā Rajab 'Alī Tabrīzī, al-Aṣl al-aṣīl. Tehran: Mu'assasat-i Muṭālaʻāt-i Islāmī-i Dānishgāh-i Tihrān. Iṣfahānī, Ḥāmid Nājī. 1999. Āqā Ḥusayn al-Khwānsārī, al-Ḥāshīyah 'alā l-Shifā' (al-Ilāhīyāt). Qom: Kungrih-i Āqā Ḥusayn Khwānsārī. Konevi, Hasan, and Mehmet Konevi. 2012. Ebū Sa'īd Ḫādimī, 'Arā'is al-nafā'is fī al-manṭiq. Beirut: Dār Ibn Ḥazm. Madkour, Ibrahim. 1934. L'Organon d'Aristote dans le monde arabe. Paris: Vrin. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1961. "Sadr al-Din Shirazi: His Life, Doctrine and Significance." Indo- Iranica 14: 4–16. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1964. Three Muslim Sages: Avicenna, Suhrawardi, Ibn 'Arabī. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Öküdan, Mehmet Zühdü. 2007. Ismā'īl Gelenbevī, Risāla fī waḥdat al-wujūd. Isparta: Fakülte Kitabevi. O'Leary, De Lacy. 1922. Arabic Thought and Its Place in History. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner; New York: E. P. Dutton. Pourjavady, Reza. 2011. Philosophy in Early Safavid Iran: Najm al-Dīn Maḥmūd al-Nayrīzī and His Writings. Leiden: Brill. Rescher, Nicholas. 1964. The Development of Arabic Logic. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Rescher, Nicholas. 1967. Temporal Modalities in Arabic Logic. Dordrecht: Reidel. Rizvi, Sajjad. 2011. "Mīr Dāmād in India: Islamic Philosophical Traditions and the Problem of Creation." Journal of the American Oriental Society 131: 9–23. Sabra, A. I. 1994. "Science and Philosophy in Medieval Islamic Theology: The Evidence of the Fourteenth Century." Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften 9 (1994): 1–42. Schmidtke, Sabine. 2000. Theologie, Philosophie und Mystik im zwölferschiitischen Islam des 9./15. Jahrhunderts: Die Gedankenwelten des Ibn Abī Ǧumhūr al-Aḥsā'ī (um 838/1434–35—nach 905/1501). Leiden: Brill. Schmidtke, Sabine, and Reza Pourjavady. 2006. A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: 'Izz al-Dawla Ibn Kammuna (d. 683/1284) and His Writings. Leiden: Brill. Walbridge, John. 1992. The Science of Mystic Lights: Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī and the Illuminationist Tradition in Islamic Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Center for Middle East Studies. Walbridge, John. 2005. "Al- Suhrawardī on Body as Extension: An Alternative to Hylomorphism from Plato to Leibniz." In Reason and Inspiration in Islam: Theology, Introduction 7 Philosophy and Mysticism in Muslim Thought. Essays in Honour of Hermann Landolt, ed. Todd Lawson. London: I.B. Tauris, 235–47. Walbridge, John. 2012. "Illuminationists, Place, and the Void." In La nature et le vide dans la physique medieval, ed. Joël Biard and Sabine Rommevaux. Turnhout: Brepols, 119–36. Watt, W. Montgomery. 1962. Islamic Philosophy and Theology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wisnovsky, Rob. 2004a. "The Nature and Scope of Arabic Philosophical Commentary in Post-Classical (ca. 1100–1900 AD) Islamic Intellectual History." In Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries, ed. P. Adamson, H. Balthussen, and M. W. F. Stone. London: Institute of Advanced Studies, 2:149–91. Wisnovsky, Rob. 2004b. "One Aspect of the Avicennian Turn in Sunnī Theology." Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 14: 65–100. Wisnovsky, Rob. 2013. "Avicenna's Islamic Reception." In Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays, ed. Peter Adamson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 190–213. Ziai, Hossein. 1990. Knowledge and Illumination: A Study of Suhrawardī's Ḥikmat al-ishrāq. Atlanta: Scholar's Press. Ziai, Hossein. 2010. Ṣadr al-Dīn Shīrāzī: Addenda on the Commentary on the Philosophy of Illumination, Pt. 1: On the Rules of Thought. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Ziai, Hossein, and A. Alwishah. 2003. Ibn Kammūna: al-Tanqīḥāt fī sharḥ al-Talwīḥāt: Refinement and Commentary on Suhrawardī's Intimations, a Thirteenth Century Text on Natural Philosophy and Psychology. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers. Chapter 1 The Theol o gy At t ri bu t e d to Aristot l e Sources, Structure, Influence Cristina D'Ancona 1.1. The Pseudo-Theology of Aristotle: Some Facts The first explicit quotation from a work named Theology by the pen of "Aristotle" features in al-Fārābī's Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages, Plato the Divine and Aristotle (Martini Bonadeo 2008, 74:5–16 in Arabic; Butterworth 2001, 164–65 in English),1 and the Theology is listed among Aristotle's works in the Kitāb al-Fihrist by Ibn al-Nadīm (ed. Flügel 252.4 = ed. Tajaddud, 312.20). If we take into account the title of a collection allegedly translated by Abū ʿUthmān al-Dimashqī (fl. 302/914)2 of texts that 1 Critical edition by Martini Bonadeo (2008), English trans. by Butterworth (2001). The Farabian authorship of this text has been challenged (see the dossier in Martini Bonadeo 2008, 28–30). Endress (2008) and Martini Bonadeo (2008) hold the text to be authentic; Rashed (2009) and Gleede (2012) maintain that it is spurious. The question of the authorship of this work does not affect the issue of the mention of "Aristotle's" Theology in it. As far as we know, the Harmonization is the first work in which the Theology is ascribed to "Aristotle"; given that none of the scholars who challenge the Farabian authorship of this writing advances a candidate either earlier or much later than al-Fārābī (d. 339/950), this elicits the conclusion that toward the middle of the tenth century the Theology was known as a work by Aristotle. Besides the literal quotation from Aristotle's Theology, mention of the text occurs in various places: 64.7; 64.15–65.14; 69.15–70.7 Martini Bonadeo, English trans. by Butterworth (2001), 155–57, 161. 2 The floruit of Abū ʿUthmān al-Dimashqī is given by the year of his appointment as the director of the hospital founded by the vizier ʿAlī b. ʿĪsā (d. 334/946). One of the most prominent scholars of his age, Abū ʿUthmān al-Dimashqī was a pupil of Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn (d. 289/910), and the author of many translations of scientific and philosophical works: see the entry by G. Endress in Encyclopedia of Islam, 8: 858. The alleged "extracts by Alexander" from the "Theology by Aristotle" are in fact some Questions by Alexander of Aphrodisias and some propositions of Proclus's Elements of Theology, as shown by van Ess (1966) and The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 9 "Alexander extracted from Aristotle's Theology" (Rosenthal 1955; van Ess 1966; Endress 1973, 34), the conclusion imposes itself that in the fourth/tenth century the exposure of the cultivated Arab readership to Neoplatonism in Aristotle's garb was an accomplished fact. That the Theology quoted in the Harmonization is nothing if not the adapted Arabic version of Plotinus is made evident by a passage as literal as to feature in the discussion of the textual tradition of the pseudo-Theology itself (Zimmermann 1986, 140). That the Theology alluded to in the Harmonization did also contain other Neoplatonic texts, namely parts of the Arabic version of Proclus's Elements of Theology, has been convincingly argued (Endress 1973, 246; Zimmermann 1986, 178–80). All this suggests that in the philosophical circles of that age various texts were available, gathered under the common reference to Aristotle as their author, but issued in reality from Neoplatonic literature: among them, the well-known Book of the Exposition by Aristotle on the Pure Good (Liber de Causis), which was known as a work by "Aristotle" by the end of the fourth/tenth century (Rowson 1984). The most important of these pseudepigrapha is the Theology par excellence: the adapted translation of selected writings from the Enneads. The Theology of Aristotle was the main conduit through which Plotinus's doctrines were known in the Arabic-speaking world, a fact that has been aptly described as the "power of anonymity" that Plotinus held on Arabic philosophical literature (Rosenthal 1974). If the mid-fourth/tenth century openly credits Aristotle with a Neoplatonic Theology, this does not imply that the latter remained unknown to or scarcely influential on earlier writers. The contrary is true: the Arabic adapted version of Plotinus (henceforth ps.- Theology) is echoed in several works from the second half of the third/ninth century onward. But before we turn to the doctrines of the ps.-Theology and to their influence, it may be well to recall the main data about the text itself. The ps.-Theology has come down to us in two versions: one in Arabic, transmitted by more than one hundred manuscripts,3 and another one that is fully extant in Latin and is fragmentarily attested in Judeo-Arabic (Borisov [1942] 2002; Fenton 1986; Aouad 1989, 564–70; Treiger 2007). The Latin version is transmitted by the editio princeps Endress (1973, 33–40). Some by Alexander, and all the texts of Proclus in this collection, trace back to a stage of the translations into Arabic that is earlier than Dimashqī's, as has been proved by Endress (1973, 59, 75–76). The reason why al-Dimashqī is mentioned as the translator lies in that he probably translated part of Alexander's Questions present in this collection, gathering also earlier materials. This elicits the conclusion that these earlier materials included not only Plotinus, but also Proclus and some Alexander. For the present purposes, the relevant point is that the learned audience of Dimashqī's times knew of the Theology by "Aristotle" that was in fact based on post-Aristotelian materials, most of them Neoplatonic (see Zimmermann 1986, 185). 3 The two editions of this version of the ps.-Theology (see below, note 5) are based on very few and random manuscripts. The study of the manuscript tradition of the ps.-Theology has been substantially improved, first in the 1950s, thanks to the research surrounding the critical edition of the Enneads, and then by G. Endress, who has established an unpublished list of more than forty manuscripts. The critical edition of the ps.-Theology is currently being prepared by a research team of the ERC AdG 249431 "Greek into Arabic: Philosophical Concepts and Linguistic Bridges." The list established by Prof. Endress counted as the starting point for the teamwork. Thanks to the support of the European Research Council, the team has raised the number of the known manuscripts of the ps.-Theology to more than one hundred. 10 Cristina D'Ancona published in Rome in 1519 (Mariën 1973, 608–10) and bears the title Aristotle's Theology, this is to say the mystical philosophy according to the Egyptians.4 This text differs from the Arabic one on various counts. To mention only the blatant differences, it falls into fourteen chapters instead of the ten of the Arabic text, and the so-called Headings of the Questions (see below, section 1.2) do not feature in it; should one go deeper into the comparison, a mismatch would appear here and there, both in wording and in structure. Partly different from the Arabic, the Latin proves to be akin to the fragments in Judeo-Arabic, so paving the way to the conclusion (Borisov [1942] 2002) that the Latin translation was made on the basis of a full text, lost to us, of which only the Judeo-Arabic fragments survive, and which was somehow different from the Arabic text. Indeed, both in these fragments and in the Latin version some passages feature that are lacking in the Arabic text; hence, the work that lies in the background of the Latin has been labeled "Long Version." It has been convincingly argued (Pines 1954) that the "Long Version" included materials of Ismāʿīlī provenance added to the original (Stern 1960–61; Fenton 1986, 245–51), that is, to the text that we can read in Arabic and that is at times labeled "the vulgata"—a label that reflects more the poor quality of its editions to date5 than the real nature of this work. The present chapter deals with the so-called vulgata, namely the Arabic ps.-Theology. The title runs: "The first chapter of the book of Aristotle the Philosopher, called in Greek Theologia (Uthūlūjiyā), being the discourse on Divine Sovereignty: Porphyry the Syrian interpreted it, and it was translated into Arabic by ʿAbd al-Masīḥ b. Nāʿima of Emessa and was corrected for Aḥmad b. al-Muʿtaṣim bi-llāh by Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq al-Kindī" (ed. Badawī 3.3–9; trans. Lewis 1959, 486, slightly modified). This title provides both a terminus ante quem for the translation of (parts of) the Enneads into Arabic, and valuable information about the milieu in which the ps.-Theology was created. The terminus ante quem for the translation, made by the Christian Ibn Nāʿima al-Ḥimsī,6 is the reign of the caliph al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 218/833–227/842), whose son Aḥmad had al-Kindī as 4 The full title runs Sapientissimi philosophi Aristotelis Stagiritae Theologia sive mystica philosophia secundum Aegyptios noviter reperta et in latinum castigatissime redacta. The allusion to the Egyptians points to a passage in which Plotinus mentions the wise men of Egypt (V 8[31], 6.1 = ps.-Theology, ed. Badawī 1955, 10, 159.16). In the fiction of the Theology, this turns to be an utterance by Aristotle himself. As we are told in the preface to the Latin version, this helps to explain why the doctrines of the Theology are so different from Aristotle's own ideas: "As a matter of fact, Aristotle says here—something he does nowhere else—that he is accounting not for his own lore, but for other's, the Egyptians" (etenim Aristotelis hic aperte praefatur, quod nusquam alibi, se non propriam, sed alienam Aegyptiorum sapientiam colligere: Proemium, A [4v26–29]). 5 Editio princeps: Dieterici (1882); editio manualis: Badawī (1955, repr. 1966). The poor quality of the editio princeps is occasionally remarked by Rosenthal (1952–55, 466); on the poor quality of the editio manualis see Lewis 1957. 6 This name is repeated also at the beginning of the so-called Headings of the Questions (see below), where it is spelled ʿAbd al-Masīḥ al-Ḥimṣī al-Nāʿimī (8.4 Badawī). The full name as it is given in the K. al- Fihrist is ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn 'Abd Allāh al-Ḥimṣī al-Nāʿimī (ed. Flügel, 244.5 = ed. Tajaddud, 304.26), but he is referred to as Ibn Nāʿima in the two entries where he is mentioned, namely that on the Soph. El. and that on the Physics. He is said (ed. Flügel, 249.27–28 = ed. Tajaddud, 309.9–10) to have translated into The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 11 his preceptor. We are told by the title that Aḥmad was the addressee of the adaptation of the work by "Aristotle" called in Greek Uthūlūjiyā. We are also told that the corrector was Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb b. Isḥāq al-Kindī (d. c. 252/866), the "philosopher of the Arabs." This ties in with the view, suggested by several clues, of al-Kindī as engaged in the philosophical education of at least part of the ʿAbbāsid court (Rosenthal 1942; Endress 1997 and 2012; Adamson 2007). We owe to Gerhard Endress not only the discovery of the common style of a set of translations from Greek into Arabic originated within the "circle of al-Kindī" (Endress 1997), but also the key to understanding why he engaged so strenuously in the assimilation of Greek metaphysics. Endress has highlighted that al-Kindī's "programme de propaganda philosophia, which came into being as an ideology of scientists heirs to the Hellenistic encyclopaedia and as a religion for intellectuals compatible with Islam, was a programme for the integration of philosophy and the rational sciences into Muslim Arab society" (Endress 2000, 569; see also Endress 2007). Against this backdrop, it comes as no surprise that Plotinus's doctrines are construed as the exposition genuinely made by Aristotle himself of the pinnacle of the Metaphysics, a work whose translation into Arabic was commissioned by al-Kindī (al-Fihrist, ed. Flügel, 251.27–28 = ed. Tajaddud, 312.14). The Metaphysics is echoed at the very beginning of the ps.-Theology and counts as the main source of inspiration for al-Kindī's own work On the First Philosophy (Abū Rīda 1950; Rashed and Jolivet 1999; English trans. Ivry 1974). The ps.-Theology opens with the claim that whoever wants to reach the knowledge of the ultimate end (al-ghāya) must seek for absolute certainty and conform in his behavior to the ideal of the ascent in the scientific disciplines toward contemplative life (ed. Badawī, 3.10–4.2). Then the writer gives the floor to the Sage, whose words are announced by the formula "the Sage said" (qāla l-ḥakīm, ed. Badawī, 4.3). The discourse of the Sage points to the final cause as the goal that, although coming last, sets the tone for all that has been done before: this theory of an Aristotelian flavor is expressed by the saying "first desired last attained" (Stern 1962; see also Zimmermann 1986, 111). The goal is described as the knowledge of the ultimate truth in theoretical sciences, and the path toward it is presented as a collective achievement of the leading philosophers (afāḍil al-falāsifa, ed. Badawī, 4.10). They all agree on the fact that the first causes of the universe are four: matter, form, the efficient cause, and perfection (ed. Badawī, 4.11). The Sage continues his account by saying that he has devoted to this topic a book named baʿd al-ṭabīʿiyyāt, "what is after the physical realities" (ed. Badawī, 4.11–5.2), a claim that leaves no room to doubt that the Sage speaking is "Aristotle." An overview of the Metaphysics follows, whose pivot is the topic of wisdom as the knowledge of causes, clearly reminiscent of the first book of the Metaphysics. Also the allusion to the philosophers of the past as engaged in the etiological inquiry traces back to the beginning of the Syriac the Soph. El. He also translated part of Aristotle's Physics with the commentary by Philoponus (ed. Flügel, 250.18 = ed. Tajaddud, 311.1). Ibn Nāʿima is mentioned also in the Latin version, not in the title (where only Aristotle appears: see above) but in the preface by Pietro Castellani, the "editor" of the Latin version (Theologia Aristotelis a graeca lingua pridem per Abenamam saracenum in arabam translatum, Proemium, A [4r8–10]). 12 Cristina D'Ancona Metaphysics. This account ends with another mention of this work, now called "Book of the Metaphysics," Kitāb Maṭāṭāfūsīqā" (ed. Badawī, 5.12). According to the Sage, the book of the Metaphysics contains the premises (muqaddimāt, ed. Badawī, 5.10) of the discourse on the Divine Sovereignty that is about to begin (ed. Badawī, 6.7), a label echoed in the title mentioned above: "Theologia (Uthūlūjiyā), being the discourse on Divine Sovereignty (qawl ʿalā l-rubūbiyya)." As we have seen before, the contents of this "discourse on Divine Sovereignty" are extracted from a selection of the Enneads, that is, the systematic edition of Plotinus's writings provided by Porphyry. In his Life of Plotinus and Order of His Books published together with the Enneads, Porphyry says he had been inspired in his arrangement by Andronicus's thematic ordering of the corpus Aristotelicum (Porph. Vita Plotini, 24.5– 11). The first three groups of nine treatises ("enneads") were devoted to man and the cosmos; the fourth ennead to soul; the fifth to the intelligible world; the sixth and last to the One, the first principle of Plotinus's universe. Of all this, only a part is attested in Arabic. The treatises translated come all from Enneads IV–VI, a fact that tips the scale in favor of a deliberate selection of topics, ruling out the hypothesis of a defective Greek model of the Arabic version. Even though there is no attestation of the treatises of Enneads I–III in Arabic, the manuscript of the Enneads out of which the translation was made must have been complete of the beginning; otherwise it would have been impossible to connect with the Enneads the name of Porphyry, which features in the title of the ps.- Theology. In fact, Porphyry's Vita Plotini does not have an independent circulation, but is premised to the Enneads; since in the ps.-Theology Porphyry is mentioned, it is fair to assume that the Greek manuscript, which was at the disposal of the translator, contained also the Vita Plotini and, by extension, the Enneads from their beginning. Be this as it may, what was considered worthy of being translated was the part dealing with the suprasensible principles: Enneads IV, V, and VI. Plotinus's One, Intellect, and Soul feature in the following statement by "Aristotle" as the natural complement of the doctrines expounded in the Metaphysics: Now since we have completed the customary prefaces, which are principles that lead on to the explanation of what we wish to explain in this book of ours, let us not waste words over this branch of knowledge, since we have already given an account of it in the book of the Metaphysics … . Now our aim in this book is the discourse on the Divine Sovereignty, and the explanation of it, and how it is the first cause, eternity and time being beneath it, and that it is the cause and the originator of causes, in a certain way, and how the luminous force steals from it over Mind and, through the medium of Mind, over the universal celestial Soul, and from Mind, through the medium of Soul, over nature, and from Soul, through the medium of nature, over the things that come to be and pass away. This action arises from it without motion: the motion of all things comes from it and is caused by it, and things move towards it by a kind of longing and desire. (ps.-Theol. Arist., ed. Badawī, 5.10–6.12; trans. Lewis 1959, 487) It is apparent from this statement that Plotinus's One and Aristotle's Unmoved Mover merge together, and that the Plotinian principles Intellect and Soul are endowed with The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 13 the task to let the power of the First Cause expand until it reaches the world of coming-to-be and passing away. Two accounts of the way in which the First Cause acts are combined: the Plotinian emanation from the One and the Aristotelian capability of the Unmoved Mover to impart movement as the object of desire (ὡς ἐρώμενον, Metaph. Λ.7, 1072b3). It comes as no surprise that the Aristotelian authorship of the ps.-Theology remained unchallenged for centuries, leading the most percipient readers of the past (who noticed that the Theology gives, despite everything, a distinct non-Aristotelian ring) to speculate about the causes of this discrepancy. One of the most ingenious attempts at accounting for the discrepancy has been made by Francesco Patrizi da Cherso in his 1591 work Nova de universis philosophia, to which the Latin version of the ps.-Theology is appended. According to Patrizi, Aristotle in his old age went back to the doctrines he had heard in his youth from Plato's own mouth: the "unwritten doctrines" whose similarity with Neoplatonic metaphysics has been remarked time and again, and to which Patrizi refers. That the doctrines held in the Theology were of "Platonic" coin was remarked in early modern times by Johannes Fabricius in the Bibliotheca Graeca (Fabricius 1716, 162),7 and the name of Plotinus was connected with the ps.-Theology first in Thomas Taylor's harsh account of this text as a forgery (Taylor 1812, III, 402), then in Salomon Munk's Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (Munk 1859, 248), and again in the review by Valentin Rose of the German translation of the ps.-Theology (Rose 1883) that inaugurated modern research on the Arabic Plotinus. Yet close as the ps.-Theology is to Plotinus, there are also many differences between the Arabic version and the original text. First and foremost, the flow of the Greek has been substantially altered, and blocks of Plotinus's treatises are relocated, in what seems to be complete disorder. Second, misunderstandings, adaptations, and changes of meaning surface everywhere, and long passages feature in the ps.-Theology, that have no counterpart in the Enneads. Both the differences and the interpolations have been accounted for in past scholarship by advancing the hypothesis that the Arabic text was the translation not of the Greek Enneads but of another work, in which Plotinus's wording and thought had already undergone adaptations of various kinds. Among them are omnipresent the monotheistic adaptations that transform the One into God the Almighty and its causality into creation out of nothing. Given that some words of Syriac origin8 or allegedly 7 The quote reads: "This work deals with God, Logos, soul, the cosmos, and the principles of things, not in Aristotelian vein, but more or less in the way of the Hermetic Poemandres, so that the very nature of this work makes it clear that its author is a Platonist, rather than Aristotle" (In hoc opere de Deo, λόγῳ, anima, universo rerumque principiis non aristotelico more, sed ita fere ut in hermetico Poemandro sic disseritur, ut platonicum potius aliquem quam Aristotelem auctorem esse res ipsa clamet). 8 As is the case with mīmar for "chapter," a fact that from Baumstark (1902) onward has been adduced as evidence of the Syriac origin of the text. In the hypothesis of forgery, this is open to another explanation, which ties in with the fact that in the title Porphyry is mentioned as the Syrian commentator of the work at hand (fassarahu Furfūriyyūs al-Ṣūrī, ed. Badawī, 3.6, modified). Porphyry, the writer who gives the floor to "Aristotle" (cf. qāla l-ḥakīm, ed. Badawī, 4.3), is presented in this hypothesis as the author of the organization of the materials into chapters (mayāmir). For another intervention that in this hypothesis should be ascribed to Porphyry in his capacity of the commentator of Aristotle's Theology, see below, section 1.2. 14 Cristina D'Ancona pointing to a Syriac antecedent peer out, the monotheistic adaptations were explained by the hypothesis that an adapted text based on Plotinus had been produced within a Christian milieu in Syria, and that it was such a text, lost to us, that lay in the background of the Arabic version (Baumstark 1902). However, the fact that the ps.-Theology is based on the Greek Enneads exactly as Porphyry had edited them has been proved beyond any doubt (Schwyzer 1941). In addition, there is no hard evidence pointing to a literary item in Syriac that may support the existence of an intermediary text, a fact that led Sebastian Brock to label "a Chimera" the alleged Syriac model of the ps.-Theology (Brock 2007). If the ps.-Theology has the Greek Enneads as its immediate antecedent, how to explain the differences between the two works? Scholars answer this question by taking into account two other texts, distinct from the ps.-Theology but connected to it both because they share in the same adaptations and because one of them overlaps here and there with the ps.-Theology. They are the so-called Sayings of the Greek Sage (Rosenthal 1952–55, Wakelnig 2014), which at times overlap with the ps.-Theology but also contain passages from the Arabic Plotinus lacking in it, and an Epistle on the Divine Science falsely attributed to al-Fārābī (Kraus 1940–41), which does not overlap with the ps.-Theology, but has one passage in common with the Sayings. These two texts prove the existence of an "Arabic Plotinus Source" (Rosenthal 1952–55) wider than the ps.-Theology itself. To the same "Arabic Plotinus Source" trace back also other quotations of Plotinus's passages that share in the same adaptations: they have been recently discovered in the early Arabic translation of Aristotle's Parva naturalia produced within the "circle of al-Kindī" (Hansberger 2011). All this points to the existence of an adapted Arabic translation of Enneads IV–VI, whose terminus ante quem is the ps.-Theology created, if we trust its title, in the 220s/840s at the caliphal court of Baghdad. The creation of the ps.-Theology as a work designed by "Aristotle" to fulfill the demand for an exposition of "Divine Sovereignty" has been accounted for in different ways: either as an awkward, later reconstruction of a collection of post-Aristotelian works that had originally been gathered within the "circle of al-Kindī" and was accidentally dismembered (Zimmermann 1986), or as the first attempt, made by al-Kindī himself, to put together a theological pinnacle for the Aristotelian corpus—an attempt not very successful in itself, but paving the way to a most refined outcome, the Liber de Causis (D'Ancona 2011). Both explanations are intended to account, although in different ways, for the fact that the chapters of the ps.-Theology do not follow the program described at the beginning of this work. This program is presented by "Aristotle" as an outline of what will be dealt with in the Theology (ed. Badawī, 6.3–4). He announces that, after having outlined what divine sovereignty is, he will proceed to describe the intelligible world, then the cosmic Soul, then again sublunar nature, and that he will eventually account for the destiny of the individual souls, explaining the cause of their descent in and ascent from the world of coming-to-be and passing away (ed. Badawī, 6.13–7.10). However, the ps.-Theology begins not by giving an account of the First Cause, but by raising the problem of the descent of the soul into the body; the other points mentioned by "Aristotle" are extensively dealt with in it, but a clear order cannot be detected in the flow of the chapters. The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 15 1.2. A Neoplatonic Model for God's Causality and the Soul's "Provenance and Destination": The Main Topics of the Pseudo-Theology of Aristotle and Their Impact on Arabic-Islamic Philosophy As we have just seen, the main topics that "Aristotle" sets for himself to discuss are divine causality, the hierarchy of the suprasensible principles, and the destiny of the soul. Before dealing extensively with these points, "Aristotle" announces he will list the "Headings of the Questions"—a puzzling item into which we are not compelled to enter here: suffice it to mention that they are 142 short numbered sentences closely connected with chapters 1–34 of Enn. IV 4[28], in itself a part of Plotinus's text that is present in the ps.- Theology (D'Ancona 2012). After this list, another section of the long first chapter comes: To proceed: Now that it has been demonstrated and confirmed that the soul is not a body and does not die or decay or perish, but is abiding and everlasting, we wish to study concerning her also how she departs from the world of mind and descends in this corporeal world of sense and enters this gross transient body which falls under genesis and corruption. (ps.-Theol. Ar., I, ed. Badawī, 18.11–16; trans. Lewis 1959, 219) Conforming to Lewis's practice, the italics mark the words and sentences taken from Plotinus, and normal typescript indicates those that feature only in the Arabic text. Here, Plotinus's sentence "How then, since the intelligible is separate, does soul come into body?" (IV 7[2], 13.1–2, trans. Armstrong 1984) is encapsulated between two passages that do not come from the Enneads, namely a summary of a demonstration allegedly provided elsewhere of the incorporeal and immortal nature of the soul, and the amplification of the term "body" through the Aristotelian pair of generation-corruption, a move that lays emphasis on the corruptible nature of the body in which the soul is dwelling. Although incorporeal and immortal in itself, the soul is united with a body that comes to be and passes away. This raises a problem: if the soul existed prior to the body and its nature is higher than the body's, why on earth should it undergo, or even decide, the embodiment? This problem sets the scene for the rest of the chapter. "Aristotle" had alluded to this question just before announcing his wish to begin by a list of "Headings of the Questions": he had in fact claimed he would have dealt with "the state of the reasoning souls in their descent and their ascent and the discovery of the cause in that" (ed. Badawī, 7.7–8; trans. Lewis 1959, 487). This problem is obviously a Platonic one: meaningless in the Aristotelian account of the soul, it arises for a Platonist who, sticking to the doctrine of the soul's incorporeality 16 Cristina D'Ancona and immortality, has to face the rival notions of soul as the entelechy of the body and as one of its emergent properties. Plotinus was indeed such a Platonist, and in the treatise that is the source of the passage quoted above, namely IV 7[2], On the Immortality of the Soul, he spent much effort in arguing against Stoic emergentism and Aristotelian immanentism. After having criticized the rival theories, he presented the real nature of the soul: a substance on its own, independent of and superior to body. Then, in a sort of appendix to the main topic of the treatise, he raised the question that, in the ps.- Theology, turns to be the first step of the detailed treatment promised by "Aristotle": if soul is an incorporeal and immortal substance, why on earth does it come into a body? This question, raised in the final part of treatise IV 7[2], On the Immortality of the Soul, was so important in Plotinus's eyes that he went back to it in a treatise written shortly after, IV 8[6], On the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies. The numbers in square brackets are those of the chronological order in which Plotinus's treatises were written; the other numbers indicate the position assigned to them by Porphyry in the systematic layout— the Enneads. The sequence IV 7–IV 8 shows that Porphyry did not fail to notice how close are the conclusion of On the Immortality of the Soul and the main topic of On the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies: hence, he edited them as the seventh and eighth treatises of the fourth ennead, devoted to the soul. This link did not escape the creator of the ps.-Theology either: the first chapter, after "Aristotle's" introduction and the "Headings of the Questions," consists of the final part of the Immortality of the Soul and the beginning of the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies, linked together in a new literary item whose focus is the cause of the soul's departure from the intelligible world (table 1.1). Not only does this add further evidence to the dependence of the ps.-Theology upon Porphyry's edition: it also indicates that the chapters of the "book by Aristotle the philosopher called in Greek Theology," as imperfect as their flow may be, result from an attempt at creating a new arrangement of the materials taken from Plotinus, a fact that rules out the hypothesis of an inept gathering of leaves accidentally scattered. In the Greek original, the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies begins by a first-person account: "Often I have woken up out of the body to myself and have entered into myself, going out from all other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part; I have actually lived the best life and come to identity with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect" (IV 8[6], 1.1–8, trans. Armstrong 1984). In chapter 1 of the ps.-Theology, the connection between the end of the part taken from the Immortality of the Soul and the beginning of the first-person account taken from the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies is marked by another intervention of the writer who, earlier in the chapter, had given the floor to "Aristotle" by the formula qāla l-ḥakīm. This time, the writer accounts for the use of the first person, saying: "A statement of his (kalām lahu) that is like an allegory (ramz) of the universal soul" (ed. Badawī, 22.1; trans. Lewis 1959, 225). There is no scholarly consensus about the identity of the "Allegorist,"9 but his kalām has been unanimously acknowledged as 9 The "Allegorist" is referred to also in another passage of the ps.-Theology, whose wording points unmistakably to the sentence quoted above. Here is the passage: "We say that he who is capable of doffing The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 17 Table 1.1 The Greek and Arabic Plotinus Ennead IV (On Soul) Treatise 7 On the Immortality of the Soul 1–8 The rival theories 9–12 The true doctrine of soul: a separate, immortal substance Treatise 8 On the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies 13–15 Appendix: the problem of the descent of the soul into the bodies 1–2 The descent of the soul into the bodies: Plato's account 3–5 The body-soul relationship 6–8 Solution of the problem of the descent: the hierarchy of the levels of being. Appendix: the undescended soul Ps.-Theology of Aristotle, Chapter 1 Aristotle's introduction to his "Theology," ed. Badawī, 3.1–7.10 Headings of the Questions, ed. Badawī, 8.1–18.10 The reasons of the descent of the soul into the bodies, ed. Badawī, 18.13–21.17 (= IV 7, 13–15 + IV 8, 1–2) Aristotle's exegesis of Plato's theological doctrine, ed. Badawī, 22.1–28.3 something important for the entire story of Arabic philosophy, and beyond. This passage has been often quoted or alluded to, in Arabic and Jewish philosophy and mysticism: by al-Kindī (Discourse on the Soul Abridged from the Book of Aristotle, Plato and the Other Philosophers, ed. Abū Rīda, 277.15–278.2 and 279.10–13), by al-Fārābī (see note 1), in the Epistles of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (ed. Ghālib 1984, I, 138), by Ibn Zurʿa (quoted by al-Bayhaqī, 77.22–78.11, al-ʿAjam 1994), by Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī (De Smet 2012, 136), and by Ibn Ṭufayl (ed. Gauthier 1981, 120.6–121.3). Other quotations or allusions feature in the works of Moses ibn Ezra, Shemtob ibn Falaqēra, Solomon ibn Gabirol, in the Sufi tradition, and in Jewish mysticism (Altmann 1963). Often I have been alone with my soul and have doffed my body and laid it aside and become as if I were naked substance without body, so as to be inside myself, outside his body and putting to rest its senses and promptings and motions, as the Allegorist (ṣāḥib al-rumūz) has described of his own soul, and is capable too in his thought of returning to himself and raising his mind to the world of mind, so as to see its beauty and splendour, is able to recognize the glory, light and splendour of the mind" (ed. Badawī, 56.4–7; trans. Lewis 1959, 375; the Plotinian passage echoed here is V 8[31], 1.1–2). According to Zimmermann (1986, 145–47), the expression kalām lahu (ed. Badawī, 22.1) alludes to Plato; according to D'Ancona et al. (2003, 280–82), to Aristotle. The topic of the allegory, ramz, is echoed also in the Nabatean Agriculture, a third–fourth-/ninth–tenth-century compilation of late-antique sources that includes also materials coming from the Arabic Plotinus: see Hämeen-Anttila 2006, 30 and 104–8. On the Plotinian passages in the Nabatean Agriculture see also Salinger 1971 and Mattila 2007. 18 Cristina D'Ancona all other things and to be knowledge, knower, and known at once.10 Then do I see within myself such beauty and splendour as I do remain marvelling at and astonished, so that I know that I am one of the parts of the sublime, surpassing, lofty, divine world, and possess active life. When I am certain of that, I lift my intellect from that world into the divine cause and become as if I were placed in it and cleaving to it, so as to be above the entire intelligible world, and seem to be standing in that sublime and divine place. And there I see such light and splendour as tongues cannot describe nor ears comprehend. (ps.-Theol. Ar., ed. Badawī, I, 22.2–9; trans. Lewis 1959, 225, slightly modified) Following in the footsteps of Plotinus's narrative, the "Allegorist" experiences not only the return of his soul to itself, but also the spiritual union with the intelligible realm,11 thus paving the way for the creation of one of the most pervasive topics of Arabic philosophy as a whole: that of the conjunction of man's mind with the separate Intellect. The fully fledged version of the theory of the conjunction of man's mind with the separate Intellect will be elaborated only after the translation by Isḥāq b. Ḥunayn of Alexander of Aphrodisias's short writing On Intellect, but the latter will be interpreted, both in the Arabic translation and by the philosophers who rely on it, in the light of the ps.-Theology (Geoffroy 2002). The influence of the ps.-Theology has been detected also on Avicenna's interpretation of the same topic (D'Ancona 2008). After having experienced this conjunction, the "Allegorist" descends once again in the realm of discursive reasoning. As Plotinus did, he wonders how is it possible that his soul, in spite of the conjunction it had with the divine, descends into a corruptible body and becomes a part of the lower world ruled by coming-to-be and passing away (ed. Badawī, 22.9–15). The answer, as was the case with Plotinus, is provided by the Greek philosophers. The ancient thinkers quoted by Plotinus (Heraclitus, Empedocles, Pythagoras: IV 8[6], 1.11–23) count also for the "Allegorist" as the authoritative voices from the past—a case in point for the "agreement of the leading philosophers" emphasized by "Aristotle" at the beginning. Still following in Plotinus's footsteps (IV 8[6], 1.23–27), he turns now 10 The words "and to be knowledge, knower, and known at once" do not feature in Lewis's translation because they are lacking in one of the manuscripts of the ps.-Theology that is particularly authoritative. The issue cannot be discussed here, but let me mention the fact that these words feature in Fārābī's quotation (see Martini Bonadeo 2008, 74.8). This independent witness, much earlier than the earliest manuscript of the ps.-Theology known to us, tips the scale in favor of the branch of the textual tradition that has this sentence. 11 Plotinus described the individual soul as capable of performing the same cognitive activity as the separate Intellect, and this is different from saying, in the footsteps of St. Paul (1 Cor. 2:9), that one has experienced the direct vision of God. On the Pauline inspiration of the words "And there I see such light and splendour as tongues cannot describe nor ears comprehend," which became also a Prophetic hadith, see Zimmermann 1986, 141–43; see also Bucur and Bucur 2006. Lack of space forbids the treatment of this topic, but let me briefly recall that for Plotinus the discursive individual soul, once it performs at its utmost the intellectual activity, is also in a position to contemplate the One, as the separate Intellect does. This is admittedly different from the beatific vision mentioned in the Arabic adaptation, but is not a complete misunderstanding of Plotinus's point. The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 19 to Plato, whose thoroughness on this point he affirms to be unprecedented. Better than anyone else, Plato has explained why the soul enters this world (a sentence that comes from Plotinus) and how soul will "return to her own world, the true, the first world" (ed. Badawī, 23.15–16; trans. Lewis 1959, 229)—a sentence that does not come from Plotinus, but is added in the Arabic. If anyone levels the objection that Plato's statements are inconsistent, because in some of his writings he condemns the soul's union with body while in others this union counts as the fulfillment of God's decree, the "Allegorist" declares that Plato's behavior is meant to incite the reader into going beyond the face value of these statements. All this comes from Plotinus (IV 8[6], 1.28–29), and so it is also for the assessment of the crucial role of the Timaeus. For Plotinus, in this dialogue one can find not only Plato's doctrine about body and soul, but also Plato's answer to the cosmological question as a whole, namely whether or not the divine Intellect acted well in producing the world of becoming (IV 8[6], 2.1–8). At this point, the Arabic text parts company with the treatise On the Descent of the Soul into the Bodies, and a long section begins that has no counterpart in the Greek text. The "Allegorist" wears the cloak of the exegete of Plato's theological doctrine. We intend to begin by giving the view of this surpassing and sublime man on these things we have mentioned. We say that when the sublime Plato saw that the mass of philosophers were at fault in their description of the essences, for when they wished to know about the true essences they sought them in this sensible world, because they rejected intelligible things and turned to the sensible world alone, wishing to attain by sense-perception all things, both the transitory and the eternally abiding … he pitied them … and guided them to the road that would bring them to the truth of things. He distinguished between mind and sense-perception and between the nature of the essences and the sensible things. He established that the true essences were everlasting, not changing their state, and that the sensible things were transitory, falling under genesis and corruption. When he had completed this distinction he began by saying "the cause of the true essences, which are bodiless, and of the sensible things, which have bodies, is one and the same, and that is the first true essence," meaning by that the Creator, the Maker. (ps.-Theol. Ar., I, ed. Badawī, 25.15–26.8; trans. Lewis 1959, 231) This passage, with its deliberate echo of the Aristotelian history of philosophy as a progress from the materialistic beginnings toward a fully fledged doctrine of the true causes (Metaph. A.3, 983b6–11), with its distinction between the mass of the philosophers liable to error and the leading ones who guide others toward truth, and with the final move of crediting Plato with the doctrine of creation, is of great importance for the development of Arabic-Islamic philosophy. Even more important is the fact that the exegete, "Aristotle," openly endorses the master's ideas, namely "Plato's" ones, presenting creation as a doctrine shared by both: note that the elucidation that the "first true essence" (al-anniyya al-ūlā al-ḥaqq) is "the Creator, the Maker" (al-bāriʾ al-khāliq) is provided by "Aristotle" 20 Cristina D'Ancona himself. It is still "Aristotle" who extols "Plato" for having taught the same doctrine that he himself had announced at the beginning of his Theology, namely the existence of Intellect and Soul as the principles that convey the creative power of the First Cause: Then he said: "This world is compounded of matter and form. What informed matter was a nature more exalted than matter and superior to it, viz. the intellectual soul. It was only by the power of the sublime mind within the soul that she came to inform matter. Mind came to give the soul the power to inform matter only by virtue of the first essence, which is the cause of the other essences, those of mind, of soul and of matter, and all natural things. Only because of the First Agent did the sensible things become beautiful and splendid, but this action took place only through the medium of mind and soul." Then he said: "It is the true first essence that pours forth life, first upon mind, then upon soul, then upon the natural things, this being the Creator, who is absolute good." How well and how rightly does this philosopher describe the Creator when he says "He created mind, soul and nature and all things else." (ps.-Theol. Ar., ed. Badawī, I, 26.16–27.8; trans. Lewis 1959, 231) The "Allegorist" credits Plato with the (admittedly Aristotelian) hylomorphic doctrine and sides with him in the assessment of the emanation of divine power through the medium of the Intellect and the cosmic Soul. This account of divine causality culminates in the claim that the First Agent, the First Essence, and the Pure Good are one and the same thing: the Creator. The enthusiastic comment on "Plato's" doctrine—"How well and how rightly …"—paves the way for "Aristotle" to turn into the learned disciple who warrants for the correct interpretation of the master's doctrine. Once established the harmony between his own views and "Plato's," he sets for himself the task of avoiding a possible misunderstanding: since creation is an "action" that "took place through the medium of mind and soul," and since it is described as a sequence of deeds ("first upon mind, then upon soul, then upon the natural things"), one may infer that God's creation was performed at a given time, as suggested also by the narrative of the Timaeus—a highly problematic conclusion indeed, since in this way God himself seems to be submitted to time. But "Aristotle" explains that the sequence is only due to the limitations of language (lafẓ), because language cannot convey the notion of priority if not through time: But whoever hears the philosopher's words must not take them literally (ilā lafẓihi) and imagine that the Creator fashioned the creation in time. If anyone imagines that of him from his [i.e., Plato's] mode of expression, he did but so express himself through wishing to follow the custom of the ancients. The ancients were compelled to mention time in connection with the beginning of creation because they wanted to describe the genesis of things, and they were compelled to introduce time into their description of genesis and into their description of the creation—which was not in time at all—in order to distinguish between the exalted first causes and the lowly secondary causes. The reason is that when a man wishes to elucidate and recognize cause he is compelled to mention time, since the cause is bound to be prior to The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 21 its effect, and one imagines that priority means time and that every agent performs his action in time. But it is not so; not every agent performs his action in time, nor is every cause prior to its effect in time. If you wish to know whether this act is temporal or not, consider the agent: if he be subject to time then is the act subject to time, inevitably, and if the cause is temporal so too is the effect. The agent and the cause indicate the nature of the act and the effect, if they be subject to time or not subject to it. (ps.-Theol. Ar., ed. Badawī, I, 27.8–28.3; trans. Lewis 1959, 231) This passage sheds light on the scope of this crucial section of the ps.-Theology. Should the exegesis of "Plato's" utterances be intended to reconcile the doctrine of the philosophers with the Qurʾān, it would surprisingly miss the mark: indeed, a literal interpretation of the Timaeus would fit better with the narratives of creation that feature in the sacred book of Islam, and the emphasis laid here on the conventional nature of the accounts that include time would rather fan the flames of a controversy between philosophy and religion than warrant for the Islamic orthodoxy of Greek thought. Thus, the scope of "Aristotle" in providing the key to the correct interpretation of "Plato's" doctrine of creation cannot be apologetic. Rather, "Aristotle's" account is meant to grant a firm footing to the theory of the "harmony between Plato and Aristotle" on the crucial issue of the causality of the First Principle, a move that presupposes the awareness of the objections against the Timaeus raised by Aristotle in the De Caelo: one should not forget that the De Caelo was known in the circle of al-Kindī, where the ps.-Theology was born (Endress 1997), and to some extent also the Timaeus was (Arnzen 2012). The interpretation of divine causality as an action that, prima facie similar to a process, in reality is performed in no time is typically Neoplatonic, but what is most interesting here is the fact "Aristotle's" account depends upon Philoponus's reply to Proclus. In his De Aeternitate mundi Philoponus came to grips with Proclus's eternalist arguments, listed in a work (Eighteenth Arguments on the Eternity of the Cosmos) that has come down to us in Greek only through Philoponus's quotations. One of these arguments inferred from the changeless nature of the divine is the impossibility for the Demiurge to produce anything new. In purely Neoplatonic vein, Philoponus retorted that the suprasensible principles always operate according to their own nature, not according to the nature of the lower realities they produce; hence, the Demiurge "operates without subdivision on divisible things, in unitary way on multiple things, and always in the same way on changeable things" (De Aet. mundi, ed. Rabe 1899, 617.15–18). The De Aeternitate mundi was known to al-Kindī and in his circle (Walzer 1957, 190–96; Endress 1973, 15–17; Ivry 1974, 144–62; Davidson 1987, 106–15; Hasnaoui 1994), and it is revealing to see the creation described in the ps.-Theology as an action whose quality is assigned by the agent, performed in no time because the agent is above time. This account, clearly inspired by Philoponus, is put in the mouth of the "Allegorist"—"Aristotle"—and emphasized as a point made by "Plato." When, later on, the ps.-Theology is quoted in the Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages, Plato the Divine and Aristotle, its author will insist on the fact that the philosophers alone can provide good arguments for creation out of nothing. If one relies on the symbolic language of the Scripture, one is left with the idea 22 Cristina D'Ancona of production out of something preexistent—water, foam, smoke, clay—and this does not do justice to God's absolute power to create out of nothing. Only philosophy disposes satisfactorily of the anthropomorphic narratives that misrepresent God's action as if it were that of a craftsman in need of a preexistent matter (ed. Martini Bonadeo, 63.16–64.6 and 66.1–67.3; English trans. Butterworth 2001, 154–57). Also al-Fārābī's definition of creation, in the Opinions of the Inhabitants of the Perfect State (ed. Walzer 1985, 92.8–10), as an act accomplished without any movement, without instruments, without any change whatsoever, testifies to the adoption of the Neoplatonic notion of causality, with which the falāsifa were acquainted through the texts produced within the circle of al-Kindī: the ps.-Theology and the Liber de Causis. The ps.-Theology shows an overarching concern with the issue of God's causality. Very often we can read in it adaptations of Plotinus's accounts of intelligible causality, which pave the way for the well-known formulas of the Liber de Causis about the First Principle as that pure Being which creates by its own being, without instruments, with no change, and in no time. This topic appears with some emphasis at the very end of the ps.-Theology. Chapter 10, the last one, consists of three blocks of Plotinian writings: the short treatise V 2[11], On the Origin and Order of the Beings Which Come after the First; a long section from the treatise VI 7[38], How the Multitude of the Forms Came into Being, and on the Good; finally, a section from the treatise V 8[31], On the Intelligible Beauty. Here Plotinus argues against the literal interpretation of the Timaeus, which may lead to the conclusion, widespread in Gnostic circles, that the principle that fashioned this universe operated like a craftsman, making first the choice whether to produce an artifact or not, then planning his deeds, then again himself doing the job step by step. This counts for Plotinus as a complete misunderstanding of the Timaeus, as he repeats time and again in his treatises; in particular, in V 8[31] he protests against those who imagine that the demiurgic "reasoning" about the cosmos can be taken at its face value (V 8[31], 7.1–17). In the final part of the ps.-Theology, this doctrine is endorsed and adapted on two points: what Plotinus says about the divine Intellect is referred to the First Cause itself, and the production of the universe is understood as creation. Once again, in what follows the italics indicate the sentences taken almost literally from the Greek; the rest is Arabic adaptation. Who will not wonder at the power of that noble and divine substance, that it originated things without reflection or investigation of their causes but originated them by the mere fact of its being? Its being is the cause of the causes and therefore its being has no need, in originating things, of investigating their causes, or of cunning in bringing them well into existence and perfection, because it is the cause of causes, as we said above, being self-sufficient without need of any cause or contemplation or investigation. We are going to cite an example supporting our description, for this statement of ours. We say that the accounts of the ancients are unanimous, that this universe did not come into being by its own act or by chance, but came from a skilful and surpassing craftsman. But we must investigate his fashioning of this universe: whether the craftsman first reflected, when he wished to fashion it, and thought within himself that first he must create an earth standing in the middle of the universe, then after that water, to The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 23 be above the earth, then create air and put it above the water, then create fire and put it above the air, then create a heaven and put it above the fire, surrounding all things, then create animals with various forms suited to each creature of them, and make their members, internal and external, following the description they follow, suited to their functions; so he formed the things in his mind and reflected over the perfection of his knowledge, then began creating the works of creation one by one, in the way he previously reflected and thought. No one must imagine that this description applies to the wise Creator, for that is absurd and impossible and inappropriate to that perfect, surpassing and noble substance. (ps.-Theol. Ar., X, ed. Badawī, 161.16–162.3; trans. Lewis 1959, 393) In his interpretation of the narrative of the Timaeus, Plotinus did not limit himself to following the path laid out in the Platonic school, which consisted in vindicating the didascalic nature of an account that deploys a logical structure in a chronological sequence. He also interpreted this narrative in the light of his own understanding of the theory of Ideas. For Plotinus, the philosophical truth of Plato's doctrine lies in that, in spite of Aristotle's irony (De Gen. et corr. II 9, 335 b 9–16; cf. Metaph. A.9, 991b3–9), it is precisely because Forms are not involved in the process of producing something that they are causes. Their causality consists in being each of them what it is: the intelligible principle that assigns the rationale behind the processes whose outcome is a thing. In order to "produce" the logical structure of a thing, Form must "do" nothing if not being what it is: the model whose instantiation is the logical structure of a given being. This philosophical doctrine, which lies in the background of images like the emanation of heat from fire, is adopted in the ps.-Theology as the most natural explanation of the way in which "the wise Creator" operates, and it is "Aristotle" who propounds this explanation of Plato's doctrine of creation. The "cause of the causes" produces by the mere fact of its being—bi-anniyyatihi faqaṭ, per esse suum tantum: a formulaic expression that will dominate the accounts of creation as a changeless and timeless emanation of the causal power of the First Principle, from al-Fārābī to Avicenna and beyond. He does not need any instrument in the origination of things because he is the cause of instruments, it being he that originated them, and in what he originates he needs nothing of his origination. Now that the unsoundness and impossibility of this doctrine are made plain, we say that there is, between him and his creation, no intermediate thing on which he reflects and the help of which he seeks, but that he originated things by the mere fact of its being. (ps.-Theology, X, ed. Badawī, 163.4–8; trans. Lewis 1959, 395) In the Book of the Exposition by Aristotle on the Pure Good, which after the translation into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187) will be known as the Liber de Causis, creation by the mere fact of the Creator's being is assessed as follows: Therefore, let us return and say that every agent that acts through its being alone is neither a connecting link nor another mediating thing. The connecting link between 24 Cristina D'Ancona an agent and its effect is nothing but an addition to being, as when an agent and its effect are through an instrument and [the agent] does not act through its being. … But an agent [in which] there is no connecting link at all between itself and its effect is a true agent and a true ruler. (Liber de Causis 19, ed. Bardenhewer 1882, 96.6–8; trans. Taylor et al. 1996, 120–21) The uniqueness of the causality of the First Principle consists, in the Arabic Plotinus, precisely in that it operates without anything preexistent, only out of its being and because of its absolute self-sufficiency: this is why it is "the cause of the causes." The First Cause alone is capable of acting in this way. Unlike it, the suprasensible principles that transmit the causal power of the First Cause to visible things—Intellect and the cosmic Soul—operate only because their causality is included in and supported by this power. Another passage of the ps.-Theology with no counterpart in the Greek, this too located in the last chapter, conveys the views of the author of the adaptation of Plotinus. These ideas will have a long-lasting influence on Arabic-Islamic philosophy: You must understand that mind and soul and the other intelligible things are from the first originator, not passing away or disappearing, on account of their originating from the first cause without intermediary, whereas nature and sense-perception and the other natural things perish and fall under corruption because they are effects of causes that are caused, that is, of the mind through the medium of the soul. But of the natural things one has a longer duration than the others, being the most lasting: that depends on the remoteness of the thing from its cause, or its proximity, and on the multitude or paucity of causes in it: for when the causes of the thing are few its duration is longer, and if its causes are many the thing is of shorter duration. We must understand that natural things are linked one to another: when one of them passes away it comes to its neighbour until it reaches the heavenly bodies, then soul, then mind. All things are fixed in mind and mind is fixed in the first cause, and the first cause is the beginning and end of all things: from it do they originate and to it is their returning, as we have often said. (ps.-Theology, X, ed. Badawī, 138.16–139.5; trans. Lewis 1959, 297) The great chain of being has its beginning in the First Principle, the One, the Pure Being and Pure Good: every degree depends on it and its power reaches the sublunar beings through the medium of Intellect and Soul. In the first chapter "Aristotle" had amplified Plotinus's sentence about the descent of the soul by a sentence of his own, concerning its return to the realm of the incorporeal, eternal principles. Here, toward the end of the ps.-Theology, we find another amplification in the same vein. Plotinus was dealing with the destiny of the soul after the end of the body it gives life to (V 2[11], 2.21–23), and the passage quoted above presents once again the cosmic hierarchy of the principles: the First Cause, Intellect, and Soul. At the beginning of the ps.-Theology as well as here, toward the end, the description of the chain of being is dominated by the pattern of the double journey of the soul, the way down along the necessary declension of the degrees of being, and the way back toward its homeland. What will become, in Avicenna's phrasing, the "provenance and destination" is one of the most influential topics created in the ps.-Theology. The Theology Attributed to Aristotle 25 This treatise of mine contains the fruit of two great sciences, one of which is characterized by being about metaphysical, and the other physical, matters. The fruit of the science dealing with metaphysical matters is that part of it known as theology (Uthūlūjiyyā), which treats [the subjects of] Lordship, the first principle, and the relationship which beings bear to it according to their rank. The fruit of the science dealing with physical matters is the knowledge that the human soul survives and that it has a Destination. (Avicenna, The Provenance and Destination, introduction, trans. Gutas 1988, 31) The literary traces of the ps.-Theology can be detected in many works of classical and postclassical Arabic philosophy. In addition to the authors and texts mentioned above, the ps.-Theology is alluded to or quoted by al-ʿĀmirī (Book on the Afterlife, ed. Rowson 1984, V, 88–95; VII, 102–3; XV, 140–41), by Miskawayh (al-Fawz al-aṣghar, ed. ʿUḍayma 1987, 99.9–12), by Avicenna, who has commented upon it (Badawī 1947, 37– 74 and Vajda 1951), by ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī (Book on the Science of Metaphysics, Badawī 1955, 209–40, and Martini Bonadeo 2013), and in the Ishrāqī tradition (Rizvi 2007). The Safavid theologians of the schools of Shiraz and Isfahan show a renewed interest for the basic works of falsafa, tracing back to the age of the translations: among them, the ps.-Theology (Endress 2001, Di Branco 2014), as is made evident from Mullā Ṣadrā's Four Journeys; Saʿīd Qummī (d. 1102/1691) wrote a commentary on the ps.-Theology (Āshtiyānī 1978). The topic of the ultimate provenance of the soul from the First Principle and of its return to it through the conjunction with the intelligible realm is the most pervasive of the doctrines of the ps.-Theology, permeating as it does also the thought of philosophers who do not exhibit any direct knowledge of the Arabic Plotinus. References Abū Rīda, M. ʿA. (ed.). 1950. Rasāʾil al-Kindī al-falsafiyya. 2 vols. Cairo: Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī. 2nd ed. 1978. Adamson, P. 2007. Al-Kindi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ʿAjam, R. 1994 (ed.). ʿAlī ibn Zayd al-Bayhaqī, Tatimmat Ṣiwān al-ḥikma. Beirut: Dār al-fikr al-islāmī. Altmann, A. 1963. 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