Avicenna And The Aristotelian Tradition

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study.

Ernst Bloch was one of the most significant twentieth-century German thinkers, yet he remains overshadowed by his Frankfurt School contemporaries. Known for his engagement with utopianism and religious thought, Bloch also wrote incisively about ontological questions. In his short masterpiece Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left, Bloch gives a striking account of materialism that traces emancipatory elements of modern thought to medieval Islamic philosophers’ encounter with Aristotle. Bloch argues that the great medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) planted the seeds of a radical materialism still relevant for critical theory today. He contrasts Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s interpretations of Aristotle on form and matter to argue that Avicenna’s reading democratizes power and undermines clerical and political authority. Bloch explores Avicenna’s world and metaphysics in detail, showing how even his most recondite theoretical concerns prove capable of pointing toward radical social transformation. He blazes an original path through the history of ideas, including Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Spinoza, and Marx as well as lesser-known figures. Here translated into English for the first time, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left is at once a succinct summation of Bloch’s own idiosyncratic materialism, a provocative reconstruction of the Western philosophical tradition in light of its exchanges with Islamic thought, and a vital resource for contemporary debates about materialism in critical theory.

Through close study of Avicenna's statements and major works, Dimitri Gutas traces Avicenna's own sense of his place in the Aristotelian tradition and the history of philosophy in Islam, and provides an introduction to reading his philosophical works by delineating the approach most consistent with Avicenna's intention and purpose in philosophy. The second edition of this foundational work, which has quickened fruitful research into the philosopher in the last quarter century, is completely revised and updated, and adds a new final chapter summarizing Avicenna's philosophical project. It is also enlarged with the addition of a new appendix which offers a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works, updating the work of Mahdavi (1954) with additional information on all manuscripts and important editions and translations. Its usefulness enhanced, the book provides primary orientation to Avicenna's philosophy and works and constitutes an indispensable research tool for their study. Winner of the I. R. Iran World Award for the Book of the Year 2014

This is the second, revised and updated, edition of this foundational work introducing a reading of Avicenna's philosophical works that is consistent with his intention and purpose in philosophy. Its usefulness is enhanced with a new appendix offering a critical inventory of Avicenna's authentic works that incorporates and updates Mahdavi (1954).

Examines Aristotle's vast influence upon the medieval Arabic philosophical tradition and includes contributions from every discipline within his corpus.

The volume brings together seventeen studies on Avicenna by Dimitri Gutas, written over the past twenty-five years. They aim to establish Avicenna’s historical and philosophical context as a means to determining his philosophical project and the orientations of his thought. They deal with his life and works, his method, his epistemology, and his later reception in the Islamic world, ending with a programmatic essay on the state of the field of Avicennan studies and future agenda. Occasioned by issues raised in Gutas’s monograph on Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (whose second edition has just appeared), they form a substantive complement to it. For this reprint, a number of the essays have been reset and accordingly revised and updated. Provided with exhaustive indexes of names, places, subjects, and technical terms, the volume constitutes a new and major research tool for the study of Avicenna and his heritage.

This volume presents a panorama of Syriac engagement with Aristotelian philosophy primarily situated in the 6th to the 9th centuries, but also ranging to the 13th. It offers a wide range of articles, opening with surveys on the most important philosophical writers of the period before providing detailed studies of two Syriac prolegomena to Aristotle’s Categories and examining the works of Hunayn, the most famous Arabic translator of the 9th century. Watt also examines the relationships between philosophy, rhetoric and political thought in the period, and explores the connection between earlier Syriac tradition and later Arabic philosophy in the thought of the 13th century Syriac polymath Bar Hebraeus. Collected together for the first time, these articles present an engaging and thorough history of Aristotelian philosophy during this period in the Near East, in Syriac and Arabic.