One of the most important medieval documents in the history of medicine and scholarship, and of culture in general, is doubtless the bibliographical treatise (“epistle”, Risāla) by Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (808-873) addressed to his patron and patron of the arts, the gentleman courtier ‘Alī b. Yaḥyā b. al-Munaǧǧim (d. 275 / 888-889), listing the translations of Galen into Syriac and Arabic. Its transmission and publication history, though, is extremely complicated.

John Walbridge, The Leaven of the Ancients. Suhrawardī and the Heritage of the Greeks (Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000), xviii + 305 pp.

This volume does not “distill more than four decades of research,” as its jacket blurb asserts, but brings together eleven articles on Farabi's “political philosophy” by Muhsin Mahdi published between 1963 and 1999. They are arranged in the book in three parts. The first, introductory part contains two general essays titled “The Political Orientation of Islamic Philosophy” and “Philosophy and Political Thought,” and a historical study on “The Foundation of Islamic Philosophy.” The second and third parts contain seven articles, which present detailed readings of eight selections from Mahdi's canon of Farabi's “political” writings: Enumeration of the Sciences (chap. 5), Book of Religion, Virtuous City (second half), Political Regime (second half), Attainment of Happiness, Philosophy of Plato, Philosophy of Aristotle, and the second part of the Book of Letters (some of Mahdi's renditions of the titles are misleading; see later). Another general essay on “Religion and the Cyclical View of History,” roaming from Plato to Nietzsche, concludes the collection.

The purpose of the article is to present further information about Avicenna's work on Eastern philosophy, supplementing what was written in the author's Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition (Leiden, 1988), pp. 115-30. In view of the prevalent but unfounded notions among some students of Avicenna that the Eastern philosophy is mystical or illuminationist, an initial section traces the history of the development of these tendentious ideas first to Ibn T[dotu]ufayl and then to the followers of his interpretation in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Further sections discuss the title of the book, list its contents insofar as they can be reconstructed from Avicenna's statements and the extant portions, and provide additional information about its manuscripts and transmission. The style of the work is then analyzed and compared with that of the šifā' in order to verify Avicenna's claim in the Preface to the latter work that the difference between the two was merely stylistic. A final section gives a table of concordance between the contents of the extant part on physics and the corresponding sections in the šifā', establishing the direct relationship and verbal congruity between the two works.

One of the monuments of Peripatetic scholarship which time and the long shadow of Aristotle have concealed from full view, and barred from general acclaim, is “The opinions of the natural philosophers” by his colleague and successor, Theophrastus of Lesbos. The work established the fields of intellectual history in the form of “doxography” in general, and of the history of natural science in particular, as separate branches of study, and laid the foundation for all subsequent research on the Presocratic thinkers and the origins of philosophy. Its pervasive influence and the tradition it generated may be briefly recounted: shortly after the turn of the 1st century B.C. there appeared in the school of Poseidonius a revised and updated edition of the work, which also included the opinions of philosophers posterior to Theophrastus. In the following century the supplemented compilation was edited anew by an otherwise unknown Aetius, under the simple title “Opinions” (Placita). Around A.D. 150 Aetius's edition reappeared in an epitome falsely attributed to Plutarch and bearing the title, “Epitome of the Natural Opinions of the Philosophers” (Placita philosophorum). Of these works, only the last named has survived intact in Greek: its attribution to a famous author and its wide use, especially by Christians in their polemical writings, seem to have contributed to its preservation. One may further hazard the guess that by the same token, and because a tradition of reference to, and respect for, this Placita had been created in Christian circles, it was translated into Arabic by a person in the same tradition, a Syriac Christian of Greek descent, Qusṭā ibn Lūqā (died c. A.D. 912). In Arabic translation it saw the widest diffusion possible among authors interested in ancient philosophy (see the diagram in the work reviewed, p. 88).