Al-Hasan ibn Musa al-Nawbakhti, Commentary on Aristotle "De generatione et corruptione": Edition, Translation and Commentary

448 Pages·2015·6.003 MB·English

by  Marwan Rashed (editor)

Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī,
Commentary on Aristotle De generatione et corruptione
Scientia Graeco-Arabica
herausgegeben von
Marwan Rashed
Band 19
De Gruyter
Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī,
Commentary on Aristotle
De generatione et corruptione
Edition, translation and commentary
by
Marwan Rashed
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-044364-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-044458-2
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043680-8
ISSN 1868-7172
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen
Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet
über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar.
© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck
∞ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
PREFACE

The present book contains the editio princeps, together with a translation
and a commentary, of an anonymous Arabic commentary on Aristotle’s
treatise On generation and corruption. Although this commentary has until
now escaped the notice of historians of Arabic philosophy, it is of conside-
rable interest. If the date (around the year 900 AD) that I suggest for the
work is accepted, then not only is it the oldest surviving Arabic comment-
ary on Aristotle, but also a rare document from a very little known period
of the history of philosophy: the short century separating the activity of al-
Kindī (ca 800–after 860) from that of al-Fārābī (870–951). Until now, we
have not had in our hands any commentary on Aristotle going back to these
decades, in which great energy was devoted to the translation of philoso-
phical texts from Greek into Arabic. Of course, we have suspected that
knowledge of the corpus aristotelicum, which was still rudimentary in al-
Kindī, was refined during the second half of the 9th century, until it attained
the degree of exegetical perfection characteristic of al-Fārābī in the first
half of the 10th century. Part of the value of this new text is that it proves by
its very existence that al-Fārābī did not simply appear ex nihilo, nor above
all did he, as he liked to claim, depend immediately on his Greek prede-
cessors and their Syriac transmitters. Rather, his work as a commentator
was prepared for by a philosophical activity of the highest order, one
which, as we will see, reveals a mastery of the Aristotelian essentialism of
Alexander of Aphrodisias down to its smallest details.
Before coming to the identity of the author, his context and his project,
let me say a few words about his reliance on Alexander. Throughout his
own commentary on the first book of De generatione et corruptione, he
relies systematically (although without saying so) on Alexander’s lost
commentary. In particular, this influence is overwhelming in the second
part of the book, beginning with chapter 5. The treatment of growth, of
contact, of action and passion, of mixture, is so close to what we know
from other sources of Alexander’s philosophical theses, that it enables us to
reconstruct to a large extent his lost exegesis. The two most remarkable
chapters from this point of view are the treatment of growth—divided into
two sections by the author, one On Growth and the other On Nutrition—
and the treatment of mixture. In the case of growth, we now understand for
the first time how Alexander interpreted GC I, 5 in a markedly anti-Galenic
VI Preface
direction, by rejecting the profusion of Galenic powers/capacities
(δυνάμεις) and preferring the more mechanistic physiology of Erasistratus,
the Alexandrian doctor whom certain ancient sources associate with
Aristotle. In the case of mixture, we see the antecedents of an important
chapter in the Medieval discussions of form and quality. Until now, much
confusion has surrounded the formulation of Alexander’s own doctrine
concerning the “qualitative” nature of the elementary forms. The new text
allows us to understand it better. We can now see how the notion of power
(δύναμις) stands at the centre of Alexander’s analysis, allowing him to
avoid reducing the forms of the elements to pairs of primary qualities and
at the same time to preserve a close link between the two. As one can see
from reading through our commentary, many other passages attest to the
influence of Alexander. The new text is therefore a third and essential piece
of evidence, alongside the commentaries of Philoponus and Averroes, for
the nature and content of Alexander’s lost commentary. In particular, it
allows us to establish that in his Epitome of the treatise On Generation and
Corruption, Averroes faithfully follows Alexander’s exegesis. Following
the discovery of substantial Greek portions of Alexander’s lost commentary
on the Physics in a Byzantine manuscript,1 this new text allows us to refine
still further our understanding of the natural philosophy of the greatest
Aristotelian of Antiquity.
Now, a word about the author of the Arabic commentary. Although the
text has been transmitted anonymously in the two manuscripts, this mys-
terious commentator has left clues enough for us to determine his identity.
He is the Imamite scholar and theologian Abū Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-
Nawbaḫtī (ca 850–ca 920). Of the forty or so works that bio-bibliographers
attribute to him, only one was known up until now, the well-known Book of
Šī‘ī Sects (Kitāb Firaq al-Šī‘a) edited in 1931 by Hellmut Ritter. His
identification with the author of the new commentary carries with it two
historical consequences. First of all, the present text is unique in
documenting the Aristotelian turn taken by the Mu‘tazilism of the Baghdad
School, as opposed to that of the Baṣra School. It has long been suspected,
on the evidence of later doxographic reports—by Šayḫ al-Mufīd (d. 1022)
in particular—that al-Nawbaḫtī had adopted, on a certain number of points,
the Aristotelian theses of Abū al-Qāsim al-Ka‘bī (d. 931), the leading
figure of the Baghdad School. This suspicion has now been confirmed by
two facts: (i) the Aristotelian turn taken by the kalām of Baghdad, which

1 See M. Rashed, Alexandre d’Aphrodise, Commentaire Perdu à la Physique
d’Aristote (Livres IV-VIII): Les Scholies Byzantines, Édition, Traduction et Commen-
taire, Berlin / New York, 2011.
Preface VII
used to be traceable only through later and often tendentious doxographies,
is now attested to by a text dating to the very time at which the turn
occurred; (ii) al-Nawbaḫtī was indeed a major actor—along with Abū al-
Qāsim al-Ka‘bī—in the adaptation of the Aristotelian ontology of the
sensible world to the conceptual framework provided by the atomism of the
mutakallimūn. This assimilation had in turn an effect on how Aristotle was
read. We shall see how, on several occasions, the ontology of the kalām
gave a particular direction to the interpretation of Aristotle. We see the
result of this mutual influence in this original and fascinating work, which
combines the essentialism of Alexander of Aphrodisias, together with his
marked interest in the problems of εἶδος, and the theory of predication of
the kalām, which takes any formulable determination, whether positive or
privative, to indicate the real existence of an attribute.
This symbiosis of the kalām and of falsafa occurred at the same time as
a crucial event in Šī‘ī history. In 874, al-Ḥasan al-‘Askarī, the eleventh
descendent of the Prophet, died without an heir apparent. My last chapter
will be devoted to showing that there is perhaps a relation between, on the
one hand, the theory of Occultation that was hastily put into place in order
to justify the change of regime and, on the other, the return to the
philosophy of Aristotle. Indeed, al-Nawbaḫtī belonged to one of the most
eminent Šī‘ī families, one of whose tasks it became to make the connection
between the Hidden Imam and Abbassid society as a whole. They also, and
especially, needed to take up on a theoretical level the task of explaining
the Imam’s epoch-making transition from manifest presence to hidden
presence. It is in light of this that the return not only to the kalām but also
to falsafa must be understood—a return carried out by our author, the
“organic intellectual” of the Banū Nawbaḫt. Indeed, it was Alexander’s
theory of essence that enabled him to build an anthropology compatible
with Shī‘ism’s new demands as a doctrine of Revelation.
It is my great pleasure to thank four people who have helped me in the
realisation of this project. Pauline Koetschet obtained a copy of the Istanbul
manuscript for me; Salimeh Maghsoudlou reread several of my analyses;
Stephen Menn invited me to give a seminar on the text at the Humboldt
University in Berlin, in June and July 2013; Brian D. Prince corrected my
English and translated the last chapter.

CONTENTS

I. TEXT AND TRANSLATION

Introduction to the Critical Edition .................................................................................. 3
Sigla ................................................................................................................................. 5
Summary of the Book On Generation and Destruction ................................................... 6
<Introduction> ............................................................................................................ 6
Section <1: On Generation, Destruction and the Categories> .................................... 6
Section <2 : On Generation, Non-Being and Matter> ................................................ 8
Section <3 : On Matter, Form and Generation and Destruction> ............................. 12
Section <4 : On Generation, Substance and Accidents> ........................................... 14
Section <5 : Different Kinds of Change and Change According to Place> ............. 18
Section <6 : On Growth> .......................................................................................... 22
Section <7 : On Nutrition> ....................................................................................... 24
Section <8 : On Contact> ......................................................................................... 32
Section <9 : On Action and Passion> ....................................................................... 40
Section <10 : On Mixing> ........................................................................................ 44
Section <11 : On the Elements> ............................................................................... 50
Section <12 : On the Reciprocal Change of the Elementary Bodies> ...................... 54
Section <13 : Formation of Homoeomers> .............................................................. 58
Section <14 : Generation and Destruction and the Celestial Bodies> ...................... 60

II. COMMENTARY

Introduction of the Work ............................................................................................... 67
Section 1: On Generation, Destruction and the Categories ........................................... 73
Section 2: On Generation, Non-Being and Matter ........................................................ 79
Section 3: On Matter, Form and Generation and Destruction ....................................... 87
Section 4: On Generation, Substance and Accidents .................................................... 99
Section 5: On the Different Changes and the Change According to Place ................. 117
Section 6: On Growth .................................................................................................. 141
Section 7: On Nutrition ................................................................................................ 159
Section 8: On Contact .................................................................................................. 191
Section 9: On Action and Passion ............................................................................... 219
X Contents
Section 10: On Mixing ................................................................................................ 237
Section 11: On the Elements ....................................................................................... 273
Section 12: On the Reciprocal Change of the Elements .............................................. 283
Section 13: Formation of Homoeomers ....................................................................... 291
Section 14: Generation and Destruction and the Celestial Bodies .............................. 307

III. AL-ḤASAN IBN MŪSĀ AL-NAWBAḪTĪ

The author of the treatise: al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī ........................................ 343
1. Pars destruens: the author is not Avicenna ........................................................ 343
2. Pars construens: the author is al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī ......................... 346
Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī as a philosopher ...................................................... 363

Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 393
Index of Arabic words .................................................................................................. 409
Index nominum ............................................................................................................ 423
Index locorum .............................................................................................................. 429