Marwan Rashed Knihy

This book contains a new edition and English translation of the oldest commentary on Aristotle written in Arabic and preserved to this day, together with an extensive commentary. It is a compendium on the treatise De generatione et corruptione, written by the Imamite theologian and heresiographer Hasan b. Mūsā al-Nawbakhtī (fl. ca. 900). To this day, apart from the title of more than forty works and numerous fragments-taken mainly from his magnum opus, the Book of the Doctrines and Religions (Kitāb al-ārā’ wa-al-diyānāt)-only a single treatise of his, the Book of Shî’î Sects (Kitâb firaq al-shî’a), was known to us. The text sheds new light in several ways: firstly, on the the Arabic philosophical tradition, since it was composed during the obscure period between al-Kindī and al-Fārābī (roughly, the 2nd half of the 9th c.); secondly, on the Greek tradition, since the author makes extensive use of Alexander’s lost commentary on De generatione; thirdly, on the formative period of shī’ism, since it helps us to reconstruct how the author borrowed from the Aristotelian tradition the tools necessary to build up a new anthropology compatible with the doctrine of the Occultation which he inaugurated at the time.

This book is the first study of the ontological system of Alexander of Aphrodisias (floruit c. 200 AD), famous for his commentaries on the works of Aristotle. By drawing not only on the entire known corpus of the commentator's works, but also on numerous new Greek and Arabic sources, Marwan Rashed aimsat defining Alexander’s place in the history of metaphysics. Alexander’s attempt to substantiate the objectivity of the Aristotelian form draws down the curtain on the phase of the Hellenistic peripatos, at the same time marking the beginning of medieval Aristotelianism.