This volume introduces ʿAlī b. ʿUbayda al-Rayḥānī (d. 219/834), one of the central figures in the transmission of classical Greek and Persian wisdom into Arabic. It offers an edition, translation, and evaluation of his book Jawāhir al-kilam , one of the oldest collections of proverbial wisdom and moralia in Arabic, as well as other remaining pieces of his works. The first part of the book surveys the content of his more than sixty books and suggests that among his translations from Middle Persian into Arabic were the Sindbād-nāma...

This book offers a critical Arabic edition, annotated English translation, introductory study, and two-way glossaries of the famous dispensatory composed around the middle of the 12th century CE by the Nestorian physician Ibn at-Tilmīḏ. The dispensatory, recognized as a masterpiece already by mediaeval contemporaries, soon after its appearance became the pharmacological standard work in the hospitals and apothecs of Baghdad and the wider Arab East, replacing, after almost 300 years, the vademecum of Sābūr ibn Sahl. The dispensatory of Ibn at-Tilmiḏ marks the apogee...

The two centuries following the rise of the Abbasid caliphate in 750 witnessed a wave of translations from Greek into Syriac and Arabic. The translation and reception of Aristotle's Rhetoric is a prime example for the resulting transformation of antique learning in the Islamic world and beyond. On the basis of a close textual analysis of the Rhetoric, this study develops elements of a comparative "translation grammar" of Greek-Arabic translations. Contextualizing the analysis with an account of the textual history and the Syriac and Arabic philosophical tradition drawing on...

The history of Islamic thought in the Middle Ages, the impact of Greek philosophy and science, and the formation of an own theological tradition, is a long and complex one. The articles in this volume dedicated to Hans Daiber, one of the pioneering scholars in this field, offer new insights from a variety of perspectives: philological, philosophical, and historical. The subjects range from Islamic philosophy and theology, over the history of science, the transmission into other medieval cultures to language and literature. In addition to their specific discoveries, they give an impression of...

The book offers and explains the hypothesis that the end of the 13th century does not denote the "final stage" and the "stage of decay" of Arabic logic as the "Aristotelian logic" continues its life and development in the following period in Bosnia and Herzegovina ̶ either as a subject within the educational system, or as general propaedeutics for each scientific thought ̶ where it had skilled interpreters. The book proves that the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina used almost the same way to compose writings in the field of logic: one in Latin within West-European cultural and...

This book offers an Arabic edition and English translation of Sābūr ibn Sahl's (d. 869 CE) famous dispensatory as preserved in a recension made by the physicians of the ʿAḍudī hospital in Baghdad around the middle of the 11th century CE. Drawing on different exponents of Sābūr's original, the recension also constituted an attempt at revising the pharmacological material on empirical grounds. Edition and translation are framed by a detailed introductory study and various medico-pharmacological glossaries. The book thus not only highlights the lasting impact...

Following al-Fārābī's approach, Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037) undertakes a new foundation of the First Philosophy based on his own critical systematisation of the Aristotelian theory of science, yielding the result that metaphysics is only possible as a transcendental science, i.e. that not only the subject-matter of metaphysics and its properties but also the arguments by which the first principles of knowledge are defended must be transcendental. This book provides the first systematic reconstruction of Ibn Sīnā's concept of metaphysics, and, given the...