Abstract

Some of Aristotle’s texts mention some sciences in the context of the distinction between physics and mathematics, the impossibility of using the demonstrations of one science in another one and the distinction between proofs of what and why. These texts allowed his commentators – especially the Arabic and Latin ones – to approach the epistemic status of such sciences. The present study seeks to examine how Avicenna – or more precisely, the Latin Avicenna – dealt with this issue in Liber primum naturalium, and what he would have added to Aristotle’s text. In this regard, it is possible to point out to the addition of at least two more sciences to Aristotle’s list, a formal definition of this type of sciences, implying their mixed nature : “this science is as if it were mixed from the natural and the disciplinary [mathematics] ones. As the pure disciplinary one is abstract, in no way in matter, and this one is as if inserting the abstract one in designated [determined] matter”. It is also noteworthy a terminology that cannot be found in Aristotle’s text: “mixed science” – in the Arabic text, “participating” or “compounded” science -, “pure and inserted science”, “abstraction”.