Historiography of Renaissance philosophy and science has long been characterized by tendencies to minimize the influence of medieval Arabic philosophy and science. According to the standard narrative, the humanists successfully eliminated Arabic writers, along with their Latin scholastic interpreters. Against this background, Dag Nikolaus Hasse calls for a "sober historical approach" in order to "assess the factual influence of Arabic sciences and philosophy in the Renaissance". His narrative is summarized by the title of his impressively (...) erudite and well-documented... (shrink)

The article comments on the epistemological foundations of medieval Arabic science and philosophy, as presented in five earlier communications, and attempts to draw some guidelines for the study of its social history. At the very beginning the notion of "Islam" is discounted as a meaningful explanatory category for historical investigation. A first part then looks at the applied sciences and notes three major characteristics of their epistemological approach: they were functionalist and based on experience and observation. The second (...) part looks at the theoretical sciences and notes that their epistemology was based on geometrical as well as (b) syllogistic modes of proof, and that the particular approach of scientists and philosophers was determined by (c) whether the motivations of each were scientific or non-scientific (e.g., religious, dogmatic, eristic, etc.). A third part concludes that for medieval Arabic-writing scholars with a scientific motivation the epistemological bases of their work were common to scientists to all cultures, and that the causes of advance or decline of Arabic science and philosophy have to be sought in social factors. In this regard three factors are presented as instrumental: (a) the level of patronage and wealth in any given society within the medieval Islamic world, (b) the cultural attitude of ideological laissezfaire in Sunni Islam which neither imposed nor adopted authoritative solutions in scientific and philosophical issues, and (c) the temporal and local specificity of scientific activity that makes the social contextualization of each science necessary in historical work. (shrink)

Hans Belting, _Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science_, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 303 pp.

The article argues that Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and his court played a unique role in the transfer and diffusion of Arabic science. Scientists at the court translated and elaborated upon it. Moreover, there existed a two-way traffic of scientific knowledge between Frederick and his court scholars, on the one hand, and several oriental courts and their scientists on the other hand. Thus the reader gains a view of Frederick's scientific activities from the Arab perspective, too.Frederick's contribution to (...) the existing biological sciences of his time was his “Book of Falconry”, which was exceptional in the then contemporary approach and methods employed in those fields. Even in this treatise on falconry, Frederick drew upon the fund of knowledge of Arab practitioners. This chain of arguments concerning Arabic science is situated within the setup of Frederick's oriental political practice and sumptuous court life. (shrink)

In an influential article, A. I. Sabra identified an intellectual trend from twelfth and thirteenth-century Andalusia which he described as the ‘‘Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic astronomy.” Philosophers such as Ibn Rushd , Ibn Tufayl , and Maimonides objected to Ptolemy’s theories on philosophic grounds, not because of shortcomings in the theories' predictive accuracy. Sabra showed how al-Bitrūjī's Kitāb al-Hay'a attempted to account for observed planetary motions in a way that met the philosophic standards of those philosophers and others. In Nūr (...) al-‘ālam , the subject of this article, Joseph ibn Joseph ibn Nahmias endeavoured to improve upon al-Bitrūjī’s models. Levi Ben Gerson's Hebrew writings on astronomy criticized al-Bitrūjī, but Ibn Nahmias did not mention them. Nūr al-‘ālam deserves attention, too, because it is the first Arabic text on theoretical astronomy by a Jewish author to come to light. In the body of this article, I will describe and analyze Ibn Nahmias’ theory, from Nūr al-‘ālam , for the motion of the sun. (shrink)

Le XIIe siecle, celui des renaissances, est une periode d'echanges multiformes entre traditions, cultures, ecoles. Sans doute aucun siecle n'est-il plus difficile a unifier que celui-ci: l'appropriation des doctrines greco-arabes voisine avec le developpement autonome des arts du langage, le temps d'Abelard est aussi celui de Bernard de Clairvaux, la dialectique s'elabore dans l'affrontement des multiples ecoles ou sectes. Ce foisonnement que n'encadre pas encore l'institution universitaire recoit ici divers eclairages portant sur la conception de la philosophie, sur la cosmologie (...) et les mathematiques ou sur les arts du langage. (shrink)

Integrating the history of ideas and sociological approaches, the two major themes that run through these studies by Gad Freudenthal are science and philosophy in the medieval Hebrew tradition and the repercussions of Greek theories of matter in the medieval Arabic and Hebrew scientific traditions.

This volume presents Epistles 39-41 of the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, which deal with the types of movement; causes and effects; and definitions and descriptions of things. the Ikhwan considers both the philosophical and spiritual value of these topics.

A (critical) review of Hans Belting's essay.

What are Arabic and Islamic philosophy and sciences? How and where did they come about? I am trying in this preface to provide a short and brief answer to those two questions. Having done this, I sketch the contents of five papers trying to study Arabic and Islamic philosophy and sciences from its perspective to method and truth.

This is the first critical edition of Epistles 15-21 of the Brethren of Purity, which explore the natural sciences and correspond to Aristotle's great works on philosophy of nature. Carla Baffioni illuminates the Epistles' relation to Greek philosophy, with particular focus on various doctrines of Ismaili origin that are echoed in the treatises.