Galen's highly influential treatise On the Affected Parts is currently being critically edited by the Corpus Medicorum Graecorum at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Over the last decade, a team of scholars, including the present authors as well as the late and lamented Aḥmad ʿEtmān, have worked on producing a critical edition of the Arabic translation of this text, and their efforts are now drawing to a close. Here we present new insights into how this Arabic translation relates to the (...) Greek textual tradition. (shrink)

Since the last several years of the life of King Hassan II, Morocco slowly moved from authoritarian rule to a managed democracy. As a result of this gradual political liberalization, religious groups as well as secular ones formed political parties. Islamists have already won seats in the parliament and they are expected to gain nearly half the number of seats in the coming elections. Equally significant is the increased presence of human rights and non-government organizations and the emergence of independent (...) and party-affiliated newspapers and other media outlets. In this article, I focus on the prospects of seeing a free press emerging in Morocco given the pressures exerted by official and non-official authorities. I argue that government interventions stifle freedom of expression and weaken civil society. This study focuses exclusively on Moroccan Arabic and French language print media. (shrink)

Galen’s Commentaries on the Hippocratic Epidemics constitute one of the most detailed studies of Hippocratic medicine from Antiquity. The Arabic translation of the Commentaries by Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq is of crucial importance because it preserves large sections now lost in Greek, and because it helped to establish an Arabic clinical literature. The present contribution investigate the translation of this seminal work into Syriac and Arabic. It provides a first survey of the manuscript tradition, and explores how physicians in the medieval (...) Muslim world drew on it both to teach medicine to students, and to develop a framework for their own clinical research. (shrink)

Asheim, O. Om handlingsformidling.--Hellesnes, J. Hending, handling og aktør.--Apel, K.-O. Vår tids konflikter og muligheten for en etiskpolitisk grunnorientering.--Böhler, D. Å kunne handle, å kunne forstå, å kunne tale.--Nordenstam, T. Vetenskaplig kompetens.--Måseide, A. Perspektivitet, intensjonalitet, refleksjon.--Øfsti, A. Moral og erscheinungswelt hos Kant.--Haga, Å. Transcendentalfilosofi og refleksiv argumentasjon.--Skirbekk, G. Folkelege tankar om sikt og oversikt.--Johannessen, K. S. Mening, kontekst, praksis og transcendentalitet.--Kalleberg, R. Fra kritikk av positivismen til kritikk av kapitalismens politiske økonomi.--Slagstad, R. Struktur-funksjonalisme og historisk materialisme.--Wyller, E. A. Politisk oppløsning (...) og forfall ifølge Platon.--Høibraaten, H. Romantisk eller teknologisk refleksjon. (shrink)

Everyone interested in Arabic and Persian literature, in Islam and in comparative religion, regrets the death of Arthur J. Arberry, Sir Thomas Adams's Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge. Arberry combined rare human qualities and exceptional professional attainment, and this enabled him to make a unique contribution both to learning and to mutual understanding between East and West. He had a deep sense of vocation, which he brought to his unremitting labours as a skilled editor of texts, especially (...) in the field of Islamic mysticism, and as an imaginative translator of these texts of the Koran and of Arabic and Persian poetry, and as a sympathetic interpreter of Sūfism. (shrink)

El análisis del islam en Sudán muestra la gran variedad de aproximaciones al objeto de estudio, la diversidad de sus lecturas y el reiterado recurso a los principios religiosos para justificar o legitimar las cuestiones políticas y de Estado. El islam sudanés, en sus diferentes manifestaciones, ha traspasado las fronteras nacionales y ha contribuido al islam africano, árabe y mundial. Eso desde el siglo XIX cuando surgió un primer proto-estado islámico de la mano de esa figura mesiánica que fue Muhammad (...) Ahmad Ibn Abdallah, el Mahdi, hasta el pensador y hombre de Estado Hasan al-Turabi en pleno siglo XX. Analizaremos tres dimensiones: el islam reformista de Mahmud Muhammad Taha, el islamismo sudanés conducido por al-Turabi y el papel del sufismo en la religiosidad popular y en la política sudanesa, y su reciente confrontación con las tendencias salafíes activas en el país en lo que parece ser una nueva lucha por el espacio socioreligioso del siglo XXI. (shrink)

Denne artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i et skille mellom samfunnsstrukturer som avgrenser legers skjønnsmessige utfoldelse på den ene siden, og profesjonens tilrettelegging for kultiveringen av erkjennelsesmessige ferdigheter på den annen. Ved å videreføre H. Grimen og A. Molanders anvendelse av S.E. Toulmins modell for praktisk resonnering i en klinisk kontekst redegjør jeg for legeskjønnets multidimensjonale, epistemiske struktur. Gjennomgangen viser hvordan skjønnsanvendelse i legerollen kan analyseres i henhold til en fagteknisk, en distributiv og en relasjonell dimensjon. Mot denne bakgrunnen diskuterer jeg så (...) spenninger som oppstår i skjæringspunktet mellom strukturering og kultivering av skjønnets ulike dimensjoner. Diskusjonen tydeliggjør at den medisinske profesjonen ikke kan betraktes som en selvtilstrekkelig premissleverandør når det gjelder å sikre adekvat kultivering av medlemmenes skjønnsutøvelse i en klinisk kontekst. Ved å synliggjøre og vektlegge de relevante profesjonseksterne bidragene i profesjonens pågående selvregulering kan befolkningens berettigete tillit til profesjonen styrkes ytterligere.Nøkkelord: strukturelt skjønn, epistemisk skjønn, profesjon, selvregulering, tillitEnglish summary: In Between Structures of Society and Profession: On Delimitation, Cultivation and Premises for Adequately Exercising Judgment in the Role as PhysicianThe point of departure of this article is a distinction between societal structures that delimit the discretion of the physician on the one hand and the profession's arrangements for the cultivation of the physician's judgment on the other. By developing H. Grimen and A. Molander's application of S.E. Toulmin's model for practical reasoning in a clinical context, the multi-dimensional epistemic structure of the physician's judgment in terms of technical, distributive, and relational judgment is accounted for. Against this backdrop, tensions emerging in the intersection between delimitation and cultivation of professional judgment in its various dimensions are discussed. The discussion clarifies that the medical profession is not a self-sufficient provider when it comes to ensuring an adequate cultivation of its members' judgment in a clinical context. It is argued that by emphasising and implementing the relevant external contributions to the profession's ongoing self-regulation, the public's justified trust in the medical profession can be strengthened. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than (...) harm.—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

La Pensée d’Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ: Un «agent double» dans le monde persan et arabe. By István T. Kristó-Nagy. Studia Arabica, vol. 19. Paris: Éditions de Paris, 2013. Pp. 605. €34.

It was a strange posthumous fate that awaited the Englishman Robert of Ketton : he was to be both best known and most strenuously criticized for a work that he surely viewed as a sideline to his own interests and career. By trade Robert was a Latin translator of Arabic scientific and mathematical works, one of those remarkable twelfth-century men who, as his contemporary Petrus Alfonsi put it, were willing “to traverse distant provinces and withdraw into remote regions so as (...) to be able to attain fuller knowledge of the astronomical art.” Like other contemporary translators, such as the Italian Gerard of Cremona , Robert had left his birthplace—in his case Rutlandshire—and traveled to Spain in order to have access to the great works of Arabic astronomy and mathematics that could be found in the still very Arab Iberian Peninsula. By 1141 we find him and his close friend Herman of Carinthia studying and translating scientific works together in northeastern Spain, and in later years his astronomical interests and ecclesiastical responsibilities led him to travel widely in Spain and England. As a scientific translator, he is perhaps best known for his Liber algebrae et Almucabola, a Latin version of al-Khwarazmī's great manual of algebra, Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-al-muqābalah. (shrink)

A recepção do pensamento greco-romano árabe e judaico pelo ocidente medieval.

Este artículo analiza la aportación de los moriscos a los estudios árabes, concluyendo que ésta fue modesta en la Península Ibérica. Algunos moriscos contribuyeron de forma activa al conocimiento del árabe a través de sus estudios sobre temas árabo-islámicos. Se demuesttra que el converso mudéjar conocido como Juan Andrés, autor de uno de los más influyentes tratados contra el Islam, fue un canónigo de la Catedral de Granada. Se aborda brevemente la cuestión de la contribución de los moriscos a la (...) traducción e interpretación de los Libros Plúmbeos y se estudia su contribucción, con posterioridad a la expulsión, a los estudios árabes e islámicos. La última parte del trabajo se centra en Holanda (República de los Siete Países Bajos Unidos) donde, como resultado de circunstancias históricas y ciertas contingencias como las relaciones personales, los moriscos desarrollaron un importante papel. En este caso, además del estudio de la lengua árabe en sí mismo, las ciencias físicas cobraron una notable importancia, circunstancia relacionada, en un marco más amplio, con la emergencia de los estudios árabes en Europa, que incorporan tanto las ciencias físicas como la religión y la filosofía, además del interés por el Norte de África, incluidas sus aplicaciones en la vida diaria. (shrink)

Summary The pharmacological tradition in the medieval Islamic world developed on the basis of the Greek tradition, with the works of Dioscorides and Galen being particularly popular. The terminology was influenced not only by Greek, but also Middle Persian, Syriac, and indigenous Arabic words. Through recent research into Graeco-Arabic translations, it has become possible to discern the evolution of pharmacological writing in Arabic: in the late eighth century, the technical terms were being developed, with transliterations being used; by the mid-ninth (...) century, many standard Arabic translations for Greek words have been established. Various authors, however, expanded the pharmacology inherited from the Greeks. Galen had established a system of degrees of primary faculties (dry or moist, and warm or cold) that various physicians in the Islamic world modified. Al-Kindī, for instance, invented a theory of how to calculate these degrees in compound drugs, whereas ar-Rāzī criticised the epistemology that underlies Galen's theories. Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) complemented the various degrees in his description of simple drugs. Furthermore, both Ibn Sarābiyun and al-Kaskarī integrated new drugs from the Islamic heartland, and the Far East into the Greek system. In these ways, the Arabic pharmacology developed in a creative tension of tradition and innovation. (shrink)

A critically important development in the tradition of philosophy, as understood by Arabic authors, was the inclusion of both rhetoric and poetics within logic. While these writers' conception of the logical Organon gave appropriate place to the theory of demonstration as found and defined in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, they added to it the syllogism not only of dialectic, but of rhetoric and poetry as well. By attaching the latter two arts to logic, the Arabic philosophers created a contextual claim about (...) rhetoric and poetry which tended both to weaken the status of either one as a mode of nonlogical discourse and yet potentially to enhance their importance as tools of cognitive activity by recognizing in them some form of syllogistic reasoning. (shrink)

Los objetivos principales de este trabajo son, por una parte, plantear una propuesta metodológica para el estudio del cambio lingüístico en árabe clásico y, por otra, explorar las particularidades de los procesos de gramaticalización y el cambio lingüístico en esta lengua semítica. Para ello, hemos analizado los procesos de cambio y gramaticalización experimentados por la partícula ḥattā (‘hasta’, ‘incluso’) en árabe clásico desde el siglo VII hasta el XX. Se han analizado 731 ejemplos de ḥattā extraídos de uno de los (...) más completos corpus históricos del árabe, el HADC, todavía inédito. El estudio ha tenido en cuenta 30 variables diferentes que se han recogido en fichas recopiladas en una base de datos relacional. Los resultados se han organizado en un esquema conceptual que presenta la vinculación semántica de cada uno de los cinco valores de ḥattā así como las trayectorias evolutivas de esta partícula en árabe clásico. Las conclusiones más relevantes son que, por descontado, sí hay cambio lingüístico en árabe clásico, si bien sus trayectorias evolutivas se ven constreñidas tanto por la presión de la norma coránica como por su naturaleza de lengua esencialmente escrita. Los resultados también revelan que existe una marcada estratificación, persistencia y divergencia en los procesos y apuntan, a su vez, la relevancia de incluir variables como el origen del autor o los tipos de texto cuando se analiza el cambio lingüístico. (shrink)

"The more we learn about the history of mankind, the more we realize that there is no spontaneous generation in history but only a continuous shaping of new 'Forms' out of existing 'Matter.' Islamic philosophy is an interesting example of this process which constitutes the continuity of human civilization." Walzer concludes that Islamic thought, based on too narrow a concept of reason, failed where Greek philosophy had failed before it.--C. E. B.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor’s Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions represents not only a significant contribution in utopian studies; it is also a major intervention in contemporary literary studies and global cultural studies more generally. Each of the book’s chapters is structured around a specific set of formal and generic questions, exploring in great detail and with a tremendous amount of insight recent feminist revisionings of older genres, including the bildungsroman, the novel of art, nonlinear histories, American historical novels, and finally, in an (...) extraordinary turn, the works of contemporary Arab feminist writers, which, Wagner-Lawlor shows, “directly address the nature of the work left to do, as.. (shrink)

Here, I should like to tell a story, beginning with how the works of Aristotelian philosophy came to exist in Latin translations, then moving to the project of transforming Christian theology into an Aristotelian “science.” After that, I would like to look a bit more closely at the case of Br. Thomas of Aquino and his dependence upon the Muslim philosopher Ibn Sīnā. Finally, I shall end by drawing some wider conclusions based upon this important example.