Alfarabi, The Political Writings: "Selected Aphorisms" and Other Texts.

• Author: Parens, Joshua S.
• Position: Book Review

By CHARLES E. BUTTERWORTH. Ithaca: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. xiii + 179. $35.

At last, a wider English-speaking audience will gain access to the riches contained in Alfarabi's political philosophy. Not that our appetite has not already been whetted by Muhsin Mahdi's authoritative translation of the Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (the Trilogy), which we can be grateful to Cornell University Press for reissuing in revised form shortly after issuing the present volume. That work on its own is so daunting, however, that it could only whet the appetite of a wider audience. (Other complete texts by Alfarabi have been translated into English but with limited success, in expensive or otherwise defective translations.) The present volume includes the Selected Aphorisms, chapter five of the Enumeration of the Sciences, the Book of Religion, and the Harmonization of the Two Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle. The bulk of these works has never appeared in translation before. By presenting this selection of works and this critical mass of translations, Charles Butterworth will enable many more readers than ever before to break through the aura of difficulty surrounding Alfarabi. And as we learn on p. 93 in a footnote, we have at least one additional volume of Alfarabi's Political Writings, including among other texts the Political Regime, to look forward to after this one.

We now know from Mahdi's magnum opus, Alfarabi and the Foundations of Islamic Political Philosophy (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), that the Book of Religion, contained in the present volume, can unlock the central mystery of Alfarabi's large corpus of political writings, the apparent redundancy of some of these writings. The Book of Religion, the Political Regime, and the Virtuous City all bear obvious resemblance to one another; however, the Book of Religion is, among other differences, highly schematic or universal--indeed, almost irritatingly so--and the others are more "determined" or particular. The Book of Religion explains that philosophy provides knowledge of universals and religion "determines" them (p. 93). The Political Regime and the Virtuous City, then, are examples of philosophically-informed religion. Further reflection and reading explains why Alfarabi would want to present more than one such example. In contrast, the Book of Religion may be Alfarabi's most important work of political philosophy.

As always, Butterworth walks the fine...