The Theology of Aristotle and some other pseudo-Aristotelian texts reconsidered.

• Author: Rowson, Everett K.

A collection of contributions to a Warburg Institute colloquium focuses on aspects of the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition in Arabic and Latin. F. W. Zimmermann's paper, occupying almost half the volume, undertakes a radical reassessment of the origins of the Arabic Theology of Aristotle and related texts and offers a highly speculative new stemma for their development. Four other contributions deal with other aspects of the Theology and the related De causis. The remaining six papers consider other pseudo-Aristotelian texts. The collection as a whole raises more questions than it answers, but represents an important body of scholarship which should spur further research in a number of areas.

It is well known that the Aristotle who represented the essence of the philosophical tradition in both the Islamic and European Middle Ages was not exactly the Aristotle we know today. In both traditions, besides works of the authentic Aristotelian corpus, numerous pseudonymous works, of very varied content, also circulated under the name of the Philosopher, and affected not only the common view of Aristotle himself, but also the interpretations brought to bear on his genuine writings. An earlier symposium at the Warburg Institute resulted in a volume of essays on the most popular of these pseudo-Aristotelian works (and indeed the most popular of all Aristotelian works, genuine or spurious, in the Middle Ages, in both Arabic and Latin), the Sirr al-Asrar or Secretum secretorum (Pseudo-Aristotle, The Secret of Secrets: Sources and Influences, edited by W. F. Ryan and Charles B. Schmitt, Warburg Institute Surveys, 9 [London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1982]). The present volume, the product of a colloquium held on May 20-21, 1983, offers a broader look at the phenomenon of the medieval pseudo-Aristotle in general, and while the assembled essays make no attempt at a comprehensive treatment of the relevant works (about a hundred in Latin, a smaller but still substantial number in Arabic), they do represent an important advance in scholarship on both the corpus as a whole and several of the most important and influential works in it.

The book is divided into two parts. The seven essays in part I deal with more general aspects of the pseudo-Aristotelian corpus and with some specific works within it. The three essays in part 11 are devoted to a single work, which was of particular importance in the Arabic tradition, the Theology of Aristotle.

Part I begins with C. B. Schmitt's "Pseudo-Aristotle in the Latin Middle Ages," which surveys the different kinds of works sharing a false attribution to Aristotle and attempts to establish some criteria for classifying them, including original language, time of appearance and popularity, and subject matter. The author's observation that the relatively few works on moral philosophy mostly go back to Greek originals, as opposed to works in the pseudo-sciences, many of which come from Arabic, seems to be valid, although his characterization of subjects such as alchemy, astrology, physiognomy, and chiromancy as "so central to medieval Muslim culture" could be questioned. Most interesting and useful are his comments on the general lack of interaction between the genuine and spurious Aristotelian works, as indicated by the way they are grouped in manuscripts, and his final division of the spuria into two groups on the basis of their appeal to different readerships, the generally Greek-based works such as the Problemata and the Liber de causis appealing to the "university culture," while the more blatantly spurious works attracted a more popular audience, with the Secretum secretorum and De pomo situated somewhere in between.

Dimitri Gutas' "The Spurious and the Authentic in the Arabic Lives of Aristotle" is a model of lucidity and probably the strongest contribution in the volume. Launching a stinging but fully documented attack on Ingemar During's Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition (Goteborg, 1957), Gutas calls for a return to the careful philology of the nineteenth-century orientalists, but at a higher level of sophistication, and then proceeds to do much of the needed work himself, fully displaying the sophistication he calls for, and particularly the requisite sensitivity to historical tendentiousness and its particular rationales. In a few pages and in tabular form, he surveys the Arabic biographies, sorts out their components and their likely origins, and indicates where further research is needed. (With regard to the components of the biography from the Siwan al-hikma, it may be noted that the paragraph attributed to "al-mu allim al-thani Abu Nasr ... al-Farabi qaddas Allah ruhahu l- aziz," while perhaps really due to him, is probably an interpolation in the Muntakhab Siwan al-hikma, since the Siwan hardly granted al-Farabi such honor - if it included him at all - and reserved such phrases for Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani, to whom they are applied in a passage immediately following this paragraph, and a few other luminaries; and the section taken from al-Tawhidi's al-Basa ir wal-dhakha ir seems not to appear in Wadad Kadi's now-completed critical edition [Beirut, 1988] of that imperfectly-preserved work. Al-Mubashshir's description of Aristotle's physical appearance presumably came from the [illustrated?] source he drew on for the appearance of other philosophers as well. Sa id's report that Plato used to call Aristotle "the Intellect" may have come from al- Amiri's al-Amad ala l-abad, from which Sa id drew material for biographies of other philosophers.) The article concludes with a valuable classification of other Arabic sources which include information, real or spurious, on Aristotle's life. (It is questionable, however, whether the attribution of the Liber de pomo to Socrates must be prior to its attribution to Aristotle, as Gutas maintains, as only two closely-related manuscripts of the work, out of six known, do attribute it to Socrates, and of other sources referring to the work only the latest, that of Abi Usaybi a, does so, while the Persian, Hebrew, and Latin translations unanimously make it Aristotle's. The six Arabic manuscripts of the work [see Gutas' note 611 are listed in F. Sezgin, Geschichte des Arabischen Schrifttums, II: 50, along with a Tehran ms which is apparently a copy of Kashani's Persian translation. The "manuscript" in Santillana's Cairo lecture notes has...