Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy.

• Author: Reisman, David C.
• Position: Book review

Avicenna and His Legacy: A Golden Age of Science and Philosophy. Edited by Y. TZVI LANOERMANN. Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, vol. 8. Turnhout, Belgium: BREPOLS, 2009. Pp. xv + 381. [euro] 80.

Whatever "golden age" means and whether or not it is useful for a periodization scheme of traditions other than that of Latin literature, it sounds awfully exciting when used in rhetorical contexts--for example, in the subtitle of the collection reviewed here. Linking post-Avicennan intellectual developments to this sort of periodization scheme is Dimitri Gutas's fault ("The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic Philosophy, 1000 c. 1350"). But no matter. Gutas did back his use of it with information on the very real fact of the tremendous importance of Avicenna to later Arabic-, Persian-, Hebrew-, and Turkish-writing thinkers, actually listed what he thought were the characteristics of that "age" in terms of the diffusion of Avicennan thought, and pointed to likely lines of desiderata. In the present collection. Gutas's idea is cited in the foreword as the Remote Cause for the undertaking and it will play a role in the evaluation here.

Tzvi Langermann's edited collection of seventeen papers is one of many products in the cottage-industry of post-Avicenniana--it has been going on at least since 2002 when Jules Janssens and Daniel de Smet produced Avicenna and His Heritage, in which Gutas published his amazingly useful chart of names of the more important thinkers to be studied as Avicennaish representatives, classed by him rightly as reactionaries, reformists, and supporters. This reviewer himself has jumped in with not one but two entries (Before and After Avicenna [2003], Interpreting Avicenna [2004]), with no "golden age" in mind unfortunately. At any rate, while there is at least a century's worth or more of academic research needed for Avicenna himself, we can appreciate studying later thinkers through the prism of his immense influence. After all, active philosophers and scientists were scratching their heads at his thought at least until the nineteenth century in the three monotheist intellectual cultures. Scholastic academicians should rightly be accorded room to expand the terrain of inquiry by way of haw[a.bar]sh[i.bar] haw[a.bar]sh[i.bar] haw[a.bar]sh[i.bar].

I will not give here as thorough an account of the papers as that of Langermann's very useful foreword. However, echoing the foreword's theme of linking cause (Gutas) to effect (all of the papers in the volume) might be a more interesting perspective. I will include some considerations directed to this or that paper.

Every publication on Avicenna and, as here, later thinkers influenced by him can be divided into the following groupings: (I) historical context; (2) philosophical themes (whether reading and analyzing the texts themselves or approaching the concepts from modern academic philosophical and ideological perspectives); (3) examinations of his very important scientific work; and (4) explorations of the ever-changing faces of Avicenna in Muslim traditional disciplines, mostly theology and mysticism or the mystico-philosophy of later Iranian thinkers (mostly Ishraqi), and in the Hebrew and Latin traditions of grappling with a "Westernized" Avicenna. The contents of this collection also follow this genre-schemata. In (I) we can place only Ahmed al-Rahim's study of the "disciples" of Avicenna.

Categories (2) and (4) often go together in modern academic research, probably because tag-words like...