Empedocles Arabus: Une lecture neoplatonicenne tardive.

• Author: Stroumsa, Sarah
• Position: Reviews of Books

Empedocles Arabus: Une lecture neoplatonicenne tardive. By DANIEL DE SMET. Brussels: KONINKLUKE ACADEMIE VOOR WETENSCHAPPEN, LETTEREN EN SCHONE KUNSTEN VAN BELGIE, 1998. Pp. 257. [Distrib. by Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, Belgium]

This book is a self-declared essay in iconoclasm, aimed at "destroying, piece by piece," what the author dubs "the Pseudo-Empedoclean myth." In a previous short study, Daniel De Smet had already attempted "to de-mystify the story about the Arabic Pseudo-Empedocles" by challenging older theories. (1) The present book moves a step further and attempts to offer an alternative theory. The main theses of the book are the following:

1. "Far from being an imaginary figure, the turbaned Empedocles preserves ... ties with Late Antiquity, and thus offers a precious testimony of the manner in which the philosopher of Agrigente was understood at the end of antiquity, at a period which slightly precedes the advent of Islam" (pp. 11, 13).

2. Almost all the information concerning this Empedocles goes back to a single source, the lost original of the heresiographical work known as the Pseudo-Ammonius (pp. 12, 61), which was based on Hippolytus's Refutaio Omnium Haeresium (pp. 153-54).

3. Empedocles belongs, within Arab Neoplatonism, to a tradition that is mostly lost, and of which only few remnants have reached us through the vagaries of the texts' transmission (p. 12).

The origins of the so-called "myth of the Pseudo-Empedocles" go back to the nineteenth century, when Solomon Munk and David Kauffmann believed they had found in three sixteenth-century Hebrew kabbalistic texts the fragments of the "Book of Five Substances." On the basis of these fragments, Munk analyzed the thought of the eleventh-century Jewish philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol. The "myth" was then blown into full bloom by Miguel Asin Palacios, who in his Abenmasarra y su Escuela, published in 1914, attempted to show the presence of a Pseudo-Empedoclean tradition in a variety of Arabic Jewish and Muslim texts, continuing all the way into Latin scholasticism. The Pseudo-Empedoclean theory constructed by these scholars involved a complex reconstruction of fragments from many different texts. De Smet presents the theory clearly and analyzes it critically. He distinguishes between the Arab Anbaduqlis and the mythical Pseudo-Empedocles: whereas Anbaduqlis reflects a continuation (and elaboration) of authentic late- antique Neoplatonist traditions about Empedocles, Pseudo-Empedocles was a brain-child of eminent, albeit ill-informed scholars, who were either too credulous or simply careless: Munk, Kaufmann, and...