The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics.

• Position: Book review

The Arabic Version of the Nicomachean Ethics. Edited by ANNA A. AKASOY and ALEXANDER FIDORA, with introduction and translation by Douglas M. Dunlop. Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus, 17. Leiden: BRILL, 2005. Pp. xv + 619. $284.

Scholars with some familiarity with medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy are well aware of the great impact of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on medieval Islamic and Jewish thought. Indeed, it is often assumed that both medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers had direct access to the full text of the Ethics. In fact, this was not always the case, and in order to gauge the influence of the Ethics on a particular thinker it is important to know the source or sources of his knowledge of the teachings of this work. It is for this reason, among others, that the publication of a critical edition of the medieval Arabic translation of the Nicomachean Ethics is most welcome. The present edition by Anna Akasoy and Alexander Fidora is accompanied by an introduction and annotated English translation by Douglas M. Dunlop, the late Columbia University Arabist.

The surprising fact is that the Arabic version of the Nicomachean Ethics, which was likely translated by Ishaq ibn Hunayn (d. 910 or 911), quite possibly from an intermediary Syriac translation, was for the most part not an easily accessible text. For example, Averroes tells us in the epilogue to his Middle Commentary on the text, written in 1177, that only its first four books were available in Andalusia until his friend Abu Amr ibn Martin brought a complete copy from Egypt (Hebrew trans., ed. L. Berman [Jerusalem 1999], 354). This was, it seems, the copy of the work Averroes used, and it remained in Spain until it burned in the fire of 1671 at the Escorial library. I have argued elsewhere that Maimonides did not have access to the full text of the Ethics until he arrived in Egypt. Similarly, I have shown that Shem-Tov Falaquera, the thirteenth-century translator, paraphraser, and explicator of Arabic philosophic texts, did not have access to the Arabic translation of the Ethics, but only to an epitome of it (Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 14 [1998]: 87-102). Yet even in the East in the centuries after it was translated, it seems that there was confusion concerning the full translation of the Ethics and the various epitomes and paraphrases of it, with leading thinkers not quite sure which was Aristotle's text. It is the history of the transmission of this text and its...