Al-Hasan ibn Musa al-Nawbakhti, Commentary on Aristotle "De generatione et corruptione"

Die Reihe widmet sich grundlegenden Texten der Wissenschaft und Philosophie der Antike und der islamischen Welt, die arabisch überliefert sind. Durch Bereitstellung kritischer Textausgaben und monographischer Untersuchungen werden der Forschung diejenigen Themenbereiche zugänglich gemacht, in denen sich die Wissenschaft zwischen der Antike und der Moderne kontinuierlich dargestellt und entwickelt hat. Die Textausgaben werden von Übersetzungen begleitet und durch inhaltliche Erläuterungen und philologische Anmerkungen erschlossen.

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This book contains a new edition and English translation of the oldest commentary on Aristotle written in Arabic and preserved to this day, together with an extensive commentary. It is a compendium on the treatise De generatione et corruptione, written by the Imamite theologian and heresiographer Hasan b. Mūsā al-Nawbakhtī (fl. ca. 900). To this day, apart from the title of more than forty works and numerous fragments-taken mainly from his magnum opus, the Book of the Doctrines and Religions (Kitāb al-ārā’ wa-al-diyānāt)-only a single treatise of his, the Book of Shî’î Sects (Kitâb firaq al-shî’a), was known to us. The text sheds new light in several ways: firstly, on the the Arabic philosophical tradition, since it was composed during the obscure period between al-Kindī and al-Fārābī (roughly, the 2nd half of the 9th c.); secondly, on the Greek tradition, since the author makes extensive use of Alexander’s lost commentary on De generatione; thirdly, on the formative period of shī’ism, since it helps us to reconstruct how the author borrowed from the Aristotelian tradition the tools necessary to build up a new anthropology compatible with the doctrine of the Occultation which he inaugurated at the time.