Averroës: Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s <i>De anima</i>. A Critical Edition of the Arabic Text with English Translation, Notes, and Introduction

Abstract

Averroes (Ibn Rushd), ‘the commentator’, wrote short, middle, and long commentaries on Aristotle’s texts—short and middle on almost all the treatises and long on five (viz Posterior Analytics, Physics, De caelo, De anima, and Metaphysics). The De anima was undoubtedly one of the most influential texts in the Middle Ages. Of Averroes’ three commentaries on this text, we have a relatively new edition of the short commentary by Salvador Gomez Nogales from 1985, a critical edition of the Latin translation of the long commentary by F.Stuart Crawford from 1953 (the Arabic is no longer extant), and now the long-awaited, annotated, critical edition with an English translation of the middle commentary by Alfred L.Ivry. Professor Ivry is certainly the best qualified scholar to undertake this task and the result, as far as I can judge, leaves nothing to be desired. His edition and translation set the highest standard and can serve as a model for anyone who works on a medieval text. The notes reflect Ivry’s wide and deep erudition in Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew philosophy; and they provide everything that the reader expects to find in notes and much more. The book includes an Arabic-HebrewGreek-Latin glossary, a very rich bibliography, and good indices. The publisher did a good job with the four alphabets, and the Arabic font is easy to read (which is not always the case in Arabic editions). The ‘Averroist community’ is now waiting for Ivry’s edition of the Hebrew translation by Moshe Ibn Tibbon, the publication of which by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities is long awaited.