Dividing Science by Ten

Abstract

Abstract The Ġāyat al-ḥakīm (“the Aim of the Sage”), the Arab ancestor of the celebrated Picatrix on astral magic, includes a curious tenfold classification of the sciences, with five disciplines said to be compulsory “for the legislators” and five “for the philosopher”. This classification was once described by Hellmut Ritter and Martin Plessner as “ein Unikum in der umfangreichen Einteilungsliteratur”. This paper is a survey of medieval texts concerned with a tenfold classification of the sciences, ranging from a wide collection of sources including the world chronicles of Agapius and Girgīs al-Makīn, the Ādāb al-falāsifa, the Sindbādnāma, the Pseudo-Avicennian alchemical De anima, and Roger Bacon’s edition of the Secretum Secretorum. It appears from this survey that the Ādāb al-falāsifa certainly played a crucial role in the transmission of these traditions, but that other texts, in particular amongst the Pseudo-Aristotelian Hermetica, may have been influential as well. Regarding the ultimate origin of this material we are reduced to mere speculations, although various elements invite us to consider Middle Persian literature as a more plausible formative stage than Greek literature in the conception of tenfold classifications of knowledge.