Ebû Sehl Îsâ b. Yahyâ el-Mesîhî ve Kitâb fî esnâfi’l-ulûmi’l-hikmiyye’si

Abstract

Abū Sahl ʽĪsā ibn Yaḥyā al-Masīḥī (d. after 416/1025) is a neglected figure within the philosophical tradition in Islam. The very limited information about his life shows that he was under the patronage of the Ma’mūnid ruler Ma’mūn ibn Ma’mūn, and his vizier Abū al-Ḥasan al-Sahlī together with a group of famous scholars, such as Ibn Sīnā, al-Bīrūnī, Ibn al-Ḫammār, and Ibn ʽIrāq. He wrote many works on different fields of philosophy, particularly on medicine. Among them, Kitāb fī aṣnāf al-ʽulūm al-ḥikmiyya is a relatively early example of the genre that falls under the classification of the philosophical/ intellectual sciences. Abū Sahl’s work is explicitly based on the Aristotelian corpus arranged in Alexandria in late antiquity, and he introduces each science by referring to its basic text(s), using the commentary tradition found both in late antiquity and in the Islamic period. In addition to the general importance of the wide literature that Abū Sahl provides us with, what is yet a more remarkable and exceptional feature of his work is his argument about the nature of “universal science”. As distinct from the positions of al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā, Abū Sahl sees both metaphysics and natural science as “universal sciences”. In this article, I first introduce Abū Sahl’s life and works, then analyze the content of Kitāb fī aṣnāf al-ʽulūm al-ḥikmiyya, focusing on his distinction between universal and particular sciences, and finally present the revised edition and Turkish translation of the work.