The Manuscript Tradition of Avicenna's Kitāb al-Šifā': The Current State of Research and Future Prospects Introduction

Abstract

TheArabic text of Avicenna’s (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037)masterpiece on philosophy, the Kitāb al-Sifāʾ (Book of the Cure), is still imperfectly known.The work is a philosophical encyclopedia in four main parts (logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics, with an appendix on practical philosophy) articulated into twenty-two sections (nine sections of logic, eight of natural philosophy, four of mathematics, plus the single section of metaphysics), each of which constitutes an independent unit. The parts on metaphysics and natural philosophy (in this order) were published in lithographic format in Tehran in 1885.The entire work was published in Cairo between 1952 and 1983, a period of time during which each of its sectionswas printed—in the case of logic andmathematics for the first time—as a self-standing volume. This printing, commonly known as the Cairo edition of the Sifāʾ, was the joint effort of a team of Egyptian scholars and represents until nowadays the standard version of the work: it was reprinted inTehran in 1983 and inBeirut in 1993.Whereas themanuscript basis of theTehran lithograph is uncertain, and variants are only occasionally reported (as interlinear or marginal glosses), the Cairo edition approaches the standard of a critical edition, in so far as it provides an apparatus criticus. Although an obvious advancement with respect to the Tehran lithograph, the Cairo edition does notmeet the basic requirements of a critical edition and remains perfectible in many respects. First of all, its material basis is scanty: both the number of codices employed and their geographical provenience are very narrow with respect to the massive and widespread manuscript tradition of the work.TheCairo editors used at most, in the case of some sections of the Sifāʾ, eleven codices (with a minimum of three codices in other cases): current bibliographical research informs us, by contrast,