About Todros Todrosi's Medieval Hebrew Translation of al-Fārābī's Lost Long Commentary/Gloss-Commentary On Aristotle's Topics, Book VIII

Abstract

Among the many logical works by Abū Nasr Muhammad al-Fārābī (870–950), there are two commentaries on particular books or points of Aristotle's Topics, whose original Arabic text has been apparently lost. A number of quotations of one or both of them, translated into Hebrew, has been recently found in a philosophical anthology by a fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish scholar, Todros Todrosi. In this article, a detailed list of these quotations is given, and a tentative short examination of the contents of each of them is offered.

Notes

For a comparative examination of the contents of the lists of al-Fārābī's works found in these book catalog; see Steinschneider 1869, where the titles of both the above works are put on pp. 214–215, at numbers 4 and 18 of the list.

About Todros Todrosi; see Neubauer and Renan 1893 (pp. 570–573); see also Steinschneider 1893 (pp. 62–63).

This family, apparently active in Arles in the period 1330–1340, was surely composed by Todros Todrosi, as well as by Qalonymos ben David Todrosi, who was very probably the paternal uncle of Todros and wrote an Arabic-into-Hebrew translation of Averroes's Incoherence of the Incoherence of Philosophers (a critique of a work by al-Ghazālī , The Incoherence of Philosophers): about the latter, see Steinschneider 1893 (pp. 332–333). This ‘Todrosian family’ might have even included another very well-known translator, Qalonymos ben Qalonymos (1286–1330 ca.), although a sure relationship between him and the two Todrosis has yet to be proved.

See Zonta 1996 (pp. 249–253).

For a complete description of the contents of the manuscript; see Margoliouth 1915 (pp. 286–290).

See Zonta 1996 (pp. 162, 253).

Zonta 1998 (pp. 228–230).

Zonta 1997a (pp. 247–251).

It should be pointed out that Todros's quotations of Themistius's Paraphrase of Aristotle's Prior Analytics, concerning various passages of Aristotle's An. Pr. 24a3–37b11, and found on folios 17r–22v of the London manuscript, have been identified, published and translated into English, see Rosenberg and Manekin 1988, Rosenberg and Manekin 1990.

See Zonta 1997b about Todros Todrosi's anthology in general (pp. 527–529), about Todros's quotation of Themistius's Paraphrase of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics (pp. 543–545), about Todros's quotations of al-Fārābī's works on the Topics (pp. 557–562), and for a more detailed, tentative examination of the other Greek and Arabic sources employed by Todros (pp. 565–575).

See the edition of this work in al-'Ağam 1986 (pp. 13–107).

About the contents of this work; see the critical edition in Butterworth and Haridi 1979.

See the manuscript of London, Add. 27559, folio 85r, lines 12–13. It should be pointed out that the same statement is found at the end of the 16th quotation of al-Fārābī's commentary found in the first section of Todros's anthology: koh dibber ‘Abu Nazr bi-perišato ha-’arukhah la-šemini mi-zeh ha-sefer, ‘so spoke Abū Nasr (al-Fārābī) in his Long Commentary on the eighth (book) of this work’; this fact seems to suggest that this passage was taken not from the ‘gloss-commentary’, but from the Long Commentary.

The number of each quotation is based on its order in the London manuscript.

For a complete Italian translation of this last passage; see Zonta 1997b (pp. 560–561).

See Aristotle, Top. 155b3–16.

See Aristotle, Top. 157a6–13.

The passage between square brackets is not found in the manuscript, but is suggested by the context.

This translation is different from the original Greek text, which can be translated into English as follows: ‘As for distinction, an instance of the kind of thing meant is the distinction of one form of knowledge as better than another by being either more accurate, or concerned with better objects; or the distinction of sciences into speculative, practical, and productive’ (the English translation of Aristotle's Topics quoted here and below is that found in Pickard 2007); it is also partially different from the more diffused Medieval Syriac-into-Arabic translation of the Topics by Ibrāhim al-Kātib, as published by ‘Abdurrahman Badawī; see Badawī 1948 (p. 733, lines 11–13): fa-ammā t-taqsīmu fa-huwa ‘alā mā asiffu: qad yuqālu anna ‘ilman afdalan min ‘ilmin, immā li-annahū asahha wa-immā ma'lūmātuhū afdalu, wa-inna l-′ulūma minhā nazarīyatan, wa-minhā fi'līyatan, wa-minhā‘amalīyatan, ‘as for the distinction, it is according to what I have arranged: it has been said that a science is better than [another] science, either since it is more correct, or since its objects of knowledge are better; and some sciences are speculative, some others are practical, and some others are active’). About this fact; see Zonta 1998 (p. 230).

See Aristotle, Top. 157a14–15.

See Aristotle, Top. 157a18–21.

See Badawī 1948 (p. 726, line 9); if the Arabic version employed by al-Fārābī was partially different from that published by Badawī, the original term might have been ihtiğāğ, ‘protest, remonstrance’. In any case, this Arabic term would have been taken for translating a form of the Greek verb epikheiréō, whose meaning is substantially different: ‘(to) put hand to, (to) apply oneself to’ (Aristotle, Top. 155b5).

See the London manuscript, folio 72v, line 23, where the last term is incorrectly written as tobiqi.

See Aristotle, Top. 160a35–160b13. It should be noted that Aristotle only makes a very short reference to the main subject of al-Fārābī's passage, as quoted by Todros, i.e. Zeno's paradoxes.

See Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1095a32–33 (book I, chapter 2, about the ‘first principles’).

See Aristotelis 1560–1562 (vol. IV, p. 95r, A – B), taken from Averroes's Long Commentary on lemma 64 of book III of the Physics: Melissus enim dicit totum esse infinitum (…) sicut dicitur in proverbio: applicare filum cum filo. Averroes's source is obviously Aristotle, Phys. 207a17: ho mèn (i.e., Melissus) gàr ápeiron tò hólon fēsín, ‘in fact, Melissus says that the whole is infinite’; cp. also the example of the ‘thread’ (línon) given immediately after this passage (Phys. 207a18–19).

See the manuscript of London, British Library, Add. 27559, folio 74v, line 21, where Todros states: koh dibber ‘Abu Nazr bi-perišato ha-'arukhah la-šemini mi-zeh ha-sefer, ‘so spoke Abū Nasr (al-Fārābī) in his Long Commentary on (book) VIII of this work’.

See Aristotle, Top. 162b17–30.

See Aristotle, Top. 163b20–21: éti te hórōn eyporeîn deî, ‘moreover, get a good stock of definitions’, and compare the Arabic version by Ibrāhim al-Kātib as published in Badawī 1948 (p. 765, line 6): wa-aydan fa-qad yanbaġi'u anna na'idda hudūda l-ašyā' i l-mahmūdati, ‘and moreover it is necessary to enumerate the definitions of the praised things’.

See Aristotle, Top. 155b3–4 and 8.

See Badawī 1948 (p. 726, lines 7–8 and 12): wa-qad yanbaġi'u linā ba'da dālika anna natakallama fī t-tartībi wa-kayfa yağibu an yakūna s-su'ālu (…) wa-l-faylasūfu wa-l-ğadalīyu muštarrikāni fī l-fahsi.

See the manuscript of London, British Library, Add. 27559, folio 86r, lines 10–11, and folios 86v, line 23–87r, line 1.

See Aristotle, Top. 155b19; the Greek term protàseis, ‘premisses’, was translated into Arabic by Ibrāhim al-Kātib as muqaddimāt, ‘propositions’ (see Badawī 1948, p. 727, line 6).

As it was noticed either by Todros or by the copyist of the Hebrew manuscript, the above passage put between square brackets was erroneously omitted in the copy of al-Fārābī's work employed here as a source (see the note found in the manuscript of London, British Library, Add. 27559, folio 87r, lines 2–4).

See Badawī 1948 (p. 727, lines 7–11).

Aristotle, Top. 159a38–39. This passage, as it results from Todros's version (in Hebrew, we-hem še-yihyu mefursamot, ‘and those which are commonly accepted’), was evidently taken from Ibrāhim al-Kātib's Arabic version of the Topics (see Badawī 1948, p. 744, lines 14–15): immā mā huwa mašhūru, ‘or those which are commonly accepted’.

Manuscript of London, British Library, Add. 27559, folio 93v, lines 15–17.

One should point out the surprising omission of the Topics in a general treatise on Aristotelian logic, inspired by Averroes's commentaries, by a fourteenth-century Provençal Jewish philosopher, Joseph Ibn Caspi: The Bunch of Silver (Zeror ha-kesef), which includes the contents of Porphyry's Eisagoge and Aristotle's Categories, De Interpretatione, Prior and Posterior Analytics, and the treatise On Sophistical Refutations (see Steinschneider 1893, pp. 91–94).

About this work and its contents, see the complete English translation and study in Manekin 1992.

al-Fārābī's Treatise on Topics was translated into Hebrew, in Spain or in Provence, by a certain Moses Ibn Lajis, possibly in the first half of the 13th century; this translation was later revised by an anonymous (see Zonta 1996, pp. 190–192). Averroes's Epitome was translated into Hebrew in Provence in 1289, by Jacob ben Makhir Ibn Tibbon, while his Middle Commentary was rendered into Hebrew in 1313 by Qalonymos ben Qalonymos.

About Gersonides's ‘supercommentaries’ on Averroes's Epitome and Middle Commentary on the Topics, see Steinschneider 1893 (pp. 68, 72); see also Zonta 1996 (p. 248). The former work was part of a commentary on the whole Organon, as summarized by Averroes in his Epitome of Aristotle's Logic (1159); the latter one was written by Gersonides in 1323. In both cases, Gersonides seems to have employed as sources the already existing Arabic-into-Hebrew translations by Jacob ben Makhir and Qalonymos ben Qalonymos.