Greek-Arab textual transmission

Fabricius, Christoph Carl (auct.) / Nagel, Johann Andreas Michael (praes.). Specimen academicum de studio philosophiae Graecae inter Arabes.

Altdorf, Johann Georg Meyer, 1745.

4to. 36 pp. Contemporary papered spine.

 1.500,00

First edition of this rare and early dissertation on the reception of Greek philosophy in the Arab world. Composed as an "academic specimen" by the young Nuremberg-born classicist Christopher Fabricius under the direction of the Altdorf professor Johann Nagel (1710-88), one of Germany's foremost oriental scholars of his age, this treatise is one of the first to investigate the crucial transmission process of ancient Greek "philosophia" into the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonically infused "falsafa" of medieval Islamic culture. The author points out that it was through Muslim travellers to India and China that even the cultures of the farther East were introduced to Western philosophy.

The study's principal Arabic sources are Abu al-Faraj and Jirjis ibn al-'Amid Makin. As the printer of Altdorf University, Meyer, lacked Arabic type, the quotations are set in Hebrew. Reprinted in 1753 in C. E. von Windheim's "Fragmenta Historiae Philosophicae".

A waterstain to the title-page, otherwise in good condition.

Literatur

Meusel X, 5.