Medieval Confluences Series, Vol. 1

Well Begun is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources

Edited by Vasileios Syros (University of Helsinki)
2011 | 226 + xiv pp. | Hardcover | 6 x 9 in | 978-0-86698-436-2 | MRTS 388
$58 | £44

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This collection of essays represents the first sustained effort to explore the trajectories of Aristotle’s political ideas in the medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish traditions. It brings to the fore an extensive corpus of hitherto neglected or understudied sources on Aristotle’s political, moral, and rhetorical theory and assesses their importance for the evolution of political thought in medieval Islam and Judaism and the Syriac, and Byzantine contexts. It also revisits the influence of Aristotle’s political thought on seminal representatives of Arabic (al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Rushd), Syriac (Bar Hebraeus), Jewish (Moses Maimonides, Ḥasdai Crescas, Isaac Abravanel), and Byzantine (Themistios, Theodoros Metochites) political writing. The volume breaks new ground by challenging the longstanding scholarly assumption that medieval Islamic and Jewish political thought was predominantly influenced by Plato’s philosophy and opens up new perspectives on the reception of classical political thought in the medieval world.

Table of Contents

  • Vasileios Syros (University of Helsinki): Forgotten Commentators Society: Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Garb

  • John W. Watt (Cardiff University): Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Political Thought in the Christian Orient and in al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes

  • Frédérique Woerther (CNRS): La Rhétorique d’Aristote comme moyen de diffusion des idées politiques aristotéliciennes dans la philosophie politique arabe: les Didascalia in Rethoricam ex glosa Alpharabii

  • Jules Janssens (Catholic University Leuven): Ibn Bajja and Aristotle’s Political Thought

  • N. Peter Joosse (University of Warwick): Between Enigma and Paradigm. The Reception of Aristotle's Politica in the Near East: The Arabic and Syriac-Aramaic Traditions

  • Anthony Kaldellis (Ohio State University): Aristotle’s Politics in Byzantium

  • Abraham Melamed (University of Haifa): Aristotle's Politics in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Political Thought

  • Jean-Pierre Rothschild (École pratique des hautes études & CNRS): La contestation des fins de la politique selon Aristote chez quelques auteurs juifs du moyen âge tardif en Espagne