Averroes and Arabic Philosophy in the Modern Historia Philosophica: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Averroes’s role as Aristotle’s commentator par excellence guaranteed him widespread and certain fame up to the first decades of the seventeenth century; but the crisis of Peripateticism and the establishment of the new philosophy and new science also find
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Averroes and Arabic Philosophy in the Modern Historia Philosophica: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Gregorio Piaia
The varied fortune of great thinkers is like the fate of shares on the stock market: their value goes up or down depending on their appreciation, and it is not rare to find cases in which a once celebrated and acclaimed philosopher ends up in the margins of the market of ideas, though his share price may rise again with a change in the intellectual climate and cultural fashion. The most emblematic case of this fluctuation is of course Aristotle, to whom we could apply the image that Alessandro Manzoni used for Napoleon in his ode Il cinque maggio (lines 47–48): ‘due volte nella polvere, due volte sull’altar’.1 And, of course, together with Aristotle, we should mention Averroes, who for centuries was considered the Aristotelian commentator par excellence. Dante deliberately placed him among the spiriti magni in the nobil castello of Limbo (Inf. IV, 144), at the end of his review of the ancient wise men who lived before or outside Christianity, but who because of their intellectual and moral stature deserved to be placed in Limbo rather than Hell itself, as was the case of Epicurus. If Dante consecrated Averroes’s fame as the Commentator on the ‘maestro di color che sanno’ – Aristotle, that is, ‘the’ philosopher – Averroes’s fortune was well-consolidated in the fifteenth, sixteenth and the first decades of the seventeenth century thanks also to the numerous Venetian editions of the Aristotelian corpus translated into Latin together with Averroes’s commentaries: from the 1483 incunable, printed impendio industriaque Andreae Torresani, to the apud Junctas editions of 1550–1552, 1562 and 1573–1575, and the Zaccaria Zenaro edition apud Cominum de Tridino (= Trino Monferrato) of 1560–1562. The famous Giunti edition in particular, which also included Averroes’s own works (such as the Sermo de substantia
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Alessandro Manzoni, Liriche e tragedie, ed. Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz (Turin: UTET, 1968), p. 93.
G. Piaia (*) Dipartimento FISPPA, p.zza Capitaniato, 35100 Padova, Italy e-mail: [email protected] A. Akasoy and G. Giglioni (eds.), Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 211, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_12, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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orbis, the Destructio destructionis Philosophiae Algazelis in the translation by Calo Calonymos, and the De animae beatitudine, seu epistola de intellectu),2 could not fail to find a place in the libraries of European scholars. Nevertheless, if we look through the Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627) by Gabriel Naudé, one of the most famous erudite men of letters of the age, we find that of the long series of Aristotelian commentators only Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius are mentioned explicitly, while Averroes is evidently among those ‘vieux Interpretes d’Aristote’ whose work
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