Averroes ex Averroe: Uncovering todros Todrosi's method of commenting on the commentator

Steven Harvey, Oded Horezky

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Our paper studies one of the most interesting manuscripts of medieval Jewish philosophy, a unicum that is housed in the British Library, Heb MS Add 27559. This fascinating manuscript, in part a version of a work compiled by Todros Todrosi, in Trinquetaille in the 1330s, is a Hebrew anthology of logical and scientific texts, written by Greek and Arabic philosophers, some of which are translated into Hebrew for the first time by Todros. The paper sheds new light on this manuscript through an examination of the section on natural science that Todros devoted to the study and explanation of Aristotle's Physics and which comprises more than a third of the entire manuscript. We uncover Todros's aims and methodology in this section on physics (and, to some extent, in other sections as well), and sketch a clear picture of the ways in which Todros intended to assist his contemporary readers in the study of natural science. The paper contributes to our knowledge of the fundamental status of Averroes's middle commentaries on the Corpus Aristotelicum among medieval Jewish scholars, as well as to our growing awareness and appreciation of the achievements of a remarkable, young, fourteenth-century Provençal scholar, Todros Todrosi. It concludes with three appendices, two of which compare Todros's text with parallel passages in the Hebrew translations of Averroes's commentaries, and a third which provides a detailed description of the British Library manuscript.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)7-78
Number of pages72
JournalAleph
Volume21
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

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