The two centuries following the rise of the Abbasid caliphate in 750 witnessed a wave of translations from Greek into Syriac and Arabic. The translation and reception of Aristotle's Rhetoric is a prime example for the resulting transformation of antique learning in the Islamic world and beyond. On the basis of a close textual analysis of the Rhetoric, this study develops elements of a comparative “translation grammar” of Greek-Arabic translations. Contextualizing the analysis with an account of the textual history and the Syriac and Arabic philosophical tradition drawing on theRhetoric, it throws new light on the inner workings of the “translation movement” and its impact on Islamic culture.

The first English-language translation of a crucial medieval Arabic commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, with context on its contribution to intellectual history. Abū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Rushd (d. 1198 AD), known as Averroes in the West, wrote one of the most significant medieval Arabic commentaries on Aristotle’s famous treatise, Rhetoric. Averroes worked within a tradition that included the Muslim philosophers Al-Farabi (d. 950) and Avicenna (d. 1037), who together built an early canon introducing Aristotle’s writings to the academies of medieval Europe. Here, for the first time, Lahcen El Yazghi Ezzaher translates Averroes’ Middle Commentary into English, with analysis highlighting its shaping of philosophical thought. Ibn Rushd was born into a prominent family living in Córdoba and Seville during the reign of the Almoḥad dynasty in the Maghreb and al-Andalus. At court, he received support to write a body of rhetorical commentaries extending the work of his Arabic-Muslim predecessors, a critical step in fostering Aristotle’s influence on European scholasticism and Western education. Ezzaher’s meticulous translation of Averroes’ Middle Commentary reflects the depth and breadth of this engagement, incorporating a discussion of the Arabic-Muslim commentary tradition and Averroes’ contribution to it. His research illuminates the complexity of Averroes’ position, articulating the challenges Muslim scholars faced in making non-Muslim texts available to their community. Through his work, we see how people at different historical moments have adapted intellectual concepts to preserve rhetoric’s vitality and relevance in new contexts. Averroes’ Middle Commentary exemplifies the close connections between ancient Greece and medieval Muslim scholarship and the ways Muslim scholars navigated an appreciation for Aristotelian philosophy alongside a commitment to their cultural and religious systems.

"Paramount examples of an extensive Arabic-Muslim tradition of textual commentary and rich corollaries to the Medieval Greek and Latin rhetorical commentaries produced in Europe. Each translation is accompanied by insightful scholarly introductions and notes that contextualize - both historically and culturally - the immensely significant work while highlighting comparative, multidisciplinary approach to rhetorical scholarship that offers new perspectives on one of the field's foundational texts."--Cover page 4.

The present volume brings together thirteen articles as so many chapters of a book, devoted to the history, methods, and practices of the commentaries that have been written on Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Examining both the linguistic and factual background, these contributions attempt to insert each of the commentaries into its particular historical, political, social, philosophical, and pedagogical context. The historical periods and geographical areas that arise – from Greco-Roman antiquity to Heidegger’s philosophy, from the Syriac and Arabic traditions to the Western world – make it possible, in sum, not only to indicate how the Rhetoric has been read and interpreted, but also to offer general perspectives on the practice of explicating ancient texts. Le présent volume rassemble treize articles envisagés comme autant de chapitres d’un livre et dédiés à l’histoire, à la méthode et à la pratique des commentaires à la Rhétorique d’Aristote. Mêlant l’approche matérielle et linguistique, ces contributions se proposent de réinscrire chacun des commentaires dans son contexte historique, politique, social, culturel, philosophique, et pédagogique particulier. Les périodes et les aires géographiques considérées ici—de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine jusqu’à la philosophie de Heidegger, des traditions syriaque et arabe au monde occidental—permettent, in fine, non seulement de suggérer des pistes de lecture pour la Rhétorique et l’histoire des interprétations de la Rhétorique, mais aussi de dessiner des perspectives plus générales sur la pratique du commentaire.

This volume contains the Syriac text, edited for the first time, of the commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric by Bar Hebraeus (died 1286) in his Cream of Wisdom. The text is accompanied by an English translation, and the volume also includes an introduction, commentary, and three glossaries (Syriac, Greek and Arabic). Bar Hebraeus’ commentary is based on the lost Syriac version of Aristotle’s treatise, but the author also drew heavily on the commentary of Ibn Sina (Avicenna). The text therefore provides a unique insight into the nature of that lost version, and also exemplifies the way Bar Hebraeus blended the Aristotle of the Graeco-Syriac translation literature with the more recent philosophy of Ibn Sina.

The current study argues that different cultures can coexist better today if we focus not only on what separates them but also on what connects them. To do so, the author discusses how both Aristotle and Confucius see rhetoric as a mode of thinking that is indispensable to the human understanding of the truths of things or dao-the-way, or, how both see the human understanding of the truths of things or dao-the-way as necessarily communal, open-ended, and discursive. Based on this similarity, the author aims to develop a more nuanced understanding of differences to help foster better cross-cultural communication. In making the argument, she critically examines two stereotyped views: that Aristotle’s concept of essence or truth is too static to be relevant to the rhetorical focus on the realm of human affairs and that Confucius’ concept of dao-the-way is too decentered to be compatible with the inferential/discursive thinking. In addition, the author relies primarily on the interpretations of the Analects by two 20th-century Chinese Confucians to supplement the overreliance on renderings of the Analects in recent comparative rhetorical scholarship. The study shows that we need an in-depth understanding of both the other and the self to comprehend the relation between the two.

In this collection edited by Alan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer, scholars in communication, rhetoric and composition, and philosophy seek to “reread” Aristotle’s Rhetoric from a purely rhetorical perspective. So important do these contributors find the Rhetoric, in fact, that a core tenet in this book is that “all subsequent rhetorical theory is but a series of responses to issues raised by the central work.” The essays reflect on questions basic to rhetoric as a humanistic discipline. Some explore the ways in which the Rhetoric explicates the nature of the art of rhetoric, noting that on this issue, the tensions within the Rhetoric often provide a direct passageway into our own conflicts.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.