"This Arabic-English translation of The Middle Commentary of Ibn Rushd, known in the West as Averroes, on Aristotle's Rhetoric makes available to English-speaking scholars and students of rhetoric, for the first time, one of the most significant medieval Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's famous rhetorical treatise"--

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.

Charles E. Butterworth provides a bilingual edition (Arabic and English) of several of this influential twelfth-century philosopher's greatest works.

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.

"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.

Comparing Averroes’ and Hegel’s positions on the relation between philosophy and religion, this book explores the theme of the authorities of faith and reason, and the origin of truth, in a medieval Islamic and a modern Christian context respectively. Through an in-depth analysis of Averroes’ and Hegel’s parallel views on the nature of philosophical and religious discourse, Belo presents new insights into their perspectives on the relation between philosophical knowledge and religious knowledge, and the differences between philosophy and religion. In addition, Belo explores particular works which have not yet been studied by modern scholarship.

Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics reveals the original version, previously considered lost, of a landmark work in Arabic philosophy. Undoubtedly authored by the Cordovan thinker Averroes (1126-1198), this “middle” commentary is distinct from the Long Commentary and the Short Commentary in method, several doctrinal elements, and scope (it includes books M and N of the Stagirite’s treatise). These points and the transmission of the Middle Commentary at the crossroads of Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions are addressed in the introduction, which also establishes that the work was extensively quoted by the mystical philosopher Ibn Sabʿīn (13th c.). The edition of the text and the facing translation follow. At the end of the book are Ibn Sabʿīn’s quotations, along with extensive indexes.

This book examines the studies of Aristotle's Poetics and its related texts in which three Medieval philosophers - Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes - proposed a conception of poetic validity (beauty), and a just relation between subjects in a community (goodness). The work considers the relation of the Poetics to other Aristotelian texts, the transmission of these works to the commentators' context, and the motivations driving the commentators' reception of the texts. The book focuses on issues central to the classical relation of beauty to truth and goodness.

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.

Introduction 1 Al-Kindi and the Beginnings of Islamic Political PhilosophyCharles E. Butterworth 2 The Political Implications of al-Razi's Philosophy Paul E. Walker 3 The Theoretical and Practical Dimensions of Happiness as Portrayed in the Political Treatises of al-Farabi Miriam Galston 4 The Philosopher-Prophet in Avicenna's Political Philosophy James W. Morris 5 The Place of the Philosopher in the City According to Ibn Bajjah Stephen Harvey 6 The Political Thought of Ibn Tufayl Hillel Fradkin 7 The Scope and Methods of Rhetoric in Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric Michael Blaustein 8 The Source and Nature of Authority: A Study of al-Suhrawardi's Illuminationist Political Doctrine Hossein Ziai 9 The Political Thought of Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi John Walbeidge About the Authors The Writings of Muhsin Mahdi Index.