Cet article s’intéresse à deux doxographies présentes dans des résumés et abrégés de Ḥunayn au traité Sur les Éléments de Galien. Nous retraçons l’origine de ces doxographies, depuis des scolies grecques au traité galénique jusqu’au Commentaire à la Physique de Simplicius, dont nous montrons qu’il en est la source ultime. Nous indiquons aussi que le Commentaire de Simplicius a inspiré une interprétation de Parménide et Mélissos que nous trouvons chez Ḥunayn. Cela nous permet de voir des traces du Commentaire à la Physique de Simplicius dans le monde arabe et d’apporter quelques éclaircissements sur la construction de ces résumés à l’oeuvre de Galien que l’on appelle les Summaria alexandrinorum.

Cet article comporte l’editio princeps du traité d’Ibn al-Hayṯam « Sur le miroir ardent parabolique », Fī al-marāyā al-muḥriqa bi-al-quṭūʿ, ainsi que sa première traduction en français. Nous examinons la place qu’il occupe dans l’histoire du miroir parabolique durant plus d’un millénaire et demi, aussi bien en grec qu’en arabe et en latin.

Do Avicenna’s extant works preserve any trace of his now-lost early philosophical production? This paper considers a hitherto neglected text, namely the chapter “On Hypothetical Propositions” from Avicenna’s “Concise Treatise on the Principles of Logic” (Risāla mūǧaza fī uṣūl al-manṭiq, henceforth: RM). The new evidence offered by the RM chapter in question will lead to a different reading of another well-known passage of Avicenna’s reworking of Aristotle’s Prior Analytics (Qiyās) from the “Book of Healing” (Kitāb al-šifāʾ). The clues gathered from an analysis of these two works will finally lead us to ponder the possibility that Avicenna may in fact have composed a (now lost) work on hypothetical propositions and syllogisms. Since Avicenna’s RM is to date unedited, an edition, as well as an English translation of the relevant chapter, is also provided in the Appendix of this paper.

Late in his intellectual life, Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī espoused a dualistic position on the nature of the soul, denying that the soul is in any sense a material body. This view, which in broad terms concurs with Avicenna’s, sets al-Rāzī in opposition to the theologians’ materialistic stance. To make his position clear, in his last work Almaṭālib al-Rāzī sets out a comprehensive case for the theologians’ materialism, before critiquing that position. This paper offers a reconstruction of al-Rāzī’s arguments for the theologians’ materialism, providing an insight into arguments in the philosophy of mind during the Islamic Middle Ages.

Both Arabic modernists and Western humanists often regard the Muslim philosopher Averroes as one of the earliest precursors of Kant and the European Enlightenment. In contrast to this reputation, this paper argues that it was Kant’s critics Herder and Tiedemann who rediscovered Averroes. Tiedemann was the first German historiographer to give an accurate account of Averroes’ thought. This was accompanied by a re-evaluation of Averroes by Herder in his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, in which he recognized the similarity between his own concept of the spirit of the age as historical reason – his alternative to the Enlightenment concept of a universal and ahistorical reason – and Averroes’ concept of a single material intellect for all individual human minds. Finally, the paper outlines the possible connections between Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s intellect and Hegel’s concept of reason in history.