Povijesna predaja grčke filozofije u islamskom svijetu
The Greek Philosophical Tradition in the Islamic World

Summary/Abstract: The author deals with the manuscripts and the Arabic biographical sources to show that the Arabic translators and the philosophers used Greek philosophical texts of varying provenience and quality in order to understand the philosophical problems they inherited through the Hellenistic system of education. This system, spread throughout the Greek world, was developed and sustained through the web of schools and intellectual centers. In the “wisdom and knowledge” transmitting process between the Greeks and the Arabs the Syrian Christians played the major role. This was the route the Arabs became acquainted with almost all the treatises of Aristotle. The translations which came out of the school of Ḥunain ibn Ishạ̄q show rigorous philological method in establishing a critical Greek text they were based on. In the 10th and the first half of the 11th century a significant group of the Arabic translators and commentatorsgathered around the Christian philosophical school in Baghdad. The commentaries and critical editions came out of this school were philologically very thorough as they had a number of older and different translation variants of the Greek texts at their disposal. The later philosophers of the Spanish West based their Aristotle reading on those translations. The fact that one philosophical work appears in a number translation variants in different periods of time, as shown on the example of the Metaphysics and the Analytics, tells us about the constant effort to renew and to improve the translations as well as about the response of the readers. Thus the Arabic translations represent a significant material link between the civilisation of Ancient Greece and the Medieval Islamic and Latin world.

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