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1. Avempace and his Commentary
We do not know much about Abou-Beer Mo'hammed ben Ya'hya, (o Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Yahya Ibn al-Sa'igh al-Tudjibi al-Andalusi al-Sarakusti), known in the Islamic world as Ibn-Badja, Ibn Badjdja. Ibn Bajja, or Ibn Bajjah, and in the Latin West as Avempace or Avenpace.1 He was born in Zaragoza (today in Spain) around 1070, traveled and lived in several Spanish and African cities, and died in Fez (Morocco) around 1139.
Avempace wrote several works on medicine, mathematics, and philosophy, and he seems to have been one of the first commentators, if not the first, on Aristotle in the West.2 Of his commentaries on the Physics, the focus of this study, at least two manuscripts are extant: one in Oxford (100 pages) and another in Berlin (156 pages).3 In 1994 Paul Lettinck published an English translation of the entire Berlin manuscript, specifically indicating the differences and similarities between the Berlin and Oxford manuscripts.4 The new pages he translated-those which were not in the Oxford manuscript-notably complete Avempace's views on books 4, 6, 7, and 8 of the Physics, those most relevant for the explanation of projectile motion.5
As to its diffusion, Avempace's commentary was written in Arabic, but not translated into Latin or Hebrew. This means that the Latin West-as well as the Spanish Jew6-only knew about this work from the fragments and ideas quoted or summarized by Ibn Rusd (Averroes, 1126-98) in his own commentary on the Physics.1 Some of these quotations inspired considerable interest throughout the Middle Ages, and in turn were commented on by various natural philosophers from Aquinas to Galileo.8
Until the early 1960s, the understanding of Avempace's physical ideas was based mainly on the studies of E.A. Moody9 and Anneliese Maier.10 Moreover, Avempace's commentary was considered lost, and the one written by Averroes constituted the primary source for our knowledge of Avempace's views. Once the Oxford manuscript was discovered, Shlomo Pines began to provide a new interpretation based on parts of the commentary by Averroes not known to Moody.11 However, no study-from either the Oxford or the Berlin manuscript-has yet appeared which extracts all the consequences that may be drawn from Avempace's views on motion in the case of projectiles.
2. Projectile Motion before Avempace
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