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Dimitri Gutas : Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works , second edition. (Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science. Texts and Studies.) xxxi, 617 pp. Leiden : Brill , 2014. [euro]167. ISBN 978 90 04 25580 7 .
Reviews: The Near and Middle East
Any scholar would be pleased to have written a book that shaped all subsequent research on the same topic, becoming at once a standard reference and a guide for subsequent publications. One can only imagine how Dimitri Gutas must feel, having written two such books (or even three, if you include his pioneering Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation, 1975). His Greek Science, Arabic Culture (Routledge, 1998), a pivotal monograph on the Greek-Arabic philosophical translation movement, came a decade after Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, which may have had an even more dramatic impact on the study of philosophy in the Islamic world. Consider three of the most important books on Avicenna to appear since the turn of the century: David C. Reisman's The Making of the Aristotelian Tradition (2002), Robert Wisnovsky's Avicenna's Metaphysics in Context (2003), and Amos Bertolacci's The Reception of Aristotle's Metaphysics in Avicenna's Kitab al-Shifa, (2006). All bear the unmistakable signs of influence from Gutas, and they are just a few of the highlights from recent research on Avicenna, which has become the most active and sophisticated area within the field more generally. This is in stark contrast to the situation in 1988, when Gutas could complain of the "still waters" and "confused" state of research.
The appearance of a second edition of the book offers a...