The Physics of Avicenna's Cure Appraisal of the Current Status of the Work and the Future Prospects

Abstract

It is already more than a hundred years ago that the Natural Philosophy and Metaphysics parts of Avicenna’s famous philosophical encyclopaedia al-Shifāʾ (The Cure) were published by the printing house of the Dār al-Funūn (‘Polytechnic’) academy at Tehran. This printing, which is usually referred to as the ‘Tehran lithographic edition’, is a milestone in Avicenna studies based on Arabic sources. It increased the level of attention for The Cure at a national and international level. About half a century after publication of the above edition, the first three volumes of the Natural Philosophy (al-Ṭabīʿiyyāt) part of The Cure were translated into Persian by Muḥammad ʿAlī Furūghī (b. 1294/1877, d. 1321/1942). It was this translation which incited the famous Iranian scholar Mīrzā Mahdī Mudarris Ashtiyānī (b. 1306/1888-89, d. 1372/ 1952-53) to write a critical study of it, both textually and philosophically. Outside Iran, the Physics of the Natural Philosophy part of The Cure was published four times: in Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and the United States. It is especially the Cairo printing (begun in the nineteen-fifties and the first of the editions just mentioned) which had a huge impact, especially among Arabists, who until then mostly had no knowledge of or interest in the Latin Avicenna tradition, which goes back some nine-hundred years. With the modern printings of the Arabic text and the studies and translations that are based on it, one could say that Avicenna truly ‘went global’ for a second time, after his huge imprint on Western