Averroes' Physics. A Turning Point in Medieval Natural Philos-ophy

摘要

Glasner's book is a fascinating text due to the complexity of the problems she set out to describe, explain and develop method for solving them. Glasner's achievements in this book are admirable. They consist in the successful application of her philolological expertise to a highly complex and complicated body of texts (Averroes' short, middle and long commentaries on Aristotle's Physics in Arabic, Latin and Hebrew) and her ideas and methods for separating these interwoven textual threads and determining their meaning and inspirations. These three commentaries exist in two main different versions, which appear in several variants. The Latin and Hebrew translations were made in part from different versions and in part from the same version, but different variants. The situation gets more complicated by the loss of most of the Arabic versions of the commentaries and, as Glasner argues in her analysis, by the incomplete stage of certain variants, i.e. by the fact that Ibn Rushd apparently began editing a version anew before finishing an earlier form and rewrote a previous textual stage of what was traditionally seen as an earlier commentary after having begun his work on what was considered as a subsequent commentary.