New Publication: Ansichten der Philosophen (Deʿot ha-filosofim).

Averrois opera. Series D: Averroica

New Sub-series

Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad Ibn Rušd, the twelfth-century Andalusian jurist, physician, and philosopher, known to the Latin West as Averroes, has left a deep mark in the history of philosophy as one of the most prominent commentators and followers of Aristotle. In the Latin world, from the thirteenth century onwards, he became the Commentator par excellence and, in the then burgeoning philo sophical tradition in Hebrew language, his writ ings were substituted for the Aristotelian texts and made the object of summaries, compila tions and super-commentaries. Only this varied and variegated recep tion, adaptation of, and reaction to his works made of Ibn Rušd the “naturalized Hebrew and Latin author”― as H. A. Wolfson has called him ― who contributed to form the future course of philosophical dis cussions in the West. In the Islamicate World Ibn Rušd’s philosophy enjoyed less fortune, yet the busy manuscript production of his works in seventeenth-century Persia is witness to the fact that there may still be many things to discover. This wealth of texts which have grown around the original writings of Ibn Rušd and their Hebrew and Latin translations are part and parcel of the Averroean tradition and often contribute, not only to a better understanding of Ibn Rušd’s arguments or their historical place in certain debates, but to the very establishment of the letter of his texts and the different versions of them which were extant.

For this reason, the Averrois Opera series which, in its three sub- series A, B, and C, publishes critical editions of Ibn Rušd’s works in Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew―and, in particular, the editions produced by the Academy funded Averroes Edition Project, run by the Thomas-Institut at the University of Cologne―has been augmented by a new  D series, Averroica, which will accommodate editions of works that belong to the ‘Averroean cosmos.’ The first book to be published in this sub-series, the psychological part of Šem Tov Ibn Falaquera’s (ca. 1227–1295) Opinions of the Philosophers, transmits Ibn Rušd’s Short Commentary on Aristotle’s  De anima in a partially independent Hebrew translation from the Arabic, interspersed with sections from other writings on Aristotelian psychology, both by Ibn Rušd and others, and was part of the encyclopedic trend in Hebrew philosophy that did much to ‘naturalize’ this discipline in  the Jewish intellectual tradition. 

Averrois Opera. Series D: Averroica 1.  Levkovich I., Šem Ṭov Ben Yosef Ibn Falaquera, ‘Ansichten der Philosophen’ (De῾ot ha-filosofim), I, 6 A-B. De anima, 2024, LXXXII-236 p., ISBN: 978-90-429-5367-3 (20th January, 2025).