 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Levyhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Founded in Translation. From Greek to Syriac and Arabic. One of the remarkable things about Germany, where I live, is that so much of what they see on TV and in cinemas was originally in English. American sitcoms and crime serials, rom-coms and action blockbusters, are put before the public with the significant difference that it is all dubbed into German. They even use the same German actors to dub characters played by the original English-speaking characters so that stars like Will Smith or Meryl Streep always sound the same in every movie. Of course, German is a rather different language than English, and the translators of these movies and TV shows occasionally have to make difficult choices. For instance, German, like French, Spanish, and Italian, for example, distinguishes between a formal and informal version of you. Thus, every time anyone in an original version addresses anyone else, the translators must decide what sort of relationship is in play and render the scene accordingly, with an informal du or formal sie. As the Germans would say, das ist dochnicht neues. More than a millennium ago, another civilization did their level best to import the entire output of another culture, and did a fair bit of interpretation in the process. I refer, of course, to the Greek-Arabic translation movement. It began in the late 8th century AD, at the behest of the wealthy and influential elite of the Abbasid era. When the second Abbasid caliph al-Mansur founded his new capital at Baghdad, he made it a round city, perhaps inspired by the geometry of Euclid. The translation movement is more often associated with the later caliph al-Ma'mun, who had the dream I mentioned at the end of the previous episode, but that's more a reflection of the success of propaganda put out by admirers of al-Ma'mun than of historical reality. Indeed, the dream is itself a carefully constructed bit of propaganda. We know that translations in fact began already under al-Mansur, who reigned from the 750s to the 770s. The later al-Ma'mun is also given credit for the famous Baghdad institution known as the Bayt al-Hikmah, or House of Wisdom. Sometimes rather inflated claims are made about the Bayt al-Hikmah, for instance that it was like a research university. Actually, though some research did go on there, like astronomical observations, it seems to have been mostly a library, staffed more by copyists and bookbinders than chemists and biologists. On the other hand, never underestimate the power of libraries, copyists, and bookbinders. By the end of the translation movement in the 10th century, an astonishing range of Greek scientific and philosophical texts had been rendered into Arabic. Their influence would last far beyond the Abbasid Caliphate. The translations included works on mathematics by authors like Euclid and Ptolemy, medical writings by Galen and other Greek authorities, and pretty much all the Aristotle that we can read today. Without al-Mansur, his successor Caliphs, and other rich patrons of the Abbasid age, there would have been no tradition of Hellenizing thought in the Islamic world. The very word for philosophy in Arabic is telling. It is falafah, which is of course simply a loanword from the Greek philosophia. While we're on the subject of etymology, I'll mention that the translation movement has left its traces even in modern English. Our word alchemy comes ultimately from the Greek hemea, and the al at the beginning is simply the Arabic definite article. Perhaps I can also take this opportunity to mention my all-time favorite etymology, which is of course that the word giraffe comes from the Arabic word zarafah. So why did they do it? The answer is complex and much debated, but let's start with a few basic and uncontroversial points. First, it was not a mere whim or the casual fancy of idiosyncratic caliphs. The translators were handsomely paid for their services, and the process stretched for over more than a century, representing a sustained effort sponsored at the highest levels. This was quite literally a major investment in the value of Hellenic culture. Second, the translations were, to some extent, motivated by common-sense usefulness. We don't need to invoke some kind of ideology to explain why people might want to be able to read the great works in such practical disciplines as medicine, geography, and engineering. Just as useful, if not more so, was the tradition of Greek astrology and its sister science astronomy. The two were both called by the same Arabic phrase, ilm al-nujum, the science of the stars. As in antiquity, astrology was desired for use in imperial propaganda, and of course to predict the future, which would be pretty useful if it could actually be done. But that doesn't explain why the Abbasids would have wanted an Arabic version of, say, Aristotle's metaphysics. Some Aristotle may have been translated early on for pragmatic reasons, since his logical works provided weapons to be deployed in disputation, for instance over the relative merits of the Muslim and Christian faiths. This might explain why the now-obscure topics, Aristotle's study of dialectic, was one of the first texts translated into Arabic. Cultural one-upsmanship may also have played a part. The new Islamic empire had a large and hostile neighbor in the shape of the Byzantine empire. What better way to demonstrate superiority than to translate works of Greek science and show a better understanding of them than the Greeks themselves? Efforts were also made to provide a lineage for Hellenic culture that traced the wisdom of Aristotle, Plato, Pythagoras, and so on back to a much earlier time and a place not far from the Abbasid capital of Baghdad. Much as ancient church fathers like Clement of Alexandria had done, the Abbasids were claiming not to take wisdom from the Greeks, but to take it back from the Greeks. If it's true that the translation movement was in part inspired by cultural rivalry with the Christian Byzantines, then there is an irony here worth savoring. The movement depended extensively on the involvement of Christians. If you had already heard of the translation movement before listening to this podcast, you may have had the following idea about it. With the collapse of the Roman Empire in late antiquity, Greek philosophy and science fell into disuse. Several centuries passed in which the Hellenic heritage was effectively ignored. Finally, Muslims got hold of these precious texts, blew the dust off, and started a cultural renaissance that could rival the goings-on in Europe in the 15th century. What this story leaves out is the crucial role of Christian intermediaries, who most often came from Syria. They wrote in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic and thus, like Hebrew and Arabic, a member of the Semitic language group. As in much of the Eastern Roman Empire, Greek also remained a commonly used language in Syria. Thus, this region boasted bilingual scholars who produced Syriac translations and commentaries on Greek philosophical literature. If you cast your mind back, you may remember the 5th and 6th century school of Neoplatonic commentators in Alexandria and its leader Ammonius. Maybe in his day, philosophy was being done in Syriac, notably by his contemporary Sergius of Resh'ayna. Like Ammonius and his colleagues, Sergius and his successors concentrated on logic with forays into physics and metaphysics. For instance, Sergius produced a Syriac paraphrase of a work on cosmology by the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. It's worth noting that Sergius didn't yet translate Aristotle. Instead, he wrote in Syriac about the meaning of Aristotle's works, which he assumed would still be read in Greek. As the generations progressed though, knowledge of Greek decreased and Syriac translations became a necessity. Scholars connected with the monastery of Kinesrin produced Syriac versions of Aristotle's logical writings in the 7th and 8th centuries, which bridged the time between the school of Alexandria and the Arabic translation movement. As a result, the transmission of Hellenic ideas to the Islamic world occurred just in the way this podcast would want, without any gap. But of course, these Christians were not motivated by a desire to prepare the way for a future philosophical tradition in Arabic. So we can ask, as we just did about the Abbasid translation movement, why did they do it? It's commonly assumed that their interest in logic must have been for the sake of theological dispute, for instance in arguments over the Trinity. That may have been one motive for the later Arabic translations, as I mentioned, but there's little evidence that it spurred on our Syriac authors. Rather, it seems likely that they concentrated on logic for the same reason the pagan Neoplatonists did—they thought it was the first thing you needed to learn in order to become a philosopher. But there was at least one difference between their approach and that of pagan thinkers like Proclus and Ammonius. For these Christians, philosophy would culminate not with Plato, but with the Pseudo-Dionysius. His divine names, which you may remember as a meditation on the possibility and ultimate impossibility of describing God, was translated into Syriac in this period. Another influence was the philosophical asceticism we saw in authors like Evagrius, whose writings were likewise translated. Though our textual evidence for this Syriac interlude in the history of philosophy is not as rich as it might be, we have enough to see that these were men with a systematic plan for doing Christian philosophy. Not unlike certain philosophically inclined Church Fathers, they drew on the best of pagan philosophy and fused it with sources from their own theological tradition. The continuing significance of Syrians and Syriac in the translation movement is clear from the personnel of the two most important groups of translators into Arabic, both of which were active in the 9th century. One was gathered around a Christian who lived in Iraq but was of Syrian extraction. His name was Hunayn ibn Ishaq. He specialized in the works of the Greek medical authority Galen. We have a fascinating report from Hunayn's own pen which tells us what he translated and recounts his efforts to track down manuscripts of Galen and his strategies for producing the best possible versions of the works he could find. Hunayn translated not from Greek into Arabic, but from Greek into Syriac. If an Arabic version was needed, this would typically be provided by another member of the circle. Hunayn ibn Ishaq's son, the confusingly named Ishaq ibn Hunayn, produced a number of highly skillful Arabic versions of Aristotle and other philosophical texts. When philosophers like Avicenna and Iverroes read Aristotle, it was never in Greek, a language of which they were ignorant. They were in the hands of the translators, and if the translator was Ishaq, those were good hands to be in. Less widely admired, even in the medieval Arabic tradition itself, were the Arabic versions of Greek texts executed by a group we call the Kindi circle. Their name comes from their leader Al-Kindi, who is usually recognized as the first philosopher to write in Arabic. He was a Muslim, but he collaborated with Christians of Syrian background, like the members of the Hunayn translation circle. These Christians could offer expertise in the relevant language, and perhaps also the intellectual background needed to understand what was going on in a work like Aristotle's Categories or On the Soul. Nonetheless, the translations of the Kindi circle were frequently criticized as being overly literal. A faithful word-by-word translation might be a useful crutch if you're trying to decipher a difficult Greek text, but if you don't know any Greek, or the Greek version is not available, such a translation can be like a code to which you have no hope of finding the key. A good example of this sort of translation is the Kindi circle version of the metaphysics. Admittedly, that's not the easiest text to understand in any language, but trying to extract Aristotle's meaning from their Arabic version of the metaphysics would take an interpretive genius beyond most of us. I would be tempted to say it simply couldn't be done if it wasn't for the fact that I have read Averroes' commentary on the metaphysics. For some parts of this commentary, Averroes was dependent solely on this early Arabic version of the work, but he still managed to understand it reasonably well. When you've got it, you've got it. By the way, the Arabic version of the metaphysics supplies us with a nice example of how translation could affect philosophical interpretation. One of the most important technical terms in that work is Eidos, which we would translate either as species or as form, depending on context. Likewise, Arabic translators had to use two different words to render Eidos, either naw – corresponding to species, or sura – the Arabic for form, the way a German translator needs to decide between formal z and informal du every time someone says u in an American movie. Thus, the translators of the metaphysics effectively decided for future readers what Aristotle had in mind every time he used the word Eidos, form or species, without the readers even knowing that any decision had been taken. Though the standard complaint about the Kindi circle was the aforementioned one that their style was overly literal, some of their translations go the other way and take startling liberties with their source texts. The most famous example is their version of the works of Plotinus. The works of Plato were not well known in Arabic, and to some extent the Arabic Plotinus filled the gap left by their absence. This translation was apparently part of a collection of Hellenic works on the soul and other topics of advanced philosophy, what the scholar Fritz Zimmerman called a Kindi's metaphysics phile. Other items in the collection included selections from Alexander of Aphrodisias and an Arabic version of Proclus's overview of Neoplatonism, the elements of theology. Through a process of addition and reworking that scholars are still trying to piece together, some of the Proclus materials were presented as a newly organized text called the Book of the Pure Good. Later, it would be translated again into Latin and called the Book of Causes or Liber de Causis, one of the most influential sources of Neoplatonic ideas in Latin medieval philosophy of the 12th and 13th centuries. The story of the Book of Causes teaches us an important lesson, which is that if you want to make a text influential in 12th and 13th century Latin philosophy, it's a good idea to say that it was written by Aristotle. Unfortunately, that advice probably comes too late to help you now. It may, though, have been only an accident of mislabeling that led to some of the contents of Al-Kindi's metaphysics phile being falsely ascribed to Aristotle. The Arabic version of Plotinus begins with a prologue which explains that what we are about to read provides a capstone to Aristotle's philosophy. Perhaps this confused a later scribe into thinking that the text before him was actually by Aristotle. But whatever the reason, parts of both the Arabic Proclus and the Arabic Plotinus were presented as works of Aristotle. A selection of materials from the Arabic Plotinus was even called the theology of Aristotle – theology because it dealt with higher, divine causes like the soul, intellect, and first cause, and of Aristotle because it was, well, by Aristotle. Other chunks of Plotinus in Arabic have survived, but without the aura of Aristotle's name. Some are simply ascribed to a Greek sage, which I've just realized sounds like something you'd find on a spice rack. You won't be surprised to hear that the theology was the most widely read bit of the metaphysics phile, still being made the subject of interpretation and commentary as late as the Safavid period in 16th and 17th century Iran. As I say, the theology of Aristotle is not a particularly faithful version of Plotinus. I don't just mean that it fails to observe the niceties of Greek grammar or that, like a German translating an American science fiction epic, the translator had to make choices about the best way to capture one language in another. Rather, original phrases and whole paragraphs of interpretive material were inserted into this version, the equivalent of filming new scenes in German and splicing them into the original movie. In fact, now that I think about it, did the original version of Star Wars really have Luke Skywalker first meet Han Solo in a beer garden? The changes made to the Arabic Plotinus are anything but philosophically innocent. You could write a whole book about the alterations that are made here, and in fact, I did. This was the subject of a book I published about 10 years ago. Since I've only got a few minutes left to go in this episode, I'll be more succinct here and just give you two examples. One is the Arabic version of a passage in which Plotinus discussed Aristotle's theory of soul. Aristotle, as we know, had defined the human soul as the actuality or perfection of a living body. Plotinus disliked this view if only because it suggested that the soul must go out of existence when the body dies. So he mounted a series of criticisms against Aristotle's definition. In the Arabic version, Aristotle is carefully protected from Plotinus' refutation by the very way that this refutation is translated. It starts already when Aristotle's characterization of soul as the body's perfection is first mentioned. Unlike the original Plotinus, the Plotinus who has been dubbed into Arabic says that this is the view of the most excellent philosophers. The translation goes on to reframe Plotinus' criticism as a possible misunderstanding of Aristotle. His definition could be taken to indicate a strong dependence of soul on body, because a perfection seems to need the thing that it perfects, but it should instead be understood to mean that the soul is the source of the body's perfection, a source that transcends the body and has no dependence on it. Thus, Aristotle's definition is not just quietly defended from Plotinus, but even assimilated to Plotinus' own theory of soul, and all this in a translation of Plotinus. My second example comes from the other end of Plotinus' system, the first cause or one. As we saw a while back, Plotinus offers a strenuously negative treatment of this principle. His advice for understanding the one is simply, take away everything, and with a few exceptions, he consistently presents the one as beyond anything we can say or think. The Arabic Plotinus makes several changes here. The most obvious is that it refers to the one as the creator, so that Plotinus' philosophical theology is itself unified with that of the Abrahamic faiths. Furthermore, a number of positive characterizations are given to this first principle. God is, in fact, presented more or less the way that Plotinus presented his second principle, namely nous or mind. God is said, for example, to think all things, and is equated with being itself, whereas Plotinus had insisted, quoting Plato's Republic, that the one is beyond being. Occasionally, Plotinus' remarks about the intellect are simply translated as descriptions about the one. Meanwhile, the translator borrows language from the contemporary theologians we looked at last time, the Mo'atazilites. For instance, it speaks of sifat, divine attributes, using their kalam terminology. It's not entirely clear what inspired these changes or even who made them. One possibility is that they were introduced by al-Kindi himself, since the prologue to the theology says that he corrected the text. Perhaps some of his corrections were philosophical ones. But I think the changes are partially or entirely the work of the translator himself, a Christian member of the Kindi circle named al-Hemsi. Either way, the Arabic version takes liberties with its source in order to make Plotinus a neater fit with the theological and philosophical needs of a 9th century readership. That intended readership included Ahmad, the son of the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim. The prologue tells us that the Greek text was rendered into Arabic for him, which brings a whole new meaning to the phrase render unto Caesar. When you have friends in such high places, fidelity to a Greek philosophical source is probably not going to weigh as heavily on your mind as making the source seem interesting and useful for the intended reader. The customer is always right, especially when the customer's father controls one of the largest empires in the history of mankind. The same dynamic of patronage and reinterpretation is going to continue next week as we turn our attention to the center of the circle. We'll be looking at al-Kindi, the tutor of the caliph's son and the man dubbed philosopher of the Arabs. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.