Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 222 - Rediscovery Channel - Translations into Latin.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Rediscovery Channel, Translations into Latin. I know you'll find this difficult to believe, but I can on occasion be somewhat pedantic. When American friends invite me somewhere by asking, do you want to come with?, is all I can do to keep myself from shouting back, the preposition with takes an object. Fortunately, I've read a lot of Stoicism, so I can usually manage to restrain myself and say, sure, I'd love to come with you. In their ironic way, the gods of grammar have arranged for me to live in Germany, where I can now annoy others by committing Solicisms of my own on a regular basis. But that doesn't mean I don't get annoyed myself. Probably the worst thing is the way younger Germans unnecessarily use English words. My pedants' hackles rise faster than the stock price of a helium manufacturing company when I hear them use verbs like downloden, dansen, or mannigen. Sometimes Germans even use English words and phrases that actual English speakers would never say, like handy for portable phones, smoking for a tuxedo, and worst of all, potnaluck to describe two people who happen to be dressed the same. But I can't really enjoy gloating about the parlous state of the German language, and not only because, if I did, the most suitable English word to describe my emotional state would be schadenfreude. It's also because so much of the philosophy I love goes in for the same sort of linguistic borrowing. If you read through medieval Arabic translations of Hellenistic scientific works, you'll come across plenty of examples, with Greek words simply transliterated in Arabic, as when they call imagination fantasia. A few centuries later, when medieval scholars in turn began to translate from Arabic into Latin, it was a case of plus achans, plus c'est la même chose. One of the first Latin translators was Adalard of Bath, and he scattered Arabisms through his works, sometimes providing an explanatory gloss for the reader. For instance, when discussing the outermost sphere of the cosmos, he wrote in Latin script the word al-mustaqim, which reflects the Arabic al-mustaqim, and helpfully added id est rectus, that is, straight. If that still leaves you puzzled, you're probably in the same state as most of Adalard's readers, who had no way of seeing behind the Arabicism to the true meaning. That didn't stop them from trying though. When Thomas Aquinas was reading another treatise derived from Arabic, he came across the phrase, the first cause is not iliathim. You can almost see him scratching his head in confusion, before deciding that this strange word iliathim must reflect the Greek word for matter, houli, which would make sense, given that the first cause, or god, indeed has no matter. So a good guess, but wrong. In fact, iliathim is an Arabicism based on the word for shape or form. So what Aquinas was reading was in fact a statement of God's transcendence, the first cause has no shape, that is, no determination or attribute. Meanwhile, other coinages from Arabic were becoming common currency in the works of Aquinas and others. The Latin technical terminology of the 13th century often reflects terms they inherited from the Arabic-speaking philosophers like Avicenna. To give just two examples, any medieval philosophy scholar will be familiar with the word intentio and the phrase dator for marum, which correspond respectively to Avicenna's ma'ana and wahib as-suwar. These mean, respectively, the content of a thought in Avicenna's theory of the soul, and the giver of forms in his cosmology, which emanates souls and other forms into pre-prepared matter to produce the substances we find in nature. Such details of vocabulary are glimpses of a wider process. As Greek and Arabic works became available to the medieval Latin reader, philosophy itself was revolutionized. This was one of the two historical developments that had the greatest impact on medieval philosophy as we move forward into the 13th century. I'll leave you to guess at what the other one might be until the end of this episode. Aquinas and his contemporaries lived in an entirely different intellectual world than Anselm or even Peter Abelard, who was active only a century earlier. The late ancient sources, who had exercised so much influence in early medieval philosophy like Boethius and especially Augustine, remained vitally important, but they were now joined by Muslim philosophers like Avicenna and Ivaroies, who had been made abundantly accessible in Latin. The most important philosophical source of all was one who had still been known very incompletely in Abelard's day. This was, of course, Aristotle. The coming century of Latin medieval thought will be dominated by the project of absorbing these new sources and integrating them with what had come before, even as some rejected the new texts as a dangerous source of heresy. Much like the earlier Greek-Arabic translation movement, the Latin translations began with practical disciplines, rather than going straight for metaphysics or ethics. Already in the 10th century, Gerbut of Oriac may have picked up some of his mathematical knowledge thanks to travels in Spain, bringing him into contact with the Islamic world. When the first major medieval translator came along in the 11th century, his specialty was medicine. This was Constantine the African, who brought books from Tunisia to Salerno and produced the Pantegny, a Latin version of an Arabic medical work. Faithful listeners won't have to be told that medicine had long-standing links to philosophy. The Pantegny was no exception, used as one of the most important sources for the Dragmaticon of the Chartrean thinker William of Conch. For instance, it was from Constantine's translation that William took the idea that there were several psychological faculties seated in the brain, an idea that will be reinforced for Latin readers when they read it in Avicenna's work on the soul. All this was only a small foretaste of the philosophical and scientific feast that would be dished up to the Latin-speaking world in the 12th century. The first course was served by Adalard of Bath. I choose the word course advisedly, since his focus on mathematics seems to have been motivated by a concern with the course of study we know as the liberal arts. His Latin version of Euclid's Elements, based not on the original Greek but on an Arabic translation, filled a gap by supplying a standard work on geometry. The success of Adalard's project is shown by the existence of a manuscript from the same time period, where his rendering of the Elements is found together with works by Boethius on music and arithmetic, thus providing a primer on the quadrivium. Like many medieval translators, Adalard wrote scientific treatises of his own too, which brings us to a bit of a puzzle. Obviously, he was acquainted with Arabic scientific literature, he translated some of it, so it seems we should believe him when he says that in his original writings he is drawing on Arabic learning. Yet scholars have failed to identify his sources. So is this just a bluff? Perhaps not. Adalard may mean that he studied with another scholar who spoke Arabic, and is thus referring to personal oral instruction rather than literary sources which we can trace today. There's an important lesson there, and you don't need to understand Arabic to learn it. In this period, scientific and philosophical learning was being shared from one culture to another through face-to-face contacts. This was not some sort of medieval interlibrary loan as happened earlier when Ariugino was able to get his hands on Greek manuscripts sent to France as a gift from the Byzantine emperor. Rather, the translations mostly emerged in places and times where Latin-speaking Christians had access to native speakers of Greek or Arabic. As those cops from Law and Order can tell you, detective work means looking for motive and opportunity, and that holds true even if the culprits are responsible for nothing worse than executing some philosophical translations. The 12th century provided motive in the form of a large and growing audience of schoolmen in Paris and elsewhere who were eager to get their hands on the works that would fill out their liberal arts reading list. As for opportunity, that came in the form of military conquests. The best example is the most important center for Arabic-Latin translations, Toledo. It fell into Christian hands in 1085, though it would be several decades before Christian scholars arrived and took advantage of the presence of Arabic-speaking colleagues. At least some of these scholars came to Toledo specifically in search of otherwise unavailable texts. For instance, Gerard of Cremona, one of the greatest of the Toledoan translators, went there to find Ptolemy's Almagest. After his death, Gerard's students wrote of how he was motivated by pity for readers of Latin who had so little access to the literary riches available in Arabic. Another translator in Toledo at the same time was Dominicus Gundisallvi, whose name you'll also see as Gundisallinus. Between the two of them, Gerard and Gundisallvi rendered numerous works by Aristotle and by Muslim and Jewish authors too into Latin. A particularly intriguing translator, also active in Toledo, is one who called himself Avendauthe. He's usually thought to be none other than Abraham ibn Dawud, a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher who appeared in this series back in episode 158. It was thanks to him that readers of Latin could peruse one of the works of the Islamic world that exerted most influence in the 13th century, Avicenna's Treatise on the Soul. Avendauthe nicely illustrates the point about personal scholarly contacts. In the preface to his translation of Avicenna, he tells us that he would read out the text in the vernacular to Gundisallvi. This probably means that he was reading it out in Arabic, though some have suspected a process of double translation, with Avendauthe reading it in a vernacular romance dialect and Gundisallvi in turn translating on the fly into Latin. Moving along to the next generation of translators, among the successors of Gerard of Cremona and Gundisallvi was Michael Scott. And for you proud Scots out there, that's two natives of your country so far, the first being Richard of St. Victor. And there are more to come. Michael Scott translated Aristotle's writings on zoology from Arabic in Toledo before travelling to Rome and then joining the court of Frederick II of Sicily. He carried on the Toledoan project of uncovering what Gundisallvi once called the works hidden in the secret places of the Greek and Arabic languages. With a particular devotion to Aristotle and his greatest commentator, Averroes. I get goosebumps when I consider that Averroes's own lifetime overlapped with the first translations done in Toledo in the 12th century. Even as he commented on the Arabic Aristotle done in southern Muslim Spain, the Toledoans were translating Aristotle from Arabic up in northern Christian Spain. Michael Scott was in turn active in the first decades of the 13th century, so just following Averroes's death in 1198. He was not the sole translator of Averroes into Latin, but was responsible for the majority of his commentaries. These commentaries would have a massive impact on the study of Aristotle in Latin. For one thing, they helped to make Aristotle himself available, since Averroes's longest commentaries quoted the Aristotelian text bit by bit before commenting on them. The metaphysics, in particular, was for some time known in Latin only in the version that Michael Scott produced while translating Averroes. Although translations based on the Greek quickly overtook these Arabic-Latin versions, Averroes never fell out of favor as the medieval's primary guide to Aristotle. His ideas concerning the eternity of the world and the human intellect will occasion bitter dispute, and the controversial movement sometimes called Averroism will be a going concern well until the Renaissance. The radical Aristotelians we call the Averroists and their detractors did agree on one thing. They all saw Averroes primarily as an Aristotelian philosopher. Those who rejected his ideas did so not because he was a Muslim, but because his commentaries revealed a conflict between Aristotle and Christianity, or, as Thomas Aquinas argued, because his commentaries in fact misrepresented Aristotle to make it seem that there was such a conflict. I've just mentioned that Michael Scott was present at the court of Frederick II of Sicily, which brings us to the fact that the translation movement was not wholly Toledo. Frederick was a great admirer of Arabic culture and had extensive ties with the Islamic world, as Sharon Eastaw mentioned in the interview about her podcast series on the Crusades. In a dramatic illustration of this, he sent a set of questions on mathematics to the Ayyubid sultan. Frederick had the endearing habit of practicing diplomacy by means of intellectual posturing. His questions were passed on to a Muslim scholar named Kamal ad-Din ibn Yunus, who was also the teacher of two scholars present at Frederick's court, a Christian translator and astrologer called Theodore of Antioch and a Muslim named al-Urmawi. Through these contexts, knowledge about Avicenna and Al-Farabi would have been brought to Sicily. So far, we've been seeing how such interpersonal connections between Christians and Arabic-speaking Jews and Muslims helped trigger the intellectual upheavals of the 13th century. But the Islamic world was not the only culture in possession of these scientific treasures coveted by Latin Christians. There was also the Byzantine realm, where many antique philosophical texts were still available in the original Greek. Indeed, our present-day access to Greek philosophical texts is almost entirely thanks to the Byzantine manuscript tradition. By this time, the Eastern Roman Empire was a shadow of its former glory, reduced in size and power in the wake of the Muslim conquests. But Constantinople could still offer unparalleled access to Aristotle and other Hellenic authors. Again, it was in the 12th century that translators began to exploit this. The most important was James of Venice, who was in the Byzantine capital in 1136 along with two other Italian translators. James was single-handedly responsible for a massive increase in the amount of Aristotle available in Latin, with new versions of several logical works and treatises on natural philosophy. James of Venice worked with Greek texts, but he had something in common with his colleagues who translated from Arabic—absolute fidelity to the text being translated. Whichever language they were working with, the translators would try to render each word in the source text into Latin, even sticking to word order insofar as they could. So medieval scholars had to get used to a kind of translation-ese, reading texts full of phrases that would be natural enough in Greek but that seemed very strange to the Latin ear. Not everyone appreciated the effect. As a well-read aficionado of classical literature, John of Salisbury was appalled by James of Venice's version of the posterior analytics. He said blame must lie with the translator or with scribes who had made errors copying the Latin text, but certainly not with Aristotle himself—a judgment John might have revised if he had ever had the somewhat dubious pleasure of reading Aristotle in Greek. But the translators knew what they were doing. Their method was born out of reverence for the source texts. As one translator remarked, he should be condemned who, when he translates a book, does not blush to take away from the author what he had labored over and to usurp that material for himself. This highly literal technique had been used in the Greek-Arabic translation movement, too, though some Arabic translators adopted a more natural style. In the case of the Latin translations, the technique continued to be used well into the 13th century. It would be criticized and abandoned later in the Renaissance. We still see it with the greatest translator of that century, William of Moabekke, who from 1260 to 1280 undertook to produce new versions of just about all of Aristotle. His translations supplanted the earlier ones, such as those by James of Venice, and became the basis for the sophisticated Aristotelian philosophy of the late 13th and 14th centuries. Another important figure to build on earlier achievements was Robert Grossetest, who will be covering his own right in a future episode. For now, I'll just mention that he produced a popular version of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, and commented on several Aristotelian treatises. In one spectacular case, the translations from Arabic and Greek came together to expose the complicated history of the Liber De Causis, or Book of Causes, which had been translated by Gerard of Cremona. The Arabic work he translated had a different title, Kitab fil Macht al-Khayr, or Book of the Pure Good. It was in turn a selective adaptation from the Elements of Theology, a systematic presentation of late ancient Platonism from the pen of one of its greatest exponents, Proclus. The Latin version, the Book of Causes, was a popular work, for instance it received a commentary from Albert the Great. And no wonder, since it was associated with the name of Aristotle. But then William of Moabeca translated the original source from Greek, that is, the really original source, Proclus's Elements of Theology. Thomas Aquinas explained the situation in his own commentary on the Book of Causes, and compared the Latin version to what William had found in Proclus. For good measure, he also brought in a further source, the pseudo-dianing Isias. All in all, it was a remarkable feat of textual criticism, only slightly besmirched by his guess about the provenance of that strange word ilyathim which was made in this same commentary. It's going to take me many episodes to chart the full impact of these new texts. As a conclusion to this episode, I want to mention just the biggest and most obvious point. The influx of works by Aristotle, Averroes, Avicenna, and others, led to a new understanding of what philosophy is in place. The translators had initially sought to fill gaps in the liberal arts curriculum, a goal I can only salute, given my own objection to gaps. But the arrival of Aristotle changed things out of all recognition. We already see this beginning to happen in Toledo, where a short work on the philosophical curriculum by Al-Farabi was translated and then used to help in deciding what else to translate. By the mid-13th century, the sequence of philosophical works required for arts students at the universities of Paris and Oxford was thoroughly Aristotelian, and thus had more in common with the curriculum of 5th century Alexandria or 10th century Baghdad than with that of Carolingian or even 12th century France. The difference already began with logic. In the very early medieval period, Latin readers lacked even access to Boethius, but his versions of the initial writings in Aristotle's Organon or Logical Treatises came into wide use in the 12th century. But the translation movement completed the Organon, and this made a big difference. It meant that medievalists could now study the Sophistical Refutations, inspiring them to sophisticated work on pseudo-arguments and argument technique more generally. It also meant they were reading Posterior Analytics, where Aristotle laid out his theory of scientific demonstration. This changed medieval perceptions about how philosophy should be carried out. Even a very well-informed 12th century thinker like John of Salisbury could proclaim solidarity with the moderate skepticism of Cicero, according to which we must often content ourselves with merely probable beliefs. That favorite text of the 12th century, Plato's Timaeus, fit nicely with his approach since its cosmology is presented as a mere likely account of the universe. The average 13th century scholastic thinker will be having none of this. He has read the Posterior Analytics, and knows that philosophy is meant to consist of valid syllogistic arguments grounded ultimately in certain first principles. Aquinas, admittedly not exactly an average scholastic thinker, will even claim that theology is a special case of an Aristotelian demonstrative science. Furthermore, the Posterior Analytics and other newly translated works made it abundantly clear that a good Aristotelian should be empirical in studying the created world. Certainly, the 12th century can boast numerous treatises on natural philosophy, especially by the thinkers in the orbit of Chartres. But these authors were engaged in a literary exercise more than an empirical one, building on the ideas of Plato's Timaeus. Without the newly rediscovered Aristotle, it's unthinkable that we could get a 13th century thinker like Roger Bacon, who developed remarkable new ideas about how science might be grounded in sense experience. Now then, with this look of the translations under our belt, we're just about ready to tackle the 13th century. Why only just about? Well, because of that second of the two most important developments I mentioned towards the start of this episode. What is that development? Well, after the next episode, we'll understand not just how it was that 13th century thinkers saw Aristotle as the man, we'll also see how he got to be the big man on campus. Make sure to bring an apple for the teacher, because we'll be seeing how the schools of the early medieval age planted the seeds for the core educational institutions of Europe, the universities. As my German friends would say, nicht vergesen zu downloden, the next episode of The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.