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Reviews 179
Rüdiger Arnzen (ed.), Averroes on Aristotle’s “Metaphysics”. An Annotated
Translation of the So-called “Epitome” (Scientia Graeco-Arabica 5), Berlin 2010:
De Gruyter, IX + 378 pp. ISBN 978-3-11-022001-8.
Averroes’ Epitome of the Metaphysics, first drafted by the famed Andalusian
commentator sometime after 1160, presents a particular set of challenges to those
scholars wishing to piece together a picture of how Averroes throughout his long
career developed his understanding of Aristotle’s teachings as well as his explication
of the same. The first and most fundamental problem is that no reliable
Arabic text exists: ^Uthman Am\n’s 1958 edition is the most readable and his complement
of manuscripts the most comprehensive, but Am\n’s use of the texts is
haphazard and badly documented. No other printed text fares any better.
A second problem is that Averroes in the Epitome organizes his text in an entirely
novel fashion, one that bears little resemblance either to Aristotle’s original
text, to Averroes’ longer and better known Commentary, or to the exposition of
first philosophy found in any of the known commentators. The construction of
the Epitome of the Metaphysics is peculiar even by the standards of Averroes’ early
works, leading some to wonder whether it falls under the general category of
mukhtasar at all. (It does.) To make matters worse, we are missing the Epitome’s
final fifth chapter, which according to Averroes’ own testimony makes up the entire
third part of the treatise.
The third and perhaps most formidable obstacle is that the manuscripts demonstrate
beyond any doubt that Averroes reworked his text, probably more than
once. We have variants for multiple passages, and this is where the stitches show
in an obvious way: but this may not be all, and there is in fact reason to think that
several layers of editing are present in all of the manuscripts, which is to say
the base text. The revisions touch on several areas central to Averroes’ interests
throughout his philosophical career, and so it would be imperative to have a compelling
overall story about what this important piece of evidence tells us about
Averroes’ evolving thought. Such a story does not yet exist, nor do we possess
even the basic building blocks from which a narrative of this sort could be constructed.
This is to say: beyond the relatively unenlightening case of the jettisoning
of the Giver of Forms as an explanatory principle, we do not yet have case
studies that would detail convincingly and uncontroversially the ways in which
Averroes’ metaphysical thinking evolved from his early to his late life. Thanks to
scholars such as Matteo di Giovanni and the present reviewee the situation is now
changing, but only slowly.
Under these trying circumstances, Rüdiger Arnzen’s English-language
translation of the Epitome constitutes a minor miracle. The work presents what is
bound to be the best text of Averroes’ Epitome that we have; it is a very readable