The present article aims to show that the treatise On the Harmonization of the Opinions of the Two Sages the Divine Plato and Aristotle cannot have been written by al-FbwillryAdAdrr in the field of cosmology, for theological reasons.

This article proposes a reconstitution of the philosophical tenor of al-Fb al-Mawdayyira). It is shown that this work is not only a response to book VI of John Philoponus' Contra Aristotelem, but that its real issues can only be grasped in the context of the author's metaphysical system. Although, for al-Fbī, genuine demonstrations proceed from the cause to the caused, thus following the order of being, it will be explained how he also admits a strictly physical proof of the simple (...) fact, independently of its cause, and that the physical demonstration of the eternity of the world pertains to this type of proof. This physical proof is specifically directed against the Kindian doctrine of creation. (shrink)

This book is the first study of the ontological system of Alexander of Aphrodisias (floruit c. 200 AD), famous for his commentaries on the works of Aristotle.

Le présent article réunit deux études indépendantes. Elles étaient cependant si intimement liées par les divers aspects d’un sujet commun, par des investigations complémentaires et des conclusions qui se rejoignent et se recoupent, que leurs auteurs ont décidé de les fondre dans un article commun.

Our aim here is to show that an enigmatic text of Avicenna's Glosses , devoted to the problem of evil, takes on its full meaning in the light of the last chapter of the Šifā ' on De generatione et corruptione . We will see how Avicenna, deepening and developing a cosmological argument already present in the commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias on the De generatione , ends up building most of his theodicy on the relative incommensurability of the different (...) celestial periods. All the problem of divine Justice is thus reinterpreted in terms of opposition between discrete and continuous. Finally we will show the importance that this development of Avicenna had in Western Christendom in the 14th century, and the complex relationship which Leibniz has with it in his recently edited reflections on the Great Year. (shrink)

This article aims at reconstructing the most damaged part of the Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles (fragment f-d), by taking into account all the parameters at our disposal: palaeography, metre and, of course, content. According to this attempt, Empedocles would be describing the very moment in the phase of increasing Strife when the whole-natured creatures (the ολοφυ) were split into male and female beings. Thus, the first part of the fragment becomes very similar, in its content, to fr. 62 D.-K. and (...) to Plato's parody of Empedocles in Aristophanes' myth in the Symposium , while its second part emerges as containing new details of the process by which double creatures were split into two. If this reconstruction is accepted, its implication will be that Aetius' presentation of Empedocles' cosmic cycle as a fourfold continuous process is deeply inadequate. (shrink)

The editing of three anonymous Greek texts preserved in the Parisinus Suppl. gr. 643 allows us to clarify certain ideas on the transmission of knowledge in the Mediterranean during the second half of the 13th century. These texts are in fact translations from Latin probably made at Salerno at the end of the Norman period or at the beginning of the Angevin dynasty. They allow us to establish the influence of the Parisian Faculty of Arts on the Sicilian intellectual milieu (...) of the period and to illustrate how, whilst remaining true to its medical vocation, the University of Salerno evolved nonetheless towards a model of general education in the Arts. Finally these texts reveal the considerable influence of Arabic learning on the Aristotelian teaching of their author. This very fact, combined with the presence of the Parisinus in Byzantium, in an environment of advanced philological learning, a few decades after its composition, leads us to question our understanding of the Palaeologan Renaissance as well as its independence with regard to the Arabo-latin scholarly tradition of the 13th century. (shrink)