Content area
Full Text
SIMONE VAN RIET, JULES JANSSENS and ANDRÉ ALLARD (eds.), Avicenna Latinus, Liber primus naturalium, tractatus secundus: De motu et de consimilibus. Introduction by Gérard Verbeke. Leuven: Peeters, 2006. Pp. lxxxix + 373. ISBN 978-2-8031-0231-0. £173.70 (hardback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087407000726
Avicenna's Physics was the most significant treatment of the science of physics in the medieval Islamic world. Unlike virtually all other works on nature within the Arabic-speaking philosophical tradition, Avicenna's account was not simply a commentary on Aristotle's Physics, but a thorough, independent reconfirmation, reworking and at times renunciation of Aristotle. At its very core is the book under review, Book II, De motu et de consimilibus, in which Avicenna discussed motion, place/void and time. Here Avicenna articulated his influential theory of motion at an instant and the related notion of a limit; he additionally addressed the great classical problem of the placement of the outermost celestial sphere. Yet despite this work's importance for the history of medieval physics, in both East and West, the Avicenna Latinus editions are the only translations of whole books from Avicenna's Physics into a 'European' language. While the fact that this book is a critical edition of a medieval Latin text makes it self-selecting for specialists of medieval science, the French introduction describing the Aristotelian Greek commentary tradition surrounding the Physics will undoubtedly be of interest to students of ancient science and physics more generally. Furthermore, the edition's indices and copious notes, which shed light on Avicenna's original Arabic and place much of his thought in its proper context (both historically and within Avicenna's...