Ibn Badja

Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Yahyā ibn as-Sā'igh ( Arabic أبو بكر محمد بن يحيى بن الصائغ, DMG Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā b. aṣ-Ṣāʾiġ , known as Ibn Bādja  /ابن باجة / Ibn Bāǧǧa , Latinized : Avempace ; * around 1095 in Saragossa ; † around 1138 in Fez , Morocco) was the earliest philosopher among the Spanish Arabs and an Andalusian- Muslim polymath in the fields of: Islamic astronomy, logic in Islamic philosophy, Arabic music , early Islamic philosophy , physics in medieval Islam, Islamic psychology, Arabic Poetry and science. He was the first Aristotelian of Islamic Spain.

He worked as the vizier of the Almoravid governor of Saragossa Abu Bakr ibn Ibrahim Ibn Tifilwit . He also wrote poems of praise for him. Later he was vizier of Yusuf ibn Tashfin for about twenty years . He lived in Seville, Granada and as a doctor in Morocco.

As a philosopher he had written several works in addition to commentaries on the writings of Aristotle, such as a book on The Direction of the Solitary , Tadbir al-mutawahhid, which deals with the levels of the soul's elevation from its instinctual behavior to the acquired intellect . Most of his writings have been lost.

The lunar crater Ibn Bajja is named after him.

literature

Works

• Life of the Hermit
  • Avempace. Il regime del solitario ; ed. v. M. Campanini et al. A. Illuminati, Classici della BUR, Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, Rome 2002, ISBN 88-17-12757-4 . (Text edition and Italian translation)
  • Avempace, El régimen del solitario, ed. Miguel Asín Palacios, Impr. De la Escuela de Estudios Árabes de Granada, Granada 1946. (Text edition and Spanish translation)
  • Lawrence Berman: The Governance of the Solitary , in: R. Lerner / M. Mahdi (eds.): Medieval Political Philosophy , A Source Book, The Free Press of Glencoe, Toronto 1963, 122-133 (English partial translation).
• Avempace. The guideline of the lonely, About the goal of human life, About happiness in this world and in the other. Translated, with an introduction and commentary, edited by Franz Schupp, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg 2015, Philosophische Bibliothek vol. 667

• Ibn Bajja: ‛Ilm al-nafs , English translation and notes, MSH al-Ma‛sûmî, Pakistan Historical Society, Karachi 1961.
• Paul Lettinck: Aristotle's meteorology and its reception in the Arab world , With an edition and translation of Ibn Suwar's Treatise on meteorological phenomena and Ibn Bajja's Commentary on the meteorology, Aristoteles semitico-latinus 10, Brill, Leiden et al. 1999, ISBN 90-04- 10933-1 .
• Paul Lettinck: Aristotle's Physics and its reception in the Arabic world , With an edition of the unpublished parts of Ibn Bajja's Commentary on the Physics, Aristoteles semitico-latinus 7, Brill, Leiden u. a. 1994, ISBN 90-04-09960-3 .

Secondary literature

• David Wirmer: Avempace -, ratio de quiditate. Thomas Aquinas's Critique of an Argument for the Natural Knowability of Separate Substances ; In: Andreas Speer, Lydia Wegener (ed.): Knowledge about borders: Arabic knowledge and the Latin Middle Ages ; de Gruyter, Berlin 2006; Pp. 569-590, ISBN 978-3-11-018998-8 (text contributions in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish).
• David Wirmer: From the thinking of nature to the nature of thinking: Ibn Bāǧǧa's theory of potency as the foundation of psychology (= Scientia Graeco-Arabica , Volume 13), de Gruyter, Berlin / Munich / Boston, MA 2014, ISBN 978-3-11 -027196-6 (Dissertation University of Bonn 2010, XII, 784 pages under the title: Ibn Bāǧǧa's book of the soul ).
• Ibn-Badja ; In: Salomon Munk : Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe , Paris 1857/59, reprint 1927 and Princeton 1980 and 1988, pp. 383-410; Online at archive.org / Online at Google Books / Online at gallica. (There is also a detailed paraphrase of the Régime du solitaire on p. 388ff ).

Web links

• Entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia , Robert Appleton Company, New York 1913.
• Josep Puig Montada:  Ibn Bajja. In: Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .