The Physics of the Healing, Books I-IV (review)

Avicenna's physics has been the object of relatively scant scholarly attention in comparison to his psychology and metaphysics. This is deplorable, for as Jon McGinnis points out in the introduction to the present volume, Avicenna's physical investigations both illuminate and deal in detail with a number of topics of crucial importance for both psychology and metaphysics. Furthermore, the scholarly consensus on Avicenna's originality and singular importance for the subsequent Arabic and Latin traditions in the two disciplines is equally true in the field of physics. The Physics of the Healing, Avicenna's major work, shows its author in full control of the late ancient commentary tradition and earlier discussion in Arabic, the material of which he weaves into an original system deservedly called "Avicennan."

For this reason, the latest title in the Islamic Translation Series of Brigham Young University Press is an occasion of great joy. Indeed, Jon McGinnis's translation of The Physics of the Healing in its entirety can be considered one of the most important volumes in the series to date, all the more so since it is only the third modern translation in any language (following earlier versions in Persian and Turkish), and since even the medieval Latin translation misses portions of the full text covered here.

The work is divided into four books, dealing respectively with the causes and principles of natural things, motion and its concomitants, the quantitative concomitants of natural things, and the accidents and interrelations of natural things. The first two books are quite faithful to the order of procedure in Aristotle's Physics 1-3, but they introduce a great deal of material that is due to the author's need to address points of debate arising from the subsequent tradition, e.g. the question of whether the mobile whole of the cosmos must have a place, the debate about the existence of the void, and the discussion of Aristotelian puzzles related to the reality of time. Books three and four contain, among other things, extended discussions on infinity, atomism, and projectile motion, all of which evidence a deep involvement with the late ancient physical tradition.

The Arabic of the present volume is based on the two existing editions of the text, neither of which is devoid of problems. McGinnis navigates a middle course, carefully considering the philosophically most plausible reading in problematic cases. The result seems eminently reliable, and McGinnis's carefully reasoned and documented readings are sound throughout. As for the translation, its primary objectives appear to be readability and philosophical exactitude. The price to be paid is an occasional distance from the Arabic, but given McGinnis's thorough notation of the most significant liberties with the original text, the English remains sufficiently transparent for a reader with a basic understanding of Arabic. On the other hand, since McGinnis is very successful with both of the supposed goals, the translation both provides a solid tool for historians of philosophy and physics with no access to the original text, and is very approachable for the interested general reader. As with any translation, some terminological choices can be debated; for instance, "material" is used for hayūlā (why not "hyle"?), and the omnipresent ma'nā is translated as "connotational attribute," a perhaps overly technical term which in its original coinage (by Dag Hasse) was introduced more as a tool of interpretation, emphasizing one particular aspect of the term ma'nā, than a proper translation. Related to this, one wonders whether McGinnis is right in reading all instances of tawahhama as technical terms, which he translates with the slightly clumsy "to imagine by the estimative faculty." Admittedly, this is a deliberate choice argued for in the translator's introduction to the volume. Moreover, if McGinnis is right, Avicenna's physics provides highly interesting material for our interpretation of his theory of the estimative faculty...