Averroes’ Physics: A Turning Point in Medieval Natural Philosophy by Ruth Glasner (review)

REVIEWS 258 words of different languages with their correspondent Latin translation. This allows the reader to see similar roots and derivations among the languages. It interesting to observe that Gessner utilizes the methods of taxonomy and cataloguing typical of zoology or botany used in his previous Historia animalium (Zurich 1551). He starts his book with a discussion of the diversity of human languages and offers his critical apparatus, mostly based on the authority of Clement of Alexandria although in the epilogue he expresses gratitude to the French scholar Guillaume Postel and to his own teacher, Theodore Bibliander. He explains why he chooses Mithridates as the title of this book; Mithridates was that famous king of Pontus in northern Asia Minor, who for more than twenty-five years was able to face the Romans, until he was finally defeated by Pompey the Great in 63 BCE. As told in the Elder Pliny’s Natural History, Mithridates was able administer justice in all twenty-two languages spoken by the people who lived in his realm. He was known in the Renaissance and the following centuries for having been the greatest polyglot of all time. Gessner’s works is important and interesting because it is one of the first linguistic studies, but his knowledge of the subject is very inaccurate and misconceived . He relies on the traditional lore found in the Bible, so he believes in the Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11) and considers that Hebrew was the earliest language of the human race. He does remark that there are languages in the world that have a common derivation, such as the modern Romance languages that Gessner cites as derivations of Latin. The two editors of this edition, Colombar and Peters, gave us an excellent critical edition with a superb introduction that will serve to guide many scholars to a better understanding of one of the greatest linguistic works of the Renaissance . ROSSELLA PESCATORI, Italian, El Camino College Ruth Glasner, Averroes’ Physics: A Turning Point in Medieval Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009) 229 pp. Western scholarship dealing with even the most famous philosophical texts of the medieval Islamic world is inhibited by many factors: lack of sufficient textcriticism in the preparation of editions (as compared to the production of editions of Greek philosophers, e.g.), uncertainty in the manuscript traditions, and the residual disinterest of generations of Latin-centric approaches to the history of medieval philosophy, to name a few. With Averroes’ Physics, Ruth Glasner has provided a model study of a major aspect of Averroes’s thought that strives to bridge the philological and methodological gaps preventing scholarly access to medieval Islamic thought. To succeed in this project, Glasner needed not only to overcome numerous textual critical problems simply to establish a textual history of Averroes’s commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics, but also to present an analysis of the resultant meta-textual “story” which would be of interest to scholars of medieval and early modern philosophy. Indeed, the philological enterprise could only be justified were the significance of the latter condition to merit such a difficult task. In its essence, this book introduces three “turning points” in which Averroes introduces new interpretations of key elements of Aristotle’s physical system. In each case, Averroes’s own view has been revised substantially over time. REVIEWS 259 The three points are (1) the “succession argument” for the infinite series of motions in Physics 8.1; (2) the continuity of motion in itself; and (3) the problem of “homeomerity,” i.e., the infinite divisibility of bodies. Each of these points served as a site for Averroes’s intervention in order to “save” Aristotle. Glasner refers to them as “turning points” because of the evidence of evolution in Averroes’s thought, including his own assertions that it was only after “an intensive inquiry and a long time” that he came upon the true interpretation of Aristotle’s words. The primary issue at hand in each of these interventions is whether or not Aristotle’s reliance upon a “continuous” analysis of motion and bodies could be tweaked to prevent the onset of determinism (especially in the case of motion, where Aristotle advocates an...