Mother tongue Quotes by Dimitri Gutas

“Al-Kind¯ı’s work revived philosophy as living practice and introduced it in the new social environment of Abbasid Baghdad by making it relevant to its intellectual concerns and widely acceptable as the indispensable means for critical and rigorous thinking based on reason, not authority. The resurrection of philosophy in Arabic in the early ninth century was a revolutionary event, as mentioned…

— Dimitri Gutas

“, the core of [Al-Kindi's] philosophical enterprise was centered in the geometrical approach to the solution of all problems associated with metaphysics and cosmology. This focus explains the fragmentary nature of the translations from Proclus and Plotinus that he commissioned, just as it explains his philosophical eclecticism: he was interested primarily in the question of the One or God as…

— Dimitri Gutas

“Two great contemporary scholars at the antipodes of the cultural spread of Hellenism, Boethius in Rome (d. 525) and Sergius of Re¯ˇsayna in northern Mesopotamia ¯ (d. 536), conceived of the grand idea of translating all of Aristotle into Latin and Syriac respectively.5 The conception is to their credit as individual thinkers for their noble intentions; their failure indicates that…

— Dimitri Gutas

“This translation movement, during the course of which almost all non-literary and non-historical secular Greek works on science and philosophy were translated upon demand into Arabic, was introduced by the caliphs and the ruling elite of the newly established Arab Abbasid dynasty (750– 1258) as an ideological response to pressing political and social problems. Once thus introduced and sponsored from…

— Dimitri Gutas

“If living philosophy was dead in Greek and had, furthermore, failed to be transplanted and to acquire an independent status in other languages, what survived were its physical remains in the form of manuscripts and libraries,8 as well as certain – much reduced, enfeebled, and diluted – philosophical curricula and theological applications, primarily of logical studies, in various schools and…

— Dimitri Gutas

“In Greek, the most significant area to which these curricula were reduced was the rudiments of Aristotelian logic. It is possible, for instance, to discern a major structural change in the medical curriculum in Alexandria toward the end of the sixth century, perhaps as a reaction to the decline of philosophical instruction in that last remaining center of Greek philosophical…

— Dimitri Gutas