How do intellectual traditions interact? This is the fundamental question driving this book, which explores a case study set in the early Islamicate world: the
Treatise on Divine Unity According to the Doctrine of the Christians by the Christian-Arabic theologian and philosopher Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī (d. 974). The book attempts to contextualise the treatise and its intellectual environment by exploring the interplay between philosophy, Christian theology and Islam. This volume includes a revised Arabic text of Samir’s 2015 edition, collated with the manuscript Tehran, Madrasa-yi Marwī 19, recently discovered by prof. Robert Wisnovsky.
Giovanni Mandolino, Ph.D. (2020), University of Padua, is a researcher at that same university. He has published editions and translations of Medieval texts, as well as several articles on Eastern Christian tradition and Arabic philosophy.
Acknowledgements Abbreviations
Introduction: Interpreting Early Arabic Christian Theology
Part 1
1
State of the Research 1.1 The life of Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī
1.2 Studies on Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī
1.3 Previous Scholarship on the
Treatise on Divine Unity
2
An Analysis of the Contents of the Treatise on Divine Unity 2.1 Title, Authenticity and Date
2.2 Topic and Purpose of the Treatise
2.3 The
pars destruens: the Refuted Doctrines
2.4 The
pars construens 2.5 The First Appendix, on the Public of the Treatise
2.6 The Second Appendix, concerning a Doubt and Its Solution
2.7 Overall Remarks: Philosophical Method and Theology
3
Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī’s Critique of the Philosophical Conception of the First Principle 3.1 The Unity of the First Principle in al-Kindī’s
On First Philosophy and Its Reprise in Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī
3.2 The Second Appendix of the Treatise in the Light of the Theory of the Three States of Existence
3.3 Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī and al-Fārābī on Divine Unity
Final Remarks
Part 2
Manuscript Transmission and Editions of the Treatise on Divine Unity
Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī. Treatise on Divine Unity According to the Doctrine of the Christians
Arabic Text
English Translation
Commentary
Bibliography Index
Mainly academic readership: university libraries in the field of Social Sciences and Humanities; scholars of Eastern Christianity, Late Antique and Arabic philosophy; post-graduate students.