Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn

Son and collaborator of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, who turned from medicine to philosophy and translated, among much else, Aristotle’s On Interpretation and revised the Arabic Topics and Rhetoric.

Life

Isḥāq was born about 215/830 into the Nestorian Arab tribe of the ʿIbād of al-Ḥīra and was trained above all by his father, the physician and translator Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq, in the Baghdad of the translation movement. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi he learned Greek, Syriac and Persian and helped his father with the translations of Galen; Ibn al-Nadīm says that his Arabic was better than his father’s. He won the friendship of the caliphs al-Muʿtamid, al-Muʿtaḍid and al-Muktafī and of al-Muʿtaḍid’s vizier al-Qāsim b. ʿUbayd Allāh, whose confidant he became, and served as a court physician. He also wrote poetry. He died of paralysis in Baghdad in Rabīʿ I or II 298 (November–December 910).

Though one of the most active members of his father’s circle, Isḥāq left medical translation largely to others and concentrated on philosophy, mathematics and astronomy; his cousin Ḥubaysh and ʿĪsā b. Yaḥyā helped him, and Thābit b. Qurra is said to have revised some of his versions. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits him with the Arabic translation of On Interpretation and with revised translations of the Topics and the Rhetoric, and, with his father, a new Syriac translation of the Posterior Analytics. The TDV adds the Categories and On Interpretation (the latter from his father’s Syriac), part of the Prior Analytics, Syriac versions of the Posterior Analytics and the Topics, and works of physics, psychology and ethics, as well as Euclid, Ptolemy’s Almagest and Archimedes; the TDV article on logic says that he translated, sometimes from Syriac and sometimes from the Greek, almost the whole of the logical corpus except the Isagoge. He also wrote a short history of physicians and philosophers, the first such work in Arabic, at the request of the vizier al-Qāsim.

Works

• Translations of Aristotle’s logical worksOn Interpretation (SEP; TDV: from his father’s Syriac); revisions of the Topics and the Rhetoric (SEP); the Categories and part of the Prior Analytics (TDV); with his father, a Syriac Posterior Analytics (SEP).перевод
• Tārīkh al-aṭibbāʾ wa-l-falāsifa تَارِيخُ الأَطِبَّاءِ وَالفَلَاسِفَةِShort history of Greek physicians and philosophers written for the vizier al-Qāsim b. ʿUbayd Allāh; ed. and tr. Franz Rosenthal, Oriens 7 (1954) (TDV).труд

Reception

His versions formed part of the growing Arabic Organon to which Abū Bishr Mattā added the Poetics and the Posterior Analytics early in the tenth century (SEP).