| Abstract: | In
the eighth and ninth centuries CE intellectuals in three different
societies were studying the same classical text in three different
languages. In Western Europe, Carolingian intellectuals were studying
the Categories of Aristotle in Latin, while in Byzantium contemporary
scholars were reading it in Greek and in the Middle East Abbasid
scholars did so in Arabic. My dissertation addresses the question of why
the Categories was studied at the same time in these three different
culturo‐political worlds. The primary sources that I use include
paraphrases and translations of the Categories that are found in the
works of John of Damascus and Photius in the Byzantine world, Alcuin and
John Scottus Eriugena in the Carolingian world and Ibn Al--‐Muqaffaʿ
and Al--‐Kindī in the Islamic world. Rather than providing an analysis
of the philosophical interpretations of the Categories by any of these
intellectuals, I explore the possible explanations of the simultaneous
study of the Categories, such as direct contact between these scholars,
movement of manuscripts and coincidence. I conclude that the most likely
explanation is that the late Roman educational curriculum which was
established by the sixth century and which included Aristotle’s
Categories, continued to exert its inTluence in all three cultural
zones. As a result, I argue that early medieval scholars living as far
apart as England and Iraq had a similar intellectual horizon in which
exposure to Aristotelian logic in schools played an important role. |
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