Document Type : Letter to Editor
Author
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Allameh Tabatabai University
Abstract
Eleven centuries after its appearance, Aristotle’s Organon was translated into Arabic and by acquainting with such translations, some elite scholars, e.g. al-Fārābi and Ibn Sinā, started to write and publish logical writings in the Islamic world. These writings caused rising and developing the logic among Muslims. Analyzing and assessing the first Arabic translations of the Organon make us acquainted, on the one hand with the Muslims attention to the Greek philosophical heritages in the earlier centuries and on the other hand with the amount of these translations accuracy. Abdul-Rahmān Badawī has gathered and edited the first Arabic translations of Aristotle’s Organon and Porphyry’s Isagoge in a three volume book. After comparing Arabic translation of Syllogism to its original Greek and to English (Jenkinson) and Persian (Adib-Soltāni) translations of the Prior Analytics, we found almost one hundred differences between them. We have categorized these differences under some titles as preference and cost of translation, unintelligible Arabic, supplemented statement, translation mistakes, change and replacement of examples, errors of editing and added explanations. In addition to indicating the significance of the translation age, we touch, in the introduction of this article, some other subjects such as Organon translation, Syllogism’s translator, Badawī’s translation, methodology of comparing different translations and preferences of Arabic translation.
Keywords
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