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Steven Harvey and Oded Horezky
Averroes ex Averroe: Uncovering Ṭodros
Ṭodrosi’s Method of Commenting on
the Commentator
ABSTRACT Our paper studies one of the most interesting
manuscripts of medieval Jewish philosophy, a unicum that is
housed in the British Library, Heb MS Add 27559. This fascinating
manuscript, in part a version of a work compiled by Ṭodros
Ṭodrosi, in Trinquetaille in the 1330s, is a Hebrew anthology
of logical and scientific texts, written by Greek and Arabic
philosophers, some of which are translated into Hebrew for the
first time by Ṭodros. The paper sheds new light on this manuscript
through an examination of the section on natural science that
Ṭodros devoted to the study and explanation of Aristotle’s Physics
and which comprises more than a third of the entire manuscript.
We uncover Ṭodros’s aims and methodology in this section on
physics (and, to some extent, in other sections as well), and sketch
a clear picture of the ways in which Ṭodros intended to assist
his contemporary readers in the study of natural science. The
paper contributes to our knowledge of the fundamental status
of Averroes’s middle commentaries on the Corpus Aristotelicum
among medieval Jewish scholars, as well as to our growing
awareness and appreciation of the achievements of a remarkable,
young, fourteenth-century Provençal scholar, Ṭodros Ṭodrosi. It
concludes with three appendices, two of which compare Ṭodros’s
text with parallel passages in the Hebrew translations of Averroes’s
commentaries, and a third which provides a detailed description of
the British Library manuscript.
Steven Harvey, Dept. of Jewish Philosophy, Bar-Ilan University, (Professor Emeritus).
Oded Horezky, Thomas-Institute, University of Cologne.
© Aleph 21.1 (2021) pp. 7–78