Final Report Summary - PHIBOR (Philosophy on the Border of Civilizations and Intellectual Endeavours: Towards a Critical Edition of the Metaphysics (Ilahiyyat of Kitab al-Shifa’) of Avicenna (Ibn Sina))
The “PhiBor” project’s aim is to provide an accurate knowledge of the historical significance and doctrinal impact of the Ilahiyyat (Metaphysics) of Ibn Sina (Avicenna)’s Kitab al-Shifa' (Book of the Cure, or: of the Healing) – one of the masterpieces of Medieval Arabic philosophy in the Islamic world, and one of the most influential and widespread works of falsafa of all times – by means of a reconstruction of the manuscript tradition, a reliable edition, an English translation, and a doctrinal explanation of the text of the work. The achievements of the project in its 60 months of activity can be summarized under three main headings:
1) The careful analysis of all the manuscripts of the work retrieved during the project. This is an exceptionally high number of more than 260 codices, most of which were previously unknown; only a small portion of this massive amount of testimonia is housed in “Western” libraries (Europe and USA), whereas their majority is preserved in repositories of the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, both public and private, often remote and difficult to access. This codicological analysis has evidenced the codicological and historical features of the manuscripts involved and has been performed both by direct inspection of the exemplars and by means of acquisition of digital copies of most of these manuscripts; in its turn, the high quality of the scans has allowed their reliable description and proper storage into the project data-base. By means of this analysis, it has been possible to discriminate between ancient and late, complete and incomplete, integral and composite manuscripts.
2) The first critical text of the work. To this end, a collation of more than 200 manuscripts and of relevant witnesses of the indirect tradition (early Arabic quotations of the work, and its Latin medieval translation) on text samples in five distinct treatises of the work has allowed the reconstruction of the precise stemmatic relations among the various testimonia; on the basis of this stemma codicum eighteen items, that is to say, the most ancient representatives of all the main branches of the manuscript tradition thus reconstructed, have been selected as basis for the edition; the attentive inspection of the selected testimonia has led to a new critical text of the first treatise, with facing English translation and historical, exegetical and lexicographical annotations, as well as to an improved text of the rest of the work.
3) A digital infrastructure in the form of a front-end named “Avicenn@”, aimed at the widest possible dissemination ans divulgation of the results of the project. To this aim, the most up-to-date techniques in digital humanities allow consultation of the project data both by specialized scholars and by a larger audience more generally interested in the history of Islamic philosophy and in Arabic codicology, in a user-friendly attitude and with didactic purposes. In “Avicenn@”, three pivotal elements interact and cooperate to grant the project results the widest possible diffusion: 3.1) The manuscripts database, in which the full codicological description of all the codices processed during the project has been provided (in the form of bare metadata), and in which indexed and annotated images can be viewed of those manuscripts for which the legal copyright holders have granted to the project an authorization to publish the acquired digital copies. This computational device has functioned both as a cooperative research platform for the activity of critical edition (in its back-end), and is meant to function as a constantly updatable repository of information for all the scholars interested in the manuscript transmission of Avicenna’s masterpiece in philosophy (in its front-end). 3.2) The web-based critical editor named “CEED”, built in accordance with TEI standards, whose public version grants access to the critical text of the work, its apparatus criticus, the sigla of witnesses, the stemma codicum, the collation of the text samples conducive to the stemma, the facing English translation, and the aforementioned different types of annotations. 3.3) The constantly updated project web-site, already online since the very beginning of the project, which provides “static” information on the library catalogues used for the identification and description of manuscripts, the bibliography consulted, the manuscripts of the other parts of the Shifa’ which the project has brought to light, bibliographical and historical information on the indirect tradition of the work (quotations, commentaries and translations), and news on more traditional ways of scientific dissemination (conferences, lectures, publications etc.).
1) The careful analysis of all the manuscripts of the work retrieved during the project. This is an exceptionally high number of more than 260 codices, most of which were previously unknown; only a small portion of this massive amount of testimonia is housed in “Western” libraries (Europe and USA), whereas their majority is preserved in repositories of the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, both public and private, often remote and difficult to access. This codicological analysis has evidenced the codicological and historical features of the manuscripts involved and has been performed both by direct inspection of the exemplars and by means of acquisition of digital copies of most of these manuscripts; in its turn, the high quality of the scans has allowed their reliable description and proper storage into the project data-base. By means of this analysis, it has been possible to discriminate between ancient and late, complete and incomplete, integral and composite manuscripts.
2) The first critical text of the work. To this end, a collation of more than 200 manuscripts and of relevant witnesses of the indirect tradition (early Arabic quotations of the work, and its Latin medieval translation) on text samples in five distinct treatises of the work has allowed the reconstruction of the precise stemmatic relations among the various testimonia; on the basis of this stemma codicum eighteen items, that is to say, the most ancient representatives of all the main branches of the manuscript tradition thus reconstructed, have been selected as basis for the edition; the attentive inspection of the selected testimonia has led to a new critical text of the first treatise, with facing English translation and historical, exegetical and lexicographical annotations, as well as to an improved text of the rest of the work.
3) A digital infrastructure in the form of a front-end named “Avicenn@”, aimed at the widest possible dissemination ans divulgation of the results of the project. To this aim, the most up-to-date techniques in digital humanities allow consultation of the project data both by specialized scholars and by a larger audience more generally interested in the history of Islamic philosophy and in Arabic codicology, in a user-friendly attitude and with didactic purposes. In “Avicenn@”, three pivotal elements interact and cooperate to grant the project results the widest possible diffusion: 3.1) The manuscripts database, in which the full codicological description of all the codices processed during the project has been provided (in the form of bare metadata), and in which indexed and annotated images can be viewed of those manuscripts for which the legal copyright holders have granted to the project an authorization to publish the acquired digital copies. This computational device has functioned both as a cooperative research platform for the activity of critical edition (in its back-end), and is meant to function as a constantly updatable repository of information for all the scholars interested in the manuscript transmission of Avicenna’s masterpiece in philosophy (in its front-end). 3.2) The web-based critical editor named “CEED”, built in accordance with TEI standards, whose public version grants access to the critical text of the work, its apparatus criticus, the sigla of witnesses, the stemma codicum, the collation of the text samples conducive to the stemma, the facing English translation, and the aforementioned different types of annotations. 3.3) The constantly updated project web-site, already online since the very beginning of the project, which provides “static” information on the library catalogues used for the identification and description of manuscripts, the bibliography consulted, the manuscripts of the other parts of the Shifa’ which the project has brought to light, bibliographical and historical information on the indirect tradition of the work (quotations, commentaries and translations), and news on more traditional ways of scientific dissemination (conferences, lectures, publications etc.).