Focusing on primarily on Fa?r al-D?n’s al-R?z?’s (d. 1210) commentary on Avicenn’s (d. 1037) Pointers and Reminders (al-Iš?r?t wa-t-tanb?h?t), Ayman Shihadeh and others have documented the ways in which Fa?r al-D?n al-R?z?’s exegetical method was one of his most innovative contributions to post-classical Islamic philosophy. These scholars have suggested that Fa?r al-D?n’s approach to commentary in Pointers and Reminders is in part inspired by Avicenna’s (d. 1037) approach to philosophy. Shihadeh has identified the various precursors to Fa?r al-D?n’s exegetical method, highlighting the importance of what he terms the “aporetic“ and “exegetical” commentary genres that predated Fa?r al-D?n’s commentary on Pointers. In this paper, I shall argue that the exegetical method that Fa?r al-D?n uses in his commentary on the Canon of Medicine shares many of the attributes with the exegetical method he employs in his commentary on Pointers. Next, I shall attempt to show how innovative Fa?r al-D?n’s exegetical method must have appeared to twelfth- and thirteenth-century medical commentators. I do this by comparing Fa?r al-D?n’s method with Galen’s (d. ca. 216) scattered remarks about how interpretation should be done. The passages on Galen’s thoughts about “metacommentary,” which have been briefly discussed by scholars such as Jonathan Barnes, Rebecca Flemming and Jaap Mansfeld, are preserved in Galen’s Hippocratic commentaries, many of which were translated into Arabic and whose insights would have been valued highly by physicians as well as philosophers after the ninth century. Finally, I shall compare Fa?r al-D?n’s exegetical method in his Canon commentary with the method that Ab? Bakr Mu?ammad ibn Zakar?y? al-R?z? (d. ca. 925) employs in his Doubts on Galen. I conclude that commentaries had always included both aporetic, demonstrative and exegetical elements. Yet, for Greek and early Islamic physician-philosophers such as Galen and Mu?ammad ibn Zakar?y?, activities such as engaging in aporetic debate and elaborating demonstrative deductions were not part of the commentator’s proper business. By including such elements into the norms of exegetical best-practice, Fa?r al-D?n’s commentary method constitutes a decisive break from exegetical conventions in medical discourse prior to the twelfth century.

Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine enjoyed great popularity not only among physicians, but also among philosophers. The first book on Generalities (Kull?y?t) in particular proved so popular that many commentaries, supercommentaries and abridgements on it were produced from the eleventh century onwards. Yet, the third book, discussing so-called ‘topical diseases’—diseases affecting a particular part of the body such as the eye, the ear and so on—contains much philosophically relevant discussions, especially in the sections on the brain. There are only a few commentaries on this book of the Canon, two of which are by Ibn al-Naf?s (d. 1288) and Ibn al-Quff (d. 1286). In this paper, I shall offer a first analysis of the sections on melancholy. Melancholy was generally defined as an impairment of reason without fever and caused by black bile. There is a long tradition of Arabic medical texts on melancholy, reaching back to the translations of key works by Rufus of Ephesus (flourished first century) and Galen of Pergamum (d. ca. 216). Avicenna’s own chapter on melancholy in the Canon draws heavily on Paul of Aegina (d. ca. 690). The two commentators discussed here, Ibn al-Naf?s and Ibn al-Quff, approached this topic from different angles, although they share some exegetical strategies. I shall contrast their approach in their Canon commentaries with that in their commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms. In this way, I shall offer a first vignette on how two powerful intellectuals interpreted Avicenna’s account of melancholy and relate it to their other exegetical practices.

It is often assumed that humoral theory remained unchanged and the dominant medical theory throughout the pre-modern history of Islamic societies. Historians have provided various explanations for this persistence of humoral theory ranging from the (alleged) religious prohibition against dissection to a predisposition amongst medical writers towards systematizing and summarizing rather than critical inquiry. Some have even claimed that Avicenna’s categorization of medicine as an applied natural science prevented the overthrow and/or modification of humoral physiology since any investigation of its principles, by virtue of being a part of Physics, was off-limits to physicians qua physicians. Yet, writers engaged critically with medical theory in their commentaries on the Canon of Medicine. The leading figure in this critical engagement was Ibn al-Naf?s (d. 1288). In this paper, I examine how the genre of medical commentaries on Avicenna’s Canon began to challenge specific aspects of humoral theory and its concomitant understanding of digestion beginning with Fakhr al-D?n al-R?z? (d. 1209). Al-R?z?’s philosophical challenges were taken up by subsequent commentators, ultimately leading to Ibn al-Naf?s’s claim that blood was the sole nourishing humor. Ibn al-Naf?s provided philosophical and empirical arguments for his critique of the Galenic physiological and anatomical understanding of digestion, and in support of his new proposals. The paper thus provides evidence for the vitality of the post-classical commentary tradition, and reveals the important role played by empirical anatomical observations in medical commentaries.

The Classification of Medicine in Somme Commentaries on Avicenna’s Canon The intrusion of philosophy, and particularly physics and logic, into medicine goes back at least to Galen for whom the best doctor was a philosopher who was able to infer a sound judgment out of the empirical data. One of the loci in which this interdependence is the most intricate is the theory of the elements that bears a tremendous influence on medicine through the primary qualities on which humoral pathology rests. However in the first pages of the Canon, Avicenna drew a strict line between physics and medicine, considering the latter as an independent science with its proper object, though subordinated to the science of physics from which it draws its principles without being able to demonstrate them. Therefore, Avicenna contends, it is qua philosopher and not qua physician that Galen must have demonstrated the number of elements. In this paper I will examine the responses to that particular point by some of the most emblematic commentaries in the vast, and as of yet untapped literature which grew around Avicenna’s Canon at the turn of the 13th century and beyond. I will explore first how the epistemological question of the priority of physics over medicine fits into the recurrent Aristotelian theme of the priority of one science to another as it is mainly addressed in the Posterior Analytics. I will then turn to Fakr al-Dîn al-Râzî’s critique of this issue in his commentary on Avicenna’s Kulliyyât, the response of his disciple Afdal al-Dîn al-Khunajî (d. 1249), in his Shar? Kulliyât al-Qânûn and the vehement critique of ?Abd al-Latîf al-Baghdâdî in The pages [he] composed on the book of Mu?ammad b. ?Umar, known as Ibn khatîb al-Rayy, composed on some of the first part of the Canon .... What is at stake is not a mere debate between theory and practice, but a theoretical reflection upon the relationship between on the one hand the contingent, specific and factual object of medicine and on the other, the more universal principles of physics on which medicine depends to prove its own conclusions without being able to submit them to rational inquiry. Ultimately it is the status of medicine which is at stake, and its capacity to question the physical principles on which it is grounded.