Greek, the language of being ? Arab answers

Modern philosophers have argued about the nature of Aristotle's "Categories": categories of language or categories of thought? This debate is reminiscent of another, almost as famous and much older one: the one that pitted Philosophers in ^10th-century Baghdad against Grammarians who were sensitive to the isomorphism of Aristotelian ontology and Greek grammar, the prescriptive force of which, although they didn't know it, they guessed. Without ignoring the striking echoes between the two debates, we will focus today on placing the Arab arguments in their proper context. This context is certainly indecipherable without taking into account the Baghdadian commentaries on the Categories ; but it is also marked, at a deeper level, by the emergence of a new awareness of linguistic plurality and of algebra.

Biography

Marwan Rashed (1971) was Professor of Greek Philology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Rue d'Ulm, and is now Professor of the History of Greek and Arabic Philosophy at the Sorbonne. He has published extensively on the history of Greek philosophy, from the Presocratics to the Byzantine commentators (in particular on logic, natural philosophy and metaphysics), and on several philosophers and theologians of classical Islam. Marwan Rashed is currently working, in collaboration with Oliver Primavesi (LMU, Munich), on a new commented critical edition of Aristotle's Metaphysics, taking into account for the first time the totality of Greek, Byzantine, Arabic and Latin sources. He is the author of the following works, among others: - Die Überlieferungsgeschichte der aristotelischen Schrift De generatione et corruptione, Wiesbaden, 2001; - Aristotle. De la génération et la corruption, edition, translation and commentary, Paris, 2005; - Essentialisme. Alexandre d'Aphrodise entre logique, physique et cosmologie, Berlin/New York, 2007; - Alexandre d'Aphrodise, Commentaire perdu à la Physique d'Aristote (Livres IV-VIII). Byzantine scholia, Berlin/New York, 2011; - Al-Ḥasan ibn Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī, Commentary on Aristotle De generatione et corruptione, Berlin/New York, 2015; - L'Héritage Aristotélicien. Textes inédits de l'Antiquité, new revised and expanded edition, Paris, 2016; - La Jeune Fille et la Sphère. Études sur Empédocle, Paris, 2017.