The work by specialist in Semitic and Iranian studies, with a serious fundamental knowledge in Arabic studies as well, Andrey Yakovlevich Borisov is a good base for studying the Arabic-Moslem philosophical tradition and the influence of the Ancient Greek philosophy at its shaping and evolution, particularly at the role of the Plotinus heritage. The book consists of several articles; they introduced earlier non published materials with corresponding historical and philosophical comments. The biggest of the articles is ‘Problems of studying the ‘Aristotle’s Theology’’; being a monument of Arabic-Moslem philosophy, ‘Aristotle’s Theology’ is a paraphrase of some parts of the ‘Enneads’ by Plotinus. In the introductory part of the article, the author set an aim to establish – in general and in roughly – the most important issues on that monument. For instance, he noted some new materials on the history of the text and argued for its republication. He described two manuscripts of the ‘Aristotle’s Theology’, known to him, mentioned other titles of the same composition, gave the literary history of the text. Then, he compared it with some fragments of the ‘Enneads’ in Greek with fragments of two versions of the ‘Aristotle’s Theology’ (the short and the long ones) in Arabic, to study the level of similarity of two manuscripts to the text by Plotinus, and to find out what version of the ‘Aristotle’s Theology’ is the basic one. First of all, he established a significant difference of two versions and shown that the second one is completed with insets. The author not only compared the Greek text of the ‘Enneads’ and the Arabic text of the ‘Aristotle’s Theology’, but also analyzed a fragment of the long version of Arabic compilation with the Latin translation of ‘Aristotle’s Theology’ and came to the conclusion about various level of exactness of that translation: sometimes it was rather close to the original Arabic text, mostly it stood quite far from the original. However, without a complete original text, the author had to use the Latin translation for the reconstruction of damaged elements of the composition. At the end of the article he gave the full structure of the ‘Aristotle’s Theology’.
The re are three other parts in the book on the works by Isaac Israeli: his ‘Book of Substances’ (Kitab al-javakhir), an anonymous Hebrew translation of his ‘Book of Definitions’, and new fragments of his other works. Besides, B. give a characteristic of the view of Solomon ibn Gabirol, describes the MuÊ¿tazila manuscripts of the State Public Library (Russian National Library now) and evaluates their significance for the history of the Moslem thought.
In the supplement to the book, there is a list of works by B., a list of his courses and seminars at the Institute of History, Philosophy, Literature and Linguistic of the Philological Faculty of the Leningrad State University, and his working plan at the Institute of Oriental Studies.