Galen in Arabic - more than a translation

The joint project “Galen in Arabic (GAIA) – More than a Translation” aims at investigating the crosspollinations between three intellectual strands of the Islamicate world in the 9th and 10th centuries: the reception of the Greek medical tradition as expressed in the writings pertaining to the Galenic tradition, early Arabic philosophy (falsafa) and early Islamic theology (kalam). Our hypothesis is that the intellectual debates taking place within the Arabic-Islamic world had a considerable impact on the reception of this tradition. We will focus on two main areas: epistemology, and semiology, i.e. the study of signs.The GAIA project proposes two main shifts of focus for its research on Galen, namely from the source text to the target text, and from Galen the physician to Galen the philosopher. In the past the Arabic transmission of Galen has often been approached from the point of view of the Greek Galen, i.e. either to reconstruct Galenic treatises lost in Greek, but preserved in Arabic, or to study Greek-Arabic translation techniques. The GAIA-approach, in contrast, focuses on the target audience for whom Galen’s works were translated, their understanding these translations, their impact on the transmission and their development of the transmitted thoughts. The research undertaken in the framework of the proposed project will further acknowledge and stress the fact that the Arabic translations of Galen the physician were not exclusively read for medical purposes, but also out of interest for their philosophical contents. In this way Galen the philosopher and his influence on the philosophy and theologyin the Islamicate world shall emerge. As many of the Arabic translations of Galen’s original treatises as well as their later abridgements remain unedited, the project will provide a number of dearly needed editions centring on Galen’s "Method of Treatment", in which the methodology and, more generally, the epistemology of the Greek physician is expounded. Based on these editions, the formation and transformations of the theory of knowledge in the Arabic Islamic world of the 9th and 10th centuries will be studied. As for the suggested research in the area of semiology, we will focus on Galen’s important influence either through his "On Demonstration" which is lost today in Greek and Arabic, but of which substantial fragments survive, or through his "On the Usefulness of the Parts" in which he presents arguments from design as indications for the existence of the Creator.The project will apply an interdisciplinary methodology bringing together the methods used in the fields of philology, the history of medicine, of ancient and medieval philosophy, as well as of kalam theology.
The main researchers responsible for the project “Galen in Arabic” will be the two scientific coordinators, Dr Pauline Koetschet and Dr Elvira Wakelnig.