Empedocles in the Arabic-speaking World in the Middle Ages through Themistius
Résumé
In the Middle Ages, the Arab readership was exposed chiefly to a pseudo-Empedocles, but the ideas of the genuine Empedocles were known, though only fragmentarily, via the Arabic translations of Aristotle’s works. While the pseudo-Empedocles has been studied as a puzzling case of the history of the transmission of the Greek philosophical heritage, the genuine Empedocles available in the Arabic-speaking world has not yet been completely examined. One of the sources has not received attention: Themistius. This paper aims to fill this lacuna through a complete list of Themistius’ quotations from and testimonies on Empedocles in the Arabic and Hebrew versions of his paraphrases.