The following article “The poetics of Avicenna” by Aziz Ali Dad, source “Friday Times, August 05-11, 2011
Avicenna (Abdallah Ibn Sina) lived in a period in the history of Islamic societies which witnessed efflorescence of philosophy and translations of Greco-Roman and Indian texts into Arabic. It was common among the scholars of the day to study Greek philosophy. Being a part of the cultural and intellectual ambience, Avicenna was also actively engaged with philosophical, scientific and literary debates of his time. His was the age when Muslim philosophers were studying Greek masterpieces, an indispensable component of their scholarship. Among the Greek writers they studied, Aristotle (384-322 BC) held a special position, and Arab philosophers presented their understanding of the ideas of Aristotle in the form of summaries and commentaries. As part of this tradition, Avicenna presented his views and understanding of Aristotle's Poetics in his own Commentary.
For his Commentary Avicenna relied on Arabic translations of Poetics. One of the main features of Arabic translations of Poetics is that Arabs used the Syriac translations as their source. Those translations were based on the Greek version of Poetics. The Arabic translation by Abu Bishr Matta contained deficiencies in syntax, nomenclatures, understanding and transliteration, and Avicenna used this translation to write his Commentary. In addition, he used the translation of Abu Bishr's student Yahya ibn Adi and al-Farabi. F. C Peter in his book Aristotle and the Arabs describes Yahya ibn Adi as the leader of the Peripatetic School of Baghdad of which Avicenna's Aristelianism was a direct product. While using these translations, Avicenna imbibed the shortcomings, misconceptions and fallacies of Poetics. It can be deduced that the sources of Avicenna were twice removed from the real source.
InPoetics, Aristotle discussed different genres of Greek poetry and the art of poetry in general. Later on Neo-Platonist philosophers erected an elaborate schema of classification of his works. This resulted in a classification of all the sciences. The classification or division of the works of Aristotle was called the 'context theory'. This classification was the work of philosophers such as Porphyry (234-304 AD) and Alexander of Aphrodisia. In this classification, Poetics came under the category of Logic. Alexander of Aphrodisias is considered as one of the proponents of the scheme of the context theory. He places Poetics in the lowest position in the hierarchy of the classification of Aristotelian logic. These ideas about the status of Poetry were products of Neo-Platonists who attributed different concepts to Aristotle that were not actually an integral part of his works.
When the Arabs conquered Alexandria and Syria, they came into contact with Neo-Platonist philosophers. Muslim philosophers were very impressed by the philosophical vigor of Greeks and appropriated it to explore and explicate different dimensions of life, religion, society and science. Avicenna came into contact with the classification of Neo-Platonists through Abu-Sahl al-Masihi who was a distinguished physician and his companion. By making Neo-Platonist classification his base, Abu-Shal presented the order of sciences that ought to be studied. According to an account given by Abu-Sahl, Aristotle incorporates Poetics in the category of the Logic, which holds the eighth position preceded by Rhetoric and Sophistics.
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