EXEGETICAL CULTURES 1 | 161with the Aristotelian commentators, was profound. At Bukhārā, “the
meeting- place of the most unique intellects of the age,”^164 in the Samanid li-
brary, he read so voraciously that by the age of eighteen or nineteen, by his
own account, he had nothing more to learn—that was in or soon after the
year 998, and recalls earlier overachievers, Augustine and Proclus.^165 Thereaf-
ter Ibn Sīnā took the well- trodden Alexandrian path of reconciling Aristotle
both with himself (the “lesser harmony”) and with Plato (“the greater
harmony”);^166 yet he came to offer certain solutions that were distinctive and
might not have occurred to him had he received a conventional education.
As he wrote to a pupil,
I have neither the time nor the inclination to occupy myself with close
textual analysis and commentary. But if you would be content with
whatever I have readily in mind on my own, then I could write for you
a comprehensive work arranged in the order which will occur to me.^167That is precisely what Ibn Sīnā already did in the early, Bukharan phase of his
career, in the work known as Philosophy for ʿArūdī, composed in the year
1001 at the request of a neighbor of that name, and still largely unpub-
lished.^168 This is a systematic summation of the entire Alexandrian philo-
sophical curriculum, and the first such summa to be produced in the Arabo-
Islamic world. It would be hard to think of a document more appropriate to
the end of our First Millennium.
In his maturer works, notably The cure (1020–27), Ibn Sīnā presented
himself as an admirer but also reformer of Aristotle, who had no compunc-
tion about criticizing or diverging from him, or omitting material discussed
by his predecessors simply because it was part of the Aristotelian corpus. Ibn
Sīnā eschewed the writing of commentaries, in which (at least convention-
ally) the whole text had to be covered regardless of its relevance to one’s own
preoccupations.^169 Instead, he addressed Aristotle as an equal and pro-
pounded a system based on the corpus Aristotelicum and the commentary
tradition with its marked Platonist coloring, but internalizing it and recast-
ing it into a carefully argued, scientifically structured, coherent synthesis, al-
most a new edition of Aristotle a millennium after Andronicus.^170 Central to
164 Al- Thaʿālibī, Yatīmat al- dahr, tr. E. G. Browne, A literary history of Persia (London 1902–24)
1.365.
165 Gutas, Avicenna [5:150] 21, 24–29, 196–97 (drawing a parallel with late Greek biographies of
Aristotle himself ), 163, 173–76.
166 This distinction is concisely explained by Wisnovsky [5:162], in Adamson and Taylor (eds),
Arabic philosophy [5:158] 97–98, who calls the combination of the two the “Ammonian synthesis,” after
the fifth- century Alexandrian philosopher Ammonius.
167 Quoted and tr. by Gutas, Avicenna [5:150] 41; cf. 101.
168 Gutas, Avicenna [5:150] 87–93.
169 Gutas, Avicenna [5:150] 47–48, 52–53, 111, 125–26, 175, 193, 223, 286–96.
170 Gutas, Avicenna [5:150] 199–200, 288–89; A. Bertolacci, “Il pensiero filosofico di Avicenna,”
SFIM 546–47.