Amable Jourdain

Amable Jourdain (25 January 1788, Paris[1] – 19 February 1818) was an early 19th-century French historian and orientalist, a student of Louis-Mathieu Langlès and Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, a specialist of ancient Persia and the Latin transmission of Aristotle.

In this second work, based on a series of questions posed by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on the influence exercised by the Arabic philosophers on Western scholasticism, Jourdain tries to answer rigorously by examining the preserved texts and manuscripts to the following three questions: "Do we owe the Arabs the first knowledge of some works of the ancient Greek philosophers and of Aristotle in particular?

[2] Indeed, since the 18th, very different opinions, not supported by a thorough examination according to Jourdain, were expressed on the introduction of the texts of Aristotle in medieval Christian West, its date and its Byzantine or Arabic origin: On the one hand for example, the Italian Ludovico Antonio Muratori had defended the idea of an early and exclusively Byzantine branch (Non ergo ex Arabum penu [...], sed e Græcia), while the Spaniard of Lebanese origin Miguel Casiri maintained that the direct translations of Greek had been very late ([...] adeo ut hac Arabica versione latine reddita, priusquam Aristoteles Græcus repertus esset, divus Thomas ceterique scholastici usi fuerint).

[3] The conclusions of the Jourdain inquiry were as follows: until the beginning of the 13th, the texts of Aristotle (apart from the Logica vetus, that is to say the translation of three or four Treatises on logic by Boethius), were neither widespread nor used in the Christian West, nor were those of the Aristotelian Arabic philosophers Avicenna, Averroes).

[4] As pertains the influence of Arab Aristotelianism on western Christian scholasticism, he concluded that it was of the order of the given example and of the emulation created, urging the Latins to systematically seek the original version of the texts.