Intensive Course on the Greco-Arabic Tradition, Princeton University, August 29–September 2, 2016

Thanks to a number of generous grants from the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project, the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton University has organized a series of short, intensive courses for graduate students on a variety of subjects in the broad field of Islamic studies not normally covered in the Princeton curriculum for over a decade. In each case, an internationally-recognized expert has been brought in to teach the course over a period of five weekdays.

This year, we plan to offer such a course on the Greco-Arabic tradition.

The course will take place at the end of the summer, starting on Monday August 29, and ending on Friday, September 2, 2016. The course is intended primarily for graduate students, both from Princeton and from other universities; applicants should have some knowledge of medieval Middle Eastern history.

The instructor will be Professor Dimitri Gutas of Yale University, a leading expert on Greco-Arabic studies. Graeco-Arabic studies is a supra-disciplinary field that studies the textual transmission of Hellenic science and philosophy and its impact in the western world (west of India) from antiquity to the Renaissance through the pivotal conduit of the Graeco-Arabic translations (8th-10th centuries). The transmission went from Greek into Syriac, Middle Persian, and Arabic, and from Arabic into Latin, Hebrew, and Medieval Greek, which constitutes the philological focus of the study; the common high culture that resulted in each of these linguistic communities, though variously received, constitutes a second major focus of study. The field combines the disciplines of classical philology and the philology of the other languages, the history of science and the history of philosophy, and the social and political history of the ancient world, late antiquity, and the medieval world (west of India).

The Intensive Seminar will present and explore the various aspects of the field in five days: textual transmission and textual criticism and editorial technique in the various languages; lexicography, translation, and the history of concepts; the history of philosophy; the history of science; social and political history of the West (of India) from antiquity to the Renaissance.