Animal and Human Souls in the Overall Arrangement of the Cosmos: the Kindī-Circle’s Adaptation of Alexander of Aphrodisias’ De Providentia as a Case Study of the Nascent “Arabic Aristotelianism”

Alexander of Aphrodisias’ De providentia in the Kindī-circle’s version contains a section about how matter is informed by the divine power, so as to explain the overall ordering of the cosmos: animal and human souls are significantly included in this section. The celestial bodies indeed do not only govern the substances of the sublunary world: they are also the cause of the essences of such substances, and this leads them to be the mediators and differentiating agents of divine power. This superior power, in turn, pours forth directly from the First Cause and needs to be differentiated since each informed body comes to be differentiated by matter. This explanation is followed by the description of different kinds of bodies and the peculiarity of each. My contribution will aim to shed light on the arrangement of the souls according to the Kindī-circle’s adaptor, insofar as it concerns both the divine world and the scala naturae of the sublunary region. As one of the testimonies of the Kindī-circle’s adaptations, the On the Governments of the Celestial Spheres (this is its own title) should be evaluated as a constitutive work of the so-called “Arabic Aristotelianism” and independently from Mattā ibn Yūnus’ translation of Alexander’s De providentia: for this reason, the analysis of the text will be conducted on the new annotated translation and forthcoming edition I have worked on for my Ph.D. research. Even more, the Kindī- circle’s adaptation should be read in light of the context where it is elaborated and reworked, that is, the Abbasid court and the golden age of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement.