About the Faculty

Dimitri Gutas
Arabic and Islamic Studies, Graeco-Arabic Studies
dimitri.gutas@yale.edu

DIMITRI GUTAS, Professor of Arabic and Graeco-Arabic (Ph.D. Yale 1974)
did his undergraduate and graduate work at Yale in classics, history of religions, and Arabic and Islamic studies.

Dimitri Gutas studies and teaches medieval Arabic and the medieval intellectual tradition in Islamic civilization from different aspects. At the center of his concerns lies the study and understanding of classical Arabic in its many forms as a prerequisite for the proper appreciation of the written sources which inform us about the history and culture of Islamic societies. He also has an abiding interest in the transmission of Greek scientific and philosophical works into the Islamic world through the momentous Graeco-Arabic translation movement in Baghdad during the 8th-10th centuries AD (2nd-4th Hijri). Out of these two interests grew the longstanding project to compile, in collaboration with Professor Gerhard Endress of Bochum University, Germany, A Greek and Arabic Lexicon, which provides “materials for a dictionary of the medieval translations from Greek into Arabic” (Leiden 1992 and ff.). The Lexicon is compiled in fascicles that appear in regular intervals, and interested graduate students in the Department have the opportunity to participate in the continuing project and sharpen their linguistic skills in both classical Arabic and classical Greek.

In addition to his lexicographical interests in Graeco-Arabic studies, Dimitri Gutas has devoted a large part of his scholarly career to the study of the transmission of Greek philosophical texts into Arabic and their influence in the Islamic world. In this field he has published Greek Wisdom Literature in Arabic Translation. A Study of the Graeco-Arabic Gnomologia (New Haven 1975), Greek Philosophers in the Arabic Tradition (Aldershot, Hampshire 2000), and has been involved from the beginning as co-editor in Project Theophrastus. This project has so far published Theophrastus of Eresus. Sources for his Life, Writings, Thought & Influence, 2 volumes edited by W.W. Fortenbaugh, P.M. Huby, R.W. Sharples, and D. Gutas (Leiden 1992), containing all the extant fragments of Theophrastus in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, and three volumes of commentaries. It is to be noted that this is the first edition of the works of a classical Greek author in which the Arabic evidence for the transmission of his text is taken into consideration. In conjunction with this project, Gutas is currently working on a simultaneous edition of the Metaphysics of Theophrastus in both the original Greek and its medieval Arabic translation. The methodology and technique of Graeco-Arabic studies is also a main area of concern and it is regularly taught in his graduate seminars.

The significance of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement for Arabic letters and Islamic civilization in general led Dimitri Gutas also to investigate its position in the social history of the early `Abbasid caliphate in which it took place. This study led to the publication of Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (London and New York 1998), which looked into the major social, political, and ideological factors that occasioned the translation movement. The social history of intellectual currents in early Islamic civilization, which includes an investigation of the multicultural elements that constituted it, is increasingly becoming the focus of contemporary research worldwide. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture has been translated into seven languages: Italian, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Japanese, and French. The Greek translation won the 2002 Special Honorary Award for the Study of Civilization, awarded by the Greek Society of Letters.

The Greek philosophical texts that were translated into Arabic upon demand by interested scholars during the translation movement led to the development of a strong and long-lived philosophical tradition in Arabic. A considerable amount of the teaching and research effort of Dimitri Gutas has been spent on the study of the Arabic philosophical tradition. General assessments of the state of research are presented in the following articles: “The Study of Arabic Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. An Essay on the Historiography of Arabic Philosophy,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 29 (2002) 5-25, and “The Heritage of Avicenna: The Golden Age of Arabic Philosophy, 1000 - ca. 1350,” in Avicenna and His Heritage, ed. by J. Janssens and D. De Smet (Leuven 2002), 81-97. Dimitri Gutas is on the editorial board of numerous scholarly periodicals publishing on Arabic philosophy, and he is also the chairman of the advisory board of the series Graeco-Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, published by the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative through Brigham Young University Press. He is currently engaged as co-editor and contributor in the new edition of the classic German history of philosophy (Ueberweg. Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie) which will now devote three volumes to Arabic philosophy: Philosophie in der islamischen Welt (Verlag Schwabe, Basel).

Within Arabic philosophy, Gutas has concentrated in particular on its greatest exponent, Ibn Sina (known as Avicenna in the medieval Latin world), on whom he wrote the fundamental Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition. Introduction to Reading Avicenna's Philosophical Works (Leiden 1988). Gutas has continued work on Ibn Sina in numerous articles and is currently engaged in the annotated translation of Ibn Sina's works on the soul. The study of Ibn Sina and other Arabic philosophical texts forms a regular subject of his graduate seminars.