philosophy · 12th century · 4 crossings
Hayy ibn Yaqzan
حي بن يقظانḤayy ibn Yaqẓān
A philosophical novel about a child who grows up alone on an island and reasons his way, unaided, to physics, metaphysics and God. Written in 12th-century al-Andalus; rediscovered by 17th-century Europe at exactly the moment Europe was arguing about innate ideas.
The chain
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Philosophus Autodidactus
translated by Edward Pococke the younger edited by Edward Pococke the elder in Oxford
A bilingual Arabic-Latin edition, the son translating at twenty-three, the father supplying the Aleppo manuscript and the preface. Published the year Locke drafted the first versions of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in the same university.
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translated by Johannes Bouwmeester in Amsterdam
Published anonymously in 1672 and reissued in 1701. The translator is unnamed in the book; scholarship places the work in Spinoza's circle, with Bouwmeester the usual candidate, and even the source text, the Latin or the Arabic itself, is argued over.
- Russell 1994
- Ben-Zaken 2011 the Spinoza circle attribution and its limits
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An Account of the Oriental Philosophy
translated by George Keith
The first English version, made from the Latin by the Quaker George Keith, whose movement read the self-taught islander as a parable of the inner light.
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The Improvement of Human Reason
translated by Simon Ockley in London
Translated directly from the Arabic, bypassing the Latin. Eleven years before Robinson Crusoe, whose debt to the book is often suggested and still debated.