Averroes’s “Concession to Avicenna. Introduction, First Edition, English Translation, and Textual Tradition

The “Concession to Avicenna,” also known as the seventh chapter of De substantia orbis, is one of Averroes’s several philosophical attempts to reconcile between the corporeality of the celestial bodies and their eternity. The “Concession” contains a brief and rare nod of approval to Avicenna, which prompted the title under which it circulated. The work, lost in Arabic, survives in Ṭodros Ṭodrosi’s Hebrew translation from 1340, from which Abraham de Balmes’s subsequent Latin translation was made in the early sixteenth century. The present contribution offers, for the first time, an edition of the text in Hebrew and its original Latin translation (before its editorial revision for the 1525 editio princeps), alongside an introduction, a philosophical analysis of the argument, an English translation, and a glossary.