Maimonides’ Shemonah perakim andAlfarabi’s Fuṣūl Muntazaᒼa

This chapter explores Maimonides' references to Alfarabi's Fuṣūl al-madanī and Fuṣūl Muntazaʿa — that is, that is to say, Fuṣūl for the Statesman and Excerpted Fuṣūl, with a focus on the latter in particular. Alfarabi's book comprises about 100 fuṣūl (chapters), which range in length from a sentence or two to a couple of pages but usually consist of a single paragraph. They are too short to be termed chapters in the accepted sense of the word today, in contrast to the eight fuṣūl making up Maimonides' Shemonah perakim, which are genuine chapters. Whether Alfarabi assembled and formulated the material by himself or copied some or all from an earlier work that had already done the job can only be conjectured. Whoever it was that composed and assembled the building blocks out of which the Fuṣūl is put together was familiar with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; that is clear from the contents and terminology. Here, the chapter shows that, although Maimonides refers to ancient and recent philosophers and to ‘many’ other compositions, all the identifiable quotations in Shemonah perakim can be traced to a single source — the well-known Fuṣūl of Alfarabi.