Averroes on Plato's "Republic"

An indispensable primary source in medieval political philosophy is presented here in a fully annotated translation of the celebrated discussion of the Republic by the twelfth-century Andalusian Muslim philosopher.

Ralph Lerner is the Benjamin Franklin Professor Emeritus in the College, and Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of Enlightenment and Maimonides' Empire of Light: Popular Enlightenment in an Age of Belief.

This is a fine translation of a very difficult and important text, lost in its Arabic original but preserved in the awkward fourteenth-century Hebrew translation of Judah ben Samuel. Even in this summary form, the Republic is one of the exceedingly few works of the Platonic corpus to surface in Islamic philosophy, and this paraphrase is an excellent example of Averroes' technique of doing philosophy in commentary form.

It is interesting to note that Plato's tenets were considered profitable also by Averroes, whose world was defined and governed by the Koran.

Because of the importance of Averroes (as a Muslim he is significant for both Platonic and Islamic thought), it is good to have Lerner's new and thoughtful interpretation, with lucid introduction, three helpful appendixes, glossary, and index.