Liber de Causis (The Book of Causes)

of Aristotle under the title Liber Aristotelis de expositione bonitatis purae. 7. Bibliographic note on the title.

Not long thereafter, two Dominican Regent Masters in the Faculty of Theology at Paris challenged the attribution of the De causis to Aristotle. Friar Albert of Cologne attributed the Liber to David the Jew, who is known to contemporary historians as Ibn Daoud or Avendauth (fl. 1150). And Friar Thomas Aquinas, after reading Proclus' Elements of Theology in the Latin translation made in 1268 by Friar William of Moerbeke, concluded that the Liber de causis was translated from an Arabic work based upon Proclus' Elements. 8. Aquinas' discovery of the Neo-Platonic source. Aquinas' discovery effectively eliminated the paternity of Aristotle and Theophrastus but left unaffected Albert's opinion. Furthermore, Thomas' observation that the Liber was translated from an Arabic exemplar did not eliminate the possibility that the text might have been first written in a different language and subsequently translated into Arabic. It could have been written in Syriac, for example, like the so-called Theology of Aristotle, which in fact is an epitome of Plotinus' Enneads.

In addition to the Latin translation, manuscripts exist in Arabic, Armenian, and Hebrew. Bardenhewer opined that Arabic was the original language of composition. His Arabic text was based on the only complete codex then known. 9. Note on Bardenhewer's source material. Subsequently, another Arabic codex was discovered by Professor F. Sezgin. 10. Note on discovery of new manuscripts. The Hebrew translation has been documented by M. Steinschneider. 11. Note on Hebrew manuscript tradition. Much of the disagreement between scholars can be attributed to the incomplete state of the manuscript traditions.

Contemporary historians writing on the origins of the treatise separate basically into two schools: Arabists and Latinists. The