Is there a versio vulgata of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Šifāʾ ? On the Hypothesis of a Double Recension of Kitāb al-Madḫal

The present paper concerns the textual tradition of Avicenna’s reworking of Porphyry’s Isagoge (Kitāb al-Madḫal) opening the Logic section of Avicenna’s Book of the Cure (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). The present inquiry, conducted on 59 Arabic manuscripts and on the twelfth-century Latin translation of the work, has as its starting point the observation that the Latin translation, together with 11 Arabic manuscripts and the early indirect tradition of the work, witnesses the existence of a different, shorter, version of some passages of the text than that attested by most of the manuscripts. I shall suggest that one of the possibilities that should at least be considered in the attempt to explain this phenomenon is that of considering the short version of the text as an earlier recension of the text. In the frame of this hypothetical suggestion, the majority of the manuscript tradition would preserve an interpolated text, a versio vulgata that might not correspond to Avicenna’s first version of the text. The existence and diffusion of two different recensions of the work might provide a clue of the compositional and editorial process that Avicenna’s Book of the Cure underwent.