Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/63

 later times down to the age of Bar Hebraeus (d. A.D. 1286), with whom the literary history of Syriac comes to an end. In the latter part of the eighth century we find Jeshudena bishop of Basra writing an "introduction to logic." Shortly afterwards Jeshubokt metropolitan of Persia wrote on the Categories (cf. Journ. Asiat. May-June. 1906). Hunayn b. Ishaq, his son Ishaq, and his nephew Hubaysh, with some other companions, formed the college of translators established at Baghdad by the Khalif al-Ma’mun to render the Greek and other philosophical and scientific texts into Arabic, a work to which we shall refer again; but Hunayn, who was a Nestorian Christian, was also occupied in making translations from the Greek into Syriac: he prepared, or revised, Syriac versions of Porphyry's Isagoge, Aristotle's Hermeneutica, part of the Analytica, the de generatione et corruptione, the de anima, part of the Metaphysics, the Summa of Nicolas of Damascus, the Commentary of Alexander of Aphrodisias, and the greater part of the works of Galen, Dioscorus, Paul of Aegina, and Hippocrates. His son Ishaq also made a translation of Aristotle's de anima, and it is significant that this treatise and the commentary of Alexander Aphr. now begins to take the most prominent place in philosophical study; the centre of interest is moving from logic to psychology. About the same time the physician John Bar Maswai (d. A.D. 857) composed various medical works in Syriac and Arabic. He, like Hunayn, was one of the intellectual group which the ‘Abbasids