“The Intellect is a Point and a Circle”: A Case Study in the Textual Relationship of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī’s Kitāb al-Maqālīd and the Longer Theology of Aristotle
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In his ground-breaking monograph Early Philosophical Shiism: The Ismaili Neoplatonism of Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī , Paul Walker has pointed out parallels between al-Sijistānī’s Kitāb al-Maqālīd and the Longer Theology of Aristotle – an augmented version of the Theology of Aristotle preserved mainly in Judeo-Arabic manuscripts and a sixteenth-century Latin translation. This raises the question of whether it is al-Sijistānī who cites the Longer Theology , or the unknown author of the Longer Theology who cites al-Sijistānī, or whether the two rely on a common source. Walker opts for the third solution: a common source used by both al-Sijistānī and the Longer Theology . The present contribution focuses on one of the parallels between al-Sijistānī’s Kitāb al-Maqālīd and the Longer Theology , demonstrates that Walker is indeed correct in postulating such a common source, and shows that this common source contained some of the most significant ideas for al-Sijistānī’s Ismāʿīlī Neoplatonism: the idea that the Word ( al-kalima ) mediates between the Creator (“Originator,” al-mubdiʿ ) and the Intellect, that the Intellect is united with the Word, that the Word is “non-being” ( lays ), and several others. The article comments on the possible nature of this common source and on how the Longer Theology sheds light on the origins of al-Sijistānī’s Ismāʿīlī Neoplatonism.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it