One does not need to repeat the oft-stated observation that editing and translating
the epistles of the Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa’) will greatly enhance
our understanding of the pre-Avicennan period’s intellectual history of
the philosophical sciences. Carmela Baffioni, senior research fellow at the Institute
of Ismaili Studies, which sponsors this project, is a leading specialist
on the Brethren, having spent an illustrious career at Naples – twenty-five
items in the bibliography constitute her major contributions, alongside the editions
and translations she has contributed to this series. She has already edited
and translated the epistles on logic in an earlier volume of this series – those
epistles come immediately before the seven that are published here (out of
the seventeen epistles that comprise the second section on the natural sciences)
and are the culmination of the first section on the mathematical sciences.
Source: American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences