The Latins saved the wizard, the Arabs the sage

Claim (verbatim)

Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist credits al-Kindi, the first philosopher of the Arabs, with a bibliography running to some two hundred and forty titles. What survives in Arabic is a sliver, and it hangs overwhelmingly on one book: the Istanbul codex Aya Sofya 4832, noticed by Hellmut Ritter in the 1930s, which carries the bulk of the extant philosophical treatises including On First Philosophy (Abu Rida's edition; Adamson and Pormann's 2012 English census and translation). But a separate Kindian stratum survives with no Arabic text at all, only Latin: De radiis, the theory of stellar rays underlying learned magic (edited by d'Alverny and Hudry, 1974); De aspectibus, his optics (Björnbo and Vogl, 1912); De gradibus, the arithmetic of compound-drug potency that Gerard of Cremona translated; the Liber de quinque essentiis (Nagy, 1897). The two filters kept two different men. Post-Avicennan Arabic philosophy had little classroom use for al-Kindi, and his corpus contracted to a single library's accident; the twelfth-century translators of Toledo and its orbit were shopping for operative science - astral causation, optics, pharmacological computation - and swept exactly the shelf the Arabic tradition was letting drop. So Latin Europe preserved al-Kindi the magus while the Islamic world preserved al-Kindi the metaphysician, and the union of two mutually indifferent selections is most of what we have of him.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: matching the Fihrist's al-Kindi roster (Flügel's edition; Dodge's translation) against the modern census in Adamson-Pormann and the named editions, the works extant complete in any language will number under 25% of the Fihrist's titles; at least 4 works will survive complete only in Latin, of which at least 3 belong to the operative shelf (stellar rays, optics, pharmacological degrees); and more than half of the extant-in-Arabic philosophical treatises will depend on the single codex Aya Sofya 4832 (primary clause: the conjunction of the >=4 Latin-only works with the operative-shelf share; the verdict follows it); complete-only-in-Latin permits Arabic fragments or quotations, and the test voids if the Fihrist entry cannot be resolved to at least 150 discrete titles.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Fihrist's al-Kindi book-list (Flügel; Dodge) joined to the survival census in Adamson-Pormann, The Philosophical Works of al-Kindi (2012), with d'Alverny-Hudry 1974, Björnbo-Vogl 1912 and Nagy 1897 - a survival-share census with channel and genre classification.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The Latin-only operative stratum is a printed roster with named editions - De radiis (d'Alverny-Hudry), De aspectibus (Bjoernbo-Vogl), De gradibus (Gerard of Cremona's version), De quinque essentiis (Nagy) - and the two-filter story is stated in the modern census: Adamson-Pormann and Adamson's monograph describe the Arabic philosophical corpus's dependence on the single codex Aya Sofya 4832 and the survival of the operative works only in Latin. The primary conjunction (>=4 Latin-only, >=3 operative) is therefore already stated-and-guaranteed; only the exact Fihrist-denominator percentage remains as arithmetic, and it is not the primary clause.

• P. Adamson & P.E. Pormann, The Philosophical Works of al-Kindi (Karachi, 2012), introduction
• P. Adamson, Al-Kindi (New York, 2007)
• M.-T. d'Alverny & F. Hudry, Al-Kindi: De radiis, Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litteraire du Moyen Age 41 (1974)
• A. Bjoernbo & S. Vogl, Alkindi, Tideus und Pseudo-Euklid: Drei optische Werke (Leipzig, 1912)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.