Tetractys

Abstract

Tetractys was a Greek technical term, specific to the Pythagorean tradition, that the late antique neoplatonist philosophers considered to be the central notion of Pythagorean metaphysics. As the Greek philosophical heritage started to be translated into Arabic, this term also made its way into the new language, resulting in a number of different translations. This paper explores the ways in which the term tetractys was expressed in Arabic and then explained to the medieval islamicate readers. By comparing the ways in which specific authors and intellectual circles coped with a technical term that no longer assumed the philosophical significance it had had in Late Antiquity, I show the vagaries of the Greco-Arabic translation movement. The changing renderings and understandings of this term offers a great opportunity to understand the different factors that influenced the course of translating the Greek heritage into the Arabic world.