LECTURE BY MAGNUS BRANDT NIELSEN: GREEK ROOTS, ARABIC BRANCHES: THE CONCEPT OF NATURE IN ARABIC PHILOSOPHY

This lecture examines how the Arabic term ṭabīʿa (“nature”) – which became the standard translation of the Greek phusis – acquired its philosophical meaning during the ninth century Graeco–Arabic translation movement. In pre-Islamic and Qurʾānic usage, the root ṭ–b–ʿ conveyed ideas such as “corrosion,” “sealing,” or “impressing,” referring to divine acts of determination rather than to a formative and internal principle of motion. With the arrival of Greek scientific and philosophical works, especially Aristotle’s Physics, a markedly different conceptual vocabulary for speaking about the natural world entered Arabic. In the lecture, I will place particular emphasis on these Greek sources and on how early philosophers such as al-Kindī (d. 256/873) and Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (d. 313/925) reinterpreted phusis within an Islamic intellectual framework. Their engagement did not simply borrow Greek ideas; it transformed them. In this encounter between Greek natural philosophy, Arabic language, and Qurʾānic theology, ṭabīʿa emerged not only as a translation of “nature,” but as a newly forged philosophical concept.

Magnus Brandt Nielsen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern Denmark and a member of the Quranatura research group. His project investigates the historical development of the Arabic concept of nature up to the fourth/tenth century. He has an academic background in philosophy, the history of religions, and philology, and completed his M.A. in 2024 with a thesis examining conceptions of nature and plants in Platonic thought across Greek and Arabic traditions.