This is an excellent book in an excellent series. I keep on reading the books in this series waiting for the editors to trip up by publishing something that is not quite up to the mark, but it is a waste of time, the standard is consistently high and both they and the publisher are to be congratulated for having made such a sterling contribution to the discipline. Those of us who work in Islamic philosophy, and no doubt science also, would be at a severe disadvantage without this series.

As regards the book itself, the thesis is quite clear and often enunciated. It is a mistake to see ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Bāgdādī as an unoriginal thinker symbolic of a period of intellectual stagnation in the Islamic world. He is often taken to represent the decline of Islamic culture, a period where the exciting developments in philosophy and science were largely in the past and the main effort lay in discussing earlier work and codifying previous discoveries. The author does this convincingly, and it has to be said that this sort of approach could be taken to virtually any of the major Islamic thinkers of this period who have been written off, since their work is always more interesting than a casual glance would suggest.

The book starts with a long discussion of the state of play up to the time of al-Bāghdādī as far as Aristotle's Metaphysics was concerned, and especially its reception by al-Kindī, al-Fārābī and most important of all Ibn Sīnā. Then there is an intellectual biography of al-Bāghdādī, which is very well done indeed, and the last part of the book is an account of his Book on the Science of Metaphysics, which is the real focus of the whole book: al-Bāghdādī as a metaphysical thinker. Bonadeo argues plausibly that his approach was to return to what he saw as the original source of philosophy, the Greeks, and their most accurate commentators within the Islamic tradition, which did not include Ibn Sīnā. He rightly observed that Ibn Sīnā was far too imaginative an interpreter of Aristotle to be a faithful guide to his philosophy, and this was also a problem for Ibn Sīnā’s approach to medicine. He much preferred Galen over Ibn Sīnā, a rare move at a time when the influence of Ibn Sīnā's medical work reigned supreme in much of the Islamic world, and in due course not only the Islamic world. We tend to see the thirteenth century as the period when everything started to go downhill in Islamic intellectual life, yet here we see an original thinker, someone who was not at all reluctant to take on the major authorities of his time, in order to establish what he thought was the best approach to both philosophy and medicine. Strangely enough, what makes al-Bāghdādī an original thinker was his enthusiasm for much earlier thinkers – the Greeks – just like his contemporary Ibn Rushd, whom he seemed not to know, and like so many more modern philosophers. A return to the past is often not a stale and rigid formula but a way of breathing new life and strength into a discipline which has gone on a path that observers may feel has exhausted its initial impetus.

Bonadeo sorts out the references to original texts and the existing manuscripts of al-Bāghdādī in an impressive manner. By the end of the book there is nothing that the reader does not know about the central text she is describing, its various versions and philosophical sources. I found the main argument a bit weak, though. Certainly she establishes that al-Bāghdādī is an interesting thinker and far more so than is often claimed by those who lazily dismiss the intellectual life of this period. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the main line of argument the thinker pursues is a general scepticism of Ibn Sīnā and contrasting enthusiasm for al-Kindī and al-Fārābī, rather unusual for the time. We do not get much sense, however, of any particularly original observations established by al-Bāghdādī apart from this wish to get closer to what he saw as the sources of philosophy. Although both Bonadeo and Gutas suggest that al-Bāghdādī was committed to the single truth theory, like Ibn Rushd, this is surely no more than an acceptance of the leading argument of al-Fārābī, sketched out more crudely by al-Kindī, that religion and philosophy do not establish different truths in contrast to each other, but they refer to the same truth, albeit in different ways. This is very much a thesis for which al-Fārābī argued, and it came to have a huge influence in Islamic and Jewish philosophy, particularly for Ibn Rushd and Maimonides. If anything critical can be said about this book it is that the focus is firmly on the history of philosophy rather than on philosophy itself, and one of the results of this is that it tends to be repetitive. History of philosophy is mainly about influence, and the linking of al-Bāghdādī's writings to other thinkers is a constant fascination of the author; this rather works against the view that he is an imaginative thinker. We do gain a nice understanding of the flavour of the times, and the refusal of al-Baghdadi to go along with current intellectual fashion is impressive and well worth stressing. It is certainly frequently mentioned in this very useful book.