Introduction

Professor Robert Wysnowski from McGill University talks about commentary culture in later Islamic philosophy. He says scholars and philosophers would write commentaries on earlier texts by previous authorities, and then they would write their own new texts. So of those 60, 70, 80 or so major original texts that were written in the centuries by Avocenna and in the centuries that followed Avocenna, we probably have 800 or 900 extant commentaries.