Is ʿInyan a Technical Term? Evidence from Averroes' De Interpretatione Commentary Tradition in Hebrew

If a technical term is one that conveys a specific scientific or philosophic meaning to its readers, the term ʿinyan would seem not to qualify. It has a large range of meanings (the Peshat website lists eight meanings of the term and another eleven compound terms that include the term ʿinyan) and in translations of Averroes was used to translated at least three distinct Arabic terms (حال, امر, معنى). One of these terms, maʿana, in Averroes' writings took on a specific technical meaning of a form with a relation to a thing (not itself), later rendered by the Latin intentio. Despite some differences in their meanings, the terms maʿana and intentio were clearly taken to be technical terms, to be used throughout various scientific writings. The Hebrew ʿinyan, however, often appears in seemingly casual, non-technical forms. Yet, in some cases, ʿinyan has a clearly identifiable technical sense as a translation of maʿana. The translation and commentary tradition of a key passage at the beginning of Aristotle's De Interpretatione clearly employs ʿinyan in its fully technical sense. Aristotle gives a brief description of the relationship between things, affections of those things on the soul, and the words symbolizing those affections (16a3-8). Averroes' short and long commentaries on this passage took those affections to be maʿānī and the Hebrew translations of those works used the term ʿinyanim. These texts themselves make clear that ʿinyan has a specific technical meaning as an intermediary mental form between spoken word and thing in the outside world. Moreover, a number of gloss-commentaries and marginal comments discuss the term ʿinyan as a technical term and relate it to the De Anima commentaries. In this paper, we shall examine the background of the term ʿinyan in the Hebrew translations of Averroes' commentaries on this section and in the supercommentaries and marginal notes on them to see how the term was used with a very specific, technical meaning, despite its various other meanings in other places.