First century Chinese, fifth century Indian, and Arabic documents from the 9th century onwards, contain similar tabular procedures to extract square and cube roots on place-value numeration systems. Moreover, an 11th century Chinese astronomer, Jia Xian, as well as al-Samaw'al, a 12th century Arab mathematician, extracted roots of higher order with the so-called Ruffini-Horner procedure. This article attempts to define a textual method to organize this corpus, by distinguishing relevant criteria for identifying similarities and differences from a historical as well as conceptual point of view. The first part analyses three different states of the descriptions of algorithms in China between the 1st and the 11th centuries, all of which exhibit a definite historical stability. The rewriting which allows one to proceed progressively from one state to the next shows a uniformity in the components of the algorithm, which culminates in procedures of the type Ruffini-Horner. Textual criteria demonstrate a greater affinity of certain algorithms, such as those described by Kūshyār ibn Labbān (ca 1000) with Chinese rather than with Indian texts, which are in turn closer to algorithms described by al-Khwārizmī. Criteria of the same kind link the algorithms of Jia Xian and al-Samaw'al on the one hand, and those of Kūshyār and al-Samaw'al on the other.

This treatise of medicine by Yühannā ibn Sarābiyūn, written in Syriac in the 8th century, translated into Arabic in the 10th century and then into Latin in the 12th century, is a typical example of the transmission of Hippocratic medicine from the Arabic East to the Latin West in the Middle Ages. However, while the complete Latin translation of Gerard of Cremona has reached us, we have only fragments of the Arabic text, dispersed in five manuscripts preserved in four European libraries.

In the first part we shall try to establish the biographical information about the author and the four translators of his treatise from Syriac to Arabic. In the second part we shall study the Arabic fragments of the Paris manuscript and the two Escorial manuscripts, first by examining their language, and then by comparing them to the Latin translation.

The theological foundations of Ghazali's causal theory are fully expressed in the chapter on the attribute of divine power in his al-Iqtiṣād fi al-I'tiqād (Moderation in Belief). The basic doctrine which he proclaims and argues for is that divine power, an attribute additional to the divine essence, is one and pervasive. It does not consist of a multiplicity of powers that produce a multiplicity of effects, but is a unitary direct cause of each and every created existent. In a defense of the doctrine of kasb (acquisition), Ghazali argues (a) that power in all animate creatures is created directly (i.e. without intermediaries) by God and (b) that there is created with it the object of power, normally, but erroneously regarded as its effect: the object of power is in fact directly created by God. It exists with the created power, but not by it. In his critique of the Mu'tazilite theory of the generated act he again denies that created power has any causal efficacy and denies that inanimate things have any causal efficacy. What one normally regards as the effects of inanimate causes are in reality their concomitants, directly caused by divine power.

The discussion of kasb, the longest in the chapter, includes Ghazali's spirited defense of it against possible objections. The defense, however, as will be shown, is not immune against criticism. At the same time, the discussion of kasb, central as it is, has to be understood in the context of the chapter as a whole, whose intricate arguments remain integrated and unified. Hence a brief exposition of the chapter's arguments will first be given, followed by a critical comment on some aspects of Ghazali's defense of kasb. This is then followed by an annotated translation of the entire chapter, a chapter so very basic for the study of Ghazali's position on causality.

In a departure from the tradition of the Neoplatonic commentators of the Organon, the sequence of summaries in the “Bratislava series” insert two treatises between the Prior Analytics and the Posterior Analytics, namely the Resolution (kitāb al-Taḥlīl) and the Sophistical Refutations. And even though the Taḥlīl is concerned with Book 2 of the Topics, it does not deal with dialectic. Instead, it comments on the summary of the Topics that belongs to the Prior Analytics (I, 27–30), while “completing” it. The contents of kitāb al-Taḥlīl and the different titles that the fahāris give it (e.g., fīiktisăb al-muqaddimāt), lead one to realize that it is an addition to the Prior Analytics offering a theory concerning the generation of the premisses of the syllogism, something that may have appeared to Alfarabi as missing from Kitāb al-Qiyās.