The unnamed teacher

Claim (verbatim)

The unnamed teacher: in the Guide of the Perplexed, naming is a safety and positioning policy, not a bibliography. Maimonides names authorities who are canonical and safely dead (Aristotle, al-Farabi) while his heaviest structural and textual dependence — the Avicennian analysis of necessary and possible existence — goes unnamed, because openly crediting the rival school's living tradition would misposition the work for both its Jewish readers and its Islamic milieu. Measured textual reliance and explicit naming should therefore anti-correlate at the top of the distribution: the most used source is the least named.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Align the Judeo-Arabic Dalalat al-hairin against the corpora of al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and the Arabic Aristotle, normalizing by source size. Primary clause: aligned-reuse volume with Ibn Sina's corpus exceeds aligned-reuse volume with al-Farabi's corpus, despite al-Farabi being named repeatedly in the Guide and Ibn Sina never; the verdict follows this clause. Secondary clause: the Avicennian reuse concentrates in the Guide's treatment of existence and necessity (the preface to part II and its opening chapters).

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: OpenITI machine-readable texts of the Dalalat al-hairin and the Farabian and Avicennian corpora, with KITAB passim alignments.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The Maimonidean naming/reliance inversion is a recognized scholarly observation: clear Avicennian doctrine (the necessary/possible-existence analysis, the proof of God) pervades the Guide, yet Maimonides names al-Farabi as his favored philosopher and never names Ibn Sina as a direct source (SEP; Pines). Not located: any measured text-reuse test of the primary clause -- aligned reuse with Ibn Sina's corpus exceeding aligned reuse with al-Farabi's -- which is genuinely open and possibly falsifiable, since Maimonides also draws heavily and explicitly on al-Farabi; the KITAB/OpenITI alignment is the decidable instrument.

• 'The Influence of Islamic Thought on Maimonides', Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Unnamed Avicennian dependence (necessary/possible existence) while al-Farabi is named and esteemed
• Shlomo Pines, translator's introduction to Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed (University of Chicago Press, 1963) — Maimonides' philosophical sources and his selective acknowledgement

Predictions

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