8 - Peripatetics

Summary

Knowledge of Peripatetic philosophy between 100 bce and 200 ce has both increased and become more accessible in the last forty years. The three volumes of Moraux’s magisterial Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen appeared in 1973, 1984 and (posthumously) in 2001. Those writings of Alexander of Aphrodisias that survive only in Arabic, and which provide information not only about Alexander but in many cases about his predecessors too, have become more easily available in translations into European languages, and some of the works that survive in Greek are now available in annotated English translations. Fragments of Alexander’s Physics commentary have been identified in scholia in a Paris MS and have provided further evidence, if such were needed, of the tendentiousness with which Simplicius treated the earlier commentator. Fragments of a previously unknown commentary on the Categories have been identified in the Archimedes palimpsest. An inscription has given us Alexander’s full name as a Roman citizen – Titus Aurelius Alexander – and the first solid evidence that the teaching post to which he was appointed by the emperors was indeed located in Athens, and that he used the title ‘successor’ (of Aristotle). It has become increasingly clear that debates among Peripatetics in our period are significant not only as the background against which later Platonists were subsequently to read Aristotle’s works, but also in highlighting issues in the interpretation of Aristotle for contemporary scholarship.