sehepunkte 25 (2025), Nr. 9

Christian Brockmann / Daniel Deckers / Stefano Valente (Hgg.): Aristoteles-Kommentare und ihre Überlieferung. Wichtige Etappen von der Antike bis in die frühe Neuzeit

The Aristotle commentary tradition can be studied for its own sake or for the sake of editing the Greek text of Aristotle's works. It can be sifted in search of vestiges of the early critical engagement with Aristotle, but it can also be explored to trace how Aristotle's philosophical thought was adopted, and indeed adapted, over the centuries to the point of giving rise to something new. All this and much else can be found in the book under review, which focuses exclusively on the Greek commentary tradition. This research focus implies that the reader will not find essays on the fruits of the critical engagement with Aristotle produced by Islamic philosophers or Latin scholars. This self-imposed limitation should probably have been announced in the book's subtitle to make it clear to the reader that the volume does not deal with the dissemination of Aristotle's philosophy across different languages and cultures, which not only poses a set of new challenges, specific to each language, but also creates the conditions for further outcomes. This research focus notwithstanding, the book shows, with a wealth of detail, how vital the commentary tradition remained all the way to the 16^th century. It also shows how diverse the agenda of the researchers working on the commentary tradition can be when they draw from this vast reservoir of ideas and information.

While a few contributors to the volume approach the Greek commentary tradition as part of their attempt to find indirect evidence for reconstructing the Greek text of Aristotle's works such as the Metaphysics (Oliver Primavesi and Marwan Rashed) or the De caelo (Mai-Lan Boureau), others deal with the segment of the Greek commentary tradition that falls squarely within the boundaries of Late Antiquity in its own terms (Klaus Corcilius, Gyburg Uhlmann, Carlos Steel, Mareike Hauer) or are concerned with its sequel in the Byzantine era (Katerina Ierodiakonou and Stefano Valente) or go even beyond those boundaries (José Maksimczuk and Nikos Agiotis). I cannot do justice to all the good work done in the volume, so I will comment on those essays that strike me as more ambitious in their philological, historical, and theoretical agenda.

The 100-page article by Primavesi is by far the longest and most ambitious essay. It consists of three pieces dealing with Plato's doctrine of the first principles as it is transmitted by Aristotle in Metaph. A 6. A first goal of the article is to establish a new, improved Greek text for Aristotle's account. But Primavesi has at least two other goals on his research agenda. To begin with, he wants to show that the whole debate around the so-called Plato's unwritten doctrines requires a more solid philological foundation. Furthermore, he wants to show that, contrary to what Harold Cherniss claimed, Aristotle is a reliable source of information when he states that, according to Plato, the ideas can be traced back to two principles, namely "the one" and "the great-and-the-small". Aristotle tells us that, for Plato, they are the elements (stoicheia) of the ideas and so they are also the elements of everything else. Primavesi shows that this report finds independent confirmation in a testimony of Speusippus preserved only in the Latin translation of Proclus' commentary on Plato's Parmenides. This passage was known to Cherniss and to the editors of Speusippus' fragments (Tarán and Isnardi Parente). But they doubted its authenticity. Primavesi accepts the Greek retroversion provided by Carlos Steel and shows that when it is read in light of Attic usage of Speusippus' time and in its most natural context - the perception of the Pythagorean reaction against the historical Parmenides - the testimony not only confirms what Aristotle reports on Plato but also attests to a pre-Aristotelian use of the expression "ahoristos duas" (indefinite dyad). Finally, with the help of very careful textual criticism, he casts new light on Eudorus of Alexandria and his critical engagement with Aristotle. Primavesi provides new reasons for Eudorus' interventions on Aristotle's text. Here, too, textual criticism has far-reaching implications for the history of philosophy - most notably the earliest (1^st century BCE) reception of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

Two essays are concerned with the reception of Aristotle's De anima in Late Antiquity. Klaus Concilius offers a historically and philosophically ambitious article in which he traces the main lines of the transformation of Aristotle's De anima from a work on the soul as the principle of living beings to a work on psychology. The reasons for this transformation are complex, but they can be traced back, in one way or the other, to the fact that there was no science of living beings in antiquity after Aristotle. As a result, the link between Aristotle's De anima and his science of living beings was severed very early on. This severance made it possible for ancient Greek commentators such as Themistius, Philoponus, and "Simplicius" to concern themselves with Aristotle's De anima in isolation from Aristotle's science of living beings, with the momentous consequence of looking at the soul as the principle of the psychological or mental phenomena rather than the principle of living beings. The consequences of this severance are still felt today since most interpreters continue to read Aristotle's De anima in isolation from the science of living beings.

The second essay on the commentary tradition on Aristotle's De anima is by Carlos Steel. Carlos Steel has long maintained, with good arguments, that the commentary on Aristotle's De anima which the tradition has attributed to Simplicius was most likely written by a fellow member of the Athenian Academy, Priscian of Lydia. In this essay, Steel brackets the much-disputed questions of authorship in order to offer a new and comprehensive study of the complicated transmission of this work, which was highly regarded among Byzantine and Renaissance scholars. The outcome of this effort is a full study of the direct and indirect tradition of this work ending with a valuable stemma which will be the basis for any future critical edition of this commentary. Such an edition is a desideratum of scholarship given that what was produced by Hayduck does not meet the highest standards of a critical edition.

Four essays are devoted to the Greek commentary tradition beyond antiquity. In particular, two articles deal with the critical engagement with the Posterior Analytics by Byzantine scholars. While Katerina Ierodiakonou offers a study of Eustratius and his account of analysis, Stefano Valente is concerned with Leo Magentinos and his commentary on the first book of the Posterior Analytics. By this time, however, there is very little that is novel or even insightful in the commentary tradition, so we should not approach these works with the expectation of finding new and bright ideas. At the same time, I do not think there is any reason to be apologetic about the lack of originality in these later authors. It is just a brute fact that even the most venerable traditions sooner or later exhaust their vitality.