Ancient Commentators on Aristotle

Abstract

In the first century bce, the previously unknown lecture notes that we now know as Aristotle’s works were rediscovered, and from then until the end of antiquity they received close attention from philosophers. Both committed followers of Aristotle and Platonists who held that Aristotle was broadly in agreement with Plato wrote commentaries on his works. For the later Platonists in particular, writing commentaries on Aristotle (as well as Plato) became an established way of doing philosophy. Although some commentaries are lost and others survive only in fragments, a substantial number of often lengthy commentaries survive, filling twenty-three large volumes in the standard collection of the Greek texts. To these we can add the Latin commentaries of Boethius and more recent discoveries both in Greek and in Arabic translation. The commentaries are valuable for a number of reasons: for their interpretations of the fine details of Aristotle’s texts, for the philosophical contributions they make to the topics they discuss, and for the information they preserve about earlier philosophers whose works are otherwise lost.