ARISTOTELIANISM AS A COMMENTARY TRADITION

Abstract

Aristotelian studies in the second half of the twentieth century underwent a decisive change: after two thousand years of travelling together, the fortuna of the Master and that of his Greek commentators began to follow separate paths. This was certainly progress – indeed, necessary progress, as we can now see when taking stock of the twentieth century’s arguments about the very meaning of interpretation, with particular regard to the interpretation of written texts as a primary philosophical activity. The crisis (if we may term it as such) started in the study of Aristotle himself – his Greek commentators did not yet constitute an independent field of research. Various intellectual currents were involved. Prominent among these were nineteenth-century advances in philological and historical research, and the analytic tendencies that progressively influenced Aristotelian studies in the twentieth century. A decisive part was played by the editorial enterprises sponsored in the nineteenth by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. Within a relatively short period of time two fundamentally important works appeared: the standard critical edition of Aristotle’s complete works directed by I. Bekker (1831-1870),1 promoted by F. Schleiermacher;2 and that of the