The Text-History of Aristotle's Metaphyics

There is as yet no critical edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, although Oliver Primavesi and Marwan Rashed are currently working on one, and although there have been excellent recent editions of some individual books of the Metaphysics. The currently standard editions of the whole treatise, by W.D. Ross and Werner Jaeger, report only three manuscripts, E and J and A^b, together with some information from the Greek commentators and from medieval translations. Since Dieter Harlfinger’s groundbreaking study of 1979, it has been known that the α family (the family of E and J) contains manuscripts independent of E and J; that the β family (the family of A^b) contains manuscripts independent of A^b; and that A^b at some point switches from following a β exemplar to following an α exemplar. More recent work, notably by Primavesi, Silvia Fazzo, Pantelis Golitsis, and Mirjam Engert Kotwick, has raised new questions about where A^b switches exemplars, about mutual contamination between the α and β families, about the relationship between manuscripts E and J, and about the relations between the hyparchetypes of families α and β and Alexander’s commentary (extant in Greek for Books A-Δ and in partial Arabic translation, preserved in Averroes’ commentary, for Book Λ).This workshop brings these scholars together to work together on the manuscripts of the Metaphysics, and on Alexander’s commentary and the translations where appropriate, to discuss different proposals for reconceiving the stemma and the text-history of the Metaphysics, and to consider the implications for establishing the text.

Participants will include:

Silvia Fazzo (Università degli Studi di Trento)
Pantelis Golitsis (Aristoteles-Archiv, FU-Berlin)
Dieter Harlfinger (University of Hamburg and Aristoteles-Archiv, FU-Berlin)
Mirjam Engert Kotwick (LMU, München)
Stephen Menn (HU-Berlin)
Oliver Primavesi (LMU, München)
Marwan Rashed (Paris-IV)
Tim Wagner (HU-Berlin)

Program