Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Aristotelian Metaphysics: Contexts, Issues, Reception – DIDASKALOS

The project “Alexander and Aristotelian Metaphysics: Contexts, Issues, Reception” aims at publishing the first translation in French of the Commentary on the Metaphysics, giving the researchers new numeric tools in order to develop the Alexandrinian hermeneutics, federating and promoting the research about Alexander, his era and his reception. Such a project is nowadays unique on the European and even worldwide scene. We have named it Didaskalos from the function that Alexander occupied at the end of the 2e century: teacher, owner of the imperial chair of Aristotelian philosophy in Athens.
This project is ambitious both from diachronic and synchronic point of view.
First, Alexander’s commentary is the oldest commentary known to us of the Aristotelian Metaphysics. The later commentaries – Greek, byzantine, Arab and Latin – were all modeled after it. Not only does it inherit of the debates of the old tradition of the Peripatos, but both the transmission of Aristotelism to the later Greek philosophy (the Neo-Platonist commentators) and its reception by the medieval, Arab and Latin thoughts are indebted to it.
Second, we must highlight a) the confrontation of Aristotelism with Stoicism, which is the dominant philosophy of the imperial era and b) the first transmission of Aristotelism to a beginning philosophical movement: Neo-Platonism. Plotinus reads Aristotle from the alexandrinian commentaries and the later Neo-Platonists, especially Simplicius, will cross their readings and commentaries of Aristotle and Plotinus, giving for the first time to the pagan philosophy its strong syncretic character. The debates between these three philosophical traditions are intense at the 2e century.
Alexander is at the center of a vast transmission network, both diachronic and synchronic, in the philosophy of this time. Nevertheless, its scope goes far beyond the history of philosophy. He is also a major figure in the scientific thought of his era because of his links with Galen.
Our purpose is therefore a) to delineate the nature and extension of “the Alexander of Aphrodisias’ effect” in the transmission of Aristotelism thanks to a precise and technical translation and a critical apparatus, and, at the same time, b) to give Alexander his right place in the network of philosophy and science in the 2e century. Though no French translation of this fundamental text exists, our project is not simply about translating. Such a translation can only be a by-result of a former microscopic analysis designed to perceive what effects the commentator’s biases can have on his reading of the original Aristotelian text. When the exegete is also the official representative of the Aristotelian philosophy, he gets a synoptic view of his patron’s works, and he connects very distant texts to give a systematic interpretation of the passages to explain. But this scruple of fidelity produces an important shift which is no less than a change in style of the philosophical expression: from the dialectic style of classical Greek philosophy, and in particular of Aristotelian Metaphysics, we move to the systematic and scholastic style of exegesis. Moreover, Alexander's polemics with the contemporaneous philosophers often lead him to some lexical borrowings of which it is necessary to closely measure the effects on the conceptual moves he will transmit to the posterity.