Alexander of Aphrodisias' Quaestiones and PERIPATetic Physics – PERIPATOS

Combining philology, history of philosophy and history of science, the project deals with Peripatetic physics and Alexander of Aphrodisias’ Quaestiones in the context of his own school. How has Aristotle’s model of the Nature become the so-called "paradigm" it has been for Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages? According to the project’s main hypothesis, this is because, after Aristotle, the Peripatetics have renewed, discussed and thus, transmitted Aristotle’s model. This hypothesis implies that for the Peripatetics, Aristotle's epistemic authority was plastic enough to allow scientific and philosophical innovations and to preclude them from being merely iconoclastic. The project aims to offer the first general study of the Peripatetic physics, focusing on three tasks: 1) to deliver the first sourcebook on Peripatetic physics, from Theophrastus to Alexander; 2) to examine their methods of scientific inquiry, by making the hypothesis that the Peripatetic scientific practice and their norms of inquiry formed the signs of belonging to Peripateticism, and that Aristotle’s epistemic authority was more procedural than substantial; 3) to offer a new edition and the first French translation of Alexander’s Quaestiones. Those “School-puzzles and Solutions on Nature” gather 3 books, composed of 69 rather short and heterogeneous texts which all relate to physics and invite to read a philosophy in the making. The project aims to deliver new material and to forge new tools for extending the understanding of a field of knowledge of greatest historical significance, i.e. Peripatetic physics, and the global representation of nature it conveyed.