Aristotle Transformed - 2nd Edition by Richard Sorabji (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide.

The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence - uncovered in some of the chapters of this book - that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.

Review Quotes

[A]nyone working in this subject area would be strongly advised to buy and read [this book] ... The amount of scholarship that is surveyed is jaw-dropping, and S[orabji]'s command of detail is impressive.
Classics for All Reviews

This hefty volume of 20 scholarly essays on the history, development, and influence of early Greek Aristotelian commentators is essentially a reprinting of the first edition (CH, Oct'90, 28-0896). For this second edition Sorabji (King's College London, UK) wrote a new introduction of some 40 pages, in which he summarizes and updates the essays and offers some critiques and revised interpretations based on new scholarship of the intervening 25 years. As Sorabji acknowledges, much of the content of the introduction is included and considered in more detail in Aristotle Re-interpreted: New Findings on Seven Hundred Years of the Ancient Commentators (2016), also edited by Sorabji, which is intended as a sequel to Aristotle Transformed. The essays compiled in Aristotle Transformed constitute indispensable scholarship on ancient commentary tradition, but either of the editions would seem sufficient, given the forthcoming Aristotle Re-interpreted. Summing Up: Recommended.
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About the Author

Sir Richard Sorabji is Honorary Fellow, Wolfson College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor, King's College, London, UK. He is the world's leading scholar on the commentators on Aristotle and founder and co-editor of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, published by Bloomsbury. He is also the author of the three sourcebooks on the ancient commentators: The Philosophy of the Commentators, 200-600 AD, vols 1-3.