Richard Sorabji (Editor)
Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence.
London: Duckworth, 1990. First edition. 0715622544 ix/545 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.75" x 9.75", is bound in mauve cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book displays very light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Interior is clean and bright. Illustrated with frontispiece reproduction of bronze plaquette "Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias". Dust jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the Aristotelian commentators. Five are new, four are translated from French or German for the first time, five are reprinted with substantial revisions.
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 chapters of the book --that they exert on later philsophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they presented Aristotle in a forme that made him acceptable to the Catholic 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."