Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Aristotle: From Antiquity to the Modern Era
Author: SCALVINI BARBARA
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 01/04/2021
Imprint: GILES
Price: $75.00
Publishing status: Active
Examines the ways in which the Aristotelian corpus has been transmitted over time, focusing on
one crucial, extended moment: the moment when, thanks to the invention of printing, Aristotle’s
works became widely available.
Aristotle towers over Western philosophy and science as no other single person does. As they
have come down to us, Aristotle’s works comprise a veritable encyclopedia of philosophy and
logic, the physical and natural sciences, ethics and politics. Aristotle’s astonishing range and depth
made him indisputably the most important intellectual figure in the Western tradition before the
modern age. Although he has been studied continuously for more than two-thousand years, his
individual works were dispersed, lost, recovered, and very gradually reunited. The physical
transmission of the Aristotelian corpus was a long, complicated, uncoordinated process – not one
chain of transmission but many. From the Roman Empire, through the mediation of Arab and
Jewish scholars, to the western Middle Ages and scholasticism and up to the cusp of modernity in
the late 15th century, Aristotle’s works were copied and recopied by scribes in Greek, Arabic,
Hebrew, and Latin before finally becoming available again in their original Greek.
The volume illustrates the ways in which the Aristotelian corpus has been transmitted over time.
In particular, it focuses on one crucial, extended moment: the moment when, thanks to the
invention of printing, Aristotle’s works became widely available in Latin, Greek, and even in
vernacular languages in the late 15th and 16th centuries. At that moment, Aristotle’s authority
comes under increasing scrutiny as the new science and philosophy of early modern Europe chart
different courses for the future. However, Aristotle is not only an obstacle to be overcome, he
also serves as a bridge to the new age especially in the work of Jesuit philosophers and scientists.
One way or the other, Aristotle had to be dealt with. He could not be avoided.
The extraordinary books and manuscripts in this volume, selected from the collection of the
Martin J. Gross Foundation, demonstrate just how intellectuals of the time received and wrestled
with Aristotle. Through commentaries, treatises, lecture courses in schools, and above all in the
written marginalia of books, the volume reveals the extent of the age’s engagement with
Aristotle. Many of these books and manuscripts have never before been studied, so this is an
important invitation to reassess the impact and influence of Aristotle at a point in time when
much contemporary scholarship chooses to ignore him.
70 colour illustrations
ISBN: 9781911282754
Dimension: 279mm X 203mm