Aristotle had his own school of followers in antiquity - Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. CE 200) was the most famous and talented of them, Themistius (c. 317-388) probably the last. But the transmission of Aristotle’s work to medieval philosophers was the result of his inclusion in the curriculum of the Neoplatonic schools, since Neoplatonism was the dominant school of philosophy in the ancient world from the third century onwards. The Neoplatonists believed that Aristotle and Plato did not disagree. Their apparent differences were the result of different subject matter: Aristotle concentrated on the world as it appears to the senses, Plato on supra-sensible reality. The study of Aristotle, especially his logic, was thus considered indispensable as a preparation for work on Plato, and it produced a large number of Aristotelian commentaries, a number of which survive. Porphyry (c. 232-305), the first of the commentators, was especially keen to read Aristotelian works in an Aristotelian way; some of his successors tended, rather, to let their underlying Platonism tinge their reading even of his logical works.
The fullest, though not the most direct, medieval heirs of this tradition of Aristotelianism were the Arabic philosophers. The Platonic school at Athens had been closed by Justinian in 529 because it preserved pagan philosophy in an Empire by now strictly Christian. But the other great Platonic school, at Alexandria, remained open until the Islamic conquest in 641: first, its pagan teachers had been willing to compromise with the Christian authorities; then it came to be staffed by Christians. In the eighth and ninth centuries, there was a movement, encouraged by the ‘Abbasid caliphs, to take over into Arabic as much as possible of the Greek texts and learning that survived in Alexandria. The Arabs were helped in this enterprise by Syriac-speaking Christians, who had already translated some of Aristotle’s logic into Syriac, a Semitic language like Arabic (Hugonnard-Roche 2004). The Syriac scholars themselves concentrated on logic and, perhaps as a result of ecclesiastical pressure, favored a shortened logical curriculum, consisting of Porphyry’s Isagoge, the Categories, On Interpretation, and the Prior Analytics up to the end of I.7 (avoiding, therefore, modal syllogistic) (Gutas 1999). But the translation movement into Arabic was not restrained by such boundaries, encouraged by such men as al-Kindl (c. 801-866), the first of the Arab philosophers. Al-Kindl, as a result of translations he had commissioned and other ones, was thereby able to read considerable amounts of Aristotle, including his Metaphysics, although he was more deeply influenced by the Plotinian material transmitted under the misleading title of The Theology of Aristotle. The Baghdad Peripatetics, such as al-FarabI (c. 870-950/951) and his pupil, the Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi, studied almost the whole Aristotelian corpus in detail, and produced both short, epitome-type commentaries and longer ones (e. g., al-FarabI on On Interpretation), which comment on the text section by section, looking in detail at the philosophical difficulties it raises, in the manner of the late ancient commentators (Gutas 1988; Pasnau 2010, Appendix B.3).
The way in which Aristotle was studied changed for ever in the mainstream Arabic tradition with Avicenna (before 980-1037). Although Avicenna did write a section-by-section commentary on Aristotle, which has been lost, his main works are all philosophical encyclopedias, longer or shorter, complex or more simple, in which he puts forward his own understanding of Aristotle. Although he usually follows the divisions of Aristotle’s work (dedicating separate books, or chapters, to physics, metaphysics, and the soul, e. g.), what he provides, by conscious contrast with the Baghdad Peripateticians, is not Aristotle’s doctrine, understood with the help of the late ancient commentary tradition, but a coherent philosophical system, with many original elements, strongly influenced by Aristotle. For most Islamic writers, Avicenna replaced Aristotle as the primary philosophical authority (although in logic there was a further move, in which Avicenna was left behind too, and the subject was taught through independent text-books) (Street 2004, 2008, Sect. 1). The main, and as yet little investigated, philosophical tradition everywhere except in the Islamic West sought to combine Avicennian philosophy with kalam, the Islamic tradition of theological speculation. Independent study of Aristotle ceased and translations of his works did not circulate (Gutas 2002). In the West (Islamic Spain and the Maghreb), an interest in Aristotle’s texts, in the line of al-FarabI, grew up in the twelfth century. Its greatest exponent was Averroes (c. 1126-1198). Averroes made a series of paraphrase commentaries and short compendia of almost all Aristotle’s works, and he wrote detailed, section by section commentaries on five works, including On the Soul and the Metaphysics. Averroes’ lifetime’s work of commentary is the last flourish of any but very indirect Aristotelianism in the Islamic Arabic tradition. It was almost totally forgotten in Islam until modern times, but it had a profound effect on Jewish philosophy and Christian Latin philosophy.
Until the end of the twelfth century, medieval Jewish philosophy was written in Arabic and its exponents worked within a broadly Arabic (as well as Jewish) culture. Although earlier Jewish philosophers had been influenced by Neoplatonism, it was not until Abraham b. Daud (c. 1160) and Maimonides (d. 1204), both of whom were educated in Muslim Spain, that Jewish thinkers began to look at Aristotelianism as the major philosophical system, to be reconciled or distinguished from their own views. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, Jewish philosophy was carried on most vigorously in Hebrew, especially among the communities in southern France.
There was an Aristotelian translation movement among these Jewish scholars, from the Arabic into Hebrew, but the texts they translated were not (with two exceptions: the Meteorologica and On the Soul) Aristotle’s own, but Averroes’ commentaries, all of which (except perhaps for the long commentary on On the Heavens) were put into Hebrew; also translated were some of al-Farabl’s short expositions of Aristotle (Zonta 1996; Pasnau 2010). This preference for an indirect approach to Aristotle has been attributed to the influence of a letter from Maimon-ides to Samuel ibn Tibbon, in which he describes Aristotle’s works as ‘‘the roots and foundations of all the sciences,’’ but also remarks that they cannot be understood with the help of commentaries, by Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, or Averroes (Harvey 1992). But Maimonides did not say that they should neglect the texts themselves altogether in favor of the commentaries: maybe there were no Arabic versions of Aristotle’s texts themselves available to them to translate. In any case, the Jewish writers made the shorter texts of Averroes and al-FarabI themselves the subjects of ‘‘supercommentaries.’’
By contrast with Arabic-speakers, the Greeks were the direct inheritors of the tradition of the late ancient schools, and there was no problem of translation for them. The basic course of Aristotelian studies was, however, quite restricted, including just Porphyry’s Isagoge, the Categories, On Interpretation, and the Prior Analytics 1.1-7 (as in the Syriac schools) and the Sophistical Refutations 1-7, and extracts from the Meteorology and On Generation and Corruption. In logic, the tradition of ancient commentary was continued by scholars like Photios in the ninth century and Michael Psellos and John Italos in the eleventh century. In the twelfth century, Eustratios and Michael of Ephesus expanded the range of Aristotelian commentary. Michael wrote commentaries on parts of the Ethics and Metaphysics, on various of Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy and on the Politics; Eustratios wrote on parts of the Posterior Analytics and of the Ethics. All these commentaries reuse a great deal of old material - just as had been done in the ancient schools. Indeed, one form of Byzantine commentary consists simply of marginalia collected from a variety of sources, with an introduction added. But twelfth-century writers like Eustratios and Michael drew this type of material to make an integral running commentary on the text. The tendency of the Byzantine commentators to base themselves on earlier writers, and ultimately the ancient tradition, makes it a difficult matter to work out the respects in which they contributed their own thoughts (lerodiakonou and Borje 2008).
Medieval Latin philosophers had two strands of access to Aristotle independent of Arabic philosophy. The first strand was due to the work of one man, Boethius (d. 524/526), a philosopher who lived in Ostrogothic Italy but, thanks to his aristocratic background, knew Greek fluently. He translated all of Aristotle’s logical works (except the Posterior Analytics - or, at least, his translation does not survive) into Latin. These translations came only gradually into circulation in the Middle Ages: the Categories, De interpretatione, and Porphyry’s Isagoge by the ninth century; the Sophistical Refutations, Prior Analytics, and Topics during the twelfth century. Boethius’ translations of these works remained standard until the end of the Middle Ages. Boethius also wrote widely-read commentaries on the logical texts, which drew on the tradition of interpretation in the late ancient Platonic schools, especially on Porphyry (see Marenbon 2009). The second strand was due to the work of various translators, working in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Through the work of the twelfth-century translators (the best known was James of Venice), some of Aristotle’s nonlogical works became available, in translations direct from the Greek, whole or part, by the early thirteenth century. The most important thirteenth-century translator, William of Moerbeke (d. 1286), produced new or revised translations, from the Greek, of the whole Aristotelian corpus, and his versions became standard, except in the case of the logical works translated by Boethius. Before William’s work, however, Latin thinkers had benefited from the third, Arabic-dependent strand of access to Aristotle. In the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, various nonlogical works of Aristotle’s were put into Latin, in whole or part, from their Arabic versions. These translations would all be superseded by Moerbeke’s ones from the Greek, and so this side of the Arabic strand was of limited importance. By contrast, the translation into Latin in the same period of parts (principally, the Metaphysics and On the Soul) of Avicenna’s largest encyclopedia commentary, the Shifa’, and of many of Averroes’ commentaries, including the long commentaries on the Metaphysics and On the Soul, had an enormous influence on Aristotelianism in the later Middle Ages. Although - mostly thanks again to William of Moerbeke - a selection of ancient commentaries on Aristotle became available in Latin, Boethius’ role in introducing, explaining, and placing Aristotle’s logic in context was played, for the nonlogical works, by Averroes (who was called, simply, the “Commentator”) and, in a more general way, by Avicenna (see Pasnau 2010, Appendix B.1 and B.4).
Despite this debt to the Arabic world, the development of the Aristotelian tradition there could hardly differ more sharply from the ways in which Aristotle was studied in the Latin West. From the beginning, Aristotle’s texts were central to the school curriculum, and they were commented on closely. Before c. 1200, when only Aristotle’s logic was known, the study of logic - the central subject of the school curriculum - was based around these works (along with some by his translator, Boethius). From about 1250, the Arts Faculties of the universities adopted an Aristotelian curriculum, in which knowledge was divided according to his different works, and the study of each subject was the study of Aristotle’s text. This intensive study of the Aristotelian texts is witnessed by an enormous number of medieval Latin commentaries on Aristotle, usually designed for, or the products of, classroom teaching. From the ninth to the eleventh centuries, this commentary material usually took the form of marginal and interlinear glosses in manuscripts of the texts. From the twelfth century a large number of independent commentaries are found on the Categories, On Interpretation, and Sophistical Refutations. Normally they are anonymous, and very often survive in just one manuscript - the record of a particular teacher or student’s work, rather than a text disseminated in written form. In the case of the Categories and On Interpretation (and also Porphyry’s Isagoge), Boethius had written commentaries which drew on the ancient Neoplatonic tradition of commentary. These were, initially, very important sources for the twelfth-century commentators, although they soon started to develop ideas and discuss problems unthought of by Boethius (Marenbon 1993/2000). There was an important change in the most common form of Aristotelian commentary in the early thirteenth century - the period when the complete Aristotelian corpus was beginning to be studied and then became the basis of the Arts curriculum. Aristotelian commentaries began to be written in the form of quaestiones. These quaestiones would very often keep close to the text, and the solutions represent the Master in question’s view of Aristotle’s meaning, but they also gave the opportunity for ideas and problems to be raised which reflected current debates but were linked only loosely to the ancient text. There were, however, some important thirteenth-century commentaries in other forms. Albert the Great followed Avicenna in producing his own, discursive reconstructions of Aristotelian doctrine. Aquinas followed Averroes (and Boethius) in writing a series of detailed, sentence by sentence commentaries on Aristotle.
Aristotle formed the basis of the Arts curriculum up to and beyond the Middle Ages in Latin Europe. Even among those who consciously opposed scholastic modes of thought, there was a lively Aristotelian tradition, and a number of Averroes’ commentaries were translated for the first time (from the Hebrew) in that monument to Renaissance Aristotelianism, the Juncta(s) edition of 1550-1552 on Aristotle’s works with Averroes’ commentaries.
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