Esordi, raccordi, «titoli» in Aristotele. I trattati del corpus e i libri della «Metafisica»

[Machine translation] Did Aristotle want to distinguish and mark his various treatises by indicating them by means of titles? Or if not, how else did you conceive of the possibility of relating the various researches that you were presenting? This investigation, conducted at the beginning with extremely accessible methods, and then declined on the more specialized case, that of Metaphysics, asks: is there, in Aristotle, an authorial system of titles? And if it isn't there, why? That is, why is it that precisely in Aristotle, whose books will become the object of study and work par excellence for posterity, there is no reference to the 'book' as such? The answer is that Aristotle, a great innovator in the genre of philosophical treatise, has not yet invented titles. In this he is still on the watershed between classical Greece and the Hellenistic culture of the book: while leaving us with the power of the first encyclopedia of philosophical sciences in history, however, he does not think of himself as a collection of books, but as of an intellectual in continuous research who methodically links his studies in order to exhaust as much as possible a well-defined program.