Alexander of Aphrodisias

The Greek Aristotelian commentator par excellence, Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c 200 CE) shaped the reception and fortuna of Aristotle’s corpus for centuries to come, summing up centuries of Aristotelian tradition before him. Alexander is the first who is known to have composed running commentaries on whole works, dealing with most of Aristotle’s corpus as it stands now. He is also the last distinctively Aristotelian commentator, bridging the legacy of Aristotle’s ancient school to other schools in late Antiquity and to Middle Age Scholastics, whether in Greek, Syriac, Arabic, or Latin. His running commentaries on Aristotle’s works in logic, physics, and metaphysics have been a source, a model, and a starting point for subsequent Aristotelian scholarship as a whole. Studies on Alexander traditionally developed firstly on a narrower set of topics, including themes in noetics and in logic (see Latin Reception). They then developed on Alexander’s independent treatises. Among his alleged works, On Fate, On Providence, On the Soul, On the Principles of the Universe, and On Mixture, are certainly his; all of them were meant to rebuild the missing parts of Aristotelianism as an all-comprehensive system, and to contrast concurrent Stoic theories (see also Studies of Alexander’s Independent Works). Yet Alexander’s normalizing impact on Aristotle’s system largely escaped attention until the second half of the 20th century, embedded as it is in the whole reception of Aristotle’s works (see Bibliographies). Only recently has scholarship focused on how Alexander’s commentaries, even if lost, still provide the standard understanding for Aristotle’s Organon and theoretical philosophy.