“Fragments before the whole: the emergence Aristotle's Metaphysics”, in Der Fragmentierte Aristoteles, ed. by Katharina Epstein and Gertjan Verhasselt. Philosophie der Antike. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter

The present paper aims to discuss the practical problem of editing Aristotle’s texts, including fragments, within a more fundamental, theoretical problem: defining the very concept of an Aristotelian text. Since an editor’s ultimate goal is to make them available as precisely as possible, a preliminary question concerning Aristotle’s treatises is: what are they supposed to be? One needs to know exactly what the object is that is being reconstructed: is it a work or a fragment of a work by Aristotle; is it the number of books that he wanted it to be and with the title that he wanted to indicate? Probably not, because Aristotle did not give proper titles to the original texts he wrote and did not articulate them in book form.2 But what is the alternative? This requires an updated theory of Aristotle’s textual history, which I will briefly summarize, based on my own research on Aristotle and on Alexander of Aphrodisias. In the Conclusions, I sum up my proposed reconstruction of an outline of Aristotle’s textual history. Under the Roman empire, the Aristotelian school completed its major undertaking: a canonical Aristotelian corpus of physics and metaphysics, edited and commented upon. Parts of Aristotle’s original texts – including some which are now lost and included in collections of fragments – may have been put into use in a different way and shape than before. Afterwards, the success of the project obliterated the previous state and made it almost inaccessible. Finding traces of that previous transmission state, however small and shadowy they might be, would be very difficult, but highly worth- while. Light would be shed on the Aristotle we do not know – the ‘fragmen- tary Aristotle’ – and the ‘Aristotle’ that we think we know but who is still susceptible to further scrutiny. Working in this perspective could help us get rid of the image of some- thing broken when thinking of Aristotle’s ‘fragments’. So far as we can judge from the extant manuscripts, Aristotle’s works have been carefully preserved, and worms have rarely devoured the only existing copies. Those that are apparently lost have not been fragmented accidentally. They could have been dismembered by the school to constitute (officially, to reconstruct) the struc- turally necessary parts. Potentially, they were there from the outset, in the fourth century BCE. In fact, the emergence of Aristotle’s main corpus was complete by the third or fourth century CE. It was only thereafter that ‘Aris- totle’ became synonymous with scientific knowledge and a guide to theoreti- cal self-awareness for the history of thought yet to come.