The Project Aristotle One and Many. The Arabic Pseudepigrapha (ArOMa) is a project on the works falsely attributed to Aristotle in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, with a special focus on the Arabic ones.
Main Challenge
This is one of Aristotle’s most famous images, that of the Scuola di Atene by Raffaello. This Renaissance Aristotle inherits from the Middle Ages the idea of authority in every branch of knowledge. We know that this idea derives from centuries and centuries of readers and commentators of the corpus, in Greek, Arabic, and Latin. In the early modern age Aristotle’s authority was shaken to its foundations, and nowadays scholars discuss whether or not his philosophy can be disentangled from his obsolete cosmology. What the scholarship fails to take into account is the following: what has been the impact of the works falsely attributed to him in the rise of Aristotle’s authority? ArOMa aims at providing the basis for answering this question.
Knowledge gap
The works falsely attributed to Aristotle in Arabic are more or less 150. Aristotle features in them as a devote pupil of Plato, as a teacher of kings, as an alchemist, as a geographer, to mention just some examples. No attempt has been made to date to consider all the Arabic pseudo-Aristotelica as a complex, neither their relationship with the Greek late Antiquity has been systematically examined. This is what we plan to study.
What ArOMa will do
We will unravel, classify, and analyse all the Arabic pseudo-Aristotelica. English translations with commentary of the most representative works will be produced.
Groundbreaking effects on the field and beyond
When this uncharted territory will be better known, also the reasons of the rise and subsequent fall of the image of Aristotle I started from will be better known. The Arabic pseudo-Aristotelica are a turning point, worthy to be investigated in itself and for its historical importance; but for the time being it is a jumble of treasures and cheap stuff. It is time to reconsider its importance the history of Aristotelianism, and this is what I would like to do with this project.