Ancient Commentators on Aristotle

This project makes accessible the period of transition from ancient to medieval philosophy, 200-600 AD. It will have sent to press by November 2007 at least 82 volumes, 77 of Greek philosophy in translation and 5 volumes of explanation, including a 3-volume sourcebook of the philosophy of the period with 350 topics in 60 chapters. The aim is to complete by sending to press a further 28 volumes that will fill the remaining gaps.
The bulk of the philosophy surviving from this period, 15,000 pages of Greek in the standard edition, is in the form of commentary on Plato and Aristotle, but like ourselves they incorporated original philosophical ideas under the guise of commentary on other philosophers. We are translating almost half of this, but also a number of other texts, some of which have been newly identified, either in Greek or in Arabic where the original Greek has been lost.
The commentaries preserve fragments of up to 1000 years of preceding Greek philosophy, much of it otherwise lost, for example fragments of the Presocratic philosophers. They thus provide a panorama of Greek philosophy. The fragments can now be better understood with knowledge of the commentators who preserved them, so as to allow for bias in their selection and emphasis.
The commentaries also influenced the next 1000 years and more of philosophy. How could Aquinas represent Aristotle as accepting a Creator God and an immortal human soul, and hence as safe for Christianity? Because that was how some ancient commentators reinterpreted Aristotle. The idea of impetus in dynamics was hailed by Thomas Kuhn as a scientific revolution of the 14th century Latin West. In fact the idea was used by the commentator Philoponus 800 years earlier in the 6th century and passed through Islam to the West. The same was true of Philoponus' arguments that the universe must have been created, because an infinite past would lead to puzzles about completing and exceeding an infinite number of years. These arguments were not invented by Bonaventure 700 years later, but passed to him from Philoponus through Islam. Galileo mentions Philoponus in his early works more often than he mentions Plato. The idea of an intentional object of awareness is central to modern philosophy of mind, but Brentano picked it up from a tradition that comes from the Greek commentators.
Islamicists are now finding in the Greek commentators the sources of much medieval Islamic philosophy, and identifying unidentified texts, including ones lost in Greek and rediscovered in Arabic translation, and we are translating these.
The project is presenting the history of philosophy as continuous, interesting in its own right at every period, Instead of skipping from Aristotle to Augustine, Aquinas, or Descartes. It is also suggesting that these figures are only understood when one sees the influence on them of the intervening periods.
The love-hate relationship between pagans and Christians is well illustrated by the commentator Porphyry, whose treatise against killing animals reveals a Greek debate more evenly balanced than anything up to the 19th century in Europe, since Augustine selected for Christians only the anti-animal side of that debate.
For students, the commentators offer tough philosophical argument, and the centuries of scrutiny of every word of Plato and Aristotle results in their raising for students far more questions about them than any modern discussion.
Further advances include our indexing of late Greek philosophical word meanings, which are not catalogued by the existing dictionaries, and evidence to settle questions of disputed authorship. Further since many commentaries represent classroom teaching, we learn about ancient teaching methods, and this has helped with interpreting archaeological excavations of certain ancient philosophy schools.