A Vocabulary of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle: Combining the GreekEnglish Indexes from the Eponymous Series Spanning Works from the 2nd Century CE to Late Antiquity

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

An astounding project of analysis on more than one hundred translations of ancient philosophical texts, this index of words found in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series comprises some 114,000 entries. It forms in effect a unique dictionary of philosophical terms from the post-Hellenistic period through to late antiquity and will be an essential reference tool for any scholar working on the meaning of these ancient texts. As traditional dictionaries have usually neglected to include translation examples from philosophical texts of this period, scholars interested in how meanings of words vary across time and author have been ill served. This index fills a huge gap, therefore, in the lexical analysis of ancient Greek and has application well beyond the reading of ancient philosophical commentaries. Bringing together the full indexes from 110 of the volumes published in Bloomsbury's Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, McKirahan has combined each word entry and analysed how many times particular translations occur. He presents his findings numerically so that each meaning in turn has a note as to the number of times it is used. For meanings that are found between one and four times the volume details are also given so that readers may quickly and easily look up the texts themselves.

Reviews

This is a really useful resource for philologists, translators, and students of ancient philosophy. It is also an interesting meta-project, providing information about the sorts of choices and preferences made by translators of individual volumes. This is not a dictionary as such, because it goes beyond what a dictionary can do in what it reveals about modern scholarship on the commentators on Aristotle. * Greece & Rome *

Author Bio

Richard McKirahan is E.C. Norton Professor of Classics and Professor of Philosophy, Pomona College, USA. He has published widely on ancient philosophy and science, including Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 8.6-10 (Bloomsbury, 2001), Philoponus: On Aristotle Posterior Analytics 1.1-8 (Bloomsbury, 2008) and Philoponus: On Aristotle Posterior Analytics 1.9-18 (Bloomsbury, 2012).