Abstract

Alexander of Aphrodisias, who began his career as a professor of philosophy in Athens under the reign of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus, ranks among the most influential of the Greek Aristotle commentators. The works attributed to him, part of the vast collection of ancient commentaries on Aristotle that have come down to us from the period between 200 and 600 A.D., constitute a crucial link in the transmission of Aristotelian thought through Hellenism, late antiquity, and the Islamic world, to the Middle Ages. On a smaller scale, the Alexandrian corpus is an invaluable source for our knowledge of the vicissitudes of third-century Aristotelianism. It represents, in fact, the last and finest stage of a strictly Aristotle-oriented Peripatetic tradition, in a time immediately before the Neoplatonists were to merge Peripatetic, Platonic, and Stoic thought in an all-embracing synthesis.