Aristotle, one of the most influential minds of antiquity, was a very prolific writer. He is known to have written over 200 works, but only about 10% of these have survived. Those transmitted through medieval manuscripts go back to his college lectures and were written for his own circle of students. However, he also wrote many works for a wider audience, which were initially far more influential. These lost works survive only in so-called fragments, i.e. in citations in later authors, and in a number of epitomes. So what is preserved today is, paradoxically, not what Aristotle was known for throughout most of antiquity or even what he intended to be known for. The fragments of Aristotle’s lost works are thus essential to understand his philosophy and assess his impact on later generations. Yet the fragmentary works play only a marginal role in modern research on Aristotle. The result is that the Aristotle met in contemporary scholarship is really only the Aristotle of the preserved school writings. The lost works include philosophical dialogues, letters, speeches, poems, doxographical works (on Plato, the Pythagoreans and Democritus), works on logic, ethics, rhetoric, poetry (particularly his collection of Homeric Problems and the elusive second book of the Poetics, which treated comedy), physics, biology, medicine, historical collections (particularly the Constitutions), catalogues (e.g. lists of victors at the Olympic Games and the Pythian Games) and production notes on the dramatic competitions in Athens (the Didascaliae).
The project FragArist aims to develop the definitive critical edition of the fragments of Aristotle and reconstruct, analyze and interpret these lost works. This will be achieved by tackling the following objectives:
(1) To collect, edit, translate and contextualize all the fragments and assess their reliability.
(2) To reconstruct the lost works and trace their reception.
(3) To assess the authenticity of the individual fragments and of the lost works.
(4) To assess the relation of the lost to the esoteric works.
(5) To study and evaluate Aristotle’s philosophical and scholarly method in the lost works.