The most important innovative aspect of this proposal is that it studied Aristotle as a historian. This sheds an entirely new light on Aristotle as a thinker, since most scholars focus only on Aristotle's philosophy. Yet, his whole life, Aristotle was an avid researcher, fascinated by history and engaged in politics. Studying him as a historian therefore complements the modern primarily philosophical portrayal of him and provides further insight into his influence on later generations. Indeed, Aristotle's works are an important part of our common European cultural heritage and thus remain highly relevant today, especially at a time when Eurosceptic populists question the validity of our European identity. In particular, this project focuses on a part of the heritage that has suffered more in the course of the transmission and is therefore less known.
Another key innovative feature is that the project devoted substantial attention to the working method and general reliability of the authors quoting Aristotle, the purpose of the quotation, the exact boundaries of the fragment. Past scholars tended to consider ancient writers mere compilers, faithfully summarizing their sources. However, the textual reconstruction is much more problematic. Almost all of the fragments of the Constitutions have been taken out of their original context or argument. Indeed, in order to make any inferences about Aristotle’s method, sources, influence, etc., it is necessary to know what the fragment is actually saying. The reliability of a fragment is thus heavily dependent on the function in the context in which it is embedded and strongly varies from one author to the other.
Another original point is that this projects bridged the gap between philology, philosophy and ancient history. The philological-editorial component was the basis for the philosophical and historical analysis. With regard to philosophy, the project assessed how the material collected in the Constitutions served the philosophical conclusions drawn in the Politics and how it related to the historical examples discussed in the Politics. With respect to ancient history, the study of the content contributed to a better understanding of the ancient Greek political system, for which our knowledge otherwise depends largely on inscriptions.
Finally, for the textual constitution, the most spectacular progress concerns the fragments preserved in collections of proverbs, especially Zenobius, which are notoriously poorly edited. Inspection of the original manuscripts (about 45 in total) brought to light countless new readings and several new fragments of Aristotle. Similar progress was made in particular for lexica and scholia.
