Metaphysics: Metaphysica (Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus) Book

This volume presents the last and only complete Mediaeval Latin translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics, partly a revision of an older version, partly an original translation, both done by the Flemish Dominican William of Moerbeke in the 13th century. Widely distributed, it has been preserved in more than 200 manuscripts. For the first time in the history of the Latin Aristotle, a still existing Greek manuscript has proved to be the main source used by the translator and contains notes in his hand: the famous 9th-century Codex Vindobonensis phil. gr. 100. The preface unfolds and clarifies the various problems related to the text: Moerbeke's authorship, the text tradition, the Greek sources (among which, besides the text, an intriguing Greek scholion translated by Moerbeke), the two successive stages of the translation -- both used in the commentary of Thomas Aquinas --, and the criteria according to which the critical text has been established. The edition itself, followed by a complete Greek-Latin and Latin-Greek index, provides historians of Mediaeval philosophy with one of the most important Aristotelian texts in the Latin tradition, and will be an indispensable tool for scholarly work in this field.Read More