Aristotle: From Antiquity to the Modern Era

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Aristotle

Martin J. Gross is the President of the Martin J. Gross Family Foundation whose purpose is the publication of scholarly works for the benefit of the general public. He has an MA in Philosophy and Politics from Oxford University, and a JD from the University of Chicago. Benjamin Morison is Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University. He has a DPhil in Philosophy from Oxford University and is the author of On Location: Aristotle’s Concept of Place (Oxford University Press, 2002).

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gross • morison • scalvini

ISBN 978-1-911282-75-4

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CS6 Aristotle jacket • 17 sp 120 fl.indd 1

UK£30.00 / US$39.95 ISBN 978-1-911282-75-4

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FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE MODERN ERA

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FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE MODERN ERA

Preface by martin j. gross Essays by benjamin morison and barbara scalvini Aristotle’s influence towers over western philosophy and science. His astonishing range and depth—logic and metaphysics, the physical and natural sciences, ethics and politics—made him indisputably the most important intellectual figure in the western tradition before the modern age. Although he has been studied continuously for more than 2,000 years, his individual works were dispersed, lost, recovered and very gradually reunited. His ethics of virtue is still relevant today. This new volume illustrates the ways in which the Aristotelian corpus has been transmitted over time. In particular, it focuses on the crucial moment when, thanks to the invention of printing, Aristotle’s works became widely available in Latin, Greek, and in vernacular languages in the 15th and 16th centuries. The extraordinary books and manuscripts in this volume, selected from the collection of the Martin J. Gross Foundation, demonstrate just how intellectuals received and interpreted Aristotle. Through commentaries, treatises, lecture courses in schools and above all in the written marginalia of books, the volume reveals the extent of the era’s engagement with Aristotle. It includes essays by leading scholars as well as a beautifully illustrated catalogue section featuring the covers and pages of works on Aristotelian texts from the 13th to the late 17th century, many of which show the annotations of contemporary readers and teachers. Front cover: Columbanus Parent and Antonius Chassé (17th century), Octo libri Physicorum …, France, 1664–65 (detail of cat. 27) Back cover: Aristotle, Opera, end of Prior Analytics, Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1495–98 (detail of cat. 1)

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FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE MODERN ERA

Barbara Scalvini has worked as senior specialist, Department of Books and Manuscripts, Christie’s, London and at rare books dealer Bernard Quaritch Ltd. She has a PhD in 18th Century European History from the University of Turin, and is an authority on the transmission of the classical tradition in the west.

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