Towards a Textual History and Reconstruction of Alexander of Aphrodisias’s Treatise On the Principles of the Universe

Among Alexander of Aphrodisia’s works, a key-role is played by his treatise On the Principles of the Universe. It contains Alexander's exegesis of Aristotle's theory of the unmoved mover, as in Metaphysics Lambda and in Physics VIII. Its original Greek text is completely lost, but a 6th-century Syriac version and two 10th-century Arabic ones are still extant. All these versions have been already published, and two of them have been rendered into modern languages (English, French, Italian) in the last ninety years, but a really deep textual comparison among them, aiming at the reconstruction of the lost Greek text, has not yet been made. Usually, a key-role is given to the second, later Arabic version of it, mostly since it is more complete than the other ones. Here, a philological re-examination of the history of the textual transmission of Alexander’s work is given, and some new conclusions about it are suggested, according to which the role of the first Arabic version, and that of the Syriac one in particular, are strongly revaluated.