Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you

with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the

LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode

on the Eastern Front philosophy in Syriac and Armenian.

Let's say you wanted to read every pre-modern translation and commentary on Aristotle.

How many languages would you need to learn?

Well, obviously Greek, there are dozens of late ancient commentaries on Aristotle,

beginning in the second century AD, if not earlier,

with the work of Aspazius and Alexander of Averdisius.

The Greek commentary tradition arguably peaked with the School of Alexandria in the 5th century,

though as we'll be seeing later in this series, the Byzantine's two contributed numerous Greek

commentaries on his works. Then there's Latin.

Alrighty, Boethius drew on the exegetical productions of Alexandria in his commentaries on Aristotle's logic,

and of course there was the rich medieval tradition featuring such authors as Aquinas and Buridan,

which carried on into the Renaissance.

And you'll definitely need Arabic.

There are extant commentaries on Aristotle from the 10th century Baghdad school,

a mostly Christian group who also included the famous Muslim philosopher al-Farabi.

The greatest of all medieval commentators on Aristotle was the Muslim of

Faroese who lived in 12th century Spain.

He did write in Arabic, but a number of his commentaries are preserved only in Latin or Hebrew,

plus there are Hebrew super-conventaries on his explanations of Aristotle, so you'll certainly

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