This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide.

The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence – uncovered in some of the chapters of this book – that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of contributors
1. The ancient commentators on Aristotle (Richard Sorabji)
2. Review of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Karl Praechter)
3. The earliest Aristotelian commentators (Han B. Gottschalk)
4. The school of Alexander? (Robert W. Sharples)
5. Themistius: the last Peripatetic on Aristotle (Henry J. Blumenthal)
6. The harmony of Plotinus and Aristotle according to Porphyry (Pierre Hadot)
7. Porphyry's legacy to logic: a reconstruction (Sten Ebbesen)
8. How did Syrianus regard Aristotle? (H. D. Saffrey)
9. Infinite power impressed: the transformation of Aristotle's physics and theology (Richard Sorabji)
10. The metaphysics of Ammonius son of Hermeias (Koenraad Verrycken)
11. The development of Philoponus' thought and its chronology (Koenraad Verrycken)
12. The life and work of Simplicius in Greek and Arabic sources (Ilestraut Hadot)
13. Neoplatonic elements in the de Anima commentaries (Henry J. Blumenthal)
14. The Alexandrian commentators and the introductions to their commentaries (L. G. Westerink)
15. Boethius' commentaries on Aristotle (James Shiel)
16. Boethius as an Aristotelian commentator (Sten Ebbesen)
17. An unpublished funeral oration on Anna Comnena (Robert Browning)
18. The Greek commentators on Aristotle's Ethics (H. P. F. Mercken)
19. Philoponus, 'Alexander' and the origins of medieval logic (Sten Ebbesen)
20. Aristotle's doctrine of abstraction in the commentators (Ian Mueller)
Note on the frontispiece
Index locorum
General index