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Mirjam E. Kotwick. Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle's Metaphysics. California Classical Studies 4. Berkeley: California Classical Studies, 2016. Pp. xvi + 340. Paper, $39.95.
This is not a book for the ordinary historian of philosophy. It consists almost exclusively of detailed analyses of the manuscript readings at a few scores of places in Metaphysics A-A and A, confronting the transmitted readings each time with Alexander of Aphrodisias's comments on the relevant passage. The reason why only those books are studied is simple: Alexander's commentary (produced about AD 200) on books E-N was lost before the end of the Byzantine era, but Averroes preserved information about the contents of an Arabic translation of the commentary on book A.
If you are brazen-bowelled (yaA-Kevrepoc;) enough to stomach so much philological detail, this is a rich book, which teaches the reader a lot about the complexities of the tradition of a text as complex as the Metaphysics. Kotwick is very methodical, very good at analyzing both the linguistic and the philosophical consequences of chosing one or another variant at a particular place, and she makes it perfectly clear which theses she argues for and believes to have...