Tiziano Dorandi and Issam Marjani, La tradizione siriaca e araba delle cosiddette Divisiones Aristoteleae. Analisi e commento della versione siriaca (ed. Brock) e delle due traduzioni arabe (ed. Kellermann-Rost)

This paper is devoted to the Syriac and Arabic translations of the Divisiones quae dicuntur Aristoteleae (DA). The discovery and publication of some fragments of an anonymous Syriac translation of the DA sheds new light on the two translations into Arabic, by Theodorus Abū Qurra and Ibn al-Ṭayyib, transmitted in revised and interpolated redactions. The Greek model of the three Oriental translations was close, and possibly identical with that of the Recensio Laertiana. However, the two Arabic translations are attested in a form that prevents the philologist from confidently use them to restore the corrupt passages of the Greek. These translations attest the circulation in late Antiquity of a collection composed of several Greek writings in the form of a “textbook” in all likelihood with didactical purposes. This collection included, under the name of Aristotle, not only the DA, but also abstracts of Peripatetic ethics, among others the treatise De virtutibus et vitiis. The presence of the DA in this collection shows that the application of the dihairaetic method was practiced also in Syriac and Arabic philosophy. The paper is supplemented by the edition of the anonymous Syriac text and English translation of the DA published in 2014 by S. Brock, as well as by the Arabic text of the two versions of Abū Qurra and Ibn al-Ṭayyib edited by M. Kellermann-Rost, here accompanied by the brand-new translation into Italian by I. Marjani.