Teaching Aristotle’s Logic in Fifteenth-Century Constantinople

An Introduction to Categories by Georgios Scholarios: Study, Edition, and Translation

Abstract

This paper offers the first edition and English translation of a Byzantine introduction to Aristotle’s Categories. The introduction is transmitted in two primary manuscript witnesses from the fifteenth century: Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, 59.17 and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Barocci, MS. 87. They contain a corpus of scholia composed by Georgios Scholarios in the 1430s, or even early 1440s, and it is most likely that the introduction that precedes the corpus was also written by Scholarios. The paper examines the textual and manuscript sources on which Scholarios relied in composing the introduction.