Timo Zarakovitis

I am Timo Zarakovitis, a new PhD at KU Leuven in the MECANO project. I have started interdisciplinary research on the canonicity of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophy by analysing quotation with DH approaches. It is the aim of this research to build a database of these authors being quoted in the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca and to speak about the history of philosophy and canonization on the basis of this corpus, which spans from the second century CE until the Byzantine period.


The philosophical canon and the art of (mis)quoting Plato and Aristotle in the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca

It is widely assumed that, at least from Iamblichus (mid 3rd–mid 4th century AD) onwards, in the Platonic schools of late antiquity philosophical education was organised around a canon of philosophical texts with works by Aristotle and Plato at the core. It is unclear what role this canon played in actual school practice and what limits it imposed on the circulation and knowledge of non-canonized Platonic and Aristotelian works. This project’s goal is to complement the ancient Platonists’ self-understanding of their philosophical canon with data generated by the study of citations and quotations of Plato and Aristotle in the Greek commentaries on Aristotle (most of which were written by Platonists). The project will combine the statistics of the texts and passages quoted in the largest philosophical corpus extant from antiquity (Commentaria in Aristotelem graeca or CAG) with a qualitative and conceptual analysis of selected passages.