Text and Idea of Aristotle's Science of Living Things (TIDA)

Justin has joined the department of philosophy at the Eberhard Karls University, Tübingen, as a postdoctoral researcher in 2023. Prior to that he did his Ph.D. in Philosophy & Greek Philology at Sorbonne-Université, Paris & LMU München, 2020–2023, on “Aristotle’s Parva naturalia: Edition and Interpretation” (https://www.theses.fr/s246284), and spent time as a Procter Fellow at Princeton University in 2019.

Within TIDA he is responsible for the Greek text of Aristotle’s De anima. The aim is to produce the first critical edition of the treatise based on (i) an exhaustive survey of its direct and indirect transmissions (Greek manuscripts, Arabic and Latin translations, ancient commentaries, etc.), (ii) sound philological principles (according to the method often associated with the name of Karl Lachmann, axiomatized by Paul Maas, and successfully applied to Aristotle’s text, e.g., in Rudolf Kassel’s edition of the Rhetoric), and an up-to-date understanding of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature. You will therefore find him busy collating the hundred or so Greek manuscripts which have been preserved until roughly 2026.

Publications

Based on his doctoral dissertation Justin will publish a new critical edition of the Greek text, along with a French translation of the first half of Aristotle's so-called Parva naturalia (De sensu, De memoria, De somno, De insomniis, De divinatione per somnium) in the near future, which will for the first time take into account every extant witness to Aristotle's text.