Protrepticus: A Reconstruction of Aristotle's Lost Dialogue
by D. S. Huchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson
The Protrepticus was an early work of
Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but
it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of
philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages
and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial
fragments of it have been preserved in several works by Iamblichus of
Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator.
On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and
excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to
reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with
the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example
in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on
Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of
the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors,
especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's.
In 2003, we began a project to reconstruct
the lost work by reevaluating all the possible sources of evidence for
it. We post regular updates about the project on our blog, where you can access a quick introduction to the project. A good place to start is with the latest version of the provisional reconstruction. If you have been assigned to read Aristotle's Protrepticus in a course, this is probably what you are looking for.
For those looking for more detail about our
methods of reconstruction and the basis of evidence, you will find on
this website our working files on a new critical Greek edition,
translation, commentary, and reconstruction of Aristotle's Protrepticus. From the table of contents page, you will be able to access drafts of various parts of the book. From the evidence page, you may find links to critical editions, along with translations and commentaries on the ancient evidence.
From the essays page you may access our 'Authenticating Aristotle's Protrepticus', published in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (2005). For those wanting to learn more about the philosophical context of Aristotle's Protrepticus, you may be interested in the unpublished essays 'The Antidosis of Iamblichus and Aristotle's Protrepticus' and 'Protreptic Aspects of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics'.
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