The BBC is reporting that the parchment manuscript that had a palimpsest of Archimedes' treatise on floating bodies, also turns out to have two other lost works: a text by Hyperides, a 4thC BCE politician of Athens, but much more excitingly, a 3rdC CE commentary on Aristotle's Categories, in which modern logic was first defined (along with other works by Aristotle), by Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Some, for instance Calamus, are critical of the Christian monks that, in the 13thC CE, scraped these works off the parchment to reuse it for a prayer book. But this is possibly due to the fact that more recent copies had been made, or were available in other libraries. Imagine how librarians will be treated when it turns out that they pulped or sold off priceless (n the 31st century!) texts of the 19thC. They are just trying to make space on their shelves.
Why the commentary is so interesting is that there is a real dearth of commentaries and works on logic after Aristotle and Theophrastus up to the late classical era in the 4th century CE on. So we are missing a lot of the development of logic over a thousand year period, and since this is where the notions of classification were developed and passed on to the middle ages, and hence us, this is going to be a major find. I personally can't wait for the translation. But then I'm known for waiting in vain for things most people don't much care about, like the next season of Battlestar Galactica.
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All people should be waiting for the new battlestar galactica. They're showing season 3 on sky one here and I don't have it so I'm trying to stay away from the, now half way through, season until I can get the DVD's. Annoyingly I think I saw a crucial thing on an advert for all the new programs on Sky and am now deeply annoyed at whichever prat compiled the advert.
I never thought of palimpsests that way before. And it does make sense; every day on the way home i ride past the dumpster of a large university library. I have plucked some fascinating and significant stuff from that dumpster, and a lot more goes on its way to oblivion.
And my own home is a microcosm; no surprise I am beginning to realize that I will only read a tiny fraction of my books more than once, and someday an unfortunate person will have to decide what to do with the tonnage.
I can't remember where Betrand Russell told the following story but it is genuine Russell. He said that he had a dream in which he is in a vast library. A man with a large bucket is going along the shelves and sorting out unwanted books and throwing them into his bucket, eventually he arrives at what Russell in his dream knows to be the last copy of Principia Mathematica in existence. The man hesitates and at that point Russell awoke...
And thousands of generations of philosophy students breathed a sigh of relief and joy, when the man took the last copy into his bucket...
I have heard it suggested that one should thank the palimpsist. He had given value to the parchment by making it into a prayer book, which would be preserved.
I anticipate the time when the librarians will be discarding useless print books, useless because it's all recorded in "permanent" electronic form. And the few left who care will not have the room and facilities to preserve those discarded books. Can you imagine standing by the library as they are throwing out tons of books, knowing that you can save only a very few of them?
I just went to the library sale here. I didn't save any classics (although I got a great copy of Hegel's Logic, and a Mayr, a Dobzhansky and a Simpson), but they do get recycled, often at greatly inflated prices, if you check ABEBooks.
"Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle..."
(Sorry, couldn't resist it)
You would have thought that Aphrodisias was the last place someone commenting on logic would have come from.
Bob
"And thousands of generations of philosophy students breathed a sigh of relief and joy, when the man took the last copy into his bucket..."
Oh come on Mr Wilkins have you ever met a philosophy student who has ever even opened a copy of Whitehead & Russell let alone read it?
Side bar to the discussion - Early Indian philosophy gave rise to a few streams of logic - the Vaisesika, Nagarjuna's schema, and the Nyaya school. The philosophers to whom these strands of thought are credited span a period from the 6th BCE to about the 2nd BCE. The Navya Nyaya or the new logic work of Gangesa - the Tattvacintamani or 'Jewel of Reflection on the Truth' written in the 13th CE, is a much studied work these days. A translation of the first volume concerning the chapter on perception has been recently published, authored by Phillips, Chakroborty, and Tatacharya. Follow this link for more information http://tinyurl.com/2ebq8r. The second conference on Logic and Navya Nyaya was held earlier this year at Jadavpur University, Calcutta - http://tinyurl.com/2zxnje
Ironically, it turns out that Alexander's commentary on Aristotle was a midterm largely cribbed from wikipedia and beginning with the words "Webster's Dictionary defines 'logic' as..."
The Russell nightmare is, I believe, from his book Nightmares of Eminent Persons (written in the 50s when he was over 80). Oddly, I can't recall what any of the other nightmares were.
Being a real outsider in philosophy, and still recognizing the name Alexander of Aphrodisias, I figure this must be quite the find.
You comment that it shed's light on a period for which we have little information on the development of logic, but, if this is the only surviving text, doesn't that imply that there weren't many copies? Doesn't that imply that Alexander's commentary wasn't very popular? It wasn't (to spin into the evolutionary aspect) a 'fit' document?
Anyway, cheers to palimpsests, and Free Baltar!
How well received must a document be to have survived 1000 years or more in manuscript form? That it was reused in the 13th century is not surprising - what is surprising is that it lasted that long.
I thought Baltar had been freed. Now I'm waiting for him to become a religious leader. L. Ron Baltar... it has a ring about it.