Lecture: José Maksimczuk

Abstract
Aristotle's collection of treatises on logic and scientific reasoning known as the Organon is perhaps the single most important work in the history of logic. A testimony to its centrality is the fact that we have around 150 surviving hand-written witnesses of this work in its original Greek. Despite its foundational role in shaping human understanding of rules of thought, scholars have still not been able to devise a stemma codicum of the Greek manuscripts, which is essential for a better understanding of the transmission and reception of the work, as it would provide us a genealogical tree of the surviving and posited witnesses and exhibit the filiation links that exist among them. In this talk, I argue with the aid of several examples that the materiality of the manuscripts plays a primary role in any attempt of setting a stemma of the Organon. This approach aims at complementing the more traditional, almost exclusively text-centred method, and holds much promise for refining philological practices in the future.

Jose Maksimczuk holds a PhD in classics from the KU Leuven. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the CSMC at the Universität Hamburg, where he is the spokesperson of a research field devoted to the study of the production and transmission of notes in manuscripts. He is also the PI, together with Christian Brockmann, of a project focused on the transmission of Aristotelian manuscripts, especially containing logical and ethical treatises.