Manuscripts of Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology

Abstract
The workshop is the third of a series of annual workshops dedicated to the material expression of intellectual activity in different philosophical genres. It brings together a diverse group of scholars in different career levels who tackle the subject matter from different methodological approaches such as codicology, philology, historiography, and material analysis. The first two workshops focused on, respectively, manuscripts of logic and natural philosophy in medieval Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin linguistic domains. They proved productive with respect to the cross-pollination among scholars from different fields and who focus on different languages and periods, finding interesting (and sometimes surprising) connections and avenues for further collaboration. The current workshop will follow suit, this time—and in line with the traditional Aristotelian curriculum—focusing on metaphysics and philosophical theology in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Hebrew.

Tuesday, 9 September 2025

10:00–10:20
Welcoming Remark

• Welcoming Address
  Giuseppe Veltri (University of Hamburg)
• Introduction
  Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)

10:20–12:40
Panel 1
Chair: Christian Brockmann (University of Hamburg)

10:20–11:20
Michael of Ephesus on Aristotle's Metaphysics Lambda: Challenges and Two Hitherto Unknown Textual Witnesses
Christina Prapa (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

11:20–11:40
Coffee Break

11:40–12:40
Yaḥyā Ibn ʿAdī on the Knowability of Corruptible Individuals—a Text from Marwī 19
Miriam Rogasch (University of Cologne)

12:40–13:30
Lunch Break

 
13:30–17:10
Panel 2
Chair: José Maksimczuk (University of Hamburg)

13:30–14:30
Chronological Stratification and Doctrinal Evolution in Scotus’ Questions on the Metaphysics (QM): the Case of QM, I, 1
Alfonso Quartucci (University of Cologne)

14:30–14:50
Coffee Break

14:50–15:50
Demarcating Syllogisms in Manuscripts of Hebrew Commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Yehuda Halper (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan)

15:50–16:10
Coffee Break

16:10–17:10
Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Metaphysics under Construction
Silvia Di Vincenzo (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) and Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)

19:30
Dinner

Wednesday, 10 September 2025

10:00–14:30
Panel 3
Chair: Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)

10:00–11:00
Metaphysics between Philosophy and Theology in Manuscripts of Post-Classical Arabic Authors
Heidrun Eichner (Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen)

11:00–11:20
Coffee Break

11:20–12:20
Metaphysics and Manuscripts: the Case of John Scottus Eriugena
John Marenbon (Cambridge University)

12:20–13:30
Lunch Break

13:30–14:30
Metaphysics in a 15th-Century Hebrew Notebook: Challenges and Insights for a Modern Edition
Hanna Gentili (University of Hamburg)

14:30–14:50
Coffee Break

14:50–16:15
Final Discussion

in alphabetical order

Averroes’ Middle Commentary on the Metaphysics under Construction
Silvia Di Vincenzo (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) and Yoav Meyrav (University of Hamburg)

Until recently, nearly all of our knowledge concerning Averroes’ Middle Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics stemmed from its two surviving Medieval Hebrew translations. With Maroun Aouad’s discovery of an Arabic manuscript containing a large portion of the work, Silvia Di Vincenzo examined all known sources and put forth a detailed hypothesis concerning Averroes’s work process and self-revisions when composing it. In our presentation we will share a hitherto unnoticed Hebrew item, discovered by Yoav Meyrav, which can be used to corroborate Di Vincenzo’s hypothesis.

Metaphysics between Philosophy and Theology in Manuscripts of Post-Classical Arabic Authors
Heidrun Eichner (Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen)

Paratexts in manuscripts play a crucial role in tracing the historical interaction between philosophical and theological approaches to metaphysics. As modern readers, we receive information from them, but earlier producers and users—consciously or unconsciously—also relied on them as sources of knowledge. Attributions are not stable; they can nonetheless provide insights into historical developments. However, dating such paratexts is particularly challenging and carries the risk of circular reasoning. This difficulty arises both when interpreting and comparing texts of several individual authors with each other and when considering that individual authors may revise and transform their conceptions over the course of their lives.
A particularly illustrative case is that of prefaces. More often than one might expect, these texts undergo substantial reworking by their authors. This can result in prefaces being separated from their “proper place” within a text, multiple prefaces appearing in a single volume, or, conversely, a work lacking a preface altogether.
In my presentation, I will focus on specific constellations in the works of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, al-Katibi al-Qazwini, and al-Taftazani.

Metaphysics in a 15th-Century Hebrew Notebook: Challenges and Insights for a Modern Edition
Hanna Gentili (University of Hamburg)

This presentation explores how the fifteenth-century philosopher and kabbalist Yoḥanan Alemanno engaged with Metaphysics in his personal notes and works. After introducing the role Metaphysics played in Alemanno’s philosophical system, I will focus on a close reading of the notes preserved in his autograph manuscript Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Reggio 23, offering a unique glimpse into the workings of a Jewish philosopher’s mind in Renaissance Italy. By combining textual analysis with manuscript studies, this talk will also raise broader questions regarding how to edit and interpret complex layered manuscripts like Alemanno’s notebook(s), offering examples based on my current book project.

Demarcating Syllogisms in Manuscripts of Hebrew Commentaries on Aristotle's Metaphysics
Yehuda Halper (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan)

Abraham Bibago (d. circa 1488), author of the most detailed commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics in Hebrew, adamantly and repeatedly denies that the science of metaphysics includes dialectical content. Rather, he argues, metaphysics is entirely made up of demonstrative arguments. To maintain this view, Bibago seeks to develop an account of Metaphysics B according to which the aporiai Aristotle mentions are doubts, solved through demonstrations, i.e., through valid syllogisms with properly grounded premises. Doubts (sefeqot) are central to Al-Farabi’s and Averroes’ accounts of dialectic in their commentaries on Aristotle’s Topics, both of which survive in Hebrew translations that were likely accessible to Bibago. Indeed, Bibago’s description of doubts at the beginning of his commentary on Metaphysics B as a contradiction both whose alternatives are supported by syllogisms, is clearly taken from the Hebrew Topics commentary tradition. These doubts, says Bibago, are not part of metaphysics, even though their proper solutions, which are made through demonstrations, are. Still, formally speaking, dialectical texts are made up of lists of syllogisms that are in support of contradictory alternatives. In fact, this is how Bibago's Commentary on Metaphysics B looks. In this talk, we will look at the manuscripts of Bibago's commentary on the Metaphysics and see how he uses text to demarcate syllogistic arguments. In the absence of diagrams these arguments become somwhat difficult to see. Still, their use does become apparent, and Bibago's textual markers allow him to write in a somewhat scholastic style in Hebrew, while maintaining a connection to Averroes' notion of dialectic, as described in Hebrew translations from Arabic.

Metaphysics and Manuscripts: the Case of John Scottus Eriugena
John Marenbon (Cambridge University)

My aim is to see whether two aspects of research on the ninth-century thinker, John Scottus Eriugena, can be brought fruitfully together. John was an Irishman who worked in northern France, in close association with the court of Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bald. His masterpiece, the Periphyseon, is an all-embracing treatment of everything that exists and (equally important for Eriugena) does not exist, with Aristotle’s Categories and the Genesis account of creation as its two main starting points. It can and should be regarded as a major achievement in metaphysics, from long before Latin scholars read Aristotle’s work of that name. 
The Periphyseon has a rich and revealing early manuscript history. Using the marginal additions in the two earliest manuscripts, some supposedly in Eriugena’s own hand, some in the script of a close associate, scholars have been able to reconstruct how Eriugena revised his work and how it was changed by its earliest students. To a great extent — with the great editor of the Periphyseon, Edouard Jeauneau, only a partial exception — the scholars interested as Eriugena’s place in the history of metaphysics have been unconcerned with details about his manuscripts, while the manuscript specialists have not explored his philosophical ideas. My paper will be an experiment to see if this gap is bridgeable, and, using Eriugena as a case study, an opportunity to discuss whether such a combination of research methods, usually the provinces of different specialists, can be revealing, historically and philosophically.

Michael of Ephesus on Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda: Working with Two Hitherto Unknown Textual Witnesses
Christina Prapa (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

As part of my editorial project (work in progress), which is to prepare a new critical edition of Michael of Ephesus’ (12th cent.) commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics Z-N, I shall shed light to the textual transmission of the text.
On stemmatical grounds I will focus on the recensio of book Lambda of the commentary and, in particularly, on two independent witnesses from the 13th cent., the Laurentianus Plut. 85.01 (with the siglum O, known as Oceanus) and the Parisinus Suppl. gr. 642, that Hayduck omitted from his edition (in CAG 1, vol. 2).
Based on the principles of textual criticism of ancient literature, I will take the text of the earliest Greek Byzantine commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics to point out questions that arise from the examination of a rather complicated textual transmission and attempt to provide some answers using manuscripts that have not yet been examined at all.

Chronological Stratification and Doctrinal Evolution in Scotus’ Questions on the Metaphysics (QM): the Case of QM, I, 1
Alfonso Quartucci (University of Cologne)

Recent scholarship on Scotus’ Questions on the Metaphysics (QM) has made it clear that this work was composed over a long period of time, and that even within one and the same quaestio some passages should be considered later additions to an original earlier core. Fortunately, the manuscript tradition offers some evidence to help identify such later additions and thus to assess the chronological stratification of the work. In my talk, after presenting the main results of existent scholarship on the chronological stratification of QM, I will focus on QM, I, 1 (on the subject of metaphysics), outlining the problems it poses and discussing some specific cases.

Yaḥyā Ibn ʿAdī on the Knowability of Corruptible Individuals—a Text from Marwī 19
Miriam Rogasch (University of Cologne)

In the short text that I want to present, Yaḥyā Ibn ʿAdī sets out to proof wrong certain unnamed opponent who claim that particulars cannot be the object of (scientific) knowledge. At first glance, his attempt at refuting this claim might seem surprising: both Plato and Aristotle, who he explicitly mentions in this text, seem to defend a similar position, i.e. it is not the sensible particular with respect to its individuality that is the object of knowledge. As the analysis of his arguments will show, Yaḥyā is ultimately less concerned with the possibility of knowing a particular in its individuality than with ascertaining that sensible particulars are a reliable (and necessary) starting point for knowledge. His aim therefore seems to be to defend a broadly Aristotelian understanding of the acquisition of scientific knowledge, possibly against kalām critics.

Please contact the HEPMASITE project for further information and registration: hepmasite.reli@uni-hamburg.de