The Problemata as a Natural Philosophical Genre

Abstract

The Aristotelian corpus not only established for some two millennia the definitions and standards for many branches in the natural sciences, but also founded a genre which respected neither the disciplinary boundaries nor the systematic presentations for which Aristotle is famous. Although rightly called pseudo-Aristotelian in their final form of 38 books containing some 900 problems, accumulated over the centuries by the Peripatetic school possibly as late as the 5th or 6th century CE, the Problems of Aristotle developed from an authentic Aristotelian core and spawned a vigorous tradition of editions and imitations--the latter outlasting the active use of the rest of Aristotle's natural science, down to the eighteenth-century publication of works entitled "Problemes of Aristotle." Collections of problemata, variously copied or imitated from Aristotle and other ancient models (notably Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plutarch and Cassius), comprised questions and answers about the causes of natural phenomena (especially relating to medicine, natural history and meteorology) and elicited learned and popular interest to fuel over one hundred editions in the genre during the early modern period. I would venture that only books of secrets surpassed the problemata among works of natural philosophy in the bulk and range of their success