This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide. The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence – uncovered in some of the chapters of this book – that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.

The eighteen studies included here reflect three particular aspects of Leonard Boyle's remarkable impact on teaching and scholarship. His abiding interest in the early history and architecture of the basilica of San Clemente in Rome forms the focus of Part I; his profound contribution to the theory and practice of palaeography is reflected in Part II; and his creative work on clerical education, pastoral care, and the Dominican Order, inspires Part III. In all these areas, Fr Boyle combined remarkable attention to detail with the humane ability to bring clarity to complex issues. This book commemorates his inspiration, but also reflects his favourite maxim, derived from the twelfth-century teacher-theologian, Hugh of St-Victor, to 'Learn everything', for 'afterwards you will find that nothing is superfluous.' The fourth section is devoted to Fr Leonard as friend, scholar, and Prefect of the Vatican Library, and it ends, fittingly, with what may be regarded as his own scholarly valediction, 'St Thomas Aquinas and the Third Millennium'.

Im April 2019 wird Jan Hallebeek emeritiert. Damit endet seine aktive Laufbahn als von der Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1989–1999) finanzierter Forscher, als Extraordinarius an der Theologischen Fakultät der Universität Utrecht (1997–2006) und zuletzt als Professor für Rechtsgeschichte an der Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (seit 1999). Die Stationen seiner Tätigkeit spiegeln zwei seiner Schwerpunkte wieder: die Kirchen(rechts)geschichte einerseits und das klassische römische Recht und die Geschichte des römischen Rechts in Europa andererseits. In glücklicher Weise konnte Jan Hallebeek sein Engagement für die Altkatholische Kirche mit seiner Arbeit als Forscher verbinden. Die Beiträger greifen das breite rechtshistorische und kirchenrechtliche Spektrum auf, das der Jubilar in seiner eigenen Arbeit aufgespannt hat. Jan Hallebeek will become emeritus in April 2019. That will mark an end to his professional career as Researcher and Lecturer on a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences post (1989–1999), as Professor Extraordinarius at the Theological Faculty of the University of Utrecht (1997–2006), and as Professor on the Chair of Legal History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (from 1999 onwards). These positions reflect two focal points of his research: on the one hand Church history and Canon Law, on the other hand classical and particularly medieval Roman law and their history. They matched very felicitously his engagement for and in the Old-Catholic Church. The contributions centre on the themes and questions the honorand has pursued in his work till now.

This work synthesizes work previously published in leading journals in the field into a coherent narrative that has a distinctive focus on Germany while also being aware of a broader European dimension. It argues that the German Lutheran Christoph August Heumann (1681-1764) marginalized the biographical approach to past philosophy and paved the way for the German Lutheran Johann Jacob Brucker’s (1696-1770) influential method for the writing of past philosophy, centred on depersonalised and abstract systems of philosophy. The work offers an authoritative and engaging account of how late ancient Platonism, Plotinus in particular, was interpreted in eighteenth-century Germany according to these new precepts. Moreover, it reveals the Lutheran religious assumptions of this new approach to past philosophy, which underpinned the works of Heumann and Brucker, but also influential reviews that rejected the English Plato translator Thomas Taylor (1758-1835) and his understanding and evaluation of late ancient Platonism.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.