[Proposed production] Aristotle's "Rhetoric"

[David Gross]

I'm considering the J.H. Freese translation
(https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002971169) which seems
well-regarded and was used by the Loeb Classical Library for its
editions, but I'm open to suggestions of other options.

[Alex Cabal]

How long is this work? I think like Plato we will have to decide if we
want an omnibus of his work, if his corpus is mostly shorter stuff.

[David Gross]

• The current SE collection of Plato's dialogues is ~6.5M (though a good hunk of that is introductory editorial text rather than Plato in translation).
  
• This page estimates Aristotle's corpus in English translation to be ~8.5M.
• The wikisource versions of Aristotle's Rhetoric in English translation come to ~365K.
• That's about half the size of Plato's Republic (~642K).
  

All numbers minus footnotes and meta-stuff.

[Alex Cabal]

Yes, but what does his corpus look like? Is it a lot of short work? We
try to compile short work into omnibuses. If so then we need to get an
idea of whether we want a few themed collections, or a larger "complete
works" omnibus a la Plato, or something else. Someone has to review his
corpus, see how it's been organized in the past, and how that
organization might fit into our process.

365k words for Rhetoric can't possibly be correct. The 3 books on
Wikisource add up to about 65k words.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Rhetoric_(Freese)

On 5/31/23 12:43 PM, David Gross wrote:
> * The current SE collection of Plato's dialogues is ~6.5M (though a

> good hunk of that is introductory editorial text rather than Plato
> in translation).

> * This page <http://www.rmki.kfki.hu/~lukacs/ARISTO3.htm> estimates

> Aristotle's corpus in English translation to be ~8.5M.

> * The wikisource versions of Aristotle's /Rhetoric/ in English
> translation come to ~365K.
> * That's about half the size of Plato's /Republic/ (~642K).

>
>
> All numbers minus footnotes and meta-stuff.
>
> On Wednesday, May 31, 2023 at 4:16:58 PM UTC Alex Cabal wrote:
>
> How long is this work? I think like Plato we will have to decide if we
> want an omnibus of his work, if his corpus is mostly shorter stuff.
>
> On 5/31/23 10:23 AM, David Gross wrote:
> > I'm considering the J.H. Freese translation
> > (https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002971169

> <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002971169>) which

> seems
> > well-regarded and was used by the Loeb Classical Library for its
> > editions, but I'm open to suggestions of other options.
> >
>

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[David Gross]

Sorry: to clarify, my numbers were characters, not words.

[David Gross]

As for possible compilations, one possible division would be Bekker's: Logic, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics & Politics, and Rhetoric & Poetics:

• Logic (13% of the total)
• Physics (55%, but about 14% of this is considered spurious)
• Metaphysics (8%)
• Ethics & Politics (18%, some spurious, also some duplication between Nicomachean & Eudemian Ethics)
• Rhetoric & Poetics (7%)
  

[Joseph Montanaro]

I think some of Aristotle's shorter works could be grouped together -rFor example, six of his logical works are traditionally grouped together into the "Organon."

On the other hand, here's a published edition of his Physics that's over 300 pages, and I don't think much of that is commentary (I have the book but am traveling at the moment so I can't grab it to check.)

[Vince]

This doesn’t answer the question of what his corpus looks like, which has to be answered before a decision can be made about how (or if) they’re going to be split up.

We need to know how many different works does Aristotle have that would be included (the link you gave shows 44 works, but only 28 of them are marked as “genuine”: are we only including the 28 or all 44, and what is determining “genuine”?), and the length (in words, not characters) of each of those works. With that information, Alex can determine what should be done from there. But a decision can’t be made on Rhetoric without the above information on the entire corpus.

[David Gross]

Well, let me know when you come to some conclusion you're happy with and I'll let you know if I'm still interested in producing it.

[Tony Espn]

Hey all, reviving a dead thread because as a casual SE user I’d be interested in seeing more Aristotle works published.

The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Oxford Translation is considered by scholars to be the standard version of the "Corpus Aristotelicum" and includes the spurious works of Aristotle. In general the reasoning is both traditional and practical. These have been grouped together in this order for so long that metaphysics is actually called metaphysics not because that's what Aristotle named it but because it was right after the physics section of the corpus so excluding them would break this long tradition. Also, for works such as On plants, while it's not written directly by Aristotle, it was most likely taken directly from his (now lost) work on this subject so it's the best scholars have until we find them. 

I'd personally argue that we let Oxford do the heavy lifting on this subject, and simply borrow their structure for the SE edition, rather than try to decide what should be cannon ourselves (trying to do so seemed to have killed this thread in the first place). In addition, since this collection is so standard keeping it would make us a great free alternative to a very pricey ebook edition...which would benefit a lot of people especially philosophy students.

That being said, the whole corpus would be a pretty big undertaking for one person, since it's dense. Maybe it makes the most sense to put Aristotle on the wanted list, produce the larger more well known works individually and the smaller works in an omnibus, then once we have a critical mass have someone start compiling them into the complete works. The main thing to look out for in a piecemeal approach is to try and stay consistent with the translations, again we can lean on Oxford for the heavy lifting since a lot of the ones they used in theirs should be PD now such as W.D Ross. If you like this method, I can go through the corpus, and figure out what the best PD scans/version+translations are for each as of right now. @David Gross if you're still interested in this, the translation by W Rhys Roberts is probably the one to pick The Internet Classics Archive | Rhetoric by Aristotle (mit.edu) and (with the team's go-ahead) large enough to be a standalone work on SE for now. 

Hope this helps, at the end of the day any path we take that gets more aristotle on SE is a good path to me.

Best,

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