Uncommon edition, published by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg, of the Armenian translation of the commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories by the sixth-century Christian philosopher and commentator Elias.

Biographical information about Elias is sketchy to non-existent. There are three commentaries (the present work, as well as commentaries on the Prior Analytics and on Porphyry’s Isagogue that are attributed to Elias, all firmly placed within the Neoplatonic tradition. Elias has been linked with the school at Alexandria, and a number of commentaries and other philosophical works connected to that school were passed down in a manuscript tradition not only in Greek but also in Armenian, Syriac, and other languages. Indeed the Categories themselves benefited from a fifth-century translation into Armenian, which saw a Venice printing in 1833. The present edition of the commentary is taken from the Armenian manuscript MS 1939 at the Echmiadzin Monastery, west of Yerevan. The editor, Jakob Manandean (1873 – 1952) was the author of several works on ancient Armenian history, as well as on the Armenian manuscript tradition.

See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a sketch of the context and content of Elias’ commentaries; outside Continental Europe, OCLC records copies at Cambridge, Dumbarton Oaks, Newberry, and Harvard.

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