The Dialectical Corpus

What's in here and how it fits together:

This repository collects fourteen texts tracing how Aristotle's Topics (his treatise on dialectical reasoning, i.e. how to argue persuasively from generally accepted premises) was translated and commented on across Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew over roughly 1,500 years.

A quick note on vocabulary, since the folder names use it constantly:

• Translation: rendering the same text into a new language.
• Commentary: a separate text written to explain or gloss an existing one, in the same or a different language. A super-commentary comments on a commentary, rather than on the original.
• Several folders are both, or something in between. That's flagged where it applies.

Two branches

1. The core line (Greek → Latin, Greek → Arabic) Aristotle's Greek original sits at the root. From there the tradition splits three ways: a Greek commentary, an Arabic translation, and a Latin line via Boethius. Cicero's Topica is a related but independently written work (not a translation of Aristotle, but a Roman rhetorical handbook drawing on the same logical material) with its own Latin commentary tradition.

2. The Hebrew branch (skips Latin entirely) Three further works reach Hebrew readers directly from Arabic, without ever passing through Latin: al-Farabi's own treatise on dialectic (Kitab al-Jadal), and Averroes' Middle Commentary and Short Commentary on the Topics. Both Arabic originals are now in the corpus, each followed by a Hebrew translation; and, for the Middle Commentary, a further Hebrew super-commentary on top of that translation.

Folder by folder

#	Text	Language	Relation
01	Aristotle, Topics	Greek	Original text
02	Alexander of Aphrodisias, commentary	Greek	Comments on 01
03	Al-Dimashqi, translation	Arabic	Translates 01
04	Boethius, De topicis differentiis	Latin	Between translation and commentary on 01
05	Abaelard, commentary	Latin	Comments on 04
06	Cicero, Topica	Latin	Independent work, related to 01
07	Boethius, commentary on Cicero	Latin	Comments on 06
08	Al-Farabi, Kitab al-Jadal	Arabic	Original text
09	Anonymous translation of 08	Hebrew	Translates 08
10	Averroes, Middle Commentary on the Topics	Arabic	Comments on 01 (via the Arabic tradition)
11	Qalonymos ben Qalonymos, translation of 10	Hebrew	Translates 10
12	Todros Todrosi, super-commentary	Hebrew	Comments on 11
13	Averroes, Short Commentary on the Topics	Arabic	Comments on 01 (via the Arabic tradition)
14	Jacob ben Makhir Ibn Tibbon, translation of 13	Hebrew	Translates 13

Folders 09, 11, and 14 each contain multiple manuscript witnesses (separate .txt files) rather than a single edited text, since no standard critical edition exists for those.

Open items

• 04 (Boethius) and 06 (Cicero) do not fit cleanly into "translation" or "commentary"; both recompose Aristotle's material for a new Latin purpose.
• Averroes commented on the Topics twice (Middle Commentary, 10–12; Short Commentary, 13–14), and both lines are now fully present in Arabic and Hebrew. These are two separate commentaries, not two witnesses of one.