Divisions and Definitions

The seven Syriac texts published in this volume are school manuals on logic composed between the 6th and the 9th centuries AD, the time of the decline of the traditional Greek paideia and the rise of Christian education. They explicate and adapt for Christian schools the main terminology of Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge. The earliest witness among them is based primarily on Sergius of Reshaina’s commentary on the Categories and Proba’s commentary on the Isagoge, and it presents the subject matters of these treatises in the form of tree diagrams. The collections of tree diagrams and short excerpts from such commentaries served as sources for the new schoolbooks containing philosophical divisions. These schoolbooks in turn became sources for the later manuals on logic published here. Ultimately, these later manuals were more focused on theological polemics than they were on Aristotle’s and Porphyry’s original texts. They thereby grant us insight into the context in which Aristotle and Porphyry were studied within the Christian schools and into the evolving school tradition during the period of transition from late antiquity to the early middle ages.