Two chapters offer a general survey of Aristotle’s extant works in order to convey the idea that these works taken as a whole express a characteristically Aristotelian commitment to scientific rationality: each science is conceived as an autonomous field determined by its own internal principles, and this applies to poetics just as much as it does to more obvious candidates such as physics or biology. The general reader in this case does not require any knowledge of Greek or indeed of Aristotle beyond some familiarity with the Poetics. There is a deliberate intention to engage the general reader as much as the Aristotelian expert. His aim is to convince people that they will only fully appreciate the Poetics by accepting all of the Tractatus material as genuine Aristotle rather than, as one sceptic put it, no small amount of silly and extraneous material jumbled together with what is truly Aristotelian. now hopes to succeed where philology on its own had not by making a philosophical case. For some time now scholars have argued that a tenth century manuscript known as Tractatus Coislinianus summarizes this lost book, but up to now they have failed to establish the point conclusively. This very engaging work sets out to save a whole treasure chest of priceless gems from an eternity in scholarly limbo, the chest being the lost second book of Aristotle’s Poetics.
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