The Lambda commentators live in exile

Claim (verbatim)

Metaphysics Lambda is Aristotle's theology - the unmoved mover, thought thinking itself - and the Greek world lost both of its great late-antique commentaries on precisely that book. Alexander of Aphrodisias' commentary on the Metaphysics survives in Greek only for books Alpha through Delta (CAG I, Hayduck); the continuation printed there is Michael of Ephesus, a millennium younger. Alexander on Lambda survives - as dozens of named, quoted chunks embedded in the Arabic of Averroes' Great Commentary (Tafsir) on the Metaphysics, collected by Jacob Freudenthal in 1885 from Bouyges's later-edited text. Themistius' paraphrase of Lambda is lost in Greek entirely and survives complete only in the Hebrew that Moshe ibn Tibbon made in 1255 from the Arabic, with Arabic portions (Landauer's CAG V.5, 1903; Yoav Meyrav's 2019 critical Hebrew-Arabic edition) - while the same Themistius' paraphrases of the Posterior Analytics, Physics and De anima survive in Greek. The pattern is the mechanism: Byzantine copying kept the commentators' SCHOOL books, the logic-physics-psychology curriculum, and dropped the theology; the falsafa tradition ran its deepest question - the nature of God and the separate intellects - straight through Lambda, so al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes and Maimonides kept its commentators alive in Arabic and Hebrew. Each civilization preserved the Aristotle it was arguing about; for the God-book, that was Baghdad, not Byzantium.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: building a per-book carrier table for Alexander and Themistius across the Metaphysics' fourteen books from the named editions, Lambda will show translation-stream-only survival for BOTH commentators while at least four other books show direct Greek survival for at least one of them (primary clause: the double-exile of Lambda against >=4 Greek-carried books; the verdict follows it); secondarily, Bouyges's index to Averroes' Tafsir will yield at least 20 named Alexander citations and at least 10 named Themistius citations within the Lambda commentary alone; pseudo-Alexander (Michael of Ephesus) does not count as Alexander, a named citation is an explicit naming in Bouyges's text or index, and the test voids if the Tafsir's Lambda index cannot be enumerated.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: Bouyges's edition of Averroes, Tafsir ma bad at-tabia (Beirut, 1938-52) with its author index, Freudenthal's 1885 fragment collection, Hayduck's CAG I, and Landauer's CAG V.5 with Meyrav's 2019 edition - a per-book carrier table plus a named-citation count in the Lambda commentary.

Novelty / leakage triage

already answered in the literature

The double exile of Lambda is stated in the editions themselves: Hayduck's CAG I confines genuine Alexander to Alpha through Delta with the continuation assigned to Michael of Ephesus; Freudenthal's 1885 monograph exists precisely because Alexander on Lambda survives as named quotations in Averroes' Tafsir; Landauer's CAG V.5 and Meyrav's 2019 edition exist because Themistius on Lambda survives only in the Hebrew-Arabic channel while his logic-physics-psychology paraphrases kept their Greek. The per-book carrier table is the CAG shelf restated, and the named-citation counts are index-arithmetic on Freudenthal's numbered fragments and Bouyges' printed indices (Genequand's introduction already surveys Averroes' reliance on both commentators in Lambda).

• J. Freudenthal, Die durch Averroes erhaltenen Fragmente Alexanders zur Metaphysik des Aristoteles (Berlin, 1885)
• M. Hayduck, Alexandri Aphrodisiensis in Aristotelis Metaphysica commentaria (CAG I, Berlin, 1891), praefatio
• Y. Meyrav, Themistius' Paraphrase of Aristotle's Metaphysics 12: A Critical Hebrew-Arabic Edition (Leiden, 2019)
• C. Genequand, Ibn Rushd's Metaphysics: A Translation with Introduction of Ibn Rushd's Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book Lam (Leiden, 1984), introduction

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.