Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, 4 (2016), pp. 985-995 TESTI E DOCUMENTI SILVIA FAZZO * - MAURO ZONTA ** THE FIRST ACCOUNT OF ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS IN FOURTEEN BOOKS: ALEXANDER OF APHRODISIAS’ ‘FRAGMENT ZERO’ 1. The scope of this article The overall scope of this article is to highlight the historical signifcance of textual fndings made by the authors in 2014 1 , namely the confrmation that a large section of Averroes’ introduction to Metaphysics Lambda comes from a corresponding text by Alexander of Aphrodisia. To this end, we reproduce at the end of this paper our original Tables 1 and 2. The section is to be added to Freudenthal’s 1885 collection of Alexander’s fragments as pre- served by Averroes 2 . For quick reference, we call it ‘Fragment Zero’ 3 . Since Freudenthal 1885 scholars has been aware that Averroes was still able to use Alexander’s commentary on Aristotles’ Lām – the Arabic name for Metaphysics book Lambda –, even though the Greek had already been lost in Averroes’ times. This was possible because, before disappearing, Alexander’s commentary had been translated in the 9th c. from Greek into Syriac by ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (808-873) and in the * Università degli Studi di Trento, CNR – ILIESI - Università degli Studi ‘La Sapienza’, Roma. 1 See the Handout given below in Appendix. In addition, Table 3 will provide a transliteration of Non-Latin alphabetic characters in every single line and column of Table 2. The discovery was pre- sented by our joint paper at the 9th S.I.H.S.P.A.I. Conference, held in Paris, October 8, 9 & 10, 2014, Manifold Rationality: Science, Philosophy and kalam in Classical Islamic Civilization, (October 8-10, 2014), International Conference organized by the Société Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences et de la Philosophie Arabes et Islamiques in partnership with the CNRS, the University of Paris Diderot and the Institut du Monde Arabe. We thank Charles Burnett (The Warburg Institute, University of London) who chaired our session, and all participants there. Since the proceedings have not been published yet, we now offer a short abstract of our paper, and we reprint without changes our 2014 Handout as an Appen- dix in order to present a piece of evidence which seems to have remained hidden so far. Moreover, we are grateful to Vittorio Bonzi, Fabio Di Martino, Carlo Maria Mazzucchi, Mattia Luigi Pozzi, Helmut Woda, who variously contributed to the fnal shape of this paper. 2 J. FREUDENTHAL, Die durch Averroes erhaltenen Fragmente des Alexanders zur ‘Metaphysik’ des Aristoteles, Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin 1885 (the conference was held in 1884). 3 It comes just before Fragment 1 as it stands (wrongly) in Genequand’s English translation. In Freuden- thal, however, it stands between the frst and the second part of Fragment 1, which actually splits into two parts, because the section in between – the very one we are interested in – had deliberately been omitted, see here below. If Freudenthal’s numbering of the fragments is to be preserved no further number seems more appropriate than ‘Fragment Zero’, because of its fundamental role and position. © 2016 Vita e Pensiero / Pubblicazioni dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore