Over the years 2006-2008 a team of researchers, led by Sten Ebbesen, John Marenbon, Tony Street and Paul Thom, will work on the reception of Aristotle's Categories in the Byzantine, Arabic and Latin traditions.

Each of these traditions is influenced by religious ideas, and each tradition houses a form of writing that aims on the one hand to expound Aristotle's text and on the other hand sets out to formulate adequate theories of the relevant philosophical subject-matter. Moreover, the three traditions, though distinct from each other, interact in important ways.

Taking all these aspects into account, the project has a set of three nested aims:

1. to create scholarly resources (new editions and translations) for the study of the various traditions of commentary on Aristotle's Categories;
   
   
2. building on these and other resources, to prepare studies of the commentaries in the Byzantine, Arabic and Latin traditions,
1. highlighting the interactions between different traditions,
2. examining the influence of different Christian and Muslim religious ideas on these traditions in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance;
   
   
3. on the basis of these studies and other existing knowledge,
1. to write critical studies of the commentary-traditions, highlighting their role in interpreting Aristotle's text for particular readerships sharing a given set of assumptions, and applying those interpretations to historically relevant problems,
2. to analyse Aristotle's text and its later interpretations as logico-metaphysical theory, and to disseminate this analysis on a dedicated web-site which will include multimedia models of the principal theories of categories.

This project is funded by the Australian Research Council.