How to Edit Aristotle in Syriac

The history of textual criticism is full of sometimes surprisingly tortured debates over matters both of principle and of detail.Since textual criticism aims at a point closer to pure science than does most research in the humanities, opposing notions of what is the "right" analysis and what the "wrong" may from time to time achieve a certain pointedness that other, greyer, areas of research do not.Even textual criticism is not a pure science; an element of creative judgement is sine qua non in the application of its principles, yet its principles are based on sound logic, and false applications of them can feasibly be detected and unmasked.As early modern readers of Horace discovered to their cost, to reconstruct an autograph out of a tradition that is already corrupt at its outset, is at the very least an exercise in searching out tracks in a wilderness.The oasis is there somewhere, but the tracks have been so far obscured by the sands as to be discoverable only by the most tortuous methods.Those methods, however, are not unknown-they are the basis of the criticism of textual traditions and the descent of manuscript readings, and so the trackless waste is not a hopeless place.Good principles must be followed, and the evidence permitted to draw us where it will.Moreover, most textual critics are a good deal terser in expression than is the norm in the meandering ways of the more discursive branches of

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