Euclid's \textit{Pseudaria}

DOI10.1007/S00407-007-0017-3MaRDI QIDQ942902zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Fabio Acerbi

Publication date 8 September 2008

Published in Archive for History of Exact Sciences (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://doi.org/10.1007/s00407-007-0017-3

zbMATH Keywords

Alexander of Aphrodisias Aristotle Euclid John Philoponus Proclus Pseudaria pseudography

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

History of Greek and Roman mathematics (01A20)

Review text

In this paper, Acerbi goes through all those references to Euclid's lost \textit{Pseudaria} that have been known since Heiberg, and locates some supplementary evidence. In contrast to predecessors, Acerbi discusses the references in the context of ancient dialectic and dialectic teaching. He argues with Tannery that Proclus (but indeed all who refer to the word after Alexander of Aphrodisias, perhaps already Alexander) knows it from epitomes and hearsay only, and reconstruct their descriptions from what they suppose must have been its purpose and scope, and further that everybody after Alexander depend either on him or on his immediate sources (which means that these descriptions are not automatically to be relied upon). Acerbi argues that a couple of geometrical pseudographies (wrong proofs based on fallacious diagrams) described in Alexander's commentary to the \textit{Topica} are likely to come from the \textit{Pseudaria}, while others (in Proclus and Alexander) are unlikely to have this source. After a discussion of the role of diagrams in Greek geometrical proofs it is concluded that pseudographies were probably the main but not the sole topic of the \textit{Pseudaria}, and that this work, if it ever served in teaching, went out of use very soon.

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