Aristotle, De motu animalium Text and Translation

The book contains a new critical edition of the Greek text of Aristotle's De Motu Animalium and an English translation of the new text by Benjamin Morison, preceded by an introduction by Christof Rapp and Oliver Primavesi. The introduction comes in two parts: (i) a philosophical introduction by Christof Rapp that aims at drawing a kind of balance of more than three decades of scholarly debate on our treatise and related issues since the publication of Martha Nussbaum's edition and commentary in 1978; (ii) a textual introduction by Oliver Primavesi that sums up the history of textual research on the transmission of De Motu Animalium up to and including the discovery of a new branch of transmission.

Oliver Primavesi studied Classics in Heidelberg and Oxford. From 1994 to 2000, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Frankfurt. In 2000, he assumed the Chair of Greek (I) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. In 2007, he received the Leibniz-Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. His main field of research is Textual work on ancient philosophy; he has published widely on Empedocles and on Aristotle (Topics, Metaphysics).


Christof Rapp studied Philosophy, Ancient Greek and Logic. From 1993 to 2000, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Tübingen. From 2001 to 2009, he held the Chair for Ancient and Contemporary Philosophy at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin. In 2009, he assumed the Chair for Ancient Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He has also held visiting positions in Berkeley (2000), Oxford (2008), and Paris (2014). His main field of research is ancient philosophy; he has broadly published on Aristotle, especially on Aristotle's rhetoric, dialectic, metaphysics, and ethics. From 2008 to 2015 he was co-editor of Phronesis. A Journal for Ancient Philosophy.


Benjamin Morison obtained his BA in Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, followed by the BPhil and DPhil under the supervision of Michael Frede. After a stint as Jonathan Barnes' assistant at the University of Geneva, he was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1997-2000), and then Michael Cohen Fellow in Philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford (2001-2009). After that, he moved to the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University, where he was Director of the Program in Classical Philosophy (2014-2022), and then Chair (2022-).