31. Monte Johnson: The Reconstruction of Aristotle's Protrepticus

In this episode, I speak with Prof. Monte Johnson about the work that he has done in collaboration with Prof. Doug Hutchinson in reconstructing Aristotle's Protrepticus. The Protrepticus is a lost work by Aristotle. Most ancient texts were written, copied, and then lost. As Monte discusses in this interview, 99% of ancient Greek literature is lost. Monte Johnson and Doug Hutchinson have done very important work in (literally) piecing together an Aristotelian text that would otherwise be lost to history. We talk about the current state of the evidence, how they took (primarily) excerpts preserved by later authors and fragments of papyri, and, ultimately, how they reconstructed from them Aristotle's lost text. The first half of the interview talks about the reconstruction process; the second half talks about the arguments of the Protrepticus and what protreptic as a genre was.

Host: Doug Campbell, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Alma College.

Interviewee: Monte Johnson, Professor in the Department of Philosophy at UC San Diego.

Monte's collaborator in this project: Professor Doug Hutchinson, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto.

For information related to the Protrepticus project, visit www.protrepticus.info.

For the most up-to-date (2025) translation of the Protrepticus that Monte Johnson and Doug Hutchinson have produced, visit https://philpapers.org/go.pl?aid=ARIP-29.

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