Oh, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast,

brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. history of philosophy.net. Today's episode, Middle Men, the

Platonic revival.

If your handwriting is anything like mine, then even you may not be able to read what

you have written.

Certain letters in particular may be easily confused.

A lowercase B and a lowercase K for instance.

If I wrote out the name of my favorite silent film comedian in lowercase, you might read it and wonder why you've never heard

of this Custer beaten if he's supposed to be so great. And I'm not alone.

You'll remember my saying last time that Greek manuscripts made a transition from being written in capital letters to being written in miniscule letters and in some types of miniscule script, the Greek letter,

Beta, or B, looks similar to the Kappa or K.

It turns out that a potential confusion between these two letters

is at the heart of one of the niftiest philological controversies in ancient philosophy.

At question is the name of the man who wrote a book called the Diddaskalikos, or Handbook, a guide to the philosophy of Plato.

He probably wrote it in the second century AD. As for his name, a ninth century manuscript, the earliest that preserves this text, tells us that he was called Al-Kinoos.

Here's the nifty part. We know of no Platonist from this period called Al-Kinoos, but we do know of a thinker named Al-Bainos.

So in 1879, a German scholar ingeniously suggested that our Al-Kinoos could be a scribes mistaken version of al-Bainos, the Greek

letter Kappa replaced with the letter Beta.

The suggested correction would banish al-Kinoos from the scene, leaving the already familiar

al-Bainos as the author of the Dittaskalikos.

But a century later in the 1970s, another scholar pointed out that even in manuscripts that are written in miniscule,

...