I'm going Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast,

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

W.W. history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode Lost and Found Aristotelianism after Aristotle.

There seems to be a deep-seated human need to collect the things we like.

A real James Joyce enthusiast will own not just a volume of Joyce's short stories and a copy of Ulysses, but also Finnegan's Wake.

Indeed, the enthusiast may even go so far as attempting to read Finnegan's wake.

In music, the true fan is not the one who listens to a Greatest Hits album over and over, but who owns

a copy of every album the band released perhaps on several formats.

The more obscure output is treasured the most.

The classical music buff who can discourse on the fine points of obscure orchestral recordings from the 1950s,

or the Led Zeppelin fan, who insists that their greatest album is presence and who collects

bootleg recordings of live performances.

We even have a word for this sort of behavior,

completest.

I myself suffer from this malady.

I own not only all of Buster Keaton's silent movies, but even copies of some of the films he made after the advent of sound.

I have been known on more than one occasion to explain to the uninitiated that the James Brown album you really want to get is the little known in the jungle groove. It's really good.

I also confess to a weakness for books about philosophy. I traced this tendency to a moment shortly after I got my first academic position, when a student told me he could tell I was new because my shelves were so empty. On the bright side, at least I am trying to collect philosophy books after the invention of printing. Before then, enthusiasts had to track down everything their favorite author wrote and pay to have copies written out by hand.

The Renaissance marks the high point of this sort of behavior, but it already existed in the ancient world.

The most ostentatious example being the library at Alexandria, where the Ptolemy's

of Egypt applied the completest principle to all ancient literature. of by scribes, many would also be damaged in some way.

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