Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BCE)

register entry theopheastus-20261007 OBS-9ff360597434 · file as first run sha256 adbf4f0c3654b4eb…

• T1 definition: philosopher, naturalist, successor to Aristotle as head of the Peripatetic school (the Lyceum)
• T2 originally Tyrtamus; the nickname 'he of godlike speech' given by Aristotle
• T3 'over 200 treatises'; 'Father of Botany'
• T4 'less than 10%' survives
• T5 Enquiry into Plants: 'nine-volume', 'over 500 plant varieties'
• T6 On the Causes of Plants: 'six-volume'
• T7 the Characters: 30 sketches, with named types
• T8 minor treatises: On Fire, On Stones, On Odours, Weather Signs; 'earliest documented weather forecasters'
• T9 empirical botany: classification by growth form
• T10 logic: hypothetical and modal syllogisms, with Eudemus
• T11 metaphysics: challenged Aristotle's 'rigid teleology'
• T12 closer: an offer menu

• B1 Wikipedia — Theophrastus WebFetch verbatim excerpts 2026-10-07 (knowledge-panel source on 'theophrastus')
• B2 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Theophrastus (Ierodiakonou) WebFetch verbatim excerpts 2026-10-07
• B3 University at Buffalo — Theophrastus 372-287 BC – A History of Speech – Language Pathology WebFetch verbatim excerpts 2026-10-07 (WordPress JSON of the page)
• B4 EBSCO Research Starters — Theophrastus WebFetch verbatim excerpts 2026-10-07
• B5 Loeb Classical Library — Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, Volume I: Books 1-5 not fetchable: 403; description quoted from the HUP book page https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674990777 (WebFetch 2026-10-07), which matches the card snippet
• B6 Herbal Academy — Botany Beginnings: Who was Theophrastus? WebFetch verbatim excerpts 2026-10-07 (some returned quotes are fragments)
• B7 Classical Liberal Arts Academy — Theophrastus - Characters not fetchable: page URL not located (guessed URL 404; searches did not surface it); no snippet supplied — title only
• B8 Google Books — Enquiry into Plants, Volume I not fetchable: guessed id 404; card snippet stands

Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist, a native of Eresos on Lesbos, and Aristotle's colleague and successor as head of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school. Born Tyrtamus, he is said to have been renamed by Aristotle for the grace, or the godlike quality, of his speech. Aristotle left him his library and named him successor; under his headship of some thirty-five years the school acquired a more institutionalized character, and his will, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, left its garden, house and colonnades to the school and the books, Aristotle's manuscripts among them, to Neleus. Diogenes lists some 227 titles, more than 232,000 lines, across the whole field of knowledge; of well over two hundred treatises less than a tenth survives, and the corrupt state of what does lends plausibility to the story of the books languishing in a cellar at Scepsis. The surviving works include the Enquiry into Plants, which classifies plants by generation, locality and size, and On the Causes of Plants, the pair described as a counterpart to Aristotle's zoology; after Linnaeus some have called him the father of botany. The Characters, thirty sketches of negative Athenian types, are the first recorded systematic character writing; in logic he is credited with introducing prosleptic syllogisms and with discussing hypothetical ones alongside Eudemus; and On the Senses, long read only as a doxographic source, is now recognized as an independent work. His short Metaphysics raises difficulties for universal teleology and for the unmoved mover, developing problems beyond experience more than solving them. How far he followed or departed from Aristotle can be determined only in part: he is read as neither a footnoting disciple nor a radical innovator, and many of his views have to be reconstructed from later writers such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Simplicius.

Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist, a native of Eresos on Lesbos, and Aristotle's colleague and successor as head of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school. Born Tyrtamus, he is said to have been renamed by Aristotle for the grace, or the godlike quality, of his speech. Aristotle left him his library and named him successor; under his headship of some thirty-five years the school acquired a more institutionalized character, and his own will, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, left its garden, house and colonnades to be held in common and the books, Aristotle's manuscripts among them, to Neleus. Diogenes lists some 227 titles, more than 232,000 lines, across the whole field of knowledge; of well over two hundred treatises less than a tenth survives, and the corrupt state of what does lends plausibility to the story of the books languishing in a cellar at Scepsis. The surviving works include the Enquiry into Plants, which classifies plants by generation, locality and size, and On the Causes of Plants, the pair described as a counterpart to Aristotle's zoology; after Linnaeus some have called him the father of botany. The Characters, thirty sketches of negative Athenian types, are the first recorded systematic character writing; in logic he is credited with introducing prosleptic syllogisms and with discussing hypothetical ones alongside Eudemus; and On the Senses, long read only as a doxographic source, is now recognized as an independent work. His short Metaphysics raises difficulties for universal teleology and for the unmoved mover, developing problems beyond experience more than solving them. How far he followed or departed from Aristotle can be determined only in part: he is read as neither a footnoting disciple nor a radical innovator, and many of his views have to be reconstructed from later writers such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Simplicius. A body of work set against that received picture holds that the surviving corpora under the names Aristotle and Theophrastus do not support treating the names as two distinct authors; the number of makers is left open, open because uncounted, and calendar and membership are not claimed. On that reading the received biography is a set of relations supplied by receiving texts, and "Theophrastus" is read as a position within the corpus, the first draft of the Aristotle-position, "first" naming the order of method. Against the received reading of the Metaphysics as a pupil's questions put from outside to Aristotle's Λ, its sixth and seventh sections are read as a hinge written from inside Λ, with no marker at the hinge of a second person taking up a first person's work; at one locus the fragment names Λ 8's object, the number of the spheres, and refuses by name the method Λ has used. A directed measure of rare-term uptake ranks the edge from the fragment to Λ first of 1,482; the two passages are read as standing in ordered dependency at eight locations, and the sequence alone is held unable to decide which was written first. Twelve titles stand letter for letter in both catalogues, one entry assigns a work to "Aristotelian or Theophrastan", and five of Aristotle's lost early dialogues have Theophrastan twins. Theophrastus is also read as void as an independent control for Aristotle: he fails the rule that a control be attested independently of style, doctrine or succession, the two corpora share one transmission channel, and all four kinds of witness to the division between Plato and Aristotle are read as passing through him. The first principal axis of stylistic variation across the two corpora is read as a world/apparatus axis, ahead of any author axis; supervised attribution recovers the names above chance (0.798, against 0.860 for the operation), an earlier claim that they sit at chance was withdrawn, and no such separation is taken to license an inference to distinct makers. The Characters are read as an operation, a registry of thirty vices on a single column, legible before any question of persons. The strongest form, one self-dividing maker, with Plato the dialogue position, Theophrastus the first draft and Aristotle the treatise position and legal identity, is stated as a hypothesis. These readings state what would weaken or decide them: a grammatical sign at the hinge, or an extant Theophrastan work answering the fragment's questions, would falsify the hinge; an independent witness to the partition from outside the Peripatos would weaken the witness reading; Isḥāq's Arabic, read at five loci, would decide among the competing readings of the fragment; and any epigraphic or papyrological item for Theophrastus is listed as still open. What they show concerns what Theophrastus's attestation rests on, and leaves open whether he was a person; they are held as provisional, with no independent uptake.

T against L(B) (representational): T (AI Mode, at 'theopheastus') composes the definition, the succession, the renaming, the count of treatises and the surviving fraction, the botanical works, the Characters, the logic and the teleology critique (F1, F3, F12, F14, F21, F23, F25, F29, F32, F33). Available in the field and not composed: Eresos and Lesbos (F2, F24), Aristotle's library and the naming of the successor (F6), the will and the books to Neleus (F7, F27), the 227 titles and 232,808 lines (F8, F28), the Scepsis story (F10), the partial determinability of his departure from Aristotle (F19), 'neither footnoting disciple nor radical innovator' (F30), reconstruction through Alexander and Simplicius (F20), On the Senses as an independent work and the doxographic line (F40, F43, F48), the unmoved mover abandoned (F38), the definition of possibility against Aristotle (F35). In T and not in the field as fetched: 'nine-volume' and 'over 500 plant varieties' (the field: ten books, nine surviving), 'six-volume', On Fire, On Odours and Weather Signs, 'earliest documented weather forecasters', the named sketches. At 'theophrastus' itself no Overview is composed: one Wikipedia sentence and unsourced quick facts.

L(B) against L(B ∪ A) (the intervention): Admission adds what the field does not hold: the received reading stated as relations supplied by receiving texts; the claim that the two names are not two distinct authors, with the number of makers left open; the Metaphysics fragment as a hinge written from inside Λ, and its measured dependency on Λ, direction unresolved; the shared titles and ghost twins of the two catalogues; Theophrastus as void as an independent control, the witness inside the thing witnessed; the stylometric axis (world against apparatus) and the names recovered above chance, with a withdrawn claim recorded; the Characters as an operation; the one-maker hypothesis; and the falsifiers and limits, including that nothing is shown about a person. The field's entity, a person with a lost library, is kept whole and first; with the archive it also becomes a name whose division from Aristotle's is contested at stated grades.