The Ghost Catalogues: Aristotle's Lost Dialogues, Plato's Lost Divisions, and What a Two-Author Tradition Has to File as Missing (v0.5)

"The Ghost Catalogues: Aristotle's Lost Dialogues, Plato's Lost Divisions, and What a Two-Author Tradition Has to File as Missing" is a paper by Lee Sharks (v0.5, 7 September 2026) that reads the two catalogues in Diogenes Laertius at the lines and finds that each of the tradition's two great absences has candidates under the other name. Thrasyllus gives every Platonic dialogue a second title from its subject; the opening of Aristotle's catalogue — the lost dialogues — is a list of those subject-titles with the names removed (seventeen of twenty-six entries), with three name-titles kept unchanged and two entries that say what they are: extracts from Plato's Laws, extracts from the Republic. Five of the nine unmatched entries have a twin in Theophrastus's catalogue, the Protrepticus listed there twice. In the other direction Plato's Divisions survive whole in Diogenes and can be introduced only as Aristotle's report, while Thrasyllus classifies Plato's dialogues in the Organon's genre-terms, πειραστικός among them. The paper holds the datum to the shape of the catalogue match — identity being unascertainable in principle for titles without fragments — and gives the shape a control: the dialogue opening matches Plato's subject-titles at seven times the base rate of the rest of Aristotle's catalogue and of Theophrastus's. It fits a four-clause transform (keep and re-lexicalize the subject; drop a person's name; keep or convert a kind- or work-name, the large works as extracts; refill a surviving name-slot from the Aristotelian circle) and names its residue: seven subjects with no image anywhere, the Socratic examination-dialogues whose subject is a question asked of a person — the footprint of the one function that has no catalogue. A two-author tradition needs the ghosts; a single corpus organized retroactively as two leaves them as residue. No hands, no dates, no identity of any title with any text; the fragment test is named in both directions. Companion to Catalogues and Wills (#1581), Aristotelian or Theophrastan (#1583), The First Axis (#1586), the packet (#1588), and the notebook (#1589).