Boethius is mainly remembered for his Consolation of Philosophy, but he certainly was a prolific writer. Quite a bit of his output has survived. He's one of the major formative philosophers for the subsequent scholastic movement of the middle ages. His status as one of the encyclopedists is the reason why I'm getting acquainted with his more obscure works right now.

This work is philosophically Aristotelian, but Aristotelian by way of Themistius and Cicero. Both Themistius and Cicero wrote on the Topics and Categories of Aristotle. Boethius spends some time comparing and contrasting the former writers and adding his own thoughts on the subject. His major purpose with this work is to lay out means for finding arguments. He differentiates between rhetorical and dialectical philosophical purposes early on and is primarily concerned with the latter. He seems to have been most idiosyncratic in the way he dealt with the differentiae.

To be perfectly honest, this isn't an incredibly engaging work. It deals with categorical and topical minutiae that is quite dry and probably only matters to specialists. That said, I was quite impressed with, not only Eleonore Stump's translation, but with her notes and essays. She certainly attempted to make the subject matter more accessible. I can't fault her effort at all. Her input certainly added to this book overall.

If someone wants to be acquainted with streams of Aristotelian thought and the way it influenced the scholastics, or just wants to be better acquainted with Boethius, I might recommend this book. I doubt the average reader would want to delve into discussions that often seem to be semantical and not all that practical in matters of logic. ( )

If you are weird and like Early Church treatises on rhetoric and logic, then this is for you. I found Stump's translation very pleasing to the eye and I'm definitely hoping on In Ciceronis Topica ( )