The Philological Part of Commentating

The commentator has to determine whether the text at hand really is an accurate representation of the original philosophical text. So you mean there might be mistakes in the way the text was copied down by the scribe in other words? Exactly. A commentator we find often complains that a previous scribe might have mistranscribed a word or a phrase or missed out a sentence. And we find this in late antique Greek commentators as well as in post-Avisanian Arabic philosophical commentators.