A 17th-century classic of Ethiopian philosophy might be a fake. Does it matter, or is that just how philosophy works?

I was under the impression that strict literary formalism had withered unremarkably in the late 20th century and is now relegated largely to the realm of questionable judicial theories.

Online discourse has revealed more than ever that authorial and social context informs meaning in unforeseen ways, though I think not as predictably or single-mindedly as we might traditionally believe. By extension, both high-level philosophical discourse among academics and real-world textual interpretations (of online messages, of political statements, of calls to violence, and the like) among laypeople have an evolved, postmodern, or really metamodern semantics. We see past some of the axioms of structuralism: that the nature of authenticity itself is subjective, and that the way we individually understand authenticity matters at least as much as whatever we are deciding is authentic or not.

In this new paradigm of meaning (which, like all postmodernity, is not truly new), we may understand an alleged forgery not for what it is (if it is "authentic") or what it is not (if it is "forged"); but rather as what it is and is not (in the present, to us, both as authentic and as forged), what it was at its time of conception (both supposed dates of creation, if applicable, to the denizens of the past), and what it has been at all times in between. In other words, such a text can inhabit a semantic superposition or a hyperreality where we can choose to integrate all "truths" into our ultimate and ever-expanding pseudo-truth of the universe. Critically, we can take the opportunity to understand different interpretations of the text (which are made differently for all of said reasons) to still contribute to the philosophical corpus. Thus we widen our perspective rather than narrow it.

While I'm not personally keen on ascribing harmless creative associations to what might be thought of as cultural appropriation—realistically, there is much at stake over credentials in some disciplines; more so things pertinent to non-academics like medicine, though nationalism and national philosophy are certainly pertinent—I'm less interested in fussing over which individual gets credit for which literary achievement and more interested in the material or intellectual impacts on people or the world. I find that academia in general is far too concerned with academic fairness and not so much with the actual significance of appropriation; fonder of reinforcing exclusionary systems for the sake of either meritocracy, procedure, or vindictive experience rather than critically evaluating those systems for what they actually do.

What is fair is not necessarily what is interesting, useful, or beneficial; and so I find that the key here is not to disregard forgeries like this, nor to dismiss them retroactively as never having been part of "the canon," but rather to create new sub-categories within the canon that account for the complicated nature of interpretation. In short: the world isn't black and white. If such a text is really Ethiopian, then it is so; if it is really Italian, but has been thought for so long to be Ethiopian that it has influenced other work in the latter tradition (or in others, with external understanding of it as Ethiopian), then it is not strictly Italian, is it? It belongs to a third category. It isn't prudent or necessarily possible to erase such traditions; despite popular thinking to the contrary, historians must understand history not as what objectively and certainly happened but rather what they and their predecessors understood to have happened, incorporating all relevant perspectives into that meta-understanding of historiography. Philosophy is no different.