Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 1–8

General Introduction to the 12 Volumes of Translations

Stephen Menn

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350286641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Supporting the twelve volumes of translation of Simplicius' great commentary on Aristotle's Physics, all published by Bloomsbury in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, between 1992 and 2021, this volume presents a general introduction to the commentary. It covers the philosophical aims of Simplicius' commentaries on the Physics and the related text On the Heaven; Simplicius' methods and his use of earlier sources; and key themes and comparison with Philoponus' commentary on the same text. Simplicius treats the Physics as a universal study of the principles of all natural things underlying the account of the cosmos in On the Heaven. In both treatises, he responds at every stage to the now lost Peripatetic commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias, which set Aristotle in opposition to Plato and to earlier thinkers such as Parmenides, Empedocles and Anaxagoras. On each passage, Simplicius after going through Alexander's commentary raises difficulties for the text of Aristotle as interpreted by Alexander. Then, after making observations about details of the text, and often going back to a direct reading of the older philosophers (for whom he is now often our main source, as he is for Alexander's commentary), he proposes his own solution to the difficulties, introduced with a modest 'perhaps', which reads Aristotle as in harmony with Plato and earlier thinkers.

General Introduction

1. Simplicius and his Physics commentary

In translating Simplicius’ commentary on the first two chapters of Aristotle’s Physics, more than 100 large pages in the Commentaria in AristotelemGraeca on four much smaller pages in a modern edition of the Physics, we are completing the translation, by many hands, of Simplicius’ commentary as a whole.¹ So I am taking the opportunity in this introduction, published together with the translation volume, to introduce not only Simplicius’ commentary on Physics 1.1–2, and our translation of it, but also Simplicius’ commentary on the Physics as a whole. Some points made in the introduction will also bear on Simplicius’ commentaries on other texts of Aristotle, the Categories and On the Heaven, since they are methodologically similar and form parts of a single great project; the commentary on the Physics is especially closely tied to the commentary on On the Heaven.

Simplicius’ commentary on the Physics, written some time around 540 CE, is at more than half a million words the longest surviving single-authored text from Greek antiquity: it is exceeded only by Eustathius’ commentaries on the Iliad and Odyssey, and they are from the twelfth century CE, which is not ‘antiquity’. Simplicius’ commentary on On the Heaven, almost 270,000 words, is also enormous; each is about nine times as long as the text it is commenting on. These commentaries combine philosophy and scholarship. Simplicius wants not only to elucidate Aristotle’s claims and arguments but also to defend them; since he is a committed Platonist, he must therefore undertake to defend the harmony of Plato and Aristotle on points of apparent disagreement. In defence of Aristotle he also undertakes the last great pagan-Christian polemic of Greek antiquity, an attack on the Christian philosopher John Philoponus’ denial of the eternity of the world and his denial of an incorruptible element making up the heavenly bodies: Simplicius argues that Philoponus is wrong philosophically, and he defends Aristotle’s arguments, and he also argues that Philoponus is wrong to claim Plato’s Timaeus as supporting his own side of these issues. Simplicius also engages in questions of textual scholarship on Aristotle, and he is also led to preserve, by quoting or closely paraphrasing, sometimes lengthy texts of earlier philosophers and mathematicians that would otherwise be lost. Most famously, he cites many texts of the pre-Socratic philosophers; but also, for instance, of the fifth-century BCE mathematician Hippocrates of Chios (through an intermediate source); of the early Peripatetics, especially Aristotle’s immediate students Theophrastus and Eudemus; the commentaries of the second-third-century CE Peripatetic (neo-Aristotelian) Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Physics and On the Heaven, the commentary of the late-third-century CE neo-Platonist Porphyry on the Physics, and many earlier commentaries on the Categories (some cited directly and others at second hand); and the series of (mostly neo-Platonic) writers on place and time, culminating in Simplicius’ own teacher Damascius, that he cites in the Corollaries on Place and Time embedded in his commentary on Physics 4. Even when Simplicius is not our only source for some text, he is an important witness to its early history, often giving a slightly different version of the text than other sources: since Diels’ classic article, Simplicius has been used as a witness to the history of the text of Aristotle, earlier than any of our extant manuscripts.² Simplicius’ aim in quoting is often not just to preserve an earlier thinker or to cite him as a witness, but to rehabilitate him against criticism, or to correct what he sees as a common misinterpretation of a past thinker.

It is usually an interest in these accomplishments of Simplicius – preserving earlier texts, harmonizing Aristotle or other thinkers with Plato, arguing against other philosophers and scholars including Philoponus – that leads modern readers to Simplicius. But while it is easy to find interesting passages in Simplicius on all these things, without the larger context we cannot judge when he is quoting verbatim or paraphrasing, when he knows a text at first hand and when only through later sources, or what biases might influence his selection and interpretation of the particular passages he cites. We cannot evaluate his testimony on particular points without understanding the larger programme that leads him to write vast commentaries on Aristotle, to discuss the views of earlier thinkers, and sometimes to cite their writings.

The three Aristotle commentaries, and especially the commentaries on the Physics and On the Heaven, are parts of a single programme, and can be dated relative to each other and placed within the larger frame of Simplicius’ career. In the Physics commentary 1117,15–1118,11 and in several later passages,³ Simplicius refers back to what he has done in commenting on On the Heaven, so he wrote the On the Heaven commentary first. As we will see, the On the Heaven commentary helped to motivate the Physics commentary, and many themes touched on in the On the Heaven commentary are further developed in the Physics commentary, although Simplicius also changed his mind on some issues between the two works. In his Categories commentary, 435,20–4, he refers back to his Physics commentary, so the Categories commentary was the last of the three great commentaries. Simplicius’ only other extant work is a commentary on Epictetus’ Encheiridion. It was established by Bossier and Steel that the extant commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul attributed to Simplicius is not really by him, and is probably by his Athenian colleague Priscian of Lydia.⁴ Two passages in this commentary on On the Soul, 28,19–20 and 217,23–8, refer back to a commentary on the Metaphysics by the same author, but if the commentary on On the Soul is not by Simplicius, there is not much evidence that he wrote a commentary on the Metaphysics.⁵ We have references from Byzantine and Arabic sources to lost works of his, notably a monograph on the principles (definitions, postulates, and common notions) in Euclid’s Elements, from which we have a few extracts in Arabic, and a commentary on Aristotle’s Meteorology. The Meteorology commentary may well have had thematic connections with the On the Heaven and Physics commentaries, but the other works (unless there was a Metaphysics commentary) probably would not add much towards understanding them.⁶

Simplicius first studied in Alexandria under Ammonius the son of Hermias, the author of an extant commentary on Aristotle’s On Interpretation and of lectures which shaped the next generation’s commentaries on other texts, including the Physics; Ammonius had studied under Proclus in Athens but was heavily influenced by Porphyry and committed to harmonizing Plato and Aristotle. Simplicius was, next, a student or junior colleague (hetairos)⁷ in Athens of Damascius, the last Platonic scholarch and the last great independent philosopher of pagan antiquity. Damascius, a more radical and experimental follower of lines of thought from Proclus and especially from Iamblichus, looks down on Porphyry and Ammonius as superficial thinkers; Simplicius, while impressed by Damascius, retains his respect for Ammonius and manages to balance both loyalties. Simplicius was one of the seven philosophers led by Damascius, who, according to Agathias’ Histories 2.30–31, emigrated to the court of the Persian king Chosroes I because ‘it was forbidden by the laws for them to take part in public life here without fear (adeôs)’ since ‘they did not agree with the opinion prevailing among the Romans about the divine’ (i.e. presumably, after Justinian’s ban on pagan teaching in 529), and who were then disappointed in the Persian court, and returned to Roman territory (or its border-zones) after Chosroes insisted on inserting in a peace treaty a clause guaranteeing toleration for them.⁸ Where exactly they returned to, whether they settled somewhere as a group, and whether they went back to teaching, are unclear and disputed; but Simplicius’ commentaries are too long to be written versions of lectures in the usual way, and he refers to future readers rather than to auditors.⁹ The first book of Simplicius’ commentary on the On the Heaven, the earliest of his three surviving Aristotelian commentaries, is credited in the oldest manuscripts to Damascius, and while no one doubts that in its present form it is by Simplicius, he may well have started it under Damascius’ tutelage.¹⁰ By contrast, the Physics commentary (775,31–4) refers back to Damascius as having died.

2. Simplicius’ philosophical aims in his commentaries on Aristotle’s On the Heaven and Physics

The motivations of the commentary on On the Heaven are the clearest, and help us to see why Simplicius was also driven to write a commentary on the Physics. The first thing to say is that Simplicius was motivated in his commentary on On the Heaven to defend the harmony of Aristotle with Plato, or specifically of Aristotle’s On the Heaven with Plato’s Timaeus. But to see why that was important to him we need to say more concretely what needed to be harmonized.¹¹

Here are some issues on which there is tension between the Timaeus and On the Heaven. The Timaeus clearly maintains that some god, the ‘demiurge’ or craftsman of the ordered physical world, who is apparently nous (reason or intelligence) personified, is the efficient cause of the physical world, and it seems to say that this god created the world (not out of nothing but out of a chaos) finitely many years ago.¹² The Timaeus also says that the heavenly bodies are made of fire, or mainly of fire with some admixture of air, water, and earth, and it seems to say that they move in circles because they are pushed by a world-soul which moves in circles when it thinks. By contrast, On the Heaven clearly maintains that the physical world has always existed, and will always exist, in its current overall structure, a series of heavenly spheres surrounding domains of (partially intermixed) fire, air, water, and earth. On the Heaven has no clear assertion of any incorporeal divine efficient cause of the world, and although Physics 8 does posit incorporeal efficient causes of the motions of the heavens, it does not seem to make them causes of the existence of the heavens; and while Metaphysics 12 posits incorporeal final causes of the heavenly motions, and describes at least the first of these causes as nous, it is not clear that they are also efficient causes even of the heavenly motions, let alone of the existence of the heavenly bodies. Finally, On the Heaven says that the heavenly spheres are made not of fire or air, which naturally move away from the centre of the world, nor of water or earth, which naturally move towards the centre of the world, but of a fifth simple body, sometimes called aether, which naturally moves around the centre of the world. This seems to leave little room for incorporeal movers of the heavens: On the Heaven 1.9 does posit one or more incorporeal gods beyond the heavenly bodies (and this is even clearer in the Physics and Metaphysics), but they do not seem to be the creating and providential god of the Timaeus.

Different Platonists react in different ways to Aristotle’s On the Heaven. Some, like Atticus in the second century CE, defend the straightforward meaning of the Timaeus and reject Aristotle’s doctrines of the eternity of the world and of the ‘fifth body,’ distinct from earth, water, air, and fire, as the substance of the heavens. But other Platonists welcome the challenge of On the Heaven as a means of distinguishing what is merely mythical in the Timaeus from the intellectual content of the myth. Aristotle does not want a god to begin to act at an arbitrary moment in time, without any change in circumstances that would give him a new reason for acting; he also does not want the heavenly bodies to move ‘violently,’ i.e. contrary to their natural motion, partly because he thinks it is absurd for a divine being to do or suffer violence, and partly because he thinks that nothing contrary to nature can endure eternally, and that what does not endure eternally cannot be the object of scientific knowledge. Many Platonists share these concerns with Aristotle and are willing to accept the Aristotelian theses of the eternity of the world and of the fifth body as part of a demythologized version of the Timaeus, as long as they do not have to sacrifice the Platonic doctrines of creation and providence. This yields a spectrum of possible positions on the harmony or disharmony of the Timaeus and On the Heaven.

There are extreme Platonists, like Plutarch of Chaeroneia and Atticus, who hold that Plato is right in the Timaeus in positing a divine efficient cause of the world, and that Aristotle is wrong in On the Heaven in positing the fifth body and the eternity of the world. On the opposite side, there are extreme Aristotelians, like Alexander of Aphrodisias, who think that On the Heaven is right in positing the fifth body and the eternity of the world and that the Timaeus is wrong is positing a divine efficient cause of the world. Between these extremes are people who are simultaneously moderate Platonists and moderate Aristotelians. Such people hold that the Timaeus and On the Heaven are both right in their distinctive theses, and that Aristotle was criticizing not the Timaeus but only ‘extremist’ interpretations of the Timaeus – interpretations that make the demiurge the kind of efficient cause that begins to act at a certain moment of time, and make the heavenly bodies out of the kind of fire that naturally moves away from the centre of the world. Thus Porphyry, in his lost commentary on the Timaeus, argued against Atticus’ ‘extremist’ Platonism, and argued for an interpretation of the Timaeus consistent with Aristotle. Proclus, in his (largely extant) commentary on the Timaeus, followed Porphyry in saving Plato for the ‘moderate’ Platonist position, according to which the divine nous eternally gives being to the heavens, and eternally gives them circular motion, not by overriding their natural motion but by eternally giving them a nature that disposes them to move in circles. But Proclus declines to save Aristotle for the moderate position.¹³ Perhaps Proclus thinks that Aristotle thought God was only a final and not an efficient cause, or perhaps he just thinks that it is not his job as a Platonic commentator to save Aristotle, and that if someone with more affection for Aristotle wants to do it, it is up to them.¹⁴ Proclus’ student Ammonius took up that challenge: ‘my teacher Ammonius wrote a whole book giving many arguments that Aristotle thought that God w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Principal Philosophers and Mathematicians Discussed
• General Introduction
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• Copyright