Of Philoponus' commentary on the Meteorology only that on chapters 1-9 and 12 of the first book has been preserved. It is translated in this series in two volumes, the first covering chapters 1-3; the second (this volume) chapters 4-9 and 12. The subjects discussed here include the nature of fiery and light phenomena in the sky, the formation of comets, the Milky Way, the properties of moist exhalation, and the formation of hail. Philoponus pays special attention to the distinction between the apparent and the real among the sky phenomena; he criticises Aristotle's theory of the Milky Way as sublunary, and argues for its origin in the heavenly realm; gives a detailed exposition of Aristotelian theory of antiperistasis, mutual replacement of the hot and the cold, as the mechanism of condensation and related processes. As in the first volume, Philoponus demonstrates scholarly erudition and familiarity with methods and results of post-Aristotelian Greek science. Despite the fragmented state of the work and the genre of commentary, the reader will find the elements of a coherent picture of the cosmos based on a radical re-thinking of Aristotelian meteorology and physics.
This volume completes, starting from chapter 6, the commentary by the young Philoponus on Aristotle's Categories, of which chapters 1–5 were previously published in this series (Philoponus: On Aristotle Categories 1–5 with Philoponus: A Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts). This ancient commentary was the first work in the Aristotelian syllabus after a general introduction to Aristotle by the same author. It is influenced by an extant short anonymous record of Philoponus' teacher Ammonius' lectures on the same work, but Philoponus' commentary is two and a half times as long as that anonymous record, and includes special contributions of Philoponus' own, for example in philology, Christian theology and in disagreements with Aristotle. This English translation of Philoponus' work is the latest volume in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series and makes this philosophical work accessible to a modern readership. The translation is accompanied by an introduction, comprehensive commentary notes, bibliography, glossary of translated terms and a subject index.
Book 2 of the Physics is arguably the best introduction to Aristotle's work, both because it explains some of his central concepts, such as nature and the four causes, and because it asks some gripping questions that are still debated today: Is chance something real? If so, what? Can nature be explained by chance, necessity and natural selection, or is it purposive? Philoponus' commentary is not only a valuable guide, but also a work of Neoplatonism with its own views on causation, the Providence of Nature, the problem of evil and the immortality of the soul.
These chapters of Aristotle's treatise are about physical interactions. In his innovative commentary, Philoponus discusses Aristotle's idea that certain qualities of the elements are basic. In what way are they basic? he asks. To what extent can the other qualities be reduced to the basic ones? And if the other qualities depend on the basic ones, how is it that they can vary independently of each other when the basic qualities change? Philoponus develops the idea that the other qualities merely supervene on the basic ones, rather than resulting from them. Moreover, physical qualities admit of different ranges of variation, and so have different thresholds at which they appear or disappear. Philoponus also discusses Aristotle's idea that the elements and their basic qualities survive potentially when mixed together. He explains this by drawing a third sense of 'potential' out of Aristotle's texts to take the place of the two senses which Aristotle explicitly recognises. Philoponus adds further restrictions to Aristotle's principles of causation. Black can contaminate white, but the black in ebony does not have the right matter for affecting the white of milk. He asks why fluids can affect each other more easily than solids. In every case, Philoponus takes Aristotle's discussions further, and his ideas on the dependence of some qualities on others are very relevant to the continuing philosophical debate on the subject.
Aristotle's Meteorology influenced generations of speculation about the earth sciences, ranging from atmospheric phenomena to earthquakes. The commentary of John Philoponus (6th century AD) on the opening three chapters of Meteorology is here translated for the first time into English by Dr Inna Kupreeva, building on the work of L.G. Westerink. Philoponus, who today is increasingly respected as a philosopher in his own right, here engages critically with Aristotle's views about the building-blocks of our world, its size and relationship to other heavenly bodies, and reception of warmth from the sun. The translation in this volume is accompanied by a detailed introduction, extensive commentary notes and a bibliography.
The first five chapters of Aristotle's De Generatione et Corruptione distinguish creation and destruction from mere qualitative change and from growth. They include a fascinating debate about the atomists' analysis of creation and destruction as due to the rearrangement of indivisible atoms. Aristotle's rival belief in the infinite divisibility of matter is explained and defended against the atomists' powerful attack on infinite divisibility. But what inspired Philoponus most in his commentary is the topic of organic growth. How does it take place without ingested matter getting into the same place as the growing body? And how is personal identity preserved, if our matter is always in flux, and our form depends on our matter? If we do not depend on the persistence of matter why are we not immortal? Analogous problems of identity arise also for inanimate beings. Philoponus draws out a brief remark of Aristotle's to show that cause need not be like effect. For example, what makes something hard may be cold, not hard. This goes against a persistent philosophical prejudice, but Philoponus makes it plausible that Aristotle recognized this truth. These topics of identity over time and the principles of causation are still matters of intense discussion.
Themistius ran his philosophical school in Constantinople in the middle of the fourth century A.D. His paraphrases of Aristotle's writings are unlike the elaborate commentaries produced by Alexander of Aphrodisias, or the later Neoplatonists Simplicius and Philoponus. His aim was to provide a clear and independent restatement of Aristotle's text which would be accessible as an elementary exegesis. But he also discusses important philosophical problems, reports and disagrees with other commentaries including the lost commentary of Porphyry, and offers interpretations of Plato. Themistius' paraphrase of Aristotle's On the Soul is his most important and influential work. It is also the first extant commentary on this work of Aristotle to survive from antiquity. A rival to that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, it represents one of the main interpretations of Aristotle's theory of the intellect, which was debated throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It continues to be an important text for the reconstruction of Aristotle's philosophical psychology today.
'. . . the more honourable animals have been allotted a more honourable soul. . . ' What is the nature of the soul? It is this question that Aristotle sought to answer in De Anima (On the Soul). In doing so he offers a psychological theory that encompasses not only human beings but all living beings. Its basic thesis, that the soul is the form of an organic body, sets it in sharp contrast with both Pre-Socratic physicalism and Platonic dualism. On the Soul contains Aristotle's definition of the soul, and his explanations of nutrition, perception, cognition, and animal self-motion. The general theory in De Anima is augmented in the shorter works of Parva Naturalia, which deal with perception, memory and recollection, sleep and dreams, longevity, life-cycles, and psycho-physiology. This new translation brings together all of Aristotle's extant and complementary psychological works, and adds as a supplement ancient testimony concerning his lost writings dealing with the soul. The introduction by Fred D. Miller, Jr. explains the central place of the soul in Aristotle's natural science, the unifying themes of his psychological theory, and his continuing relevance for modern philosophy and psychology.
This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide. The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence – uncovered in some of the chapters of this book – that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.
Philoponus' On Aristotle Categories 1-5 discusses the nature of universals, preserving the views of Philoponus' teacher Ammonius, as well as presenting a Neoplatonist interpretation of Aristotle's Categories. Philoponus treats universals as concepts in the human mind produced by abstracting a form or nature from the material individual in which it has its being. The work is important for its own philosophical discussion and for the insight it sheds on its sources. For considerable portions, On Aristotle Categories 1-5 resembles the wording of an earlier commentary which declares itself to be an anonymous record taken from the seminars of Ammonius. Unlike much of Philoponus' later writing, this commentary does not disagree with either Aristotle or Ammonius, and suggests the possibility that Philoponus either had access to this earlier record or wrote it himself. This edition explores these questions of provenance, alongside the context, meaning and implications of Philoponus' work. The English translation is accompanied by an introduction, comprehensive commentary notes, bibliography, glossary of translated terms and a subject index. The latest volume in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, the edition makes this philosophical work accessible to a modern readership. Philoponus was a Christian writing in Greek in 6th century CE Alexandria, where some students of philosophy were bilingual in Syriac as well as Greek. In this Greek treatise translated from the surviving Syriac version, Philoponus discusses the logic of parts and wholes, and he illustrates the spread of the pagan and Christian philosophy of 6th century CE Greeks to other cultures, in this case to Syria. Philoponus, an expert on Aristotle's philosophy, had turned to theology and was applying his knowledge of Aristotle to disputes over the human and divine nature of Christ. Were there two natures and were they parts of a whole, as the Emperor Justinian proposed, or was there only one nature, as Philoponus claimed with the rebel minority, both human and divine? If there were two natures, were they parts like the ingredients in a chemical mixture? Philoponus attacks the idea. Such ingredients are not parts, because they each inter-penetrate the whole mixture. Moreover, he abandons his ingenious earlier attempts to support Aristotle's view of mixture by identifying ways in which such ingredients might be thought of as potentially preserved in a chemical mixture. Instead, Philoponus says that the ingredients are destroyed, unlike the human and divine in Christ. This English translation of Philoponus' treatise is the latest volume in the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series and makes this philosophical work accessible to a modern readership. The translation in each volume is accompanied by an introduction, comprehensive commentary notes, bibliography, glossary of translated terms and a subject index.
