Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 8.1-5

257 Pages·2011·1.31 MB·English

by  Istvan Bodnar & Michael Chase & Michael Share

SIMPLICIUS
On Aristotle
Physics 8.1-5
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SIMPLICIUS
On Aristotle
Physics 8.1-5
Translated by István Bodnár,
Michael Chase and Michael Share
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
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First published in 2012 by Bristol Classical Press
Paperback edition fi rst published 2014
© 2012 by István Bodnár, Michael Chase, and Michael Share
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The present translations have been made possible by generous and
imaginative funding from the following sources: the National Endowment
for the Humanities, Division of Research Programs, an independent
federal agency of the USA; the Leverhulme Trust; the British Academy; the
Jowett Copyright Trustees; the Royal Society (UK); Centro Internazionale
A. Beltrame di Storia dello Spazio e del Tempo (Padua); Mario Mignucci;
Liverpool University; the Leventis Foundation; the Arts and Humanities
Research Council; Gresham College; the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable
Trust; the Henry Brown Trust; Mr and Mrs N. Egon; the Netherlands
Organisation for Scientifi c Research (NOW/GW); the Hungarian National
Fund for Scientifi c Research (OTKA); the Ashdown Trust; Dr Victoria
Solomonides, the Cultural Attaché of the Greek Embassy in London. The
editor wishes to thank Peter Lautner, Barrie Fleet, James Wilberding,
Pantelis Golitsis, Michael Griffi n, Donald Russell, Michael Share, Richard
McKirahan, and Katharine O’Reilly for their comments, Annie Hewitt,
David Robertson, Riin Sirkel and Ian Crystal for indexes. He is also
grateful to Ian Crystal for preparing the volume for press and to Deborah
Blake, the publisher responsible for every volume since the fi rst.
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Preface Richard Sorabji vii
Conventions xi
Abbreviations xii
Departures from Diels’ Text xiii
Simplicius’ response to Philoponus’ attack on Aristotle
Physics 8.1
Michael Chase 1
Translation
8.1-2 Michael Chase 19
8.3 Michael Share 94
8.4 István Bodnár 112
8.5 Michael Share and Michael Chase 130
Notes 169
Bibliography 197
English-Greek Glossary 199
Greek-English Index 207
Subject Index 232
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Preface
Richard Sorabji
In these chapters of Book 8 of the Physics, Aristotle (384-322 BC) paves
the way for introducing, at the end of Book 8, the Prime Mover of the
heavens, which along with most Greeks Aristotle took to rotate around
the earth. In Chapter 1, he urges against Democritus that an explana-
tion of motion is needed, even if, as he argues in Chapter 2, motion is
eternal, despite (Chapter 3) some non-motion. In Chapter 4,1 he argues
that a body’s movement must be caused by something distinct from
itself, contrary to Plato’s view that soul is self-moving. Taking the
particular case of animals, which are popularly thought of as self-
moving, Aristotle says that it is really the soul that moves an animal’s
body (8.4, 254b27-33, developed in 8.6, 258a1-b9), along with stimuli
from the environment (to periekhon, 8.2, 253a7-20; 8.6, 259b1-20). But
what about the natural motion of air and fire upwards and of earth or
water downwards? In Physics 2.1, he had distinguished natural motion
from the motion of artefacts, by saying that natural objects have an
internal source of movement, their nature, whereas artefacts have to be
propelled from outside. But in Physics 8.4, a body’s inner nature seems
insufficiently distinct from it to satisfy the requirement that what is
moved should be moved by something other than itself. So he introduces
a point not made explicit before, that the inner nature of earth, air, fire
and water is a source not of causing motion, but of undergoing it
(paskhein, 255b30-1) at the hands of some further agent. To serve as
this further agent, he introduces two low-grade causes which do not
maintain continuing contact with what they move. To take steam rising
from a kettle as an example of rising air, the low-grade agent could be
either the person who boils the water in the kettle, or the person who
releases the obstacle to its rising by taking the lid off the kettle
(256a1-2). The obstacle remover, however, is an agent only accidentally,
like the wall off which a ball ricochets. This second agent does not
interest Alexander, and Philoponus was later to rule out the obstacle-
remover altogether (in Phys. 195,24-32). The inner nature still answers
the question why (dia ti) light and heavy natural objects move to their
natural places. But the further agents answer the question by what the
movement is initiated. If in all motion, even that of animals and of
viii Preface
natural rise and fall, a body is moved by something distinct from itself,
then the way has been paved for inferring by induction that the heavens
too must be moved by something distinct from themselves. The induc-
tion is not required to show that that something acts in the same way
as the celestial mover.
In 8.5, Aristotle argues that, on pain of an infinite regress, we must
avoid saying that everything moved is moved by something that is
moved in its turn. But he still regards Plato’s idea of self-motion as not
yet ruled out, and offers a more general argument that in so-called
self-movers, we have to find a part that causes and a part that under-
goes motion. Hence the prime mover that stops the regress needs to be
unmoved. Rather unexpectedly, he urges that the soul itself is un-
moved, a view that he will defend in his later On the Soul 2.5, by saying
that when the capacities that in his view constitute the soul are
actualised, such actualisation is not to be thought of as an ordinary case
of being moved or affected. The reference to soul as unmoved may seem
risky, because he does not want the conclusion that the heavenly bodies
are moved simply by their own souls as unmoved movers. But eventu-
ally in 8.10, without mentioning the issue, Aristotle will argue that the
unmoved mover required cannot be a capacity housed in or possessed
by the finite body of his universe (as the souls of the heavenly bodies
would need to be), because a finite body could not accommodate the
infinite power needed for the eternal rotation of the heavens.
The commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 8.1-5 written by the Neo-
platonist Simplicius some time after AD 529 is particularly interesting
for two reasons. First, it contains a substantial excursus attacking
Philoponus, and this is the subject of Michael Chase’s Introduction to
Simplicius’ response to Philoponus’ attack on Aristotle Physics 8.1.
Simplicius’ excursus includes precious fragments of Book 6 of
Philoponus’ Against Aristotle. These fragments, numbered 121-33,
have already been included in fourteen pages of Christian Wildberg’s
1987 translation of Philoponus’ attack on Aristotle in the series Ancient
Commentators on Aristotle, and have been further discussed by him
elsewhere.2 Philoponus’ attack includes the famous arguments that, on
principles accepted ever since Aristotle, the universe cannot have
finished going right through a more than finite number of days, much
less be going to exceed a more than finite number. These arguments by
Philoponus have drawn attention repeatedly and were highlighted
again in 1983.3 The present translation makes more accessible Sim-
plicius’ side of the case. This was examined in the first of several
writings by Philippe Hoffman, in a collection of 1987.4 The collection’s
second edition of 2010 provides a survey and bibliography of writing on
Philoponus since 1987, including writing on this subject,5 and Michael
Chase below takes the discussion of Simplicius further.
Secondly, Simplicius reports and quotes extensively the lost com-
mentary of Alexander, holder of the Aristotelian chair in Athens at or
Preface ix
soon after AD 200. This is an ideal time to consider Simplicius’ use of
Alexander,6 because Marwan Rashed has at this moment published and
discussed his newly discovered fragments of Alexander’s lost commen-
tary on Books 4 to 8, more on Book 8 than on any other book.7 In an
earlier article, he found Simplicius ascribing to Alexander the opposite
of his real view by leaving out of his quotation six words that survive in
the newly recovered text.8 But the overall picture that emerges from
comparing the new fragments as a whole is that Simplicius tends to
report or quote Alexander accurately and to respect his judgement,
even though on certain types of issue he goes on to disagree. The
subjects on which Simplicius disagrees suggest to Rashed Simplicius’
purposes in writing a commentary.9 Simplicius saw some Presocratic
philosophers, along with Plato, Aristotle and the Chaldaean Oracles as
constituting a coherent and eternal philosophy, in which Aristotle
legitimately discussed the perceptible world, but Plato above all and
others emphasised its dependence on a higher intelligible world. Sim-
plicius disagrees with Alexander when the latter interprets Aristotle in
a way that rules out the higher causes and that turns merely perspec-
tival differences among the authorities into doctrinal differences.
Alexander, he thinks, is of much value because of his mastery of
Aristotle’s text, but because of these other tendencies, his is the last
interpretation of Aristotle outside pagan Neoplatonism that Simplicius
can tolerate. Christianity, on this view, is the foe, represented at its
worst in Simplicius’ Christian contemporary Philoponus. The latter has
no understanding of perspectival differences, but seeks to show dissen-
sion and error in the eternal philosophy.
If this is right, it is no accident that the two most distinctive aspects
of the present text are its attack on Philoponus, and its intensive use,
with caveats, of Alexander. For these will have been the two issues
which most exercised Simplicius.
Notes
1. This account of Chapters 4 and 5 is chiefly based on that in my Matter,
Space and Motion, London 1988, Chicago 2006, ch. 13.
2. Christian Wildberg, ‘Prolegomena to the study of Philoponus’ contra
Aristotelem’ in Richard Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristote-
lian Science, London 1983, 2nd edn, Supplement 103 to the Bulletin of the
Institute of Classical Studies, London 2010, and in John Philoponus’ Criticism
of Aristotle’s Theory of Aether, Berlin 1968.
3. Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum, London 1983, Chi-
cago 2006, ch. 14, ‘Infinity arguments in favour of a beginning’.
4. Philippe Hoffmann, ‘Simplicius’ polemics’, in Richard Sorabji (ed.), Phi-
loponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, London 1983, 2nd edn,
Supplement 103 to the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, London
2010.
5. The second edition edition adds, besides the survey and bibliography of
the literature on Philoponus since 1987, an interpretation of the excavated