Alexander of Aphrodisias: On Aristotle Metaphysics 1

249 Pages·2014·14.358 MB·English

by  Dooley, E. W

Alexander of Aphrodisias
On Aristotle Metaphysics 1
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Alexander of
Aphrodisias
On Aristotle Metaphysics 1
Translated by
William E. Dooley SJ
B L O O M S B U RY
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Bloomsbury Academic
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First published in 1989 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
Paperback edition first published 2014
© William E. Dooley, 1989
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Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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ISBNHB: 978-0-7156-2243-8
PB: 978-1-7809-3362-7
ePDF: 978-1-7809-3362-7
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Typeset by Derek Doyle & Associates, Mold, Clwyd.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction Richard Sorabji and Robert W. Sharpies 1
The commentary on Metaphysics 1 1
Alexander and his commentary 2
Translator's preface 5
Textual emendations 7
Translation
Chapter 1 11
Chapter 2 25
Chapter 3 41
Chapter 4 57
Chapter 5 62
Chapter 6 77
Chapter 7 93
Chapter 8 98
Chapter 9 111
Chapter 10 178
Appendix: the commentators 181
Bibliography 192
Indexes
English-Greek Glossary 199
Greek-English Index 205
Subject Index 223
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Acknowledgments
The editor and translator would like to thank all those who have
helped with their valuable comments on this volume: Jacques
Brunschwig, Gail Fine, M.M. Mackenzie, Bruce Perry, David
Robinson, Christopher Rowe, Robert Sharpies and Christian Wild-
berg. We are further grateful to Robert Sharpies for providing the
main part of the Introduction and Bibliography.
The present translations have been made possible by generous
and imaginative funding from the following sources: The National
Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency of
the USA; The British Academy; The Jowett Copyright Trustees;
The Royal Society; Centro Internazionale A. Beltrame di Storia
dello Spazio e del Tempo (Padua); Liverpool University; and by the
collaboration of I. Hadot (Paris), CNRS (Paris), and the Institute of
Classical Studies (London).
We further wish to thank Eric Lewis, John Ellis and David
Barlow for their help in preparing the volume for press.
IOANNEI ADELPHOI • PHILIAI
Introduction
Richard Sorabji and
Robert W. Sharpies
The commentary on Metaphysics 1
In the first two chapters of Metaphysics I, Aristotle asks what is
philosophy and in particular philosophical wisdom (sophia), and
how is it related to philosophy? He answers that it is a knowledge
of causes, or rather of explanations, including God, who is a cause
or explanation in one of the few distinguishable ways. The
remaining eight chapters examine the account given of cause or
explanation by his predecessors.1
Alexander of Aphrodisias was the greatest expositor and elabor-
ator of Aristotle's philosophy. But his commentary on this book has
a curious feature: over half is devoted to the two chapters in which
Aristotle discusses Plato. From this we learn not only about Alex-
ander, but also far more than we could from Aristotle's text itself
about Aristotle, Plato and Plato's Academy. Aristotle's battery of
objections against the theory of Ideas is spelled out, with fragmen-
tary quotations and paraphrases from four of his lost works, On the
Ideas, On the Good, On Philosophy and On the Pythagoreans. There
is an expanded account of the 'unwritten doctrines' which Plato
developed late in his career, according to which the Ideas are
numbers, namely the One and the Indefinite Dyad.
1 The following is a summary of the contents of Aristotle's chapters:
(1) To show that philosophical wisdom (sophia) is a knowledge of causes, Aristotle
passes in review lower types of cognition.
(2) It is a knowledge of first causes, ultimately of God, who is a final, rather than
an efficient, Cause.
(3), (4) Anticipations of the doctrine of four causes by the Presocratics: material
and efficient causes.
(5) Pythagorean material causes and the Eleatics on cause.
(6) Plato on Forms as formal causes and on the material and formal causes of
Forms.
(7) Earlier thinkers support the distinction of four causes, although they treat
formal and final cause inadequately.
(8) Criticism of the Presocratics on cause.
(9) Criticism of the Platonic theory of Forms and its later development, and of the
arguments for it.
(10) The inadequacy of earlier treatments of cause.
1