Alexander of Aphrodisias: On the Soul: Part I: Soul as Form of the Body, Parts of the Soul, Nourishment, and Perception PDF
Preview Alexander of Aphrodisias: On the Soul: Part I: Soul as Form of the Body, Parts of the Soul, Nourishment, and Perception
ALEXANDER OF APHRODISIAS On the Soul Part 1 This page intentionally left blank ALEXANDER OF APHRODISIAS On the Soul Part 1 Soul as Form of the Body, Parts of the Soul, Nourishment, and Perception Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by Victor Caston LONDON(cid:2)(cid:222)(cid:2)(cid:48)(cid:39)(cid:57)(cid:2)(cid:38)(cid:39)(cid:46)(cid:42)(cid:43)(cid:2)(cid:222)(cid:2)(cid:48)(cid:39)(cid:57)(cid:2)YO(cid:52)(cid:45)(cid:2)(cid:222)(cid:2)SYDN(cid:39)(cid:59) Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2012 Paperback edition first published 2014 © 2012 by Victor Caston Victor Caston has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN HB: 978-1-7809-3024-4 PB: 978-1-4725-5798-8 ePDF: 978-1-4725-0172-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Acknowledgements 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 Scientific Research (NWO/GW); the Ashdown Trust; Dr Victoria Solomonides, the Cultural Attaché of the Greek Embassy in London. The editor wishes to thank John Thorp, James Wilberding, Michael Griffin, Donald Russell and William Charlton for their comments, Sebastian Gertz for preparing the volume for press, and Deborah Blake at Bristol Classical Press, who has been the publisher responsible for every volume since the first. Typeset by Ray Davies Printed and bound in Great Britain Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Note 23 Abbreviations 25 Textual Emendations 27 Translation 31 What is the soul’s essence? 31 Bodies act and are modified in virtue of non-bodily items 36 The demonstration that the soul is a form 39 ‘In something’ [is said] in how many ways? 40 The soul is inseparable from the body whose soul it is 44 The soul is not one of the simple bodies 46 The soul itself just on its own is unchangeable 48 The soul is not a harmony 51 The parts of the soul: how many and which ones? 53 That there are not infinitely many powers of the soul 53 There are two kinds of nourishment 59 On the activity of being nourished 61 Heat is the soul’s tool for nourishing [oneself] 61 Why parts detached from plants live and develop, while those from 63 animals no longer do On the soul for perceiving 64 On what is intrinsically and extrinsically perceptible 66 How there comes to be light in the transparent 68 Commentary 71 Bibliography 169 English-Greek Glossary 177 Greek-English Index 189 Index of Passages Cited 215 Subject Index 237 In memoriam Robert W. Sharples 1949-2010 Acknowledgements As a graduate student in London in 1985-7, I had the good fortune to study Alexander of Aphrodisias with Bob Sharples. I met with him weekly to read Alexander’s On the Soul and discuss the text’s finer points, while attending the university lectures he offered on Post-Aristotelian philoso- phy with my supervisor Richard Sorabji and the many seminars they organised at the old Institute for Classical Studies on Gordon Square. It was an exciting time to be in the UK working on ancient philosophy. The turn to Hellenistic philosophy was still relatively new, Long and Sedley’s collection had just been published, and the project to translate all the commentators on Aristotle was just getting under way. They were wonder- ful years. In retrospect, I had no idea just how fortunate I was. No one in the twentieth century did more to advance the study of the Peripatetics after Aristotle, from Theophrastus to Alexander. His scholarship was exem- plary, not merely for its erudition, which was remarkable, or for its range and sheer quantity, which was impressive, but above all for his critical judgement. He was unusually alive to the openness of texts to multiple interpretations and the recalcitrance of counterevidence: short of decisive refutation, which he took to be rare, one always had to acknowledge the possibility of alternative readings, and he was ingenious at devising ways in which they might be defended against even his own favoured view. In others, these might merely have been methodological scruples. But in Bob they were also a natural expression of his own characteristic modesty and his charity towards others. As a teacher, he was unfailingly generous and supportive. Bob immediately read any draft you gave him and returned it with copious, thoughtful comments and acute criticisms, often within just a day or two. I could not have studied Alexander with anyone better. Like many others, I was greatly saddened to hear of Bob’s illness and untimely demise, and he passed away while this volume was still in preparation. Both it and the second volume are dedicated to his memory. I would also like to thank several other people who were crucial in bringing this volume to term, above all the editor of the series, Richard Sorabji, who has my deepest gratitude for his detailed and invaluable comments, his unwavering encouragement, and (not least) his patience and trust. Thanks are also due to Ian McCready-Flora, who served as my research assistant in the summer of 2009, and to Michael Griffin, the viii Acknowledgements editorial assistant through most of the project. Both made excellent con- tributions, which I have tried to acknowledge in the notes. Sebastian Gertz, the editorial assistant who saw the project through to its final stages, also has my thanks for his yeoman’s service with all the corrections and changes. I am grateful as well to the students in my graduate seminar at the University of Michigan in the winter term of 2009, who worked through an earlier draft of the entire translation, and to the participants in a mini-conference on the present volume at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in March 2011, especially my commentators Jakub Krajczynski, George Karamanolis, and Miira Tuominen. I learned a great deal from both groups, who helped save me from quite a few errors. In addition, I owe a great debt to Ian Crystal for his Herculean efforts to assemble the index locorum. Such tools are invaluable for making a scholarly work useful, and they rarely get the thanks they deserve. Finally, I would like to record my greatest debt of all, to my wife, Ruth, for her love and support, and for all the joy that she and my two daughters, Eva and Sarah, have brought me. Without them, I could not have accom- plished any of the things I have. Introduction Alexander of Aphrodisias, easily one of the greatest commentators on Aristotle – later Greek commentators sometimes refer to him as ‘the Commentator’ (ho exêgêtês) on Aristotle1 or even as a ‘new’ or ‘second Aristotle’2 – is also one of the foremost Aristotelians in the tradition, alongside Thomas Aquinas and Ibn Rushd, a philosopher in his own right, who developed a profound and systematic synthesis of Aristotle’s views that was to have lasting influence. Life and works We know little of Alexander’s life, apart from the fact that he came from Aphrodisias, a city in Caria (a region in the southwest of modern day Turkey), and that sometime between 198 and 209 CE he was appointed by the emperors Septimus Severus and Antoninus Caracalla to a chair in Aristotelian philosophy in Athens, one of four chairs established for each of the major schools of philosophy by Marcus Aurelius in 176.3 It has often been assumed that Alexander is referring to this appointment in the dedication of his treatise On Fate.4 But recently this has been confirmed by an inscription from Aphrodisias, which Alexander had dedicated to his father, who was also named Alexander and was a philosopher as well (perhaps even the author of On Fevers and the collections of medical problems attributed to an ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’). The inscription gives the full name of the younger Alexander (that is, the commentator) as Titus Aurelius Alexandros.5 We also know that he studied with Sosigenes and Herminus (who had been one of Galen’s teachers as well).6 Based on these facts, we can infer that Alexander was born sometime between 140 and 165.7 Apart from commentaries on Aristotle’s works, Alexander also wrote philosophical treatises, articulating and defending in his own voice an Aristotelian point of view.8 The present work, On the Soul, is one of the few surviving treatises, along with one on determinism and freedom of choice (On Fate) and another on material composition (On Mixture). Alexander also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. But the commentary is now lost and survives only in isolated quotations.9 The present treatise is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a commentary, because of its faithfulness to both the sequence of topics and the doctrines put forward in Aristotle’s On the Soul. But the purpose of the two types of work is
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