Philoponus: On Aristotle Physics 4.1-5

159 Pages·2012·1.52 MB·English

by  John Philoponus

PHILOPONUS
On Aristotle
Physics 4.1-5
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PHILOPONUS
On Aristotle
Physics 4.1-5
Translated by Keimpe Algra
and
Johannes van Ophuijsen
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published in 2012 by Bristol Classical Press
Paperback edition fi rst published 2014
© 2012 by Keimpe Algra and Johannes van Ophuijsen
Keimpe Algra and Johannes van Ophuijsen have asserted their right
under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identifi ed as Authors 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,
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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: 978-1-7809-3211-8
PB: 978-1-4725-5800-8
ePDF: 978-1-4725-0177-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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 (NWO/GW); the Ashdown
Trust; Dr Victoria Solomonides, the Cultural Attaché of the Greek
Embassy in London. The editor wishes to thank Gábor Betegh,
Barrie Fleet, Michael Griffi n, Pamela Huby, Richard McKirahan,
and Arnis Ritups for their comments, Ian Crystal for preparing the
volume for press, and Deborah Blake, who has been the publisher
responsible for every volume since the fi rst.
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Conventions vii
Introduction 1
Textual Questions 13
Translation 15
4.1 17
4.2 37
4.3 43
4.4 56
4.5 79
Notes 93
Bibliography 123
English-Greek Glossary 125
Greek-English Index 133
Subject Index 147
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Conventions
<(cid:125)> proposed addition to the Greek text.
[(cid:125)] proposed deletion from the Greek text.
((cid:125)) parentheses inserted whether by the editor or by the translators.
{(cid:125)} to be supplied in thought.
Bold type is used for words quoted by Philoponus from Aristotle’s
Physics text.
Introduction
Keimpe Algra
Philoponus’ commentary on Aristotle’s discussion of place in Physics
4.1-5 is nowadays usually treated as consisting of two distinct parts:
the commentary proper on the text, in nine sections or lectures, and
the so-called ‘corollary on place’ which has been inserted as an
excursus at the end of the seventh lecture. It is fair to say that the
commentary proper has received far less attention from modern
scholars than the corollary. This may be partly due to the fact that
the corollary was translated separately into English as one of the
first volumes in this Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series,
whereas the English translation of the rest of the commentary on
Physics 4 is appearing in three volumes only in 2012.1 Apart from
this, however, it is also hard to deny that the running commentary
on the one hand, and the corollary on the other, are not on an equal
footing in terms of philosophical power and significance. The corol-
lary contains a fairly systematic attack on Aristotle’s conception of
place, which clearly uses earlier discussions of problems in Aristotle’s
theory (thus, four out of the five aporiai put forward by Theophrastus
(fr. 146 FHSG) reappear, although without ascription) and an
equally systematic exposition and defence of an alternative concep-
tion of place as a three-dimensional extension.2 The running com-
mentary, on the other hand, is predominantly exegetical and
paraphrastic, stays close to Aristotle’s text and in general, though
certainly not always, refrains from taking an independent critical
stance. It may be a fine example of a late antique scholastic commen-
tary, and it does contain exegetical exercises which do have a philo-
sophical interest in their own right, such as the attempt to offer a
coherent explanation of the way in which the terms ‘in respect of
itself’ (kath’ heauto), ‘in respect of something else’ (kat’ allo), ‘in the
primary sense’ (prôtôs) and ‘incidentally’ (kata sumbebêkos) should
be used (in Phys. 530,1-531,5). Yet we do not see too much here of the
dragon slayer of Aristotelian physics who Philoponus is often taken
to be. Here we may have another reason why, in modern scholarship,
the commentary proper has been overshadowed by the corollary.
The nine sections into which the commentary proper on Physics
2 Introduction
4.1-5 is divided each have the same form – a form which seems to
reflect the classroom practice of similarly structured praxeis or lec-
tures, of which we also find traces in the works of such later
Neoplatonists as Olympiodorus, Elias and David. Each chapter
starts out with what Philoponus himself labels the theôria: a kind of
sustained paraphrasing and explanatory lecture on the text at issue,
which is then followed by a commentary on the lexis, i.e. a commen-
tary on the wording of individual passages, keyed to lemmata taken
from Aristotle’s text.
Philosophically the theôriai are the most interesting sections, but
even these are on the whole didactic rather than scholarly in nature.
Philoponus’ primary intention seems to be to lay bare the structure
of Aristotle’s thought by showing how the various topics broached in
individual sections of Physics 4.1-5 hang together, by formalising the
argument in terms of categorical or hypothetical syllogisms, by para-
phrasing and by explaining the vocabulary chosen by Aristotle. In
this respect Philoponus’ commentary on the Physics differs consider-
ably from the one written more than a decade later by Simplicius. It
is hard to imagine Simplicius’ huge commentary functioning in an
everyday classroom practice. Simplicius offers a host of relevant
quotations from earlier philosophers and his commentary is replete
with references to interpretations provided by the earlier commen-
tary tradition. In general (i.e. apart from the corollaries) Philoponus’
text is more elementary, and in some respects it comes closer to the
paraphrasing exegesis of Themistius, by which it has clearly been
influenced. Philoponus often refers to Themistius, he sometimes
takes over his readings of Aristotle’s text, and he includes extensive
paraphrasing quotations from his work, e.g. in his discussion of
Aristotle’s rather obscure arguments against the conception of place
as a three-dimensional extension (in Phys. 550,9-551,20). In addition,
Philoponus apparently knew and used the now lost commentary on
the Physics by Alexander of Aphrodisias. It is to the latter that he
seems to owe his typical way of highlighting the structure of the
argument in Aristotle (‘having established that X he now goes on to
show that Y, etc.’).
The way in which the commentary proper and the corollary relate
deserves some closer examination. It has been argued by Koenraad
Verrycken that a comparison of Philoponus’ works reveals a develop-
ment in his metaphysical stance from an early stage of Alexandrian
Neoplatonism, which Verrycken labelled ‘Philoponus 1’, to a plain
Christian metaphysics involving, among other things, the rejection
of the eternity of the world.3 According to Verrycken, the Physics
commentary as we have it combines traces of both stages of this
development and should be assumed to consist of a substrate repre-
senting Philoponus 1, which was written in 517,4 plus a number of
additions postdating the year 529, when Philoponus published his