Simplicius on Aristotle "Categories 7-8"

241 Pages·2002·2.3 MB·English

by  Simplicius

SIMPLICIUS
On Aristotle Categories 7-8
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SIMPLICIUS
On Aristotle
Categories 7-8
Translated by
Barrie Fleet
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First published in 2002 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
Paperback edition first published 2014
© Barrie Fleet (Preface, Richard Sorabji) 2002
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be identified as Author of this work.
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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: 978-0-7156-3038-9
PB: 978-1-4725-5734-6
ePDF: 978-1-4725-0101-1
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
Board of the British Academy; the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust; the
Henry Brown Trust; Mr and Mrs N. Egon; the Netherlands Organisation
for Scientific Research (NWO/GW). The editor wishes to thank Tom Bole,
Michael Chase, Ian Crystal, Brad Inwood, Alexander Jones, Frans de Haas
and John Thorp for their comments, George Karamanolis for valuable comments
on the whole ms., and Myrna Gabbe and Han Baltussen for preparing
the volume for press.
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Abbreviations vi
Preface Richard Sorabji vii
Introduction 1
Textual Emendations 5
Translation 7
Notes 157
Bibliography 185
Appendix: The Commentators 187
English-Greek Glossary 197
Greek-English Index 205
General Index 221
Index of Passages Cited 225
Abbreviations
DK = H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edition revised by W.
Krantz, Berlin 1952
KRS = G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven and M. Schofield (eds), The Presocratic
Philosophers, 2nd edition, Cambridge 1983
LS = A.A. Long and D. Sedley (eds), The Hellenistic Philosophers (2 vols),
Cambridge 1987
LSJ = H.G. Liddell, R. Scott and H.S. Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th
edition, Oxford 1940
Works of Aristotle
An. Pr. = Analytica Priora (Prior Analytics)
DA = de Anima (On the Soul)
EE = Ethica Eudemia (Eudemian Ethics)
EN = Ethica Nicomachea (Nicomachean Ethics)
GC = de Generatione et Corruptione (On Coming-to-be and Passing Away)
Int. = de Interpretatione
Metaph. = Metaphysica (Metaphysics)
Phys. = Physica (Physics)
Sens. = de Sensu et Sensibilia (Sense and Sensibilia)
Top. = Topica (Topics)
Preface
Richard Sorabji
Aristotle’s Categories was the battleground on which his future role in the
curriculum of the West was decided. The earliest commentaries, from that
of Andronicus in the first century BC, had focused above all on the
Categories. And the work had not only been defended but also attacked –
with particular ferocity by the Platonists Lucius and Nicostratus who
wrote, not commentaries, but simply attacks on the Categories. So
Plotinus in the third century AD had plenty of ammunition to draw from
when he mounted an attack which could well have been decisive in
Enneads 6.1. Plotinus’ disciple and editor, Porphyry, rescued Aristotle and
made him central to the western curriculum once and for all, with the
Categories as the first work in the curriculum. In the seventeenth century
Jesuits still chose the Categories as the first work to be translated into
Chinese, as being the basis of all further thought.
In mounting their defences of Aristotle, Porphyry and Iamblichus would
have been able to draw on many hints in Plotinus’ aporetic discussion, as
has been very well brought out by Steven Strange.1 On the other hand, I
cannot accept the view of Rainer Thiel that Plotinus was not attacking
Aristotle after all.2
In his Categories, Aristotle recognises ten categories: substance, quan-
tity, relative, quality, acting and being acted on, position or posture, when,
where, and holding or wearing. It has plausibly been suggested by C.M.
Gillespie3 that Aristotle thought up his ten categories by taking as an
example of a substance one of the students in his classroom and suggesting
what further properties might belong to that substance. The student
would have a certain size or quantity. He would be in relation to other
students, to the right of one, to the left of another. He would have qualities
like being fair. He would be acting, for example, writing and being acted
on, for example, jostled by his neighbour. He would be in a sitting position.
It would be in the afternoon. He would be in the Lyceum (the name of
Aristotle’s school) and he would be wearing certain types of clothes.
Aristotle’s examples of substances were things like people and horses.
They were all physical bodies except for God and any other divine minds
there might be.
viii Preface
The Neoplatonists did not take the Categories to have been thought up
in this conversational sort of way. Rather, they took the ten categories as
a definitive guide to the whole of Aristotle. This led them to ask highly
philosophical questions, which might not occur to us, about how the system
of categories was to work out in detail throughout Aristotle’s system. It
made their approach to the Categories perhaps more philosophical and less
historical than ours.
It should be noticed that Aristotle does not argue that there are ten
categories; he simply presents the ten. It is the same with his four causes.
He does not argue that there are four modes of explanation. In each case
he rather says ‘see it like this’. That is how the best philosophy often
occurs. By an act of imagination, a great philosopher presents a compelling
picture. The argument comes in only later in the process of working out
the details and defending the imaginative suggestion. We are wrong if we
suppose that we will understand philosophy by looking only at the argu-
ments for propositions. Rather, we must understand both the pictures
presented and the argumentation.
From very early on, Aristotle’s scheme of categories was disputed.
Xenocrates, the third head of Plato’s school, said that all we need is what
exists in itself and what is relative. These two categories had been enough
for Plato and they should be enough for us. We are told this by Simplicius
On the Categories 63,22-3. For each category there was someone at some
time who said that that category should instead be understood as relative.
Plotinus was a major critic of the Categories. He deplored the fact that the
Categories failed to describe the intelligible world of Platonic forms. Even
as descriptions of the sensible world in which we live, Plotinus in 6.3
accepted only the first four categories (substance, quantity, relative, and
quality) as acceptable, and even that only with qualifications. He then
added a fifth category of his own, the category of change, not recognised by
Aristotle, but drawn from the five Great Kinds postulated in Plato’s
Sophist. Plotinus presents change as a category in 6.1.15 (12-16). Aristotle
himself did not say where change belonged in his scheme of categories, but
Aristotelians put it under the category of quantity.
Plotinus had a completely different view of the nature of reality. He
thought that the qualities we perceive in the sensible world were mere
shadows and traces of the activities of intelligible Platonic forms in the
intelligible world. He explains this in 2.6.3 (11-26). He regards Aristotle’s
substance as a mere conglomeration (sumphorêsis) of qualities and matter,
6.3.8 (19-23), while matter is only a shadow upon a shadow (30-7). He
complains that Aristotle either excludes intelligible substances from his
categories or, if he includes them, exceeds the number of ten categories
handed down by Aristotle and combines prior entities with posterior
entities within a single category in violation of what Aristotle allowed,
6.1.1. In 6.2, Plotinus thinks that the right description of the intelligible
world of Platonic forms is provided by the five Great Kinds of Plato’s
Preface ix
Sophist. He excludes Aristotle’s quantity, quality and relative from being
descriptions of this world (chapters 13, 14 and 16). He also thinks of Plato’s
Five Kinds, viz. Motion, Rest, Being, Sameness, and Difference, as crea-
tive forces in a way which is very hard for us to accept. But the other four
kinds, in Plotinus’ view, combine with Being to create the species and
particulars. Moreover, this world of creative genera and species is not
spread out but all united into an indivisible whole, rather as the rational
principles in seeds are not spread out until the animal grows out of them.
Many of the most severe criticisms of Aristotle’s scheme of categories
turned on the notion of a relative. For Aristotle a relative is not a relation-
ship but the thing related. A slave is a relative according to Aristotle’s
Categories 7a31-b1, but human is not, even though a slave is a human.
Slave is relative to master. Aristotle gives two definitions of relative.
According to the first definition (Cat. 6a36-7), something is spoken of as
relative when whatever it is itself is said to be of or in relation to other
things, as a slave is said to be a slave of a master. Aristotle adds a further
restriction that there should be reciprocity between the relative and its
correlate (6b28-7; 6a18), and a master is indeed said to be the master of a
slave. But later in the same chapter of the Categories, ch. 7, Aristotle gives
a second definition of relative (8a31-2). He says he wishes to exclude heads
and hands from being relatives. In fact, he would seem to have ruled this
out already by his requirement of reciprocity. For although a hand is said
to be the hand of a person or animal, a person or animal is not said to be
the person or animal of a hand. Nonetheless, Aristotle now offers us a
stricter definition of relative. For a relative to be is the same as its being
disposed relatively to something. The phrase ‘disposed relatively to some-
thing’ is in Greek pros ti pôs ekhon. The rival Stoic school used the same
phrase for the fourth of their four categories and they understood the
relatively disposed, so we learn from Simplicius (in Cat. ch. 7, 166,15-29),
as involving what Peter Geach has called Cambridge Change. The distinc-
tive feature of such change is that what is relatively disposed, for example
what is to the right of something, can cease to be to the right without
undergoing any change itself, just through the thing on the left moving. It
has recently been shown by David Sedley that Plato’s Academy had also
used the expression ‘relatively disposed’ according to Simplicius (in Cat.
ch. 8, 217,8-32). And the idea of Cambridge Change is already found in
Plato’s Theaetetus (154B-155D), where Plato says that Socrates can be-
come shorter than Theaetetus without undergoing any change himself, by
Theaetetus becoming taller. Aristotle adds a corollary (8a35-b15): if one
knows definitely that something is relative then one also has definite
knowledge of the thing to which it is relatively disposed. This is applied
both to universals (8a24-8) and to particulars (8b7-13). If one knows
definitely that this particular is more beautiful one must know the thing
than which it is more beautiful and know it definitely, not merely as
‘something less beautiful’.