Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 8.6-10 PDF
Preview Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 8.6-10
SIMPLICIUS On Aristotle Physics 8.6-10 This page intentionally left blank SIMPLICIUS On Aristotle Physics 8.6-10 Translated by Richard McKirahan LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY 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 First published in 2001 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd. Paperback edition fi rst published 2014 © Richard McKirahan 2001 Richard McKirahan asserts his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed 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: 978-0-7156-3039-6 PB: 978-1-7809-3897-4 ePDF: 978-1-7809-3896-7 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 Scientifi c Research (NWO/GW). The Editor wishes to thank István Bodnár, John Ellis, Edward Hussey, Ben Morison, Don Morrison and Marwan Rashed for their comments, and Han Baltussen for preparing the volume for press. Typeset by Ray Davies Printed and bound in Great Britain Contents Introduction 1 Textual Emendations 11 Translation 13 Chapter 6 15 Chapter 7 33 Chapter 8 51 Chapter 9 96 Chapter 10 105 Notes 159 Bibliography 182 Appendix: Notes on the text of Aristotle’s Physics 184 English-Greek Glossary 187 Greek-English Index 197 Subject Index 235 Index of Names 243 Index of Passages Cited 245 This page intentionally left blank Introduction After a millennium and a half, Simplicius’ commentary on the Physics still stands up well against even its most recent rivals. The magnitude of the work is impressive in its own right, but sheer quantity does not make for a good commentary. However, in it Simplicius constantly brings to bear his thorough knowledge of Aristotle and the entire Greek philosophical tradition, as well as his acuity in dissecting arguments. He makes frequent use of earlier commentaries now lost, expecially those of Eudemus, Alex- ander and Simplicius’ own teacher, Ammonius, not hesitating to quote them at length. His independence is instanced by his occasional disagree- ment with Alexander, whom he frequently cites with approval. He takes strong exception to Philoponus, his contemporary Christian rival in Alex- andria, and in the present volume he engages in extensive criticism of one of Philoponus’ lost works in passages notable for their invective. As a Neoplatonist, Simplicius attempts to reconcile the doctrines of Aristotle with those of Plato, and this interpretive programme is prominent in the present volume. In what follows, for each of the five chapters of the Physics covered here, I briefly summarize the contents of each and indicate some of the features of Simplicius’ commentary that are of historical and philo- sophical interest. In Chapter 6, Aristotle argues that there is an eternal and unmoved primary mover; it causes a single, eternal, continuous motion, and there- fore what is primarily moved by it is eternal as well, and it is the motion of this that causes generation, perishing, and other kinds of change to occur in other things. He also analyses the nature of self-movement which animals possess and concludes that it is not continuous, whereas even when not undergoing this motion animals undergo other motions such as breathing and growth, which are due not to their own agency, but to the changing environment, whose motion is ultimately due to the unmoved primary mover. Simplicius’ contributions in his treatment of Chapter 6 consist largely in explicating Aristotle’s arguments, supplying missing steps where nec- essary, and offering supplementary arguments for some of Aristotle’s claims (1250,35-1251,4, 1252,10-11, 1253,3-12, 1255,21-33). At 1252,18-23, he argues that the unmoved elements in self-movers fail to satisfy the account of what it is to be a principle of motion. At 1255,34- 2 Introduction 1256,30, he raises and then solves a serious objection: that although Aristotle’s argument for the existence of an eternal unmoved mover is based on the existence of continuous eternal motion, the points for which Aristotle argued in Chapter 1, that prior to any motion hypothesized to be first there is always another motion, and likewise there is always a motion posterior to any motion hypothesized to be last, establish only that motion is consecutive, not that it is continuous. At 1259,15-28, he offers several interpretations of Aristotle’s problematic claim that the soul moves itself by leverage (259b20). At 1260,22-35, he quotes with approval Alexander’s account of how a cause of circular motion, while being located in the body that is in motion, can be ‘in the same place’ throughout the motion. He also rejects Alexander’s view that the souls of the planetary spheres are moved incidentally (1261,30-1262,13). He likens Aristotle’s view that changes in the sublunary sphere are due to the variations in position of the sun, moon and other planets, with Plato’s views in Phaedrus 246B on the motion of the soul in the heaven. Throughout, he interprets Aristotle’s abstract arguments in terms of Aristotle’s cosmology, a strategy which gives con- siderable clarity to several of the individual arguments as well as the overall direction of Aristotle’s thought. Chapter 7 establishes by means of several arguments that locomotion is the primary kind of change and the only kind that can be continuous, and hence that this is the kind of motion that the first mover causes. At 1265,26-8, Simplicius contrasts Aristotle’s account of growth here (260a29-b5) with that in the Categories, saying that here Aristotle is speaking ‘more like a natural scientist’. At 1267,15-19, he makes an argument for a point not made by Aristotle, that considerations of combi- nation and separation, which Aristotle used in proving that generation and perishing are posterior to locomotion, can also be used to prove that growth and decrease are posterior to locomotion. At 1267,19-28 (also 1272,38-1273,12), he claims that in holding that locomotion is prior to other forms of change, Aristotle agrees with Plato (Laws 10, 893E-894D). Whereas at 260b17-19 Aristotle lists three ways in which a thing may be prior, at 1268,7-1269,5 Simplicius goes through other significations of priority found in Categories 12 and Metaphysics 5,11. At 1270,4-13, he fills in missing steps in the elliptical argument at 260b29-30. At 260b30- 261a12, Aristotle argues that even though in individuals that are subject to generation locomotion is posterior to other changes, nevertheless the cause of generation of the individual will undergo locomotion prior to the individual’s generation. Whereas Aristotle merely envisages an infinite chain of ancestors, where in each case the parent undergoes locomotion prior to generating offspring, Simplicius, bearing Aristotle’s cosmology constantly in mind, refers the entire series of generations to an eternal, prior cause, the motion of the heavens (1270,25-6, 1270,35-7). At 1273,28- 33, he carefully shows the relation between Aristotle’s argument that only locomotion can be continuous (261a31-b22) and his argument in Chapter Introduction 3 8 that among locomotions only circular locomotion can be continuous. At 1274,16-25, he offers arguments for the proposition that a single continu- ous motion cannot arise from opposite or contrary motions, which Aristotle uses tacitly in his argument. At 1274,25-8, he describes lateral motion as a compound of upward and downward motion and compares it to a compound made out of contrary elements. At 1274,33-1275,4, he provides a badly needed explication (securely based on Chapter 8) of Aristotle’s oracular claim that ‘a thing that is not always undergoing a particular motion, but that existed previously, must previously have been at rest’ (261b1-2). At 1277,31-3, he supports Aristotle’s claim that it is ‘absurd if something that was generated had to perish immediately, and could persist for no time interval’ (261b23-4) through considerations drawn from Neoplatonic epistemology. Chapter 8 establishes that circular locomotion is the only kind of motion that can be eternal, single and continuous. At 1278,10-13, Simplicius problematizes the claim (which Aristotle apparently considered obviously true) that if either of the components of a combined (rectilinear and circular) motion is not continuous, the combined motion is not continuous either, and he proposes a response to someone who denies this claim. At 1279,22-32, we have a useful treatment of the difference between argu- ments based on ‘signs’ (sêmeia) and demonstrations. At 1292,24-1293,5, in discussing Aristotle’s statement that ‘it is an accidental attribute of a line to be an infinite number of halves’ (263b7-8), Simplicius points out that this is not an accidental property in Aristotle’s normal use of that expres- sion, and suggests that Aristotle here introduces a different kind of accident, namely, what belongs to something potentially. He quotes with approval Alexander’s use of Aristotle’s claim that the instant of change (e.g. the instant when Socrates died) is the last instant of the process of dying and does not belong to the interval in which the thing is in the state that results from the change (when Socrates is dead), to solve sceptical arguments against the possibility of dying or being born (1296,18-35), and to show that propositions of the form ‘If Dion is alive, Dion will be alive’, which some people claimed change truth value indeterminately, do not change truth value at all (1299,36-1300,30), and he offers a cogent modi- fication of this latter claim of Alexander (1300,30-6). At 1301,19-29, he tells us that a ‘dialectical’ (logikos) argument is one based on terms that are not ‘appropriate’ but more common and more general, and capable of applying to other things too, and says that they are so called because they arise through accepted (endoxos) arguments. At 1303,12-24 (cf. also 1304,39-1305,6), he states and refutes an objection that one might make to one of Aristotle’s arguments that backward-turning rectilinear motion stops at the endpoint (264a18-19), and at 1303,27-33 he quotes an addi- tional argument of Alexander’s for the same thesis. In Chapter 9 Aristotle proves that circular motion is the primary kind of motion, since it alone is simple and complete, it alone can be eternal,
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