Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence

✍ Scribed by Richard Sorabji (editor)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 649
• Series: Ancient Commentators on Aristotle
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide.
The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence – uncovered in some of the chapters of this book – that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Preface to the First Edition
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Introduction to the Second Edition
1 The ancient commentators on Aristotle
Two impulses: Andronicus and Porphyry
The harmony of Plato, Aristotle and other Greek philosophers
Neoplatonist school practices
The commentators and Christianity
Dangers in reading the commentators
The individual commentators
This volume
The importance of the commentaries
The CAG texts
2 Review of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca
3 The earliest Aristotelian commentators
I
II
4 The school of Alexander?
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
References
5 The mistius: the last Peripatetic commentator on Aristotle?
6 The harmony of Plotinus and Aristotle according to Porphyry
7 Porphyry’s legacy to logic: a reconstruction
1. Introduction
2. The harmony of Plato and Aristotle
3. The rise of language and the formation of concepts
4. Ambiguity and its bearers
5. Truth and its bearers
8 How did Syrianus regard Aristotle?
9 Infinite power impressed: the transformation of Aristotle’s physics and theology
10 The metaphysics of Ammoniusson of Hermeias
Ammonius’ metaphysics in Asclepius’ in Metaphysica
The Ammonius of Zacharias Scholasticus and the Ammonian commentaries on the Organon
Ammonius’ interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of God
Ammonius and the problem of Alexandrian Neoplatonism
11The development of Philoponus’ thought and its chronology
Philoponus 1 and Philoponus 2
The philosophical career of John Philoponus
The chronology of Philoponus’ commentaries on Aristotle
The motives for Philoponus’ volte-face
Simplicius’ acquaintance with Philoponus
The evolution of Philoponus 2
12 The life and work of Simplicius in Greek and Arabic sources
13 Neoplatonic elements in the de Anima commentaries
Addendum: March 1988
14 The Alexandrian commentators and the introductions to their commentaries
1. The Alexandrian School from Hermeias
2. Prolegomena to Aristotle and Porphyry
Ammonius’ prolegomena
15 Boethius’ commentaries on Aristotle
I
II
III
Bibliography
16 Boethius as an Aristotelian commentator *
17 An unpublished funeral oration on Anna Comnena
Appendix
18 The Greek commentators on Aristotle’s Ethics
The main commentaries
The Greek manuscripts of the composite commentary with the early anonymous scholia
The Greek manuscripts of the composite commentary with the remaining commentary of Aspasius
The Renaissance translation of the composite commentary
Eustratius on Books 1 and 6
The ancient anonymous scholia
The excerpts from Adrastus’ monograph
The scholia on Book 2
The scholia on Book 3
The scholia on Book 4
The scholia on Book 5
Michael of Ephesus on Books 5, 9 and 10
Anna Comnena’s ‘Aristotelians’
The anonymous commentator on Book 7
Aspasius on Book 8
Eustratius in Albertus Magnus and Bonaventure
19 Philoponus, ‘Alexander’ and the origins of medieval logic
Bibliography
20 Aristotle’s doctrine of abstraction in the commentators
1. Universals
2. Aristotle’s account of mathematical objects
3. Ammonius and Philoponus
4. Alexander
5. Syrianus
6. Simplicius
7. Porphyry
8. Summary
Note on the frontispiece ‘Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias’ by Ulocrino
Bibliography
Select Bibliography of Secondary Literature
Index Locorum
General Index