Simplicius

Simplicius: On Aristotle Physics 1.3--4

Translated by Pamela Huby and C.C.W. Taylor

In this volume Simplicius is dealing with Aristotle's account of the Presocratics, and for many of them he is our chief or even sole authority. He quotes at length from Melissus, Parmenides and Zeno, sometimes from their original works but also from later writers from Plato onwards, drawing particularly on Alexander's lost commentary on Aristotle's Physics and on Porphyry. Much of his approach is just scholarly, but in places he reveals his Neoplatonist affiliation and attempts to show the basic agreement among his predecessors in spite of their apparent differences.

The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle

General Editor: Richard Sorabji Research Professor of Philosophy at King's College London

The 15,000 pages of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, written mainly between 200 and 600 AD, constitute the largest corpus of extant Greek philosophical writings not translated into English or other European languages. The works in question are not only invaluable as commentaries. They represent the classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic schools in a crucial period during which pagan and Christian thought were reacting to each other. This series of translations draws attention to their high philosophical interest; but their significance extends far beyond the period in which most of them were written. They incorporate precious fragments of earlier Greek philosophy from the Presocratics onwards, and the subsequent history of Philosophy cannot be understood without them. Aquinas' reading of Aristotle was partly mediated by the commentators, who gradually transmuted Aristotle to make him agree with Plato and ended by turning his God into a Creator and so making him more acceptable to Christianity. In the time of Galileo the commentaries were seen as a repository of ideas alternative to Aristotle's which could be used in the new science of the Renaissance. The projected series, planned in some 100 volumes, fills an important gap in the history of European thought.