John Dillon - Iamblichus: On the General Science of Mathematics

Ancient Commentators on Aristotle

GENERAL EDITORS: Richard Sorabji, Honorary Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and Emeritus Professor, Kings College London, UK; and Michael Griffin, Assistant Professor, Departments of Philosophy and Classics, University of British Columbia, Canada.

This prestigious series translates the extant ancient Greek philosophical commentaries on Aristotle. Written mostly between 200 and 600 AD, the works 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. The translation in each volume is accompanied by an introduction, comprehensive commentary notes, bibliography, glossary of translated terms and a subject index. Making these key philosophical works accessible to the modern scholar, this series fills an important gap in the history of European thought.

A webpage for the Ancient Commentators Project is maintained at ancientcommentators.org.uk and readers are encouraged to consult the site for details about the series as well as for addenda and corrigenda to published volumes.

The present translations have been made possible by generous and imaginative funding from the following sources: the National Endowment for the Humanities, Divison 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 Esme Fairbairn Charitable Trust; the Henry Brown Trust; Mr and Mrs N. Egon; the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NOW/GW); the Ashdown Trust; the Lorne Thyssen Research Fund for Ancient World Topics at Wolfson College, Oxford; Dr Victoria Solomonides, the Cultural Attach of the Greek Embassy in London; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The editors wish to thank Carlos Steel for his comments; Sebastian Gertz for his introduction and preparing the indexes; Dawn Sellars for preparing the volume for press; and Alice Wright, Publisher, along with Georgina Leighton at Bloomsbury Academic, for their diligence in seeing each volume of the series to press.

Richard Sorabji

The late J. O. Urmson made a draft translation of this work of Iamblichus. On retirement from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Urmson had offered to translate commentaries on Aristotle by Simplicius, and others, with the warning that his interest was only in Aristotle, not in the Neoplatonism of Simplicius: take it or leave it. I accepted with gratitude, and he accepted with grace, correction from peer reviewers on some Neoplatonist passages. He completed no fewer than six volumes of these translations during his retirement, with or without collaborators, but well before finishing, he had got intrigued by some of the Neoplatonists. He could not believe that a certain commentary on Aristotles On the Soul, ascribed variously to Simplicius or to Priscian could possibly be by Simplicius, and asked to write an introduction, saying so. After his sixth volume, he quietly translated two other works of late Greek philosophy. One was written at the end of the fourth century by bishop Nemesius of Emesa in Syria, his On the Nature of Man, which has thrown light on Aristotles greatest defender among his commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and one was on the present work by Iamblichus. Urmson did not wish to write notes on these drafts, and he did not intend them for the series. But copies were made available in the library of the Institute of Classical Studies in London University and both were then put to use by other translators. The draft translation of Nemesius, On the Nature of Man was acknowledged in the first sentence of their preface by the subsequent translators, R. W. Sharples and P. J. van der Eijk.

After that, John Dillon, who has, with or without collaborators, translated four previous volumes for this series, and a very large proportion of Iamblichus surviving work, then offered to revise Urmsons draft of the present work, to make a new version for this series. His translation was ready by 2018, when he asked me to arrange for annotation and introductions to be done by others. The General Introduction has been written by Sebastian Gertz, and with some trepidation, I took on most of the annotation, along with a further essay, although conscious of how much more Dillon knew than I did about Iamblichus.

I was greatly helped by the scholarship on Iamblichus brought to my attention by D. S. Hutchinson and M. R. Johnson, including their study of Iamblichus Protrepticus, Authenticating Aristotles Protrepticus (Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2005), and the results of their research reconstructing Aristotles Protrepticus, published online at www.protrepticus.info, of which the most recent available version is from 2017. This incorporated text, translation, and commentary on Chapters 22, 23, 26, and 27 of Iamblichus De communi mathematica scientia (DCMS), and in a subsequent collaborative exchange, Hutchinson sent me their unpublished research on Chapters 21, 24, and 25. He also provided comments on other parts of DCMS, notably Chapters 7 and 35. In further developments, Hutchinson and Johnson now argue that Chapters 2127 of DCMS constitute another sequence of citations from the Protrepticus of Aristotle, a group of chapters that provides us with many new fragments of that lost work from more than six centuries earlier, and significantly increases our knowledge of Aristotles lost dialogue.

Throughout the notes the following abbreviations have been used: SG, Sebastian Gertz; RRKS, Richard Sorabji; From DSH or From DSH/MRJ, as reported with permission from the research of Doug Hutchinson and Monte Johnson. All other notes are by John Dillon, marked JMD only in cases where there are additions by others to his footnote.