Michael Chase (translator) - Ammonius: Interpretation of Porphyrys Introduction to Aristotles Five Terms

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 David Blank, Marije Martijn, Mossman Rouech, and Donald Russell for their comments; David Robertson for preparing the volume for press; and Alice Wright, Publisher at Bloomsbury Academic, for her diligence in seeing each volume of the series to press.

The Alexandrian school, probably one of several private institutions in the city in which the professors made their living from honoraria paid by their students, another key point of pagan-Christian controversies. Whether out of deference to his Christian students, fear of the Christian authorities, personal inclination, or a combination of all three, Ammonius(?) seems to be anxious to avoid sectarianism and to render his teaching acceptable to a multiconfessional audience.

It is hard to determine, however, to what extent Ammonius alleged agreement and the generally precarious nature of Ammonius position may contribute to explaining other differences between the philosophical system one finds in his surviving works and those of other contemporary Neoplatonists, especially those of the Athenian school. Some of these differences Ammonius apparently simplified philosophical system and the fact that the highest principle he mentions is the Demiurge,

Another important feature of Neoplatonic teaching that may have been initiated as early as

Porphyrys Isagg

Brief and concise, the Isagg consists primarily in a discussion of the so-called so that one should not expect to find in it discussions of Platonic forms, or even, for that matter, of the nature of physical reality.

It has sometimes been maintained that Ammonius was the first to comment on the Isagg, but this seems wrong. He clearly is responding to an established series of objections to the treatise.they seem to be considered self-evident in the commentary on the Isagg might be interpreted as additional evidence of the composite, heterogeneous nature of the commentary, at least in its later parts.

The reader may well judge that the most interesting part of our commentary is to be found in its earlier sections, which are also the most coherent, and, in my view, the parts most likely to go back more or less directly to Ammonius himself. The introductory section, with its five no less of a human being, for (97,910) a human being is not more human than a human being, or more rational.

To what extent are we even entitled to speak of a commentary by Ammonius on the Isagg? The question is legitimate, and it can be raised with regard to most of Ammonius surviving work, which with the notable exception of the commentary on the De Interpretatione, a polished literary production written by Ammonius himself, evincing a very high degree of philosophical sophistication all consist of notes taken by students in his classes. Often these class notes were taken, and later published, by John Other students in Ammonius classes will, of course, have been less gifted or less attentive. If there were any doubt that this is the case with the present work, it is dispelled by the following passage (105,1314):