Philoponus - On Aristotle Categories 1–5; A Treatise Concerning the Whole and the Parts

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

Translated by Riin Sirkel, Martin Tweedale and John Harris

Translated by Daniel King

[] Square brackets enclose words or phrases that have been added to the translation for purposes of clarity.

() Round brackets, besides being used for ordinary parentheses, contain transliterated Greek words.

Translated by Riin Sirkel, Martin Tweedale and John Harris

Introduction by Richard Sorabji

I believe this is a comparatively early commentary of Philoponus. Questions of dating have been transformed by Pantelis Golitsis, who made use of the titles given to Philoponus commentaries on Aristotle by the best manuscripts. I plan elsewhere to assess how far we can take this useful evidence. titles to Ammonius and does not appear to reflect teaching, and so was written after Philoponus had stopped teaching courses on Aristotle. In forthcoming work, which he has been kind enough to discuss, Golitsis takes the first four commentaries to be largely the work of Ammonius.

There are also commentaries on Aristotles Categories and Prior Analytics anonymously drawn, according to their titles, from the voice of Ammonius. These differences of title might be taken to suggest, although this is an over-simplified extrapolation from Golitsis hypothesis, that a commentary anonymously derived from Ammonius would be a close student record of Ammonius. When the recorders name appears first, but without warning of reflections added, as with Philoponus version of in An. Pr., the commentary might be slightly divergent from Ammonius, but not as divergent as commentaries whose title warns of the recorders reflections. But how divergent are these last? The attention which Golitsis has directed to titles has further consequences of the highest value. It makes us question more than before, although this has already occasionally been questioned, how much is Philoponus own and how much a record of Ammonius. This in turn makes it important to query the current practice of citing without warning commentaries drawn anonymously from the seminars or voice of Ammonius, as by Ammonius. I shall here instead speak of the commentaries anonymously drawn from the voice of Ammonius as Ammonius in Cat. Anon. and Ammonius in An. Pr. Anon. With Philoponus commentaries drawn from Ammonius seminars, I think it is worth giving the title in full to encourage looking for evidence on who is responsible for what. When the title does not mention Ammonius at all, and Philoponus name comes first, on the present line of thinking, we might expect Philoponus to have diverged considerably from Ammonius.

This is an extrapolation from Golitsis hypothesis, close to, but not exactly the same as, his formulation, and it will turn out that it does not fit the facts, as I will claim in my forthcoming paper. Notably, Philoponus commentaries on Aristotles Physics and Categories make no reference to Ammonius in their titles, so on the suggested extrapolation should be written by him at a more advanced stage, more divergent from Ammonius and plausibly on the basis of reflections inspired by lecturing himself. But for quite different reasons, I think other parts of his Physics commentary besides that on book 8 are early, and so is the Categories commentary, which is the one most relevant to the present subject. I shall also mention below a doubt about the relative dates of Philoponus in An. Pr. and in Cat., but in this case to dissent only from the extrapolation, not from Golitsis formulation. Disagreement on details is in any case a fruit of the all-important attention he has drawn to the meaning of the titles.

I believe there are signs of earliness in Philoponus in Cat. For one thing, over long stretches it is extremely close, even in wording, to Ammonius in Cat. Anon., which it appears to have copied. But this observation needs to be tempered, since Philoponus commentary in Cat. (as possibly also Asclepius from the voice of Ammonius in Metaph.) includes a substantial number of additions to that earlier commentary.

As regards Philoponus additions, Adolf Busse claimed in the preface to his edition of the anonymously edited commentary three places at which Philoponus in Cat. included Christian ideas, which the anonymously edited version omitted. The most plausible is at 169,19, where Philoponus qualifies the denial in Ammonius in Cat. Anon. that a blind person could see again, by adding, in reference to Christs healing the blind, unless by divine power. I think that Philoponus, as a Christian addressing pagans, would have had a good motive for adding the qualification in reference to Christs healing the blind, whereas for a pagan like Ammonius, it would have been pointless or even provocative to lengthen the account by referring to pagan divine powers, and against the grain to acknowledge Christs.

Concetta Luna has found Philoponus making a much larger number of additions, thirteen by my count, to the earlier Ammonius in Cat. Anon. in a mere twenty-one pages, none of them presented as objections. Apart from an opening section missing from Ammonius (25,2727,9), the thirteen additions in Philoponus commentary are:

1. It gives extra explanations (27,1127).

2. It adds an excursus on what types of contrary will make an exhaustive division (29,2230,24).

3 and 4. It twice offers a solution different from that of Ammonius in Cat. Anon. (33,2031; 34,1635,8).

5. It inserts an extra problem and solution (33,3234,7).

6. It replaces a two-fold division in Ammonius in Cat. Anon. with a four-fold division (31,1926).

7. It gives a different account of what is being divided in another pair of divisions (43,39).

8. It adds extra evidence (36,611).

9. It gives a distinction with three examples absent from Ammonius in Cat. Anon., separates it from the Anonymous context of solving an objection to Aristotle, and extends the discussion to grammarians items: disyllable and trisyllable (38,2839,15).

10. It adds a section explaining things said (legomena), and includes, unlike any other commentary, grammarians items: conjunctions, prepositions and articles (43,1744,2).

11. It substitutes a list of items of interest to Philoponus as omitted from the Categories, viz.: point, instant (now), unit, privations, negations, movements, changes, in place of Ammonius in Cat. Anon.s list of point, privation, matter, form (46,1448,27).

12. It gives the right reference to Aristotle, when Ammonius