ARISTOTLE TRANSFORMED
Ed. by Richard Sorabji
Bloomsbury (2016) h/b 648pp £120 (ISBN 9781472589071)
ARISTOTLE REINTERPRETED
Ed. by Richard Sorabji
Bloomsbury (2016) h/b 673pp £120 (ISBN 9781472596567)
The Berlin edition of the Greek Commentators on Aristotle took a cohort of German philologists nearly thirty years to produce. Reviewing that monumental effort in 1909, Praechter stressed the riches that were now offered to scholarship. In fact, for various reasons, not least the Great War, little work was done in this field for many years. One could go further and point out that for much of the twentieth century the commentary tradition was off the radar. If the commentators were to be studied at all, this was merely as an aid to the interpretation of Aristotle.
University educators in the UK had concentrated on Plato primarily, with Aristotle in second place, and the post-Aristotelian tradition a distant third. A prevalent attitude rejected the Hellenistic period as too materialist, and the subsequent Neoplatonist phase as overly tainted with mysticism. How far intellectual horizons have widened is a debatable question. But it cannot be denied that S.’s project of translating the Berlin edition into English has now seen over 100 volumes appear and his belief that the philosophy of the commentators is a subject worthy of study in its own right has moved from the fringes to the mainstream. There are many fields of knowledge that will be enriched by reading the commentators: philosophers, historians of science, medievalists and theologians, as well as classicists, will find much to interest them.
When launching the commentator series S. published a general introduction which aimed to provide some context and at the same time to uncover the influence exerted by the commentators as philosophers on subsequent philosophy. This volume, Aristotle Transformed, has now been reissued in a 2nd edition, together with a sequel, Aristotle Reinterpreted, which aims to bring people up to date by recording some of the major developments in the last twenty-five years: these are two hefty and expensive volumes. But are they a good investment of one’s money? In terms of the amount covered they are certainly good value, and in my view anyone working in this subject area would be strongly advised to buy and read both of them (there is really no point in having one without the other, as there are frequent references back and forth).
Readers may expect that, as a second edition, AT has been brought up to date. But the exponential increase in commentarial research over the last thirty years makes this a nigh on impossible task. The only change to AT is the inclusion of a 36-page essay by S. (‘Introduction to the 2nd edition) in which S. provides a running commentary on the original articles, describing the debates that they provoked and referring the reader to AR for further details. To complement this, S. has written an 80-page introduction to AR which guides the reader through all the major developments. The amount of scholarship that is surveyed is jaw-dropping, and S.’s command of detail is impressive. However, something must have gone wrong with the proof-reading, as there are some egregious errors: on p. 30 Porphyry departs for Sicily in AD 368, having died in 303; on p. 40 a Christian mob lynches a Christian mathematician (Hypatia).
Such has been the amount of scholarly activity since the first edition of AT that many things that were accepted as true in AT are now corrected in AR. The view in AT that Themistius was an Aristotelian provoked a counter-argument that he was a Neoplatonist, and AR now suggests that he was neither. More dramatic still is the volte-face regarding the philosopher Stephanus. He was described in AT as the man appointed by the emperor Heraclius to lecture on philosophy in seventh century Byzantium and the real author of the commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima Book 3, previously attributed to Philoponus. But in AR it is claimed that he was active in fifth century Alexandria, and Philoponus wrote the commentary after all. These two examples—and there are many others—make it clear why one needs to have both volumes: AR for the current state of play and AT for the essential background. At this rate of growth in the subject, even fatter volumes will be needed in twenty-five years’ time.
Alan Towey