{"_index":"sire","_id":"1510","_score":null,"_source":{"id":1510,"authors_free":[{"id":2623,"entry_id":1510,"agent_type":"person","is_normalised":1,"person_id":46,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Gerson, Lloyd P.","free_first_name":"Lloyd P.","free_last_name":"Gerson","norm_person":{"id":46,"first_name":"Lloyd P.","last_name":"Gerson","full_name":"Gerson, Lloyd P.","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/131525573","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"The Aristotelian Commentaries and Platonism","main_title":{"title":"The Aristotelian Commentaries and Platonism"},"abstract":"All students of the history of philosophy are apt to be seduced by linearity. What I mean is this. Naturally, we read the texts of the history of philosophy in the chronological order in which they were written. So, for example, we read Aristotle after we read Plato. And we read the supposedly later works of Plato after the earlier ones. Perfectly reasonable. But in pursuing the task of trying to figure out the meaning of what we have read, we tend to seek out or suppose the \u201cinfluence\u201d of the earlier philosopher on the later or the \u201cdevelopment\u201d of the philosopher\u2019s views.\r\n\r\nThe employment of these two seemingly innocuous and certainly ubiquitous terms is in fact rarely edifying. An easy means of seeing why this is so is to ask what sort of Aristotelian cause influence and development are supposed to indicate. Since we are talking about temporal succession, presumably we would have in mind efficient or moving causes. But it only requires a moment\u2019s reflection to realize that the views of one philosopher never stand in relation to the views of another as efficient cause to effect.\r\n\r\nThus, for example, it is not because Plato believed that nominalism is false that Aristotle believed that nominalism is false, even if it is indeed the case that Aristotle accepted Platonic arguments to this effect. If, however, we loosen the connection between Plato and Aristotle and agree that the views of the former did not cause the views of the latter, what is the influence supposed to amount to? Indeed, why claim that Aristotle is influenced by Plato, with whom he happened to agree on many issues, and not by, say, Democritus, with whom he happened to disagree? Surely, one can be inspired to embrace a position that is exactly the opposite of that which one hears from another.\r\n\r\nConsider \u201cdevelopment.\u201d The perfectly anodyne sense of this term\u2014namely, that according to which the sequence of writings in an author indicates the progress or course of his thought\u2014is quite useless. But as soon as you try to gin up this weak sense of development into something more portentous, you get into serious trouble. If, for example, you say that Plato\u2019s thought developed in the sense that his later dialogues represent an advancement in, or even a change from, his earlier thought\u2014apart from cases of outright contradiction of which there are few or none\u2014you have to specify what the development is a development of; that is, to use Aristotelian terminology once again, what is the underlying substrate for the development? But this underlying substrate will be the locus of continuity throughout the putative development; continuity that may be far more important than any change.\r\n\r\nI am not suggesting that Plato or any other philosopher never changed his mind. I am suggesting that the changes cannot ever be viewed uncritically as going from false to true or wrong to right. Consider someone who believes that the high point of Plato\u2019s thinking occurred in the early or middle dialogues. Someone like this would not consider the middle or late dialogues developments in any sense but the anodyne one mentioned above. Some scholars, looking at the identical texts, believe that Aristotle developed from a Platonist to something like an anti-Platonist, while others believe that his anti-Platonism was only a \u201cphase\u201d after which he developed into a Platonist once again. None of this is very helpful.\r\n\r\nThe reason I bring it up is that the Platonists of late antiquity who introduced the philosophical curriculum wherein the commentaries played such an important role were mostly impervious to the siren song of linearity. As we know from the accounts of the philosophical curriculum, perhaps introduced by Iamblichus or Porphyry in the late third century, students were obliged to study Aristotle before studying Plato. Studying Aristotle, or at least some of the works of Aristotle, was thought to be the most suitable preparation for studying Plato.\r\n\r\nThe reason for this is quite simple: the Platonists were aiming at truth rather than what we might like to think of as an \u201cobjective and unbiased\u201d account of the \u201cdevelopment\u201d of the history of philosophy. But we still should want to ask why the study of Aristotle was supposed to be conducive to understanding the truth as it is revealed in Plato and articulated by the man whom Proclus called \u201cthe exegete of the Platonic revelation,\u201d namely, Plotinus.\r\n\r\nSimplicius provides a preliminary answer to this question when he says in his Physics commentary that Aristotle was authoritative for the sensible world as Plato was for the intelligible world. Beginning the study of philosophy \u201cin\u201d the sensible world, in accord with Aristotle\u2019s remark in Physics\u2014that we start with things more intelligible to us and move to things more intelligible by nature\u2014puts the student in a better position to appreciate the more difficult insights found in the two works that comprise the culmination of philosophical study: namely, Timaeus and Parmenides.\r\n\r\nLet us be quite specific. The study of Categories is supposed to assist the student in preparing for the study of the intelligible world. Initially, this seems far-fetched. Indeed, it is not uncommon for contemporary Aristotle scholars to take Categories as in a way programmatic for an anti-Platonic Aristotelian philosophy, the focus of which is the individual sensible substance. So, on this showing, Iamblichus was naive to think that he was molding disciples of Platonism by having the students read Categories even before they encountered a dialogue of Plato.\r\n\r\nAs I have argued elsewhere, Iamblichus and Simplicius and many other prominent Platonists of late antiquity believed that Aristotle\u2019s philosophy was in harmony with Platonism. The way I characterized harmony was to argue that Aristotle\u2019s philosophy stood to Platonism analogous to the way that Newtonian mechanics stood to quantum mechanics. I was and am not altogether happy with letting my argument rest on an analogy in part because, in trying to explore further the details of harmony, one soon runs up against the limitations of the analogy.\r\n\r\nInstead, I would like to pursue a different approach here. I would like to argue that what underlies the claims of harmony is a set of shared principles; shared not only by self-proclaimed Platonists and by Aristotle, but by virtually all philosophers from at least 200 CE until perhaps the beginning of the seventeenth century, with only a few notable exceptions. It will become clear as I proceed why I have cast my net so widely. And I hope it will also become clear why the Aristotelian commentary tradition remains a critical component in the larger Platonic project. [introduction p. 7-9]","btype":3,"date":"2014","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/fH9zEC1gXGTy5tA","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":46,"full_name":"Gerson, Lloyd P.","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}}],"book":null,"booksection":null,"article":{"id":1510,"journal_id":null,"journal_name":"Quaestiones Disputatae","volume":"2","issue":"4","pages":"7-23"}},"sort":["The Aristotelian Commentaries and Platonism"]}