{"_index":"sire","_id":"1347","_score":null,"_source":{"id":1347,"authors_free":[{"id":2002,"entry_id":1347,"agent_type":"person","is_normalised":1,"person_id":167,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Hankey, Wayne J.","free_first_name":"Wayne J.","free_last_name":"Hankey","norm_person":{"id":167,"first_name":" Wayne J.","last_name":"Hankey","full_name":"Hankey, Wayne J.","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/1054015821","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"Review of: Simplicius, On Aristotle's Physics 5, translated by J.O.Urmson, notes by Peter Lautner. The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle","main_title":{"title":"Review of: Simplicius, On Aristotle's Physics 5, translated by J.O.Urmson, notes by Peter Lautner. The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle"},"abstract":"This welcome volume is yet another in the important series The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. Edited by Richard Sorabji, about 30 volumes have now been published (they are not numbered). As in all the volumes, Sorabji\u2019s General Introduction is reprinted as an appendix (pp. 151-160), though its accompanying lists, both of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, in the Berlin edition of Hermann Diels, and of English translations of the ancient commentators, are found only in the first of the translations: Philoponus, Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World (1987).\r\n\r\nUniformly with the series, there are, as well as the translation (here in 110 pages), a short introduction (here in two parts: one by Peter Lautner, who did the notes, and the other by J.O. Urmson, who translated the text), a list of textual emendations, extensive notes (305 in fact, compensating for the shortness of the introduction), an English-Greek glossary, a Greek-English index, and indices of names and subjects.\r\n\r\nOther compensations for the regrettable shortness of the introduction are the affiliated publications from the Cornell University Press: Sorabji's Time, Creation and the Continuum (1983), his Matter, Space and Motion (1988), and the collections of articles Sorabji has edited: Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science (1987), Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence (1990). These are indispensable for negotiating Lautner\u2019s notes. Also useful on the Aristotelian tradition and the place of Simplicius in it is a new collection of articles edited by Sorabji but published by the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London in 1997: Aristotle and After.\r\n\r\nUnderstanding the character and significance of what Simplicius is doing here, especially of his very consequential modifications of Aristotle, requires consultation with excellent but inconvenient endnotes and with their references to this and other, less accessible, literature. As a result, In Physics 5 and its companion volumes are for well-formed scholars with first-class university libraries at their disposal.\r\n\r\nWith this volume, we near the completion within this series of the translation of Simplicius' enormous commentary on the Physics. It joins, of Simplicius, the Corollaries on Place and Time, On Aristotle On the Soul 1.1-2.4, and On Aristotle's Physics 2, 4, 6, 7; all of which have appeared since 1989. They manifest in the English-speaking world a renewed scholarly and philosophical interest in Simplicius, which has produced translations, editions, and research by American, Belgian, English, French, German, and Italian scholars. Their work and projects were collected in Simplicius: sa vie, son \u0153uvre, sa survie (1987), edited by Ilsetraut Hadot. Indeed, a contributor to that collection, Leonardo Tar\u00e1n, promises us a new edition of the Greek text of the commentary on the Physics as well as another translation of it. Another contributor, Philippe Hoffmann, is reediting the commentary on the De Caelo.\r\n\r\nThe renewed labor on the commentaries is justified by those who undertake it. The first place to find this is in Sorabji's General Introduction, which, beyond indicating the influence of the Neoplatonic commentaries, calls them \"incomparable guides to Aristotle\" (p. 159). A claim he supports by reference to the \"minutely detailed knowledge of the entire Aristotelian corpus\" possessed and conveyed by the commentators.\r\n\r\nIn his article for the French colloque, Tar\u00e1n maintained that Simplicius' commentary on the Physics remains the best commentary on that work \"even today\" (p. 247). Since her Le Probl\u00e8me du N\u00e9oplatonisme Alexandrin: Hi\u00e9rocl\u00e8s et Simplicius (1978), Ilsetraut Hadot has defended Simplicius and the commentators of the Athenian Neoplatonic school from denigrating comparisons with the production of the Alexandrines. She demonstrates that Praechter was wrong in supposing the Alexandrian commentaries to have been more devoted to the vrai sens of Aristotle in contrast to their own Neoplatonic philosophical projects. In fact, the commentaries of both schools were produced within a tradition initiated by Porphyry and were required by the essential role Aristotle's writings played in teaching. The value of the commentary may be diminished by the service given to such Neoplatonic scholastic projects as the reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle, but Hadot\u2019s demonstrations elevate Simplicius by diminishing the preeminence given to the Alexandrines.\r\n\r\nIn a review in this journal (BMCR 97.9.24), Richard Todd produced good reasons for choosing, as the place to begin among the older scholarship on Aristotle, the Renaissance commentaries of Jacobus Zabarella or Julius Pacius, but still, he would have these Renaissance humanists bring readers back to Simplicius. By the Renaissance, his commentaries, lost to the Latins until the 13th century, were well known and highly respected.\r\n\r\nSo none will deny the enormous importance of Simplicius' commentary. Beyond its illumination of Aristotle, its application and defense of the Neoplatonic interpretative framework is skillful and creative. Moreover, it is the great treasury for our knowledge of previous Greek physics from the Pre-Socratics onward and of the commentaries before his own. Both of these he preserves by quotation, often at greater length than his argument requires, as if Simplicius, like Boethius, saw himself preserving a disappearing heritage in a darkening age. Much of In Physics 5 is a dialogue with Alexander of Aphrodisias, and enormous passages of his commentary are reproduced. They remind us of one of the essential tasks of scholarship that has only begun and will be assisted by this translation. Since so much of what we know about natural philosophy before Simplicius is dependent on him, we need to deepen our understanding of his thinking to consider how his selection and reproduction shape our knowledge of ancient philosophy.\r\n\r\nThe conservative labor was successful; evidently, the commentary of Simplicius survived and carried his past with it. In consequence, another reason for the great importance of this work is its influence. His understanding of Aristotle constituted an essential element in the thinking of the Arabic Neoplatonists and, from the 13th century on, his comments were communicated to the Latin West in their treatises and in their own commentaries on Aristotle's texts, as well as through direct translations from the Greek by Latins like William of Moerbeke. Thus, he reached the scholastics of the medieval West.\r\n\r\nThe conscientious continuation by Simplicius of the great Neoplatonic enterprise of reconciling Plato and Aristotle helped determine the Latin understanding of Aristotle. Moreover, ideas of his own, developed in that context, became fruitful again as Aristotelian physics was transformed in the construction of modern natural philosophies.\r\n\r\nSimplicius was with Damascius and the other pagan philosophers who headed east after Justinian closed the Academy in Athens. He probably composed this, and his other Aristotelian commentaries, in the remote city of Harran (Carrhae). Whatever the activity of the philosophers gathered there, as distinct from his predecessors like Themistius or contemporaries like Philoponus the Christian, Simplicius' commentaries no longer show characteristics marking them as having been developed as lectures. Evidence points to composition after 538, and Peter Lautner shows that at least part of the commentary on the Physics was written before the commentary on the Categories.\r\n\r\nSimplicius assiduously carries forward the reconciliation of Aristotle with Plato. Whether, with Sorabji, we call this project \"perfectly crazy\" (p. 156), we will agree it stimulates Simplicius to his greatest creativity. Here the philosophical commentator is moved by his religion. Since Porphyry, and fervently with Iamblichus, Proclus, and their successors, piety in respect to the old gods demanded that the unity of that by which they revealed themselves and their cosmos be exhibited. Further, defending the Hellenic spiritual tradition against its critics and effectively marshaling its forces against the Christian enemy required this unification.\r\n\r\nSimplicius helps work through completely what the Neoplatonic reconciliations and unifications require. He assists with its momentous move from substance to subjectivity. For what it furthers and transmits in this greatest of Western transformations, his commentary is philosophically important. Those who have made it more accessible are to be thanked. [the entire review]","btype":3,"date":"1998","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/gUxdRzi2BGcl9jH","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":167,"full_name":"Hankey, Wayne J.","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}}],"book":null,"booksection":null,"article":{"id":1347,"journal_id":null,"journal_name":"Bryn Mawr Classical Review","volume":"3","issue":"19","pages":""}},"sort":["Review of: Simplicius, On Aristotle's Physics 5, translated by J.O.Urmson, notes by Peter Lautner. The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle"]}