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Rediscovered Categories Commentary: Porphyry(?) with Fragments of Boethus, 2016
By: Chiaradonna, Riccardo, Rashed, Marwan, Sedley, David N., Sorabji, Richard (Ed.)

Title	Rediscovered Categories Commentary: Porphyry(?) with Fragments of Boethus
Type	Book Section
Language	English
Date	2016
Published in	Aristotle Re-Interpreted. New Findings on Seven Hundred Years of the Ancient Commentators
Pages	231-262
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Chiaradonna, Riccardo , Rashed, Marwan , Sedley, David N.
Editor(s)	Sorabji, Richard
Translator(s)

The celebrated Archimedes Palimpsest has turned out to include not only seminal works of Archimedes but also two speeches by Hyperides and—identified as recently as 2005—fourteen pages of an otherwise unknown commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, in a copy written around 900 CE. Even if it contained nothing else, the citations that this last manuscript preserves from named earlier commentators—Andronicus, Boethus, Nicostratus, and Herminus—would be enough to make it an important addition to our knowledge of the Categories tradition. Its new evidence on the first-century BCE Aristotelian Boethus is especially significant. Two of the three citations from him (3,19–22; 14,4–12) probably embody his words more or less verbatim, to judge from the combination of direct speech and peculiarly crabbed language, very unlike the author’s usual style. In addition, the author mentions a group of anonymous commentators already criticized by Boethus, thus giving further unexpected insights into the early reception of Aristotle’s work. But the author’s own contributions are rich and fascinating too. If his date and identity could be established, the new text would make an even greater impact on our present state of understanding. In this article, it will be argued that the new fragment is, to all appearances, a remnant of the most important of all the ancient Categories commentaries, Porphyry’s lost Ad Gedalium. The grounds for such an attribution will be set out in this introduction. There will then follow a translation of the passage, and finally a commentary on the commentary. Our aim is not, in the space of a single article, to settle all the interpretative questions but, on the contrary, to initiate discussion, to develop our proposal regarding authorship, and, above all, to bring the already published text to the attention of interested scholars in the field of ancient philosophy. The commentary consists of seven consecutive folios, recto and verso, each with thirty lines per side and around forty letters per line. For ease of reference, we have renumbered the sides into a simple consecutive run, 1–14. Despite its severely damaged state, it has proved possible to decipher much of the greater part of the text on these fourteen pages. In what follows, we start with a brief description, then turn to the question of authorship. The entire fourteen pages deal, incompletely, with just two consecutive lemmata from the Categories. The passage already under discussion when the text opens is 1a20-b15, a strikingly long lemma, especially given that the same passage is divided into three lemmata by Ammonius and into five by Simplicius. The commentator has by this point already dealt, presumably at some length, with Aristotle’s well-known distinction there between properties that are ‘said of a subject’ and those that are ‘in a subject.’ As the text opens, he is discussing the later part of the lemma, 1b10–15, where Aristotle explains a principle of transitivity according to which when predicate B is said of subject A, and predicate C is said of subject B, then predicate C is said of subject A. Various aspects of this theorem, and problems arising from it, occupy the commentator from 1,1 to 7,8. But he then returns (7,8–9,30) to the opening part of the main lemma, its fourfold division of predicates (1a20-b9), which he presents as applying a neglected Aristotelian method of division, one that can also, as he proceeds to illustrate, be used effectively in the doxographical mapping out of philosophical theories. At 9,30–10,12, we encounter the transition to a new lemma, Categories 1b16–24, where Aristotle explains his thesis that any two different genera, such as animal and knowledge, which are not subordinated one to the other, will normally be divided by two specifically (tôi eidei) different sets of differentiae. The commentator takes the opportunity here to explain the basic vocabulary of genus, species, and differentia, as befits the opening pages of a work that was itself placed first in the Aristotelian corpus. Otherwise, his discussion, as for the preceding lemma, is largely taken up with the resolution of the exegetical problems raised by his predecessors. The Categories was the earliest Aristotelian treatise to attract commentaries and critiques from the first century BCE onwards. The numerous exegetes, of whose work only a small proportion has survived, included not only Aristotelians but also Platonists, Stoics, and others of uncertain philosophical allegiance. The surviving commentaries are in fact all the work of Neoplatonists, starting with the short question-and-answer commentary by Porphyry (third century CE), but they contain plentiful reports of the views of earlier commentators and critics. Since our commentary repeatedly cites previous commentators from the first century BCE to the second century CE but none later than that, we can be confident that it was written in the Roman imperial era, not earlier than the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. 200), whose teacher Herminus is the latest commentator cited, and probably not very much later either. This enables us to set about searching for its author’s identity systematically, since we are fortunate, in the case of this particular Aristotelian treatise, to have from Simplicius (in Cat. 1,9–2,29 Kalbfleisch) a detailed survey of the commentary tradition down to the beginning of the sixth century. [introduction p. 231-233]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/boTHRcfBsw3NuBU

PAGE 1 OF 1

Rediscovered Categories Commentary: Porphyry(?) with Fragments of Boethus, 2016
By: Chiaradonna, Riccardo, Rashed, Marwan, Sedley, David N., Sorabji, Richard (Ed.)

Title	Rediscovered Categories Commentary: Porphyry(?) with Fragments of Boethus
Type	Book Section
Language	English
Date	2016
Published in	Aristotle Re-Interpreted. New Findings on Seven Hundred Years of the Ancient Commentators
Pages	231-262
Categories	no categories
Author(s)	Chiaradonna, Riccardo , Rashed, Marwan , Sedley, David N.
Editor(s)	Sorabji, Richard
Translator(s)

Even if it contained nothing else, the citations that this last manuscript preserves from named earlier commentators—Andronicus, Boethus, Nicostratus, and Herminus—would be enough to make it an important addition to our knowledge of the Categories tradition. Its new evidence on the first-century BCE Aristotelian Boethus is especially significant. Two of the three citations from him (3,19–22; 14,4–12) probably embody his words more or less verbatim, to judge from the combination of direct speech and peculiarly crabbed language, very unlike the author’s usual style. In addition, the author mentions a group of anonymous commentators already criticized by Boethus, thus giving further unexpected insights into the early reception of Aristotle’s work.

But the author’s own contributions are rich and fascinating too. If his date and identity could be established, the new text would make an even greater impact on our present state of understanding. In this article, it will be argued that the new fragment is, to all appearances, a remnant of the most important of all the ancient Categories commentaries, Porphyry’s lost Ad Gedalium.

The grounds for such an attribution will be set out in this introduction. There will then follow a translation of the passage, and finally a commentary on the commentary. Our aim is not, in the space of a single article, to settle all the interpretative questions but, on the contrary, to initiate discussion, to develop our proposal regarding authorship, and, above all, to bring the already published text to the attention of interested scholars in the field of ancient philosophy.

The commentary consists of seven consecutive folios, recto and verso, each with thirty lines per side and around forty letters per line. For ease of reference, we have renumbered the sides into a simple consecutive run, 1–14.

Despite its severely damaged state, it has proved possible to decipher much of the greater part of the text on these fourteen pages. In what follows, we start with a brief description, then turn to the question of authorship.

The entire fourteen pages deal, incompletely, with just two consecutive lemmata from the Categories. The passage already under discussion when the text opens is 1a20-b15, a strikingly long lemma, especially given that the same passage is divided into three lemmata by Ammonius and into five by Simplicius. The commentator has by this point already dealt, presumably at some length, with Aristotle’s well-known distinction there between properties that are ‘said of a subject’ and those that are ‘in a subject.’ As the text opens, he is discussing the later part of the lemma, 1b10–15, where Aristotle explains a principle of transitivity according to which when predicate B is said of subject A, and predicate C is said of subject B, then predicate C is said of subject A. Various aspects of this theorem, and problems arising from it, occupy the commentator from 1,1 to 7,8. But he then returns (7,8–9,30) to the opening part of the main lemma, its fourfold division of predicates (1a20-b9), which he presents as applying a neglected Aristotelian method of division, one that can also, as he proceeds to illustrate, be used effectively in the doxographical mapping out of philosophical theories.

At 9,30–10,12, we encounter the transition to a new lemma, Categories 1b16–24, where Aristotle explains his thesis that any two different genera, such as animal and knowledge, which are not subordinated one to the other, will normally be divided by two specifically (tôi eidei) different sets of differentiae. The commentator takes the opportunity here to explain the basic vocabulary of genus, species, and differentia, as befits the opening pages of a work that was itself placed first in the Aristotelian corpus. Otherwise, his discussion, as for the preceding lemma, is largely taken up with the resolution of the exegetical problems raised by his predecessors.

The Categories was the earliest Aristotelian treatise to attract commentaries and critiques from the first century BCE onwards. The numerous exegetes, of whose work only a small proportion has survived, included not only Aristotelians but also Platonists, Stoics, and others of uncertain philosophical allegiance. The surviving commentaries are in fact all the work of Neoplatonists, starting with the short question-and-answer commentary by Porphyry (third century CE), but they contain plentiful reports of the views of earlier commentators and critics.

Since our commentary repeatedly cites previous commentators from the first century BCE to the second century CE but none later than that, we can be confident that it was written in the Roman imperial era, not earlier than the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias (c. 200), whose teacher Herminus is the latest commentator cited, and probably not very much later either. This enables us to set about searching for its author’s identity systematically, since we are fortunate, in the case of this particular Aristotelian treatise, to have from Simplicius (in Cat. 1,9–2,29 Kalbfleisch) a detailed survey of the commentary tradition down to the beginning of the sixth century.
[introduction p. 231-233]

Online Resources

https://uni-koeln.sciebo.de/s/boTHRcfBsw3NuBU

PAGE 1 OF 1