{"_index":"sire","_id":"1172","_score":null,"_source":{"id":1172,"authors_free":[{"id":1747,"entry_id":1172,"agent_type":null,"is_normalised":null,"person_id":42,"institution_id":null,"role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"},"free_name":"Sharples, Robert W.","free_first_name":"Robert W.","free_last_name":"","norm_person":{"id":42,"first_name":"Robert W.","last_name":"Sharples","full_name":"Sharples, Robert W.","short_ident":"","is_classical_name":null,"dnb_url":"http:\/\/d-nb.info\/gnd\/114269505","viaf_url":"","db_url":"","from_claudius":null}}],"entry_title":"Alexander on Physics 2.9","main_title":{"title":"Alexander on Physics 2.9"},"abstract":"I want to draw your attention today to a report of Alexander in Simplicius\u2019s Physics commentary which, as far as I can tell, has escaped the notice of everyone, myself included\u2014and I have rather less excuse than most, for, as we shall see, the report connects directly with issues about which I have written in other contexts. That was concerned with On Coming-to-Be and Passing-Away [hereafter GC] 2.11, with Philoponus\u2019s commentary thereon, and with Alexander\u2019s discussion in some of the Quaestiones; the present paper, with Simplicius\u2019s help, extends the discussion to Physics 2.9. Alexander\u2019s GC commentary and the relevant part of his Physics commentary are lost. The text that will chiefly concern us is (3) (2) in the appendix, where Simplicius says:\r\n\r\n \"For my part, I do not understand why Alexander says that unqualified necessity excludes what is for the sake of something.\"\r\n\r\nPerhaps indeed he does understand why Alexander says this, and this is a disingenuous way of introducing a problem; but the problem may be real nonetheless.\r\n\r\nIf my story has a moral, it is, I suppose, that those who have an interest in Alexander should be more proactive than I confess I have myself been in looking up the later commentaries on passages of Aristotle that are of interest in the context of Alexander, in order to see whether Alexander is recorded as having had interesting comments to make. Or, if that is a counsel of perfection, I think it shows that we need a collection of the reports of Alexander by name in later Greek commentaries on the Physics, rather like Andrea Rescigno\u2019s recent edition of the fragments of the De Caelo commentary. We already have the fragments of the Physics commentary preserved in Arabic, and the fragments in Greek identified by Marwan Rashed; there may be scope, if copyright and other issues can be overcome, for a compendium assembling all this material in the order of the passages of Aristotle commented upon. This would indeed in a way be assistance for the lazy, making nothing available that individual scholars could not find for themselves in published sources, but it might be useful nonetheless.\r\n\r\nIn Physics 2.9, Aristotle continues his polemic against those who explain nature in terms of necessitating material interactions, arguing that necessity is present in all things that have goal-directedness, if I may so translate \u201cthe for-the-sake-of-something,\u201d but that the necessity of matter is not the cause or explanation of what comes about. There is, by the way, in my view a systematic ambiguity in the terminology commonly used here; necessity can be conditional either on a future goal or on some past event, but the custom has developed of using \u201cconditional\u201d or \u201chypothetical\u201d necessity to indicate that which relates to the future, \u201cabsolute\u201d to indicate that which is conditional on past events\u2014presumably because there is no longer anything hypothetical about these. But, especially in the ancient Peripatetic context where, as Patzig pointed out, qualifications attach to predicates rather than to whole propositions, this could be misleading from the point of view of logical analysis.\r\n\r\nBuilding a house necessarily requires bricks; but the fact that you, or the builder, purchased a pile of bricks from the builders\u2019 merchant is not an explanation of why you now have a house. (It could be an explanation of why you have a brick house, or more strictly of why, given that you have a house, it is a brick one; but that is a different point.) To be sure, Aristotle\u2019s argument in 2.9 is open to challenge in that he takes his examples from human goal-directed activity, and the extrapolation from these to natural processes is open to question. David Sedley well suggests that the self-building wall may be a parody of atomist cosmogony. A human being requires human flesh and human bones; but, Aristotle\u2019s view would seem to imply, human flesh does not self-assemble into a human being\u2014perhaps because it cannot even be human flesh, except homonymously, if it is not part of a human being. There are well-known problems here about how the final cause of embryonic development can also be the efficient cause, but I do not propose to pursue them now.\r\n\r\nFor, more important in the present context, is a distinction indicated by the example I have just used. The fact that you, or the builder, purchased a pile of bricks from the builders\u2019 merchant is not an explanation of why you now have a house. Why not? Well, presumably, because sitting looking at the pile of bricks will not give you a house; you, or the builder, need to do something with them. Bricks not only do not explain the coming-to-be of a brick house (let us call this \u201cthesis A\u201d); they do not necessarily lead to it, either (let us call this \u201cthesis B\u201d). In more formal language, they are necessary but not sufficient conditions. For the Presocratic natural philosophers whom Aristotle is attacking, on the other hand, material interactions are both sufficient conditions for, and explanations of, natural phenomena.\r\n\r\nNormally, an explanation will be a sufficient condition, or at least that one of a number of jointly sufficient conditions that is relevant in the explanatory context. Consequently, to say that material actions may necessitate, i.e., may be sufficient for, but may not explain, some event, or in the contexts with which we are concerned the coming-to-be of something, is to raise the specter of over-determination. If natural comings-to-be are necessitated by matter and its interactions\u2014what some call \u201cabsolute\u201d necessity\u2014is there any room left in which to argue that they are explained by the purposes or goals for which they are necessary means?\r\n[introduction p. 19-20]","btype":3,"date":"2012","language":"English","online_url":"","online_resources":"https:\/\/uni-koeln.sciebo.de\/s\/RKYRiSGUGVV8cTg","doi_url":null,"categories":[],"authors":[{"id":42,"full_name":"Sharples, Robert W.","role":{"id":1,"role_name":"author"}}],"book":null,"booksection":{"id":1172,"section_of":1171,"pages":"19-30","is_catalog":null,"book":null},"article":{"id":1172,"journal_id":null,"journal_name":"Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies","volume":"55","issue":"1","pages":"19-30"}},"sort":["Alexander on Physics 2.9"]}