Simplicius and Avicenna on the Essential Corporeity of Material Substance, 2001
By: Stone, Abraham D., Wisnovsky, Robert (Ed.)
Title Simplicius and Avicenna on the Essential Corporeity of Material Substance
Type Book Section
Language English
Date 2001
Published in Aspects of Avicenna
Pages 73-130
Categories no categories
Author(s) Stone, Abraham D.
Editor(s) Wisnovsky, Robert
Translator(s)
Abraham Stone weighs Avicenna's ideas about what it is to be a body against those of the Neoplatonic Aristotle-commentator Simplicius. Stone is primarily interested in how Avicenna and Simplicius treat the problem of how the terms "corporeal" and "material" are related. Both corporeity and materiality appear to be essential characteristics of natural substances, the subject of natural philosophy. Are corporeity and materiality ultimately the same thing, then? Or is there some way to distinguish them? Stone argues that Simplicius holds corporeity and materiality to be identical, while Avicenna holds corporeity to be a quasi-formal characteristic and thus different from materiality. Although Simplicius' and Avicenna's solutions to this problem differ, Stone finds that they share a tendency to treat issues such as this - originally a problem of natural philosophy - as a part of the domain of metaphysics. By creating new metaphysical concepts ("corporeal form" is a good example) and carving new metaphysical distinctions, the two philosophers were trying to create deeper and deeper foundations of consistency on which their philsophical systems could rest.

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By creating new metaphysical concepts (\"corporeal form\" is a good example) and carving new metaphysical distinctions, the two philosophers were trying to create deeper and deeper foundations of consistency on which their philsophical systems could rest. 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By this I mean two things. First, the increasing availability of edited Avicennian texts has allowed scholars to examine a broader spectrum of passages about particular topic than they were able to in the past. This, in turn, has made possible the recent and ongoing attempts to periodize Avicenna\u2019s philosophical career through the careful dating of individual work. Scholars now have to come to terms with the fact that there may not be a single Avicennian position on a given issue, but rather a history of positions, adopted at different periods of his life. \r\nSecond, many of the ancient commentaries on Aristotle, though available in the original Greek for a hundred years now, have only recently been translated into English. 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Simplicius and Avicenna on the Essential Corporeity of Material Substance, 2001
By: Stone, Abraham D., Wisnovsky, Robert (Ed.)
Title Simplicius and Avicenna on the Essential Corporeity of Material Substance
Type Book Section
Language English
Date 2001
Published in Aspects of Avicenna
Pages 73-130
Categories no categories
Author(s) Stone, Abraham D.
Editor(s) Wisnovsky, Robert
Translator(s)
Abraham Stone weighs Avicenna's ideas about what it is to be a body against those of the Neoplatonic Aristotle-commentator Simplicius. Stone is primarily interested in how Avicenna and Simplicius treat the problem of how the terms "corporeal" and "material" are related. Both corporeity and materiality appear to be essential characteristics of natural substances, the subject of natural philosophy. Are corporeity and materiality ultimately the same thing, then? Or is there some way to distinguish them? Stone argues that Simplicius holds corporeity and materiality to be identical, while Avicenna holds corporeity to be a quasi-formal characteristic and thus different from materiality. Although Simplicius' and Avicenna's solutions to this problem differ, Stone finds that they share a tendency to treat issues such as this - originally a problem of natural philosophy - as a part of the domain of metaphysics. By creating new metaphysical concepts ("corporeal form" is a good example) and carving new metaphysical distinctions, the two philosophers were trying to create deeper and deeper foundations of consistency on which their philsophical systems could rest. 

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By creating new metaphysical concepts (\"corporeal form\" is a good example) and carving new metaphysical distinctions, the two philosophers were trying to create deeper and deeper foundations of consistency on which their philsophical systems could rest. 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These translations, along with the new scholarly work on the commentators which has followed in their wake, have made a massive but heretofore forbidden resource for the history of late-antique and early-medieval philosophy easily accessible to speciallists in Arabic philosophy. The more precisely we understand how Greek philosophy developed durig the period between 200 CE and 600 CE, the better able we shall be to situate the theories of philosophers such as Avicenny in their intellectual-historical context. 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