This collection of articles presents the views of the different philosophical schools of the Hellenistic area on various theological topics such as on the existence of the gods, their nature, and their concern for humankind. It also mirrors the changes of perspective that took place over the many centuries in this area, thus presenting the Hellenistic contribution within the larger framework of Greek philosophical theology.

Traditions of Theology

The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity comprises over forty specially commissioned essays by experts on the philosophy of the period 200–800 ce. Designed as a successor to The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy (ed. A. H. Armstrong), it takes into account some forty years of scholarship since the publication of that volume. The contributors examine philosophy as it entered literature, science and religion, and offer new and extensive assessments of philosophers who until recently have been mostly ignored. The volume also includes a complete digest of all philosophical works known to have been written during this period. It will be an invaluable resource for all those interested in this rich and still emerging field.

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The Cambridge history of philosophy in late antiquity

https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/37302/1/hdl_37302.pdf

From polemic to exegesis: The ancient philosophical commentary

LIFE The few facts we have about Simplicius’ life come from his own works and a few other sources. He came from Cilicia (south-eastern Anatolia) as Agathias tells us ( Hist . 2.30). He was educated by Ammonius in Alexandria (fl. 490 ce , cf. In Cael 26.18–19) and Damascius (fl. 520 ce ) in Athens ( In phys . 601.19). Among influential figures on his philosophical outlook are Porphyry, the learned pupil and biographer of Plotinus (245–320), Iamblichus (fl. 300 ce , referred to as ‘the divine Iamblichus’, In phys . 60.7; 639.23 etc.), and Proclus (‘the teacher of my teachers’, In phys . 611.11–12, cf. 795.4–5). The expulsion of Platonists from Athens in 532 ce after Justinian’s ban on pagan teaching ended school activities in 529 ce (Malalas Chronicle 18.47), the cross-references between the extant works, and the lack of evidence after 540 ce suggests that his life-span comes roughly to 480–560 ce . Allusive comments in a discussion of the role of the philosopher in the city in his commentary on Epictetus ( In Epict . 32.65.30– 9 D. with reference to Plato Rep . 496d) make it probable that he wrote that commentary before the others while still in Athens, as does his mention of the oppressive situation in Athens ( ibid . epilogue). His personal note on friendship ( In Epict . 87.39–44/354 Hadot) indicates that he experienced help from friends who looked after his family while he was away, but we cannot establish the nature and date of this event.

Simplicius of Cilicia

Author(s): Kotwick, Mirjam E. | Abstract: Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary (about AD 200) is the earliest extant commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and it is the most valuable indirect witness to the Metaphysics text and its transmission. Mirjam Kotwick’s study is a systematic investigation into the version of the Metaphysics that Alexander used when writing his commentary, and into the various ways his text, his commentary, and the texts transmitted through our manuscripts relate to one another. Through a careful analysis of lemmata, quotations, and Alexander’s discussion of Aristotle’s argument Kotwick shows how to uncover and partly reconstruct a Metaphysics version from the second century AD. Kotwick then uses this version for improving the text that came down to us by the direct manuscript tradition and for finding solutions to some of the puzzles in this tradition. Through a side-by-side examination of Alexander’s text, his interpretation of Aristotle’s thought, and the directly transmitted versions of the Metaphysics, Kotwick reveals how Alexander’s commentary may have influenced the text of our manuscripts at different stages of the transmission process. This study is the first book-length examination of a commentary as a witness to an ancient philosophical text. This blend of textual criticism and philosophical analysis both expands on existing methodologies in classical scholarship and develops new ones.

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Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Text of Aristotle's Metaphysics

Aristotelian studies in the second half of the twentieth century underwent a decisive change: after two thousand years of travelling together, the fortuna of the Master and that of his Greek commentators began to follow separate paths. This was certainly progress – indeed, necessary progress, as we can now see when taking stock of the twentieth century’s arguments about the very meaning of interpretation, with particular regard to the interpretation of written texts as a primary philosophical activity. The crisis (if we may term it as such) started in the study of Aristotle himself – his Greek commentators did not yet constitute an independent field of research. Various intellectual currents were involved. Prominent among these were nineteenth-century advances in philological and historical research, and the analytic tendencies that progressively influenced Aristotelian studies in the twentieth century. A decisive part was played by the editorial enterprises sponsored in the nineteenth by the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. Within a relatively short period of time two fundamentally important works appeared: the standard critical edition of Aristotle’s complete works directed by I. Bekker (1831-1870),1 promoted by F. Schleiermacher;2 and that of the

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Aristotelianism as a commentary tradition

Abstract: No major edition of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as a whole has been published since the one prepared by Ross in 1923, and no minor edition either since Jaeger’s in 1957. Yet in recent years individual books have been edited, and there is a lively debate regarding the stemma codicum as a path towards an edition more accurate and reliable than existing ones. Starting from Primavesi’s work on book Alpha, as the most elaborated edition of a book of the Metaphysics available so far, the article draws a scenario for future investigation, in which areas of obscurity and open desiderata are elucidated. A path is suggested of how to deal with the long-standing problem of how to reconcile the two different branches of the text’s transcription.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics – Current Research to Reconcile Two Branches of the Tradition

Among Alexander of Aphrodisias’s works, a key-role is played by his treatise On the Principles of the Universe. It contains Alexander’s exegesis of Aristotle’s theory of the unmoved mover, as in Metaphysics Lambda and in Physics VIII. Its original Greek text is lost, but a sixthcentury Syriac version and two tenth-century Arabic ones are still extant. All these versions have already been published, and two of them have been rendered into modern languages (English, French, Italian) in the last ninety years, but a really deep textual comparison between them, aiming at the reconstruction of the lost Greek text, has not yet been made. Usually, a key-role is given to the second, later Arabic version of it, mostly since it is more complete than the other ones. Here, a philological re-examination of the history of the textual transmission of Alexander’s work is given, and some new conclusions about it are suggested, according to which the role of the first Arabic version, and that of the Syriac one in particular, are found to be more important than hitherto suspected. It is hard to find a Greek philosopher whose textual transmission owes more to Semitic languages than Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. about 200 ce).1 Sure, not every writing transmitted in his name has the same chances to be authentic (some have definitely none); nor does every middle age version of his authentic works offer the same reliability and closeness to its Greek Vorlage.2 On the whole, it 1 R. Goulet and M. Aouad, ‘Alexandros d’Aphrodise’, in R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. I (Paris 1989), 125–39. As Goulet and Aouad recall, ‘il est peu d’auteur anciens dont l’oeuvre soit aussi dispersée; traduction directe et indirecte; versions syriaques, arabes, hébraïques, latines; des nombreux titres enfin, attestées par les biobibliographes arabes, mais dont l’authenticité est parfois remise en question par les spécialistes’ (DPhA I, 1989, 127). 2 Relevant literature in S. Fazzo, ‘Alexandros d’Aphrodise’, in R. Goulet (ed.), Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, Supplément (Paris 2003), 61–70. 96933_JOSS_59_1_2014_05_Fazzo Zonta.indd 91 16/01/14 14:35 alexander of aphrodisias on the principles of the universe 92 is pretty clear that the most relevant contribution of the Arabic is the transmission of two major treatises of Alexander: On Providence and On the Principles of the Universe. The authors of this article have provided in 1999 a critical edition and a comprehensive study of the two Arabic versions of the treatise On providence, whose Greek exemplar is now lost, in spite of a few later quotes (as late as Cyril of Alexandria’s Contra Julianum).3 We aim now to give a detailed account of our findings concerning the troublesome textual history of the treatise On the Principles of the Universe (henceforth: De principiis). These findings are intended to justify and to explain the method we are now following in preparing a new edition and commentary of the treatise. The relevance of the subject deserves to be considered as well: De principiis makes us well acquainted with Alexander’s interpretation on a subject whose relevance is second to none in Aristotelian philosophy: namely, Aristotle’s theory about the unmoved mover and beyond, i.e. the whole of Aristotle’s theory about the principles of the universe. Though not being compiled in the form of a continuous commentary, the treatise is based on Alexander’s own exegesis of book Lambda (XII), which he regarded as the final book of Aristotle’s Me taphysics.4 De principiis thus includes an extensive paraphrase of chs 6–10 of Lambda, focused on the Prime Mover and the way it relates to the universe. Starting from paragraphs 63–4, Alexander broadly follows the sequence of argument in the relevant sections of Lambda, with extensive additions from book VIII of Aristotle’s Physics.5 To this one must add that in the previous part of the De principiis the same subject matter (always borrowed from Lambda and Physics VIII), is given with an independent arrangement, probably for 3 S. Fazzo and M. Zonta, Alessandro di Afrodisia: La provvidenza. Questioni sulla provvidenza (Milan 1999); S. Fazzo, ‘La versione araba del peri pronoias di Alessandro di Afrodisia e i frammenti greci nel trattato Contra Julianum di Cirillo di Alessandria’, Aevum 2 (Milan 2000), 399–419. 4 S. Fazzo, ‘L’exégèse de Métaphysique Lambda dans le De principiis et dans la Quaestio I.1 d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise’, Laval théologique et philosophique 64/3 (2008), 607–26. For a further piece of Greek evidence on Alexander’s exegesis of book Lambda, see Fazzo’s forthcoming edition of another Greek text by Alexander or from his school, described on p. 611 of the article just cited. 5 After we had submitted this paper, a much needed book appeared with all the Greek fragments from Alexander’s commentary to Aristotle’s Physics: M. Rashed (ed.), Alexandre d’Aphrodise, Commentaire perdu à la Physique d’Aristote (livres IV–VIII): les scholies byzantines, édition, traduction et commentaire (Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina 1, Berlin and Boston, MA 2011). Future inquiry on Alexander’s De principiis will have to take this new material and work into careful account. 96933_JOSS_59_1_2014_05_Fazzo Zonta.indd 92 16/01/14 14:35 alexander of aphrodisias on the principles of the universe 93 the sake of a broader readership which was not expected to be directly acquainted with Aristotle’s texts.6 Alexander’s exegesis has been so influential on the reception of Aristotle’s texts, that it is still difficult to separate it from the original significance of those texts; on a number of fundamental issues, the well-known prime mover’s theory which is commonly ascribed to Aristotle can be more properly regarded as Alexander’s. Alexander made a synthesis of Lambda and of Physics VIII which is coherent in itself and was extremely successful. Still, in spite of the subject’s relevance, the two current editions of De Principiis, based only on the one translation, have been scarcely quoted and studied so far; moreover, neither of them has a full summary and comprehensive commentary.7 Probably, such desiderata need to be based on a general textual reconstruction, still to be accomplished.8 As a matter of fact, different stages in the textual history of the treatise, both in Syriac and Arabic, carry unedited information about its contexts of transmission. The original Greek text of Alexander’s De principiis is apparently lost; but we have three later versions of it. Only one of these really covers the second part, so the evidence on that latter part is poorer but simpler. Concerning the former, by contrast, one has to investigate how the three sources are related. As Gerhard Endress noted in the introduction of his 2002 edition of a shorter Arabic text on the same subject and transmitted under Alexander’s name, the textual history of our treatise De principiis is a complicated one.9 Different 6 Both of Aristotle’s books Lambda and Physics VIII are crucial and crucially difficult. Their mutual relationship is not always obvious from the outset. Alexander commented upon both of them line-by-line but, unfortunately, neither of Alexander’s commentaries survives. We just have some quotations in later authors, especially Simplicius’s Greek commentary on Physics VIII and Averroes’s Arabic commentary on book Lambda. But neither series of fragments amounts to a coherent witness of what Alexander’s exegesis ought to be. 7 Silvia Fazzo aimed to fill part of this gap in her ‘L’exégèse de Métaphysique Lambda dans le De principiis et dans la Quaestio I.1 d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise’. However, that analysis only covers De principiis §§63–4 onward. A thorough analysis will be given as an introduction to our forthcoming edition of the treatise. 8 Sparse references to books Lambda and Physics VIII are found in Genequand’s reference edition (Ch. Genequand, Alexander of Aphrodisias On the Cosmos, Leiden 2001), although they do not have any systematic character; this might be partly due to the obscurity of some points of the text. 9 G. Endress, ‘Alexander Arabus on the First Cause. Aristotle’s First Mover in an Arabic Treatise attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias’, in C. D’Ancona and G. Serra (eds), Aristotele e Alessandro di Afrodisia nella tradizione Araba (Padova 2002), 19–74. The text is named ‘VE35’ in van Ess’ list of works of Alexander transmitted in Arabic. See J. van Ess, ‘Über einige neue Fragmente des Alexander 96933_JOSS_59_1_2014_05_Fazzo Zonta.indd 93 16/01/14 14:35 alexander of aphrodisias on the principles of the universe 94 versions of it are transmitted in different languages,10 and there is as yet no consensus about the interrelationship of these versions and how exactly they relate to the lost Greek version. Having set out to produce a new edition on a comprehensive basis, we soon realized that we needed a general reconstruction, possibly a stemma, in order to judge the nature and value of the different sources at our disposal. With this goal in mind, we will focus here on the three versions of De principiis itself, leaving aside related texts such as the shorter one edited by Endress. Despite its closely related subject matter, it seems to be a different text — as Endress notices, it would seem to be a summary, but not necessarily of our treatise.11 So it will not help us in reconstructing De principiis. Instead, we intend to focus on those texts which can be considered as different versions of one and the same work by Alexander. All three versions were made in the Near East between 500–950, thus at least three centuries after the original composition of the work. The earliest version was made in Syriac: it is found in MS London, British Library, Additional 14658, on folios 99v–107v. It includes a text which has the following title: Discourse on the causes of the whole, said by12 Mar Sargis priest of Re’sh ‘Ayna, according to the opinion of the ph

Towards a Textual History and Reconstruction of Alexander of Aphrodisias's Treatise On the Principles of the Universe

L’article a pour but la presentation d’un nouveau stemma codicum de la Metaphysique. L’introduction retrace la serie des stemma codicum precedents : Gercke (1892), Bernardinello (1970), Harlfinger (1979), Harlfinger revise par Fazzo (2010), Golitsis (2015). Toutes les reconstructions precedentes traitent la Metaphysique de tradition soi-disant « ouverte », dans le sillage sans doute des etudes de Werner Jaeger, qui comptait pouvoir trouver la trace des Additamenta Aristotelis - donc des variantes d’auteur - dans les differences parmi les deux recensiones principales. En fait, sur la base des donnees disponibles a ce jour, il est possible de postuler un seul archetype, qui peut se reconstruire avec une certaine precision par le biais des deux temoins qui l’ont utilise directement, a savoir, les deux mains (J, J2) qui travaillent sur le manuscrit le plus ancien (Vind. Phil. gr. 100, « l’Aristote de Vienne ») et le manuscrit de Paris (E, le Paris. gr. 1853). Ces deux vetustissimi seront donc la base priorita...

Lo stemma codicum della Metafisica di Aristotele

This paper emphasizes an unnoticed connection between two lines in Aristotle, Metaphysics Λ.1, 1069a32, and Λ.2, 1069b26. It argues that the Greek text of the former has been obscured in standard editions by unnecessary emendation: if the reading of the mss. is preserved, the text here sets out a programme for research into the elements of heavenly bodies which is taken up in the second part of Λ.2. There, Aristotle distinguishes the matter of heavenly substance as if it were matter in a certain sense only, and not sensu stricto: the only change it underlies is coming-to-be ποθέν ποι, ‘from one place to another’ (not from privation to form, the standard case). In Θ.8 as well, this is what allows Aristotle to deny that eternal things can have matter (strictly speaking) as an element of their substance. The reading argued for here may also explain how Aristotle can claim, by the end of Lambda, that he has succeeded in responding to an important aporia which (he says) was neglected by predecessors, namely ‘why some things are corruptible and other incorruptible’ (Metaphysics B, Aporia 10).

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Silvia Fazzo

Papers

Aristotelianism as a commentary tradition

Aristotle’s Metaphysics – Current Research to Reconcile Two Branches of the Tradition

Towards a Textual History and Reconstruction of Alexander of Aphrodisias's Treatise On the Principles of the Universe

Lo stemma codicum della Metafisica di Aristotele

Heavenly Matter in Aristotle, Metaphysics Lambda 2