Simplicius

In one of the most famous but equally obscure passages in the Timaeus, Plato describes the generation of time and the heavens. The “moving image of eternity” (37d5) is commonly read as Plato’s most general characterisation of time. Rémi Brague famously challenged the traditional interpretation on linguistic grounds by claiming that Plato actually did not conceive of time as an image (εἰκών) but rather as a number (ἀριθμός). In this paper, I shall claim that this controversy is by no means (...) a modern one. The traditional interpretation is mostly owed to Plato’s most prominent reader, Plotinus, who famously conceives of time in relation to eternity (Enn. III.7.13.24-25). Brague’s alternative reading, however, is anticipated by Simplicius’ attempt to refute the Plotinian interpretation, as I shall show. According to my reconstruction, Simplicius’ reading of the Timaeus not only shows why the traditional interpretation falls short, but it also offers a systematic argument that bolsters Brague’s alternative reading. Finally, I shall show that this is consistent with Plato’s text. It shall become clear that current interpretative problems are essentially prefigured in the late ancient debate. (shrink)

In this study, we aim to analyze the notions of “pragmatic” and “commatic” we encounter in what we highlight to be a process of canonization of style appropriate to each content and theological level since Porphyry. This research is divided into three parts: primarily, we investigate the sense in which the Neoplatonists use the adjective “commatic”, which includes on the one hand (1) defining what the Neoplatonists mean by “unity of meaning”, and on the other hand distinguishing between a “woven” (...) and continuous style and a “disjointed” and broken style, collecting the stylistic criticisms made by the Neoplatonists of the ancient texts; then (2) we seek to establish the areas of application of the “commatic” style in Neoplatonic discourse, distinguishing on the one hand inspired and ethical discourse, and on the other hand clear and sharp dialectical discourse, bordering on that which eludes philosophical demonstration, namely, the ἀσάφεια; finally (3), we aim to study the “pragmatic” style associated with each theological content in order to highlight its corresponding style and vocabulary. The present research stems from the need to show how behind the lexical and structural choices of the Neoplatonic writings there is a precise theory of style, produced by a process of aesthetic canonization that emerges clearly as early as Porphyry’s rhetorical fragments and from Neoplatonic exegetical activity on rhetorical works, as well as from an innumerable amount of references to a rhetorical tradition on the period and its parts, the commata and côla, which the Neoplatonists, as this study aims to show, master and apply on their own structuring and formalization of theological content. (shrink)

Physics IV.10 (217b30–218a30) is pivotal in Aristotle’s discussion of time, preceding his own account from IV.11 onward. Aristotle presents three puzzles about the existence of time with reference to the “Now”. Modern interpretations often view this section as an aporetic prelude with Aristotle’s failure to provide explicit solutions. This paper examines Simplicius’ alternative interpretation, which draws upon the theory of proof and the syllogistic model from the Posterior Analytics. Simplicius contends that the arguments’ failure lies in their inability to fit (...) within the suitable syllogistic framework to establish a demonstrable definition of time, not in their aporetic nature. Every science has to prove the relation between (i) establishing whether X exists and (ii) showing what X is by establishing what the cause of X is. In evaluating Simplicius’ interpretation, this paper addresses two key aspects of the exegesis of IV.10: firstly, Simplicius can show why the “Now” is not part of the definition of time, and secondly, the ancient commentator underscores the close connection between the arguments in Physics IV.10 and the broader context of Aristotle’s discussion of time. Modern interpreters fail to address both of these issues. (shrink)

This paper examines two doxographies present in Ḥunayn’s summaries to Galen’s treatise On the Elements. We track the origin of these doxographies back, from Greek scolia to Galen’s treatise to Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, which we show to be the ultimate source. We also point out that Simplicius’ Commentary inspired an interpretation of Parmenides and Melissus that we find in Ḥunayn’s texts. This allows us to see remnants of Simplicius’ Commentary in the Arabic world and to shed some light (...) on the production of these summaries to Galen’s work called Summaria Alexandrinorum. (shrink)

In explicating a passage from Physics A 3, Simplicius reports a criticism by Alexander of Aphrodisias against Plato’s conception of not-being in the Sophist. Alexander deems this conception contradictory, because it posits that unqualified not-being is. Simplicius defends Plato and gives a diagnosis of what he regards as Alexander’s interpretative mistake in raising his objection. I unpack this debate and bring out ways in which it sheds light on important aspects of Plato’s project in the Sophist and of Simplicius’ own (...) philosophical background, notably in Damascius’ De principiis. (shrink)

La dificultad de captar el pensamiento de Parménides llevó a los intérpretes ya en la Antigüedad a encarar su filosofía según esquemas de pensamiento posteriores. Fue el caso de Aristóteles, cuya interpretación fue heredada por su discípulo Teofrasto y por sus comentadores, especialmente Simplicio. Simplicio, neoplatónico y aristotélico a la vez, propuso una interpretación, fuertemente dualista, que no se encuentra en las citas recuperadas. En 1789 G.G.Fülleborn, inspirándose en Simplicio, propuso una división del Poema en dos “partes”, aceptada hoy en (...) forma unánime, y que debe ser revisada y rechazada con urgencia. (shrink)

Volume 35 contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2018-19. Works: Commentary on _De Anima_, Nicomachean Ethics. Topics: Humean motivation, memory-oblivion & myth, final causality and ontology of life.

No fully extant text of Presocratic philosophy has survived antiquity. Occasionally, there are significant new discoveries such as the Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles, but, as Runia commented in 2008, “even the students of early Hellenistic philosophy are better off” when it comes to source material. The modern scholar of early Greek philosophy is reliant on source books published in the shadow of the Diels-Kranz that collect together fragments and testimonia from later sources. Much of what we know about the Presocratics (...) comes from Plato and Aristotle, but also from the Neoplatonic tradition, in the form of the explicit influences that the Presocratics had on particular Neoplatonic thinkers, and the wealth of verbatim fragments preserved in Neoplatonic texts. -/- This paper discusses the reception and transmission of early Greek philosophy through the lens of Neoplatonism, focusing on Simplicius’ commentaries on the works of Aristotle. Many of the fragments and testimonia that we have today come from Simplicius. However, there are issues surrounding our reliance on Simplicius’ commentaries. Why does Simplicius include extended references to Aristotle’s predecessors in his commentaries on Aristotle? Does the tendency to harmonize the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle in Neoplatonic works, known as the harmonization hypothesis, extend to Simplicius’ reportage of the Presocratics? The paper evaluates Simplicius’ contribution to Presocratic scholarship and asks what implications there are for our reading of the Presocratic fragments we receive from Simplicius. (shrink)

This paper lists and examines the explicit references to Aristotle’s Topics in the Greek Neoplatonic commentaries on the Categories. The references to the Topics by Porphyry, Dexippus, Ammonius, Simplicius, Olympiodorus, Philoponus and David are listed according the usual prolegomena to Aristotle’s works. In particular, the paper reconstructs David ’s original thesis about the proponents of the title Pre-Topics for the Categories and compares Ammonius’, Simplicius’ and Olympiodorus’ doxographies about the postpraedicamenta. Moreover, the study identifies two general trends. The first one (...) is that all the commentators after Proclus share the same general view about: the authenticity of the Topics, Aristotle’s writing style in them, the part of philosophy to which they belong, their purpose, their usefulness and their place in the reading order. The second one is that whereas Porphyry, Dexippus and Simplicius use the Topics as an aid to understanding the Categories, Ammonius, Olympiodorus and David do not. (shrink)

The book contends that the digression ending Simplicius’ In de caelo 2.12 is not a proper history of early Greek planetary theory, but a creative atempt to show that to accept Ptolemy’s planetary hypotheses one need not repudiate Aristotle’s argument that the cosmos is eternal.

Simplicius in Cat. 12,10-13,12 presents an interesting justification for the study of Aristotle's Categories, based in Neoplatonic psychology and metaphysics. I suggest that this passage could be regarded as a testimonium to Iamblichus' reasons for endorsing Porphyry's selection of the Categories as an introductory text of Platonic philosophy. These Iamblichean arguments, richly grounded in Neoplatonic metaphysics and psychology, may have exercised an influence comparable to Porphyry's.

Review of Simplicius: On Aristotle, On the Heavens 3.1-7, trans. Ian Mueller, London: Duckworth, 2009.

Simplicius’ project of harmonizing previous philosophers deserves to be taken seriously as both a philosophical and an interpretive project. Simplicius follows Aristotle himself in developing charitable interpretations of his predecessors: his distinctive project, in the Neoplatonic context, is the rehabilitation of the Presocratics (especially Parmenides, Anaxagoras and Empedocles) from a Platonic-Aristotelian perspective. Simplicius’ harmonizations involve hermeneutic techniques which are recognisably those of the serious historian of philosophy; and harmonization itself has a distinguished history as a constructive philosophical method.

The following paper offers a brief discussion of Simplicius’ intriguing concept of “propensity” (epitedeiotes), an attempt to account for particularized qualities in terms congenial to a Neoplatonist. For although claiming to follow Aristotle, Simplicius ultimately explains the existence of particularized qualities in termsof a metaphysic of participation. Although his doctrine does not seem not have enjoyed much popularity in Late Antiquity, it will be adopted and expanded upon both late 13th century scholastic authors such as James of Viterbo who see (...) Simplicius’ theory as offering a philosophically rigorous equivalent to Augustinian seminal reasons. (shrink)

Aristotle and Other Platonists is a remarkable work in terms of what is established and how its arguments are developed. Gerson’s meticulous and sensitive examinations of original texts of Plato and Ar-istotle, along with their central commentary traditions and more recent interpretations, offer nuanced insights into the intended meanings of each relevant text. Gerson attempts “ in part to achieve a richer understanding of Platonism by showing why Neoplatonists took Aristotle to be an authentic collaborator in its development and explication”. (...) He also endeavors to confirm that Aristotle was often “ actually analyzing the Platonic position and making it more precise, not refuting it,” and “ criticizing philosophers other than Plato or deviant versions of Platonism”. (shrink)

: In earlier work, Bernard R. Goldstein and the present author have introduced a procedural rule for historical inquiry, which requires that one take pains to establish the credibility of any citation of ancient thought by later writers in antiquity through a process of verification. In this paper, I shall apply what I call the Rule of Ancient Citations to Simplicius' interpretation of Aristotle's remarks in Meta L. 8, which is the primary point of departure for the modern understanding of (...) Greek planetary theory. I first sketch several lines of argument that lead me to conclude that Simplicius' interpretation should not be accepted because it assumes a concern with planetary phenomena unknown to the Greeks before the late 2nd and early 1st centuries BC. Then, after showing that there is a fairly well defined range of readings of Aristotle's remarks more in keeping with what we actually know of astronomy in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, I conclude that neither Aristotle's report about the Eudoxan and Callippan accounts of the celestial motions nor Simplicius' interpretation of this report is a good starting point for our understanding of early Greek planetary theory. (shrink)

At "Categories" 12b5-16 Aristotle appears to regard the referents of declarative sentences, such as "Socrates is sitting," as what later writers were to call "complexe significabilia," i.e., items such as that Socrates is sitting. Simplicius' discussion of this passage in his commentary on the "Categories" clearly shows the influence of Stoic philosophy of language; but, if we follow the text printed by Kalbfleisch, Simplicius' commentary is seen to be a muddle of Stoic and Aristotelian elements, neither properly understood. It is (...) possible, however, by making a crucial emendation to the text, to preserve the Aristotelian integrity of Simplicius' theory of meaning. On that line Simplicius would be adopting the view that a declarative sentence refers to a thought in the first instance and a "complexe significabile" in the second instance. This view is plausibly the upshot of combining the "Categories" text with the first chapter of "De Interpretatione.". (shrink)

The dissertation is a case study of the thesis of the Neoplatonist commentators that Aristotle's philosophy was in basic harmony with Plato's. The cases examined are the surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle's Categories authored by Porphyry, Dexippus, Ammonius, Simplicius, Philoponus, Olympiodorus, and David. The Categories was the traditional introduction to a systematic reading of Aristotle's works; it is also blatantly anti-Platonist: if it could be shown to be harmonious with Plato's philosophy, Aristotle's other works could more easily be accommodated. ;The (...) crucial move in the commentators' harmonization is set out in the dissertation's introductory chapter: how their determination of the intended theme of the Categories permits them to construe Aristotle's listed categories not as ontological, and so in competition with Platonist summa genera, but as semantic of the derivatively real material world. The second chapter notes that the commentators' conceptions of homonymy includes a relationship between intelligibles and sensibles according to which terms for sensibles receive their meaning because they signify that which derives both ontological determination and meaning from intelligible exemplars. It then takes up the commentators' treatment of issues of ontological dependence: how form is in matter; whether accidents are separable from one particular subject; and whether the last six categories are derivative from relationships among the first four. The third chapter shows that only Dexippus and Porphyry apud Dexippum demonstrate that the emanation of the sensible from the intelligible is parallel in Platonism and in Aristotle. Our other commentators either claim a looser parallelism between Plato and Aristotle or simply presume this parallelism. The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters investigate how, and with what consistency, each of the commentators views each of the three categories of quantity, relatives, and quality as the building blocks of the sensible world. The fifth chapter also confirms Conti's thesis, not taken seriously since Luna's objections, that the commentators anticipate the modern notion of relation as a polyadic function. A final chapter examines the appropriateness of stopping the survey of the commentaries on the ninth chapter of a fifteen-chapter work. (shrink)