Richard Sorabji, “The Ancient Commentators on Aristotle,” in Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence, ed. Richard Sorabji (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) 1-30.

ISBN: 9781472589071

Notes

• 6 – “Another introductory heading concerns the reason for Aristotle’s obscurity of style, which Ammonius explains as designed so that ‘good people may for that reason stretch their minds even more, whereas empty minds that are lost through carelessness will be chased away by the obscurity when they encounter sentences like these’.”
• 8 – “The philosophical chairs in Athens and Alexandria were latterly passed from teacher to pupil. Plutarch of Athens taught Syrianus (his successor) and Proclus. Syrianus taught his own successor Proclus and Hermeias who took the chair at Alexandria. Proclus taught Hermeias’ successor, Ammonius, while Ammonius taught Damscius, who held the chair at Athens, and Olympiodorus, an indirect successor of his own, as well as the two non-chair-holders, Philoponus and Simplicius. These ties were in some cases cemented by family connexions. Hermeias married a relative of Syrianus, originally intended for Proclus, while Ammonius was Hermeias’ son.”
• 18 – “Philoponus’ most scintillating arguments turn the tables on the 800-year-old Aristotelian tradition by arguing that on the Creation of the world Christianity must be right. If the physical universe had no beginning, it would already have passed through a more than finite number of years, and Aristotle declared that passing through an infinity was impossible.”
• CAG = commentaria in aristotelem graeca
• 24 – “I have already explained the value of the works as commentaries, but it will now be clear that they are much more than commentaries. Commentary writing was one of the ways of doing philosophy, and the works therefore represent the thought of the Neoplatonist and Aristotelian schools, as well as expounding Aristotle.”
• 24-5 – “The commentaries represent a missing link in the history of philosophy. The Latin-speaking Middle Ages obtained their knowledge of Aristotle at least partly through the medium of the commentaries. We have already see how that medium could pass on a transformed Aristotle, one whose God has become a Creator of the world, and whose active intellect, it may be added, provides the hope of immortality for the human soul. Without knowledge of the commentaries, we cannot understand the Aristotle of the later Middle Ages. Again, the ancient commentaries are the unsuspected source of ideas which have been thought, wrongly, to originate in the later medieval period.”
• 25 – “The new available of the commentaries in the sixteenth century, thanks to printing and to fresh Latin translations, helped to fuel the Renaissance break from Aristotelian science. For the commentators record not only Aristotle’s theories, but also rival ones, while Philoponus as a Christian devises rival theories of his own and accordingly is mentioned in Galileo’s early works more frequently than Plato.”
• 26 – But by the time of Brentano in the nineteenth century, the idea of awareness of that message had become prominent. Thus it was only through a series of distortions by the commentators that Brentano was able to read into Aristotle’s treatment of sense perception his own seminal idea of an intentional object. He thought of an intentional object, like a hoped-for fortune, as an object which does not have to exist in reality in order to serve as the object of which our mind is aware. By reading this influential idea into Aristotle, he lent authority to it, and to his proposal that the mental could be distinguished from the physical by the fact of its being directed to intentional objects of this kind this little story illustrates that the role of the best commentators is to reinterpret rather than to reflect Aristotle, and that, as in the case of Brentano, reinterpretation can prove more fruitful than fidelity.”