Robert B. Todd - Böcker

"Physics Book 4" is one of Aristotle's most interesting works, discussing place, time and vacuum. Themistius was a fourth-century AD orator and essayist, not only a philosopher, and he thought that only paraphrases of Aristotle were needed, because there were already such comprehensive commentaries. Nonetheless, his paraphrastic commentaries are full of innovative comment. According to Aristotle, there is no such thing as 3-dimensional space. A thing's exactly-fitting place is a surface, the inner surface of its immediate surroundings. One problem that this created was that the outermost stars, on Aristotle's view, have no surroundings, and so no place. Themistius suggests that we might think instead of the neighbouring bodies which they surround as providing their place. Aristotle time as something countable, and concluded that it depends for its existence on that of conscious beings to do the counting. Themistius is in the minority among commentators in disagreeing. Themistius concurs with Aristotle in denying the existence of vacuum. We cannot think that a space formerly empty of body penetrates right through a body inserted into it.If one extension could penetrate another, says Themistius, a body could penetrate a body, because bodies occupy places solely in virtue of being extended.

Themistius ran his philosophical school in Constantinople in the middle of the fourth century A.D. His paraphrases of Aristotle's writings are unlike the elaborate commentaries produced by Alexander of Aphrodisias, or the later Neoplatonists Simplicius and Philoponus. His aim was to provide a clear and independent restatement of Aristotle's text which would be accessible as an elementary exegesis. But he also discusses important philosophical problems, reports and disagrees with other commentaries including the lost commentary of Porphyry, and offers interpretations of Plato. Themistius' paraphrase of Aristotle's On the Soul is his most important and influential work. It is also the first extant commentary on this work of Aristotle to survive from antiquity. A rival to that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, it represents one of the main interpretations of Aristotle's theory of the intellect, which was debated throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It continues to be an important text for the reconstruction of Aristotle's philosophical psychology today.