Ancient Commentators on Aristotle – serie

Proclus' On the Existence of Evils is not a commentary, but helps to compensate for the dearth of Neoplatonist ethical commentaries. The central question addressed in the work is: how can there be evil in a providential world? Neoplatonists agree that it cannot be caused by higher and worthier beings. Plotinus had said that evil is matter, which, unlike Aristotle, he collapsed into mere privation or lack, thus reducing its reality. He also protected higher causes from responsibility by saying that evil may result from a combination of goods. Proclus objects: evil is real, and not a privation. Rather, it is a parasite feeding off good. Parasites have no proper cause, and higher beings are thus vindicated as being the causes only of the good off which evil feeds.

A new translation of Aristotle's classic work on the natural sciences.

This is the commentary attributed to Simplicius on Aristotle's "On the Soul". It is intended to provide a wider readership with the opportunity to assess the disputed question of authorship. Is the work by Simplicius, or by his colleague Priscian, or by another commentator? The commentary is a source for late Neoplatonist theories of thought and sense perception and provides insight into this area of Aristotle's thought. In this volume the Neoplatonist commentator covers the first half of Aristotle's "On the Soul", comprising Aristotle's survey of his predecessors and his own rival account of the nature of the soul.

Aristotle's "On Interpretation", a centrepiece of his logic, studies the relationship between conflicting pairs of statements. The first eight chapters, studied here, explain what statements are; they start from their basic components, the words, and work up to the character of opposed affirmations and negations. The 15,000 pages of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, written mainly between 200 and 500 AD, constitute the largest corpus of extant Greek philosophical writing not translated into English or other European languages. This new series of translations, planned in 60 volumes, fills an important gap in the history of European thought.

"On the Soul" was the most widely read of all the Aristotle commentaries in the Renaissance. The best-known of Themistius's discussions is that concerned with Aristotle's active intellect, which leads to his wider musings on the nature of the self. The 15,000 pages of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, written mainly between 200 and 500 AD, constitute the largest corpus of extant Greek philosophical writing not translated into English or other European languages. This new series of translations, planned in 60 volumes, fills an important gap in the history of European thought.

Aristotle's "Meterology Book 4" provides an account of the formation of minerals, metals and other homogeneous stuffs. In doing so, this text argues, it offers us fresh and important insights into Aristotle's conception of matter. The 15,000 pages of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, written mainly between 200 and 600 AD, constitute the largest corpus of extant Greek philosophical writing not translated into English or other European languages. This is a new series of translations, planned in 60 volumes which fills an important gap in the history of European thought.

Chapter 9 of Aristotle's "On Interpretation" deals with determinism, and here the two influential commentaries of Ammonius and Boethius have been published together. These are crucial works, for Ammonuis' commentary influenced the Islamic Middle Ages, while that of Boethius was of equal importance to medieval Latin-speaking philosophers. It was once argued that Boethius was influenced by Ammonius, and this work aims to show that this was clearly not the case. Ammonius draws on the fourth- and fifth-century Neoplatonists Iamblichus, Syrianus and Proclus. He arranges his argument around three major deterministic arguments and is our main source for one of them, the Reaper argument. Boethius, on the other hand, draws on controversies from 300 years earlier between Stoics and Aristotelians as recorded by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Porphyry.

Book two of Aristotle's "Physics" is thought by some to be the most interesting and representative book in the whole of his corpus. It explains his conception of nature, of physics as opposed to mathematics, of causation and explanation, of chance and of purpose in nature. Simplicius, writing in the 6th century AD, is the most comprehensive of all the commentators. He reports interpretations of Aristotle from the preceding 800 years by Eudemus, Posidonius, Porphyry and Syranius. His accounts of the various definitions of nature and of chance are highly useful, are as his analyses of Aristotle's technical terms, per accidens and privation. He often carries out the project, which Aristotle himself proposed but never undertook, of putting Aristotle's scientific explanations into syllogistic form.

Simplicius and Priscian were two of the seven Neoplatonists who left Athens when the Christian Emperor Justinian closed the pagan school there in AD 529. Their commentaries on works on sense perception, one by Aristotle and one by his successor Theophrastus, are translated here in one volume. Both commentaries give a highly Neoplatonized reading to their Aristotelian subjects and give an insight into late Neoplatonist psychology.