Greek–Latin Philosophical Interaction

Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen Volume 1

Sten Ebbesen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351932141
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Sten Ebbesen has contributed many works in the field of ancient and medieval philosophy over many decades of dedicated research. His style is crisp and lucid and his philosophical penetration and exposition of often difficult concepts and issues is both clear and intellectually impressive. Ashgate is proud to present this three volume set of his collected essays, all of them thoroughly revised and updated. Each volume is thematically arranged. Volume One: Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction explores issues of relevance to the history of logic and semantics, and in particular connections and/or differences between Greek and Latin theory and scholarly procedures, with special emphasis on late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Chapter 1

The Greek under the Latin and the Latin under the Greek

The essays gathered in this volume have two features in common besides being by the same author: firstly, they explore issues of relevance to the history of logic and semantics, and, secondly, they explore connections and/or differences between Greek and Latin theory and scholarly procedures, with special emphasis on late antiquity and the Middle Ages. A general overview of the interrelationships between the philosophical milieux of the two language areas is presented in Chapter 2, and some more detailed comparisons of the study of logic in the two areas may be found in Chapters 10 and 11. Chapters 3 to 6 deal with the way certain ancient discussions and views continued to occupy scholastic thinkers, although the schoolmen were often unaware of their ancient predecessors.

To a large extent, my work has consisted of looking for Greek thought and wording underneath Latin formulations, or – less often – in looking for Latin thought and wording under Greek formulations.

Searching for the Greek under the Latin is an occupation to which many scholars have been addicted. Among the monuments to that addiction is Maximilian Adler’s wonderful 1924 index volume to Hans von Arnim’s Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, where, after an extensive Greek index verborum (which actually refers also to Latin fragments) you find a brief, but extremely useful Index vocabulorum ad Stoicorum doctrinam pertinentium, quae ab auctoribus Romanis e Graeco in Latinum sermonem translata sunt. The indices in the volumes of Aristoteles Latinus have continued the tradition in a superb way.

I became addicted as a young man when, following in the footsteps of L. Minio-Paluello, I decided to gather all possible fragments and traces of a twelfth-century Latin translation of a Greek commentary on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi. My investigations soon broadened out to look also for more fragments of translations of Greek commentaries on Prior and Posterior Analytics – once again in Minio-Paluello’s footsteps.

The main results of the search for fragments of the translated Elenchi commentary were presented in my Commentators and Commentaries on Aristotle’s Sophistici Elenchi (Ebbesen 1981a). Some supplements are provided in Chapter 14, which also presents the most important fragments of the translated commentary on the Posterior Analytics. My contribution to the search for traces of a translated commentary on the Prior Analytics is reprinted as Chapter 13.

Whereas the very existence of Latin translations of (or parts of) these Greek commentaries had only been discovered a few years before I started to work on them, and little had been done to discover what impact they had on early Western scholasticism, I have had no lack of predecessors in the investigation of the influence that Manlius Boethius (c. AD 474–c. 524) – known to Renaissance writers as ‘the last of the Romans’ – exerted on medieval Latin philosophers. Yet, I have found that there is still work to do. For one thing, we still lack a thorough investigation of the development of such medieval philosophical genres as the literal commentary (expositio), the question commentary (quaestiones) and the introduction or handbook (introductio, summulae), at least two of which owe a debt to Boethius. For another, we still need a better understanding and a more detailed exegesis of Boethius’ logical works; and an indispensable prerequisite for obtaining those goals is the ability to see the Greek under the Latin, as Boethius was a rather lonely Latin-language participant in a philosophical culture just about all of whose other participants used Greek. Too many modern interpretations of Boethius’ philosophy have been written by people who know much about later Latin philosophy and little about the Greek philosophical culture to which Boethius belonged.

Chapter 7 is a preliminary attempt to assess what the medieval commentary genres owed to Boethius and, via him, to Greek ways of commenting on authoritative works, as well as an attempt to characterize certain important differences. Chapter 8 outlines my general view of Boethius and his debt to Porphyry, whereas Chapter 9 contains a detailed examination of what he says about ‘the metaphysics of words’. What he says is quite sensible, I believe, but to see that such is the case you have to pay close attention both to his own words and to his Greek background.

In Chapter 12 an attempt is made to sum up the combined role of Boethius and the translated Greek commentaries in the formation of scholastic logic, the main ideas being:

1. That, for a part of the Aristotelian Organon to become a subject of regular teaching it was required that it be accompanied by a commentary to help scholars obtain a first grasp of the text, after which they could soon produce better commentaries themselves. Boethius provided what was needed for the Ars Vetus, the translated commentaries provided what was needed to start an interest in the Analytics and the Elenchi.
2. That reflection on Boethius’ works was a major factor in the rise of Latin nominalism in the late eleventh century.

While most of the story about ancient and medieval times is one of Latins translating and using Greek texts, there was some movement in the opposite direction from the late thirteenth century onwards. As there was insuficient space, I have not included the two articles that constitute my contribution to the investigation of this phenomenon, but I shall summarize them here.

In the Palaeologian era (c. 1260–1450) a number of Latin theological and philosophical works were translated into Greek, but most of them were ancient classics and very few were on logic. Among the ancient texts, only Boethius’ De topicis differentiis (Top. diff.) and the same author’s De hypotheticis syllogismis are works of logic. Boethian topics must have aroused some curiosity among certain Greek scholars, for not only do we have two different translations (by Manuel Holobolos and Prochoros Kydones), but also a short translated text consisting of a note about arguments, a table of τόποι = loci, and a dubitatio about Aristotle’s division of loci.¹ Save for minor discrepances, the table may be considered a tabulation of the loci presented in Peter of Spain’s Summulae. The translator, who has not been identified, probably worked in the late thirteenth century. He certainly had some acquaintance with Aristotle’s Topics, and probably with Nicephoros Blemmydes’ Epitome logica, whereas a number of nonsensical items in the table prove that he did not have any deep knowledge of Western logic, or else he could have performed the necessary emendations, even if the errors were already in his Latin source (which I doubt that they were).

By itself, the text with the table of loci is of no great significance, but it throws a little light on a much-neglected part of Greek intellectual history, and its fate in modern scholarship illustrates how important it is to be able to see the Latin under the Greek. In this case, the first editor did not realize that he was dealing with a translation, and, on insufficent grounds, he attibuted the opusculum to Georgios Pachymeres, who, he thought, had based it on Holobolos’ translation of and scholia on Boethius’ Top. diff. Later, another scholar undertook an analysis of the text on the assumption that it was an original work by Pachymeres. When I first saw the text in 1993 it struck me that the theory and terminology were Latin in Greek clothes, and that the whole thing presupposed acquaintance with some such summulistic work as Peter of Spain’s, whose Tractatus or Summulae was establishing itself as a classic in Western schools in the late thirteenth century. There was no way independent study of Boethius could have produced the same result. In an article from 1996 I proved my point, I believe, showing, inter alia, that with very few exceptions the text could be effortlessly translated back into scholastic Latin.²

Apart from the anonymous translator of the text on loci, I only know of one other Palaeologian translator of scholastic logic. He is the famous Georgios Scholarios, alias patriarch Gennadios II (reigned 1454–64), who, in his youth, tried his luck as a teacher in Constantinople with a logic course based on Western patterns and with the use of his own translations of scholastic texts. Among them were the anonymous Liber sex principiorum, Peter of Spain’s Summulae with the omission of treatise VII De fallaciis, Ps.-Thomas Aquinas’ De fallaciis, Aquinas’ commentary on Posterior Analytics and a commentary on the Ars Vetus with the descriptive title Γ∊ωργόου του˜ Σξολαρόου προλ∊γόμ∊να ∊ὁζ τὴν Λογικὴν καὸ ∊ὁζ τὴν Πορφυρόου Eὁσαγωγὴν ἐκ διαφόρων συλλ∊γέντα βι

λόων, μ∊τὰ ὁδόων ἐπιστάσ∊ων. Scholarios’ editor, Martin Jugie, could detect that the ‘various books’ used by Scholarios must have been in Latin, but did not try to identify them. Jugie’s edition appeared in 1936.

About 1980, my attention was drawn to the Ars Vetus commentary by an article in which the author tried to use it to elucidate Scholarios’ thinking about aequivocatio entis, a central issue in a fierce polemical exchange with Georgios Gemistos (Plethon). En passant, this scholar mentioned that in his commentary on the Isagoge Scholarios presented what somebody called the ‘Englishman (ὁ Bρότων)’ had said about the relationship between substance and accident. To the best of my knowledge, Bρότων never meant ‘Brit’ in Greek, so I suspected that we might be dealing with the famous philosopher Radulphus Brito (Raoul le Breton to the French), who taught the arts in Paris in the 1290s. A look at Scholarios’ work quickly convinced me that it was largely or wholly a translation of one or more Latin texts. Already in his preface, Scholarios had explained that he would use Western procedures, one of them consisting in dividing the text into ἀναγνώσ∊ιζ (that is, lectiones, lessons) and analysing each lesson in a number of ways customary in the West. But a look at the way he implemented that strategy made it clear that he must have had one or more definite Latin source(s) – his Greek language was just so Latin. Thus lectio 7 starts (Jugie: 41.15–20):

Tὸ βι

λόον του˜το διαιρ∊ι˜ται ∊ὁζ δύο, ὥσπ∊ρ καὸ αἱ πλ∊όουζ τω˜ν ἐπιστημω˜ν, ∊ὁζ τὸ προοόμιον καὸ ∊ὁζ τὴν ὑπόθ∊σιν. ‘H ὑπόθ∊σιζ ἄρξ∊ται ἐν τ

“’′Eοικ∊ν ο

ν”. Tὸ δὲ προοόμιον διαιρ∊ι˜ται ∊ὁζ δύο. Kαὸ ἐν μὲν τ

πρώτῳ μέρ∊ι ἅπτ∊ται τη˜ζ ὕληζ καὸ τη˜ζ αὁτόαζ του˜ ἔργου ὁ ποιητήζ, προστιθ∊ὸζ π∊ρὸ τόνων καὸ ποόων καὸ πω˜ζ μέλλ∊ι προξωρ∊ι˜ν.

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