Aristotle Transformed

The Ancient Commentators and Their Influence

Richard Sorabji

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781350123656
• eBook ISBN: 9781472589088
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Literary Criticism

This book brings together twenty articles giving a comprehensive view of the work of the Aristotelian commentators. First published in 1990, the collection is now brought up to date with a new introduction by Richard Sorabji. New generations of scholars will benefit from this reissuing of classic essays, including seminal works by major scholars, and the volume gives a comprehensive background to the work of the project on the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, which has published over 100 volumes of translations since 1987 and has disseminated these crucial texts to scholars worldwide. The importance of the commentators is partly that they represent the thought and classroom teaching of the Aristotelian and Neoplatonist schools and partly that they provide a panorama of a thousand years of ancient Greek philosophy, revealing many original quotations from lost works. Even more significant is the profound influence – uncovered in some of the chapters of this book – that they exert on later philosophy, Islamic and Western. Not only did they preserve anti-Aristotelian material which helped inspire Medieval and Renaissance science, but they present Aristotle in a form that made him acceptable to the Christian church. It is not Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed and embedded in the philosophy of the commentators that so often lies behind the views of later thinkers.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• 1 The ancient commentators on Aristotle
• 2 Review of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca
• 3 The earliest Aristotelian commentators
• 4 The school of Alexander?
• 5 Themistius: the last Peripatetic commentator on Aristotle?
• 6 The harmony of Plotinus and Aristotle according to Porphyry
• 7 Porphyry’s legacy to logic: a reconstruction
• 8 How did Syrianus regard Aristotle?
• 9 Infinite power impressed: the transformation of Aristotle’s physics and theology
• 10 The metaphysics of Ammonius son of Hermeias
• 11 The development of Philoponus’ thought and its chronology
• 12 The life and work of Simplicius in Greek and Arabic sources
• 13 Neoplatonic elements in the de Anima commentaries
• 14 The Alexandrian commentators and the introductions to their commentaries
• 15 Boethius’ commentaries on Aristotle
• 16 Boethius as an Aristotelian commentator
• 17 An unpublished funeral oration on Anna Comnena
• 18 The Greek commentators on Aristotle’s Ethics
• 19 Philoponus, ‘Alexander’ and the origins of medieval logic
• 20 Aristotle’s doctrine of abstraction in the commentators
• Note on the frontispiece: ‘Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias’ by Ulocrino
• Select Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• General Index
• Copyright