1 Contents of the Volumes1
This is the first of three volumes, written jointly by participants in a seven-year research project Representation and Reality (2013–2019). This project, funded by the Swedish National Bank’s Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in Swedish), has united historians of philosophy working on topics concerning sense-perception, dreaming and conceptualisation in the Aristotelian tradition from antiquity through the end of the middle ages, in all of the three major cultural spheres in which that tradition flourished: the Greek, the Arabic and the Latin.2
Each volume can be read by itself, but to avoid tedious repetition the following general introduction about the Aristotelian tradition and the source material at our disposal will only appear in the present, first, volume.
2 An Outline of the History of the Aristotelian Tradition
“The Aristotelian Tradition” is a blanket term designed to cover philosophers, philosophical thinking and philosophical writings that, in one way or another, depend on the seminal work of Aristotle (384–322 BC).
Being a fully-fledged Aristotelian implies believing that the world is fundamentally intelligible, and that to understand it we need a number of distinctions, notably the distinctions (1) between potency and actuality, (2) between a thing’s matter and its form, (3) between a thing’s inalterable substance or essence and its (in principle) changeable accidental properties and (4) between nine different sorts of accidental properties (quantity, quality, relation etc.), which together with substance make up the ten so-called categories. It also implies holding that genuine “scientific” knowledge consists in knowing why something is or happens the way it is or happens, and that genuine knowledge is about universals, but has its foundation not in some Platonic world of ideas but in input from the senses, which deal with particulars. Moreover, it implies holding that there are four fundamental types of explanations why something is the case or happens: (1) one may refer to an (external) “efficient” cause, (2) to the matter of the thing involved, (3) to its form, (4) to its purpose. All natural things are composites of matter and form, and everything in nature can be assigned a purpose: “Nature does nothing in vain,” as Aristotle repeatedly says. In living beings the form is what is usually called a soul.
Being a fully-fledged Aristotelian further implies believing that the world is sempiternal, i.e., it has neither a beginning nor an end in time, and that it is stable in the sense that its inventory of types of things and processes is unchangeable, while the whole machinery is kept in motion by a desire for God, the unmoved mover, who – being an intellect – unceasingly thinks and is himself the content of his thought.
Many philosophers have wholeheartedly embraced all the Aristotelian theses mentioned; others, while accepting most of them, have partly or completely rejected certain others. For instance, medieval Christians and Muslims struggled with the concept of a sempiternal, uncreated universe, and how to reconcile the aloofness of Aristotle’s God with the God of their faiths. Many also found that there must be a place for something like the Platonic ideas in their epistemology, even if they accepted major parts of Aristotle’s approach to the topic. Still others, while being fundamentally un-Aristotelian, have used and developed Aristotelian ideas – often ideas that have become so integrated into our language and culture that most people nowadays do not even know of their origin.
Most modern scientists are blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are working on an Aristotelian project (outlined in the Posterior Analytics) when they aim to discover universal laws, or at least laws that hold for the most part, and that their craft is called “science” because Aristotle called the goal of intellectual work epistḗmē, “knowledge,” which was translated into Latin as scientia. A modern philosopher discussing the ontological status of universals need not be aware that the pair of universal/particular is Aristotelian (it does not occur in Plato, for instance), or that the discussion he engages in was initiated by Aristotle, but so it was. In the nineteenth century the distinction between potency or possibility and actuality gave rise to the notion of potential energy, and in the twentieth it was employed in possible world semantics with its opposition between possible worlds and the actual one. Some of the modern uses of the Aristotelian distinctions would have been unacceptable to the old philosopher himself, but still he is part if their historical background.
How did we end up in a world that constantly needs to resort to Aristotelian words like “matter,” “form,” “potential,” “actual,” and “substance”?
Aristotle left behind him a number of pupils, and, importantly, one of them, Theophrastus (c.371–c.287 BC), continued to teach in the Athenian sports centre (gymnásion) called the Lyceum. For about a century there was an unbroken chain of successors, each head of the so-called Peripatetic school being followed by another, usually a pupil of the preceding head of the school, and in one way or another the Athenian institution seems to have survived till the early first century BC. Its demise was no catastrophe for Aristotelianism, however, because about the same time it got a new boost as Aristotle’s technical treatises, the ones we still have, began to become known to more than a few specialists. These works were known in antiquity as esoteric because they were assumed – no doubt correctly – to have been composed for internal use in Aristotle’s school, as opposed to the exoteric, i.e., outward-oriented ones, which, with their literary finish, had enjoyed popularity in the Hellenistic Age but now gradually fell into oblivion with the result that not a single one has survived the end of antiquity. The esoteric works seem to have originated as lecture manuscripts, and with a few exceptions never received from their author the sort of stylistic work-over and other editing that would have made them publishable. This means that there are plenty of rough edges and many ideas which are only adumbrated, not spelled out in detail.
Consequently, when philosophers began to take a serious interest in the esoteric writings, they began to write commentaries on them to clarify unclear points and investigate possible internal inconsistencies. When in the first centuries AD it became common to give courses based on the reading of Aristotelian treatises, the teaching itself became an oral commentary, which, of course, could be and frequently was written down by pupils. The first major extant set of commentaries by one man is due to Alexander of Aphrodisias, who held an imperially endowed chair of Peripatetic philosophy in Athens in the years around AD 200. We still have commentaries by him on parts of Aristotle’s logic as well as parts of his natural philosophy and metaphysics, and we know that several more have been lost. The third century marked a turning point in the history of philosophy in that the old Hellenistic schools (Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism) disappeared, not only as institutions (that had happened earlier) but also as schools of thought. Likewise gone was now the mildly sceptical (fallibilistic) sort of Platonism (“the New Academy”) that had thrived in Hellenistic times, as well as the sort of Peripateticism that was as much inspired by Theophrastus and other of Aristotle’s successors as by the founder himself. From now on, a unified Aristoteli-Platonism dominated the philosophical scene in the Roman Empire. Plato was recognised as the master of deep metaphysical thought and the realm of the intelligible, whereas Aristotle was considered the most penetrating thinker in matters relating to logic and the sensible world.
The alliance between Platonism and Aristotelianism was particularly promoted by Porphyry (c.AD 234–c.304), and became widely accepted. The study of philosophy had now become scholastic, i.e., it was organised round a close reading of selected works by the two old masters, and differences of opinion between them were thought to be in many cases eliminable through proper interpretation. In the last centuries of antiquity, Athens and Alexandria housed the leading philosophical schools, but after AD 529, when pagans were banned from teaching, only Alexandria kept up the tradition for a few more generations. However, on a lower level, some traditional philosophical education continued to be offered in the Middle East, not least in the Syriac-speaking community, and this proved to be extremely important for later developments.
By AD 800, the Abbasid caliphate had consolidated its power in the Middle East and Arabic was becoming the dominant language of the sciences. An extraordinary effort was made to translate Greek learning, particularly philosophy and medicine, into Arabic. Much of the translation work was undertaken under the patronage of the caliph’s court by Syriac Christians. Translations, especially of Aristotle’s works on logic, had been appearing in Syriac since the sixth century, and subsequent generations of specialists were able to work from Syriac intermediary texts as well as Greek originals, eventually establishing a sizeable library of philosophical texts translated into Arabic and a comprehensive technical vocabulary in Arabic for the dissemination of contemporary, Platonising Aristotelianism. The reception of Aristotle and the Greek Commentary tradition shaped the development of Arabophone philosophy.3
In the reduced Greek-language cultural sphere left after the Muslim conquests, philosophy only barely survived, but until the end of the Eastern Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire in 1453 there would always be some people continuing the study of Aristotle and other ancient thinkers, though never a really blossoming philosophical culture with many students and teachers. And, importantly, in the Greek world it was possible to find in private or public libraries the whole Corpus Aristotelicum as well as a considerable number of ancient commentaries and other related material.
Throughout antiquity, philosophy was an almost exclusively Greek affair. In the fundamentally bilingual Roman empire, where Greek was the lingua franca of the East and Latin of the West, philosophy was mostly studied in Greek, even in the Latinophone part of the empire. An attempt to create an up-to-date Latin philosophical library was made by Marius Victorinus and a few others in the fourth century, but met with only moderate success. A decisive break-through only came with the monumental œuvre of Manlius Boethius from the first decades of the sixth century. Boethius managed to translate Porphyry’s Isagoge (“Introduction to Aristotle’s Categories”) and most of Aristotle’s logic into Latin, while also providing a series of auxiliary works: commentaries on the works of Porphyry and Aristotle as well as introductions to specific themes such as syllogistic. All of those auxiliary works were based on Greek models, and thus presented the Latin world with the results of Greek exegesis as well as its literary forms. The immediate effect of Boethius’ works was not all that great because soon after his death horrible wars destroyed the social structures needed to upkeep philosophical studies in the West. But when the situation started to stabilise again in the Carolingian age, Boethius’ works slowly began to exert their influence, culminating in their becoming, in the twelfth century, central to philosophical studies and preparing Westerners to go the whole way and acquire translations of all of Aristotle’s works, which happened in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At all higher schools in the Western world, Aristotle’s works were now the fundamental books in the teaching of philosophy until at least the sixteenth century. As well as the Corpus Aristotelicum, Westerners also received translations of several late-ancient commentaries and some important Arabic works in the Aristotelian tradition, notably Avicenna’s (Ibn Sīnā, c.980–1037) philosophical encyclopedia, al-Shifā (“The Healing”) from the early eleventh century, and a number of Averroes’ (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) Aristotle commentaries from the second half of the twelfth.4
By far the most important location for Aristotelian studies in the West were the universities, with Paris dominating the thirteenth century, Oxford becoming a serious rival in the fourteenth, and several lesser universities in Italy, Germany, Bohemia, and Poland gaining some importance in the fifteenth. Besides, some mendicant orders had high-quality schools (studia), where Aristotelian philosophy was also studied.
Aristotle and university Aristotelianism (“scholasticism”) came under attack in the Renaissance (i.e., the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), with the attackers generally turning to the Platonic tradition and its affiliates, such as Hermeticism, for a substitute. Others, however, provided updated versions of Aristotelianism, with the Jesuits playing a crucial role in this movement. The erudite commentaries emanating from the Jesuit university of Coimbra in Portugal, published in the late sixteenth century under the uniform “series title” Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Jesu, became standard companions to Aristotle in both catholic and protestant Europe and helped keep Aristotelianism alive throughout the seventeenth century, although new philosophical currents such as Cartesianism and new developments in the sciences severely dented its influence. A last revival of major parts of the Aristotelian tradition came with the Vatican-sponsored Neo-Thomism of the late nineteenth century – an attempt to reinvigorate the thought of Thomas Aquinas that was to dominate catholic universities until the 1960s, although it rarely entered into fruitful dialogue with other currents of thought in the period.
In the Islamic world fully-fledged Aristotelianism was rather more short-lived. After a century and a half of concentrated translation and interpretation of the Aristotelian corpus, chiefly in Baghdad, Avicenna’s writings generally superseded Aristotle’s as the foundations of philosophical erudition. One major exception – and one with a huge impact on the Latin tradition – was the work of Averroes; Averroes expressly sought to recover the original Aristotelian doctrines from their Avicennian interpretation, producing extensive commentaries on many Aristotelian works. But Averroes, working in Muslim Iberia, was largely unknown in the Muslim East, where Avicennian philosophy remained dominant. Nevertheless, as Aristotelian ideas were essential aspects of the Avicennian project, the Peripatetic intellectual genealogy of Arabo-Persian epistemology is evident into the modern period.
So, to sum up: Aristotelianism in the sense of a philosophising that took Aristotle’s writings to be fundamentally trustworthy guides to the truth, flourished in Greek culture from about AD 100 till about 600, with a long, but weaker, after-life in the so-called Byzantine era through the mid-fifteenth century. It has flourished at varying locations in the Arabophone cultural area between 800 and 1200, and in the Latin lands of Western Europe from 1100 till 1600 (and in some places even longer). Its influence is evident in our language: substance, quality, quantity, relation, matter, form, and a host of other words in common use nowadays are all ones we owe to the Aristotelian movement. Ways of thinking that go back to Aristotle or to his followers are deeply embedded in the way we go about science and many other subjects. Even many of the philosophical problems discussed in post-scholastic philosophy can be shown to have their roots in Aristotelian scholasticism. For instance, in the theory of cognition the question whether one needs to posit some mental representation or sense datum over and above the object thought of or perceived and the act of thinking or sensation themselves is a question that has been bequeathed to modern philosophers by their medieval predecessors. Indeed, the term repraesentatio was introduced into the philosophical discussion of cognition at the time of Peter Abelard in the early twelfth century.
3 The Central Aristotelian Sources
For the purpose of the present volume and its two sequels, four of Aristotle’s works are central:
On the Soul (De anima), traditionally divided into three major sections called “books.” Starting with a presentation and refutation of previous views about the nature of the soul, Aristotle arrives in book two at his famous definition of soul as “the first actuality of a natural body furnished with organs,” and then goes on to deal with the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) through which humans access information about the external world, after which he ends with a disquisition into the nature of the intellect from book 3 ch. 4 onwards to ch. 8.5
On Sense and the Sensibles (De sensu et sensatis or sensibilibus), which, like De anima book two deals with the external senses, but primarily concentrates on the physics and physiology of sensation.
Posterior Analytics (Analytica posteriora), the topic of which is scientific knowledge, its characteristics, how it is acquired, and how it should be communicated. In this connection Aristotle offers some influential remarks about the acquisition of universal concepts.
On Sleep and Being-Awake, On Dreams, On Divination by means of Dreams (De somno et vigilia, De insomniis, De divinatione per somnia – also known as De divinatione per somnum “On divination in sleep,” which corresponds more closely to the Greek title). Though nowadays usually presented as three separate works, these three treatises are so closely connected to one another that it makes excellent sense to consider them just three sub-units of one work. Here Aristotle investigates the physiology of sleep, which he takes to be a shutting-down of the external senses, as well as phenomena such as dreams which indicate that something is going on in the sleepers’ mind even though external input has been blocked. He finally considers whether dreams can, in some sense, be claimed to provide information about future events.
All the above treatises are very technical, often explorative rather than dogmatic statements of some finished theory, and often very brief on matters of crucial importance. In other words, they invite commentary.
4 The Genres of Commentary
4.1 Literal Commentaries
Literal (i.e., textual) commentaries are the dominant type of commentary in the Greek tradition, where they usually consist of
A preface outlining the theme of the work to be commented on, and settling questions of authenticity and the like.
A continuous series of comments (scholia), each covering a portion of the Aristotelian text. The portion covered by each scholium is identified by at least a lemma consisting of its initial words, but sometimes the whole section to be commented on is reproduced at the head of the scholium. Usually, a considerable part of each scholium is taken up by paraphrases of the Aristotelian text so as to make it easier to understand. The commentator may also make digressions in order to discuss some problem of interest in greater depth.
From Greek antiquity we have quite a number of such commentaries. Of particular relevance to our purposes are (1) Alexander of Aphrodisias’ commentary on De sensu et sensibilibus from about AD 200 and (2) Philoponus’, Priscian’s, and Simplicius’ (or Stephanus’ ?) sixth-century commentaries on De anima. Apart from Alexander’s commentary on De sensu, there are no ancient commentaries on the Parva naturalia, which seem to have been somewhat neglected in late-ancient teaching, although Priscian in the early sixth century shows familiarity with the treatises about dreams.6 The commentary genre was continued in Byzantine times, with Michael of Ephesus’ companion to the Parva naturalia from the first half of the twelfth century as the most important instance in our context.
The Greek type of literal commentary was transplanted into Latin soil by Manlius Boethius in the early sixth century, and his format was widely imitated in the early phases of Latin scholasticism. In the Arabophone tradition, Averroes’ commentaries from the twelfth century also have this basic form, although Averroes composed “epitomes” and paraphrases as well. There is no evidence of ancient Latin commentaries on any of Aristotle’s writings on the soul and its capacities, but there are plenty from the scholastic period in the middle ages (thirteenth century and onwards).
In the thirteenth century, Latin scholasticism developed a new variant of the literal commentary, namely the lectio commentary, in which the text under consideration is divided into a number of lectiones, i.e., lessons. The teacher then starts each lesson by laying out the main structure of the text, continues with a paraphrase and/or a summary of the contents, and finally adds some notabilia, i.e., important points to remember, and some dubia or quaestiones, i.e., discussions of problems that might seem to arise from the text under consideration.7
4.2 Question Commentaries8
Beginning in the thirteenth century, the quaestiones were often lifted out of the context of the literal commentary, presumably due to a teaching practice in which some lessons were devoted to a close reading of the Aristotelian text, while others were devoted to the discussion of the philosophical problems it might seem to raise. With several variants, depending on time and location, the fundamental format of a scholastic quaestio is:
0. It is asked whether…. The question generally allows for only a Yes or a No answer.
1. It seems that No. A number of arguments for the No answer follow.
2. The opposite is argued. One or more arguments for the Yes answer is proffered. If only one, then the argument is simply that this is what the text commented on says.
3. What should be said is this…. The master’s reasoned solution to the problem at hand follows. Sometimes this section starts with a veritable Forschungsbericht, but usually the author goes straight to the matter.
4. To the arguments. The master’s refutation of each and every argument under 1. or 2. that does not agree with his solution of the question follows.
The earliest question commentaries are from about the middle of the thirteenth century. With modifications, the format stayed in use through the end of the middle ages, but it was only used in the Latin lands. An early fifteenth-century attempt by George Scholarios (later, 1454–1464, patriarch of Constantinople under the name of Gennadios II) to introduce it in Greek teaching practice met with no success. Numerous question commentaries on all parts of Aristotle’s œuvre survive, most of them still unedited, although for the purposes of the research project behind the present volumes, editions have been made of most thirteenth-century ones on De memoria and the books about dreams.9
Question commentaries are ideally suited to studies of doctrinal development, because teachers tended to ask the same questions as their predecessors, so that often one can see how master B engages in discussion with a predecessor A and either emends his solution or rejects it in favour of a new one, which in turn is modified or rejected by a later master C.
The Latin quaestio must have arisen out of disputations with at least a couple of (student) participants besides the master, but it would appear that in actual university teaching it soon became customary for the teacher to play all roles himself in questions on the Aristotelian texts. This did not, however, mean the end of real disputations at the medieval universities. Thus, at the arts faculty, graduate students (bachelors) could take the role of respondents (“answerers”) in so-called sophismatic disputations, which would involve not only a respondent (who had to defend some thesis), but also opponents (“objectors”) and a presiding master, who was to give the final solution to the problem at hand, just as in an ordinary quaestio on a text from the syllabus. Sophismatic disputations were primarily concerned with logical analysis, but could also take up other matters, such as conceptualisation. Disputations of relevance to our topics could also take place in the faculty of theology.
4.3 Paraphrases
The continuous paraphrase of a whole Aristotelian work is an ancient creation, the earliest examples of which are found among the works of Themistius (fourth century AD), from whose workshop we have a paraphrase of De anima that was translated into Latin almost a thousand years later. This gave it a moderate influence on scholastic thought; before that, it had been instrumental to the Arabic reception of De anima. Likewise, his paraphrase of the Posterior Analytics was to exert a moderate influence on scholastic thought about concept formation.
In such paraphrases, the Aristotelian text is repeated verbatim when it offers no difficulty to the reader, but paraphrased and/or equipped with explanatory additions when it is less tractable, whether because it presents linguistic problems to the reader or because the train of thought is difficult to follow. In the Greek world, paraphrases, always incorporating material from literal commentaries, continued to be composed until the fall of Byzantium; for instance, Theodore Metochites in the early fourteenth century paraphrased both De anima and the Parva naturalia. By contrast, paraphrases never became popular in the Latin West.
Besides using a translation of Themistius’ paraphrase of De anima, the Arabic tradition also produced a ninth-century anonymous compendium derived from Philoponus’ commentary and the Alexander tradition. This paraphrase was durable enough to be translated into Persian in the thirteenth century.
4.4 Summaries
Summaries of the contents of Aristotelian books have been popular in most periods and places. A handbook of logic, whether in Greek, in Latin, or in Arabic, whether ancient, medieval, or early modern, could be expected to contain condensed accounts of the contents of the Categories, De interpretatione, Prior Analytics and Sophistical Refutations, or at least of the parts of those works considered most important. Separate monographs summarising one Aristotelian work each also circulated. Thus Boethius’ On Categorical Syllogisms, which builds on a lost work by Porphyry, summarises the syllogistic of the Prior Analytics. For the purpose of the present volume and its sequels one such summary is of particular importance, namely Averroes’ of the treatises on sleep and dreams. It was based on an adulterated ninth-century Arabic version of the Aristotelian text that had transformed Aristotle into a sort of Neo-Platonist. This allowed Averroes to depict a much less naturalist Aristotle in matters of dreaming and divination than the real Stagirite, and, since his summary was translated into Latin, it encouraged Westerners to interpret Aristotle’s words (which they had in an unadulterated form) in ways that mitigated his naturalism so as to make his teaching more compatible with their ingrained belief in astrology.
4.5 Treatises with a More or Less Loose Connection to an Aristotelian Work
Treatises with some connection to an Aristotelian work but not following the conventions for classroom material are numerous in Greek, Arabic, and Latin. Some seem to be by-products of teaching; the ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias has left us a series of discussions of matters related to De anima which were probably occasioned by his teaching of the Aristotelian text, but hardly give a picture of the teaching itself, which may have been more closely mirrored in his lost commentary on the work. In the same way, Boethius of Dacia’s On Dreams from around 1270 must have been occasioned by a course on De insomniis and De divinatione per somnum, but the author has recast his lectures in order to produce a coherent treatise. By contrast, a bulky anonymous Latin treatise on sense-perception from the late thirteenth century,10 while using the quaestio format, contains both questions that could have been asked in courses on De anima and De sensu et sensibilibus, and questions that would have no place in such courses. Moreover, the plan of the work does not at all follow that of the two relevant Aristotelian texts.
4.6 Encyclopedic Works
Two encyclopedias had a major impact on philosophy in the Arabic and Latin tradition.
The first is Avicenna’s voluminous al-Shifā (“Healing”) from the early eleventh century. The plan of the work is heavily dependent on the Corpus Aristotelicum, but Avicenna does not by any means follow Aristotle slavishly either in structure or in content. He is close enough to Aristotle that when Westerners began to use his work in a Latin translation done in Toledo sometime between 1160 and 1190 they frequently thought of it as a companion to Aristotle, but his theories are often decidedly un-Aristotelian. For the purposes of our volumes the most important part of his encyclopedia is the one that in the West was known as Liber sextus naturalium (“Book six of the tome on the science of nature”), which treats of, among other things, the soul and its faculties.
The second important encyclopedia is Albert the Great’s gigantic multi-volume work from the 1250s, most of the single parts of which correspond to one Aristotelian book each. Sometimes Albert seems to presuppose that his reader has the Aristotelian text at his elbow, on other occasions his text can be read as a substitute for the ancient text. Albert incorporates much material from contemporary commentaries, but also from multiple other sources – he was a man of vast reading. He likes reviewing what major philosophers have thought about some problem and is likewise fond of illustrating his points with empirical facts. In reality, his doxographies are often unreliable, and his “facts” anecdotes with no hold on reality. For later Latin scholars he was an inexhaustible source of materials, be it doxography, explanations of phenomena, or supposedly supporting empirical evidence.
5 Modern Scholarship
The foundations for serious study of the Greek commentators on Aristotle were laid in the years between 1882 and 1909 when the Prussian Academy in Berlin published critical editions of all ancient and some Byzantine commentaries in the series Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca, some fifty volumes in all. For a long time, however, this treasure-trove of information was visited by rather few scholars, as most historians of philosophy kept their eyes fixed on the “classical” period from the Presocratics to Aristotle. But in the course of the twentieth century, and especially after World War II, scholars started to turn their attention to later phases in the history of ancient philosophy, in particular to the Hellenistic period, but gradually also to late antiquity, the time of the commentators. The study of these commentators received a considerable boost when Richard Sorabji started the multi-volume series Ancient Commentaries on Aristotle in 1987, which provides English translations of the texts edited in Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca and some related works that did not appear in the Prussian series. A new long-term editorial project, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina, under the aegis of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy (the successor of the Prussian Academy) aims at providing a textual basis for the study of Byzantine Aristotelianism like that provided for the study of Late Ancient Aristotelianism by the academy’s ancestor, but the first volume is yet to appear.
The foundations for the study of the Latin commentators also began to be laid in the late nineteenth century when the Neo-Thomist movement encouraged catholic scholars to produce editions of medieval theological and philosophical texts – in the beginning primarily the opera omnia of saintly authors, but soon also works by persons without much chance of ever being sainted. During the first half of the twentieth century the study of medieval philosophy was virtually restricted to Neo-Thomist environments, but this began to change after the middle of the century, the change bringing with it both alternative ways of viewing the already available material and an interest in types of material that had been of scant interest to Neo-Thomists. By now, there is a very considerable mass of editions of scholastic works, many of them commentaries on Aristotle, as well as an equally considerable secondary literature.
Studies of Arabic philosophy were very rare before the middle of the twentieth century, and still rare for about another quarter of a century, but then the topic began to attract wider attention. It is now taught in quite a few universities. However, as opposed to the situation regarding Greek and Latin Aristotelianism, there is still a massive lack of editions. Even top philosophers like Avicenna and Averroes have not been properly edited in their entirety, whether in the original Arabic or in the Latin or Hebrew translations that are sometimes the only extant witnesses to their works.
Among the topics treated in our three volumes, concept formation (vol. 3) attracted the attention of scholars from the very beginning of modern research on medieval philosophy. Because Thomas Aquinas had engaged in a debate about the matter, there is an extensive literature about it. This literature also involves Averroes, since he influenced – or was reputed to have influenced – some of Thomas’ opponents on the issue. Sense-perception and dreaming (vols. 1–2) have generated many fewer editions and scholarly studies, which is why those topics were given high priority in our project.
We hope our three volumes will inspire further research into the Aristotelian tradition. There is still a huge amount of philosophically exciting texts in Greek, Arabic, and Latin that have been little investigated, or not investigated at all!
This introduction was written by Ebbesen, but went through several readings by the whole Representation and Reality team, which resulted in numerous changes. The author owes particular thanks to Pavel Gregoric for incisive critique and a wealth of proposals for additions and reformulations, and to David Bennett for information about the Arabophone tradition.
A much smaller precursor project on the Aristotelian tradition in logic and metaphysics, also funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, ran 2009–2011 and resulted in the anthology The Aristotelian Tradition: Aristotle’s Works on Logic and Metaphysics and Their Reception in the Middle Ages, ed. B. Bydén and C. Thomsen Thörnqvist (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2017).
For a convenient survey of Arabic translations of works by Aristotle and his Greek commentators, see Dimitri Gutas, “Greek Philosophical Works Translated into Arabic,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. R. Pasnau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2:802–14.
For a survey of Latin translations of Aristotle and his Greek commentators, see Michele Trizio, “Greek Aristotelian Works Translated into Latin,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, ed. R. Pasnau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2:793–97.
Notice that in the Latin tradition the first three chapters of De anima 3 were counted as parts of book 2. The same was the case in the lost Arabic translation(s) used by Avicenna and Averroes, whereas in the only extant Arabic translation they belong to book 3.
See Richard Sorabji’s introductory note to ch. 3 of Priscian, Answers to King Khosroes of Persia, trans. P. Huby et al. (Bloomsbury: New York, 2016), 34–35.
A vaguely similar format (the “praxis commentary”) was used by Greek commentators from the very end of antiquity. See Sten Ebbesen, “Greek and Latin Medieval Logic,” Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 66 (1996): 84–87, reprinted in Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction: Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen, vol. 1 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
The medieval Latin genre of “question commentaries” should not be confused with the genre kata péusin kai apókrisin “by question and answer” used by some ancient commentators (but not in texts of relevance to the volumes to which this is an introduction). In the latter, the exegesis of the text is structured by a sequence of questions asked by a fictive pupil and answered by the author.
These editions, by Sten Ebbesen and Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist, have all appeared in Cahiers de l’Institut du Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 82–86 (2013–2017). See the following publications by Sten Ebbesen: “Anonymus Orielensis 33 on De memoria: An Edition,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 85 (2016): 128–61; “Anonymus Parisini 16160 on Memory: An Edition,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 85 (2016): 162–217; “Anonymus Vaticani 3061 and Anonymus Vaticani 2170 on Aristotle’s Parva naturalia: An Edition of Selected Questions,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 86 (2017): 216–312; “Geoffrey of Aspall, Quaestiones super librum De somno et vigilia: An Edition,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 83 (2014): 257–341; James of Douai, “James of Douai on Dreams,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 84 (2015): 22–92; “Radulphus Brito on Memory and Dreams: An Edition,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 85 (2016): 11–86; “Quaestiones super librum De somno et vigilia: An Edition,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 82 (2013): 90–145; and by Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist: “Walter Burley’s Expositio on Aristotle’s Treatises on Sleep and Dreaming: An Edition,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 83 (2014): 379–515.
Unrelated to the project, David Bloch published Peter of Auvergne’s questions on De memoria in “An Edition of the Quaestiones super De memoria et reminiscentia,” Cahiers de l’Institut de Moyen-Âge Grec et Latin 78 (2008): 51–110.
Unedited, found in MS Amiens, Bibliothèque municipale, 406, fol. 155r–65v.