 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Not Written in Stone, Alexander of Aphrodisias. People like me tend to complain about how much of the culture of antiquity has been lost, but really we should be thankful that so many ancient Greek and Latin writings still exist. After all, ancient texts reach us only through centuries of copying by later scholars. Really rarely can we read the actual documents the ancients themselves produced. There are exceptions, though. Papyrus rolls have been preserved by the dry sands of Egypt and the odd volcanic explosion. And when the ancients really wanted their words to last, they quite literally wrote them in stone. Inscriptions on stone tablets were erected already by the ancient Greeks to announce new laws or agreements between cities, as part of funeral rites or in religious contexts. The Romans followed suit, as in the so-called res gestae, or things accomplished, which detailed the achievements of Augustus Caesar and which survives in copies in far-flung parts of the empire. Surviving inscriptions are among the richest sources exploited by classical historians. Normally, they don't play such a big role in the study of ancient philosophy. Although we did see Epicurean philosophy being preserved in an inscription of the second century AD, in general the cut and thrust of philosophical argument seems badly suited to the cut and thrust of chisel in stone. Yet occasionally an ancient inscription will provide us with a vivid glimpse into the lives of philosophers, if not their ideas. It happened in 2001, when they unearthed a tablet from the ancient city of Aphrodisias in modern-day Turkey. Standing a bit more than a meter tall, it is a son's dedication for the statue of his father. Son and father have the same name, Aurelius Alexandros, and both are given the same epithet, philosophos. But the son claims an additional title. He also calls himself diadokos, which means successor. This indicates that the younger Alexandros, known to us today as Alexander of Aphrodisias, was head of the Aristotelian philosophical school. The inscription thus confirms other evidence, showing that Alexander held one of the chairs of philosophy set up in Athens by the emperor Marcus Aurelius. That other evidence comes from another dedication. This one at the beginning of one of Alexander's philosophical writings, a diatribe against the Stoic teaching on fate. Alexander addresses the work to another father-son pair, the emperors Septimus Severus and Caracalla. This helpfully dates the work, and thus Alexander's career, to around 200 AD. In attacking the Stoics, Alexander was of course engaging in the time-honored practice of inter-school debate. In this respect, he seems to have one foot still in the Hellenistic era with its competing intellectual rivalries. But with his other foot, Alexander was kick-starting another genre, one that will dominate the philosophical scene in the centuries to come, the commentary. Alexander was the greatest ancient commentator on Aristotle. He was recognized as such by his successors. Like the earlier philosophers we looked at last time, like Andronicus and Aspasius, Alexander was a confirmed peripatetic, devoted to interpreting, analyzing, and expounding the thought of Aristotle. But this didn't stop Platonists from respecting Alexander and using his works. His writings were studied in the school of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, and Platonist commentators on Aristotle frequently quote Alexander's interpretations. Alexander's standing as the foremost authority on Aristotle outlived Late Antiquity. He was still an important source for Byzantine philosophy, and in the Islamic world his works were translated into Arabic alongside Aristotle. Indeed, several of Alexander's writings are lost in Greek but preserved in Arabic. As late as the 12th century, the greatest medieval commentator on Aristotle, the Muslim Averroes, would work Alexander's interpretations into the fabric of his own. Averroes' commentaries were then translated into Latin and used by medieval Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, who thus knew not only the name of Alexander but the details of Alexander's exegesis. For the Platonists of Late Antiquity, and for medieval authors writing in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, philosophy frequently meant reading Aristotle and reading Aristotle frequently meant reading Alexander of Aphrodisias, the most reliable guide to his thought. Philosophy was carried on in commentary form for many centuries, but that form changed from time to time and author to author. The works being explained might be epitomized, summarized to make them briefer and, hopefully, clearer. They might be made the subject of a running paraphrase that could serve as a kind of explanatory guide through the text. Or, the commentator might isolate certain puzzles or questions arising from Aristotle's teachings. We have a whole series of such treatments from Alexander's school which pose and solve difficulties within the peripatetic system. But Alexander was above all known for his full commentaries, which would quote an entire treatise by Aristotle one bit at a time, with lengthy explanations of each bit. Just so you can impress your friends with your knowledge of late antique commentary practice, I'll tell you that each quoted bit of text is called a lemma. As the commentators refined their approach, they would often begin the interpretation of each lemma with a so-called theoria, meaning that they would explain the overall gist of Aristotle's remarks. They would then move on to the lexis, a phrase-by-phrase or word-by-word analysis of what Aristotle was saying. It also became standard to preface the entire commentary with a discussion of certain standard questions, for instance the meaning of the title of the Aristotelian work, any possible doubts about authenticity, its overall intention and topic, and so on. Alexander's approach is not yet quite so elaborately standardized, but his commentaries, a number of which still survive thanks to those Byzantine copyists, were lemmatized, that is, in the form of quotations of Aristotle's text interspersed with extensive explanation. The format is telling. Every sentence in Aristotle was treated with great care and attention. Platonist commentators might allow themselves the thought that Aristotle made an occasional mistake, especially when he dared to criticize Plato. But Alexander's goal was to explain and justify Aristotle in lavish detail, raising difficulties only so that they could be solved. While this might sound more like apologetics than philosophy, sophistication and even creativity was required to make Aristotle's words come out true. Especially given a further assumption made by Alexander and later commentators, namely that Aristotle was always consistent and never changed his mind. Commentators rarely strove to be original, but they usually managed it anyway, using great ingenuity to make Aristotle agree with himself and to defend the results. Of course, sometimes the best defense is a good offense. This is why we find Alexander writing the polemical treatise I mentioned earlier, On Fate. Although it is not a commentary, it's a good chance to see how Alexander does philosophy. He promises only to present Aristotle's position on the topic of fate, but offers a theory of fate that certainly does not appear in Aristotle's original writings. He also turns the tools of Hellenistic philosophy to his own advantage. He begins by agreeing with the Stoics that fate does exist. This can hardly be doubted, he says, because all of us share a so-called common conception that some things are indeed fated. The phrase common conception is Hellenistic terminology, but Alexander does not hesitate to use it. First though, he reaches for a tried and trusted Aristotelian distinction, the four types of cause. Fate is, after all, a cause, for the things that are fated, so what type of cause is it? Clearly not form or matter, nor is it a final cause, a purpose. That leaves only the agent or efficient cause. But there are different sorts of efficient cause too. Whereas natural things, like fire, act automatically, human agents act through deliberation, choosing one course of action rather than another. Fate seems to be more like fire, in this respect. It brings about things inevitably and necessarily. Fate, then, must be a natural efficient cause. After all, Aristotle recognizes that nature is a necessary and eternal constancy in the universe. It is due to nature that mother giraffes give rise to baby giraffes, not baby monkeys. Nature also ensures that the existence of giraffes is, thank goodness, a necessary and permanent feature of the world around us. Fate is meant to be permanent, eternal, and necessary, so what could be more obvious than to identify fate with nature? Another work of Alexander's, which survives only in Arabic, deals with the related problem of divine providence, and thus sheds further light on our problem. Alexander claims that God's providential care over our world extends to causing the regularities of nature. This leaves plenty of room for things that God did not intend, like evil human actions and the occasional corruption of nature in the form of illness, deformity, and the like. So, to sum up, fate is nature, which acts generally in our world, thanks to the gift of divine providence, but unlike the Stoics version of fate, nature is subject to accidental exceptions. This account preserves both fate and providence, and lets God off the hook for all the bad things that happen. Alexander 2, Stoics 0. And yet doubts linger. The whole point of fate, we might think, is that it is universal in scope, and includes everything. It is, to use a joke I've used before but am not too proud to use again, without any gaps. Alexander simply rejects this idea. For him, many things occur without being determined by nature. Human actions are one example, as we've already seen. He also raises the issue of lucky, or chance, events. Again, following discussions of the topic in Aristotle, he explains that an event is lucky if it is the sort of thing someone might intend to happen, but which does not come about intentionally. For instance, if I go to dig in my garden to plant a pumpkin patch and discover a buried treasure, then my discovery is lucky, because it is accidental to the digging. Normally, when I dig, I don't strike it rich, and it wasn't actually my intention to find treasure. Whereas if I'd been following a treasure map and dug up a treasure, this would not count as lucky. In that case, getting treasure would be the expected result of digging, rather than accidental. The moral of this story is that nature, which produces its results in an expected and regular way, cannot include lucky, chance events, any more than it can include freely chosen human actions. So, neither of these is fated. Although Alexander pays a good deal of attention to this topic of chance, it is the need to preserve human choice that is really decisive. He complains that the Stoics would give fate the responsibility for all things and leave nothing up to us. Taking his cue from Aristotle, as usual, he points out that no one deliberates about things they think are unavoidable. So, if everything is necessary, then deliberation is always meaningless. Chrysippus and other Stoics had already given an answer to this objection, namely that deliberation is co-fated along with the action you will take. When you deliberate, this does affect the result, but the deliberation itself is fated, and the same is true if you fail to deliberate. Alexander would still claim an advantage here, though. As an Aristotelian, he has a nice plausible account of what makes an action up to us, namely that our rational deliberation chooses from among genuinely possible alternatives. Unlike the inscription he placed on his father's statue, our future actions are not written in stone. While we might find this position attractive, it seems Alexander has said little that would persuade a Stoic reader. Certainly, they wouldn't agree that human actions and luck are exempt from the workings of fate. For them, God's designs for the universe are all-encompassing and cannot be thwarted. To my mind, this raises the question of what Alexander is trying to achieve. I assume the idea is not just to irritate the Stoics, to see if he can get them to forget their Seneca and show some anger. More likely, he is addressing himself to the neutral reader. It's more a sales pitch for Aristotelianism than a sober critique of Stoicism. On the other hand, Alexander has a problem the Stoics do not. Remember that Aristotle had put great emphasis on the role of ethical character. When virtuous people see an opportunity for virtue, they have the tendency, the ability, and the desire to take it, and, similarly for vicious people, and opportunities for vice. Doesn't this mean that character will determine our actions just as surely as Stoic fate would? Alexander sees the problem, but points out that even if a person is determined by his character to be virtuous, this doesn't settle which virtuous action he will perform. One virtuous person might choose to erect a statue to honor his father, while another instead devotes his energies to, say, writing and presenting a podcast. Furthermore, we are responsible for our character itself, because our previous actions helped to form that character in the first place. It was our choices earlier in life that made us generous or greedy, courageous or cowardly, sensitive or, like Buster Keaton and the statue of Alexander's father, stone-faced. Alexander carved out his philosophical positions not only in response to opponents like the Stoics, but upon the platform laid by earlier Aristotelians. Without the work of predecessors like Andronicus, Boethus, and Aspasius, we can hardly imagine Alexander's massive project of commentary. Still, he didn't hesitate to criticize his peripatetic predecessors. You may remember Boethus of Sidon, who, probably, criticized Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul. He seems to have been keen to avoid Platonism in other areas, too. Where Plato had supposed that the forms that give things their natures are separate and transcendent, Boethus proposed seeing all forms as mere qualities of the matter they inhabit. The form of Hiawatha the giraffe, for instance, would be nothing more than Hiawatha's matter having a giraffe quality. This suggests that the form-matter relationship is a rather casual one, like the relationship between a wall and the color it happens to be painted. For Alexander, this was going too far. The form of giraffe doesn't relate to the giraffe's body in this casual or accidental way, as white is present in a wall. Rather, the form makes Hiawatha what she is, namely a giraffe. This sort of form is, as Aristotle himself had proposed in his metaphysics, the substance of the animal. A qualitative form, like white in a wall, is a mere accident. In other words, the whiteness plays no role in making the wall a wall. This is why it remains a wall if it is painted green. Boethus's theory makes it impossible to distinguish between these two cases. Still, his heart was in the right place in rejecting Platonism. Alexander was no fan of Platonic forms either, and would have said that the substantial forms recognized by Aristotle render Platonic forms unnecessary. Since plant and animal species are eternal, forms like sunflower or giraffe are permanent features of the world, even though these forms only ever exist in particular flowers and particular giraffes. So these forms provide a basis for universal and necessary human knowledge. All this relates back to what Alexander said about fate and divine providence. What really matters philosophically, and what really matters to God, is that natural kinds of things like sunflowers, giraffes, and so on are always present in the world. Fate ensures that this happens through the natural propagation of species. But the particular details don't matter. God wants there to be giraffes, but doesn't care, or even notice, what Hiawatha has for lunch. As humans, we have a less lofty perspective, bound up as we are with the world of particulars. I mean, I don't know about you, but I certainly do care what I am going to have for lunch. This is why deliberation and rational choice is unique to humans. God doesn't need to deliberate, because there's nothing for Him to decide. There are necessarily and eternally giraffes, and this is guaranteed by God's necessarily and eternally causing the heavens to move. Heavenly motion indirectly brings about the production of giraffes, and of course all the other less impressive animals, like goats and of course humans. Like many philosophers, Alexander was actually more interested in humans than he was in giraffes. He wrote several treatises addressing the topic of the soul, and of course the human soul was of particular importance. His comments about the soul were disturbing to some later readers, because he made soul depend heavily on the composition of the body. Again, there is an anti-Platonism here, which had been running through the Aristotelian tradition for generations. Galen claims that Andronicus simply identified the proportionate mixtures of the body with the soul. As with his reaction to Boethius on the topic of form, Alexander shows himself a bit more circumspect, and naturally so given Aristotle's claim that the soul is the form of the body. In light of this, Alexander was bound to accept the substantiality of soul. As we just saw, the form of a giraffe is a substance, and the form of the giraffe is nothing other than its soul. But it's also consistent for him to depict this soul as heavily dependent on the body, a real substance that can only exist within matter. On Alexander's reading of Aristotle, there doesn't seem to be much prospect of life after the death of the body. Nor was there much life in Aristotelianism after the death of Alexander. Sure, the next generations, indeed the next centuries, of philosophers will consider Aristotle a leading authority. But Alexander is the last significant thinker of antiquity to consider himself a peripatetic and not a Platonist. Platonist commentators would use his expert analysis of the writings of Aristotle, but always within a broader Platonist project. The closest we get to an exception is a man who wrote more than a century later, in the mid-fourth century A.D. He was not a philosopher of Alexander's stature, but he did focus on expounding Aristotle with only occasional signs of a further allegiance to Plato. His name was Themistius. He'll give us a chance to discuss a question that was left hanging by what I've just said about soul. Although Aristotle says that the soul is the form of the body, he also claims that the human intellect needs no bodily organ. Might this offer the prospect of a more dualist take on Aristotle? Perhaps even an afterlife that is more real than being immortalized in a statue? Themistius will also give us a window into a broader cultural phenomenon, because he was a rhetorician as well as a philosopher. In late antiquity, rhetoric was as closely intertwined with philosophy as mathematics or medicine. So, whether you're interested in the human soul or the soul of wit, you'll want to join me for Themistius, Rhetoric and Philosophy, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.