Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 082 - Lost and Found – Aristotelianism after Aristotle.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kings College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Lost and Found, Aristotelianism after Aristotle. There seems to be a deep-seated human need to collect the things we like. A real James Joyce enthusiast will own not just a volume of Joyce's short stories and a copy of Ulysses, but also Finnegan's Wake. Indeed, the enthusiast may even go so far as attempting to read Finnegan's Wake. In music, the true fan is not the one who listens to a greatest hits album over and over but who owns a copy of every album the band released, perhaps on several formats. The more obscure output is treasured the most. The classical music buff who can discourse on the fine points of obscure orchestral recordings from the 1950s, or the Led Zeppelin fan who insists that their greatest album is Presence and who collects bootleg recordings of live performances. We even have a word for this sort of behavior, completest. I myself suffer from this malady. I own not only all of Buster Keaton's silent movies, but even copies of some of the films he made after the advent of sound. I have been known on more than one occasion to explain to the uninitiated that the James Brown album you really want to get is the little-known In the Jungle Groove. It's really good. I also confess to a weakness for books about philosophy. I traced this tendency to a moment shortly after I got my first academic position when a student told me he could tell I was new because my shelves were so empty. On the bright side, at least I am trying to collect philosophy books after the invention of printing. Before then, enthusiasts had to track down everything their favorite author wrote and pay to have copies written out by hand. The Renaissance marks the high point of this sort of behavior, but it already existed in the ancient world. The most ostentatious example being the Library at Alexandria, where the Ptolemies of Egypt applied the completest principle to all ancient literature. Of course, handmade copies of texts nearly always contain errors made by scribes. Many would also be damaged in some way. So ancient and medieval readers already did what classical scholars now do, getting hold of multiple manuscripts and comparing them to one another in order to have the best chance of reading what the author originally wrote. The procedure I've just described was challenging, but for ancients it represented the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the author's works might simply be lost. Surviving texts were often in a chaotic or error-strewn state and needed to be reorganized and corrected. This brings us to the works of Aristotle and one of the most famous tales about ancient textual transmission. Strabo, who lived in the first centuries BC and AD and was author of a famous work on geography, tells us a complicated story about what happened to Aristotle's private collection of books after his death. Supposedly, Aristotle left his books to his follower Theophrastus. A student of the Aristotelian school named Nilius inherited the books along with the rest of Theophrastus' library. They passed to Nilius' family, who hid them in an underground trench to stop them from being seized and placed in the library at Pergamum. In these harmful conditions, the books were damaged, and when they were finally sold to another man named Apellicon, he made matters worse by making copies that were full of errors. With Apellicon, the books came to Athens, where they were seized after all by the Roman general Sulla, who conquered the city in 84 BC. The story's happy ending has the books coming back to Rome with Sulla. This narrative is detailed, and for a story about a collection of books, pretty exciting, what with the underground trench and Sulla's wartime exploits. As Strabo implies, it would also explain what seems to us a puzzling feature of early Hellenistic philosophy. The early Stoics, Epicureans, and skeptics failed to engage much with Aristotle's works, which we now see as a high point of Greek intellectual achievement. And yet Aristotle re-emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the first century BC. Indeed, the book's arrival in Rome did come shortly before a burst of activity centering on Aristotle. No wonder Strabo would have us think, his thought had been lost, but now it was found. The story has, however, received a skeptical reaction from some modern scholars, especially Jonathan Barnes. He pointed out that the temporary loss of Aristotle's own books would not explain much unless it was the only copy available, which seems a dubious assumption. Barnes also doubted another long-held assumption. Once the Aristotelian works came to Rome, they had to be brought together and re-edited, especially if they were in such a bad state. On the traditional story, this was the work of the original Aristotle completist, a man named Andronicus. Andronicus hailed from Rhodes, but apparently worked in both Athens and Rome. Supposedly, he got hold of these ancient texts of Aristotle and produced a groundbreaking edition like a collected works. Some have supposed that Andronicus edited and organized the Aristotelian writings more or less in the form that we have them today. But Barnes pointed out problems with this assumption. For instance, later ancient authors rarely speak of Andronicus as an authority on textual questions concerning Aristotle. Admittedly, the Neoplatonist Porphyry compares his edition of the works of his master Plotinus to the collection assembled by Andronicus. But Porphyry took major liberties with Plotinus's works, for instance cutting a single treatise into multiple parts and scattering these parts out of order through his edition. So this parallel is not very encouraging. On the other hand, it lends plausibility to the idea that Andronicus would do something really nutty, like for instance taking a pile of unrelated texts and putting them together as if they were a single work by Aristotle. This is where textual history can have serious philosophical implications. Of all the works of Aristotle, the one with the most controversial textual history is the metaphysics. Many experts today regard it as a mere stitching together of originally unrelated texts, some of which may not even be by Aristotle. In the late ancient and medieval world, though, the metaphysics was seen very differently, as having a careful structure which leads to a climax in the 12th book where Aristotle discusses God. Aristotle's whole philosophy will look very different if you think he intended this theological material to be read alongside the rest of the metaphysics, where we find discussions of topics like the principle of non-contradiction and the nature of physical substances. So a lot is riding on the editorial work Andronicus may or may not have done. Indeed, one can go further. Although Aristotle never uses the word metaphysics, this branch of philosophy has ever since antiquity been taken to include more or less what is covered in the Aristotelian work of that name. If it was Andronicus who assembled unrelated texts to create the metaphysics as we have it today, then he should get much of the credit, or blame, for deciding what is and is not included in the discipline of metaphysics itself. Whatever the extent of his editorial activity, Andronicus certainly represents a surge of interest in Aristotle in the first century BC. To the extent that he was read in the preceding centuries, it was often the so-called exoteric works that attracted attention. These were written by Aristotle for an audience beyond his students and colleagues. Ironically, these originally more widely circulated writings are lost today, apart from fragments. Supposedly, they were models of elegant Greek composition, a fact that will amaze anyone who has spent time perusing the rather technical and difficult works we now have. These surviving writings are from among Aristotle's so-called esoteric treatises. The term means not that they were full of mystical or occult teachings, but only that they were intended to be read within his school, the Lyceum. It took a long while before they would reach a wider reading public, even after Andronicus and the resurgence of Aristotelianism. For instance, Seneca and Plutarch, in the first and second centuries AD, still don't seem to know these texts well. Even admirers of Aristotle, like Cicero for instance, admitted that the esoteric treatises were very difficult. Aristotle's partisans sometimes claimed that he had purposefully written in such an obscure way, perhaps as a way of training the reader to think. One might even draw a comparison between Aristotle's obscurity and Plato's use of the dialogue form, which forces the reader to reflect on what the characters are saying. But whether their challenging nature was intentional or not, Aristotle's texts clearly called out for explanation and interpretation. Andronicus and others answered that call. Since podcasts had not yet been invented, the Aristotelians, also known as the Peripatetics, did the next best thing. They wrote commentaries. This would before long become one of the chief vehicles for philosophical reflection in antiquity. Pagan philosophers commented on Aristotle, on Plato, even on Hesiod and works of pagan religion like the Chaldean oracles. Jews and Christians set forth their ideas in commentaries on the Bible. Our earliest surviving commentary on Aristotle is by an author named Aspasius, who worked in the first half of the second century AD. It covers parts of Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which is slightly surprising because the ethics did not loom as large in ancient discussions of Aristotle as it does today. More than a century before Aspasius, heeded debate already surrounded a different, much shorter, and superficially less interesting text, the categories. Here again, at least a bit of credit should go to Andronicus. Even if he didn't produce a complete edition of Aristotle's works, he at least authored a catalogue of those works. This implied an order of reading and also involved his making decisions about which treatises were authentic. He argued that one logical work, On Interpretation, was not in fact by Aristotle. This was because it contains a cross-reference to Aristotle's On the Soul, and Andronicus couldn't find anything in On the Soul that seemed relevant to the passage. Later ancient authors found that reasoning rather flimsy, but they were greatly influenced by two other decisions made by Andronicus. First, he defended the use of the title still given to the treatise today, categories, which means predications. Second, he placed the categories at the head of Aristotle's logical works. For centuries to come, the categories would serve as an introduction to logic, and thus, given that logic was the first thing studied in late antiquity, an introduction to philosophy as a whole. Even as it assumed this prominent place, the categories was causing controversy. As you'll remember, the work sets out a division into ten classes, substance, quality, quality, place, time, and so on. But it isn't clear what this division is meant to divide. The categories begins with brief reflections on language, for instance the phenomenon of words that are used equivocally, as when both a person and a picture of a person are both called man, and the difference between simple expressions like man and compound expressions like man runs. This suggests that the ten classes covered in the categories are supposed to be a list of types of linguistic expressions. Stoic critics pounced on this, complaining that the categories is woefully inadequate compared to the sophisticated distinctions they had been making in their philosophy of language. The charge was answered by a student of Andronicus named Boethius of Sidon, not to be confused with the later, much more famous Christian philosopher Boethius. Boethius diffused the Stoic challenge by lowering the stakes a bit. The categories, he said, was never intended to be a complete analysis of language. Rather, the ten classes are only types of predicates, and divide linguistic expressions insofar as they relate to things out in the world. Stoic distinctions like the one between literal and metaphorical uses of language would have no place here. So naturally Aristotle doesn't mention them. Rather, he distinguishes between substance terms like man or giraffe, quality terms like black or elegant, quantity terms like two cubits tall, and so on. Aristotle is interested only in terms that reveal the furniture of the world, so to speak, the substances that populate it, and the properties these substances possess. Andronicus himself had a similar outlook. For him, the terms that Aristotle was studying in the categories carve nature at the joints, to use a metaphor that goes back to Plato. The right division of words goes hand in hand with the right division of things out in the world. This early defense of Aristotle was gratefully adopted by later commentators on the categories, who also confronted another question that may already have been explored by Andronicus and Boethius. If the categories classifies words insofar as they relate to things, then how does Aristotle think that this relationship works? The later commentators consider two possible views. The first is simple. Terms refer directly to objects or their properties. Thus, the term giraffe would immediately signify such things as Hiawatha the giraffe munching on hay in the zoo enclosure. The idea is simple, but it raises some puzzles. For instance, if I utter a word without knowing what it means, will the word still refer to the thing? This problem could be dealt with by a different proposal, inspired by Aristotle's remarks about language at the beginning of his On Interpretation. On this suggestion, words refer to things only through the intermediary of thoughts. When I say giraffe, this is meant to signify, in the first instance, my thought, which is a thought about giraffes. It is the thought that relates to the giraffe directly. Though the debate between these two positions is known to us from later commentators, it's likely that the positions go back to our early peripatetics. The three-part theory, which makes thoughts an intermediary between words and things, is ascribed in some sources to Boethus. The two-part theory, meanwhile, would fit with what we know about Andronicus. Remember, he didn't think that On Interpretation was even by Aristotle, so he may well have adopted a simpler theory of reference that didn't make use of its remarks about how thoughts relate to language. Andronicus, Boethus, and other peripatetics were no doubt interested in the categories partly because questions of language and logic had received so much attention from other Hellenistic schools, especially the Stoics. In this age of philosophical allegiances, they had to show that their man could compete on territory that had been claimed by their rivals. This brings us back to the ethics. As we've seen, Hellenistic philosophers frequently mention Aristotle only to dismiss his ethical theory as insufficiently rigorous. Authors of the first centuries BC and AD, like Cicero and Seneca, still tend to reduce Aristotle's subtle and elaborate ethical reflections to two fundamental ideas, both of which provide a contrast to Stoicism. The emotions should be moderated rather than eliminated, as the Stoics recommended, and external things like health and wealth do play a role in the good life, whereas the Stoics saw them as indifferent. This is obviously not an adequate summary of Aristotelian ethics, but the Aristotelians still needed to respond, especially on the issue of external goods. They did so by meeting the Stoics halfway. They admitted that virtue suffices for happiness, but said that the supremely happy man would be the man who has it all, both virtue and external goods. In the second century, Aspasius, author of that earliest surviving commentary, is still fighting this battle. He defends the idea that virtue involves moderating emotions like anger, and argues that external goods too are intimately related to virtue. Part of being virtuous is doing noble things, and, as he memorably remarks, someone whose father was a male prostitute is not going to have many opportunities to do noble things. Here, he resists the temptation to stoicize Aristotle. Elsewhere, he passes over a chance to Platonize him. Aristotle had said at the end of the ethics that a life of contemplation is the highest possible for man. Scientists who were fond of Aristotle later seized on this to insist that Aristotle ultimately shared their conception of happiness as residing in nothing but intellectual fulfillment. But Aspasius firmly locates human happiness in a life that involves both virtuous practical action and intellectual contemplation, the battlefield and the senate as well as the lecture room. On the other hand, he clearly knows his Plato. He alludes to the tripartite soul of the Republic and Timaeus, and, in one interesting passage, meditates on Socrates' habit of being ironic. Here in Aspasius we can detect the prospect of an alliance between peripatetics and Platonists. This will come to fruition eventually in Neo-Platonism, above all thanks to Porphyry, who I mentioned a few minutes ago as the faithful student and editor of Plotinus. Porphyry was first and foremost a Platonist, so his approach to Aristotle was more friendly takeover than straightforward allegiance. But his was only the most influential answer to the long-running question whether Platonists and Aristotelians should be making common cause against other schools, or instead seeing each other as targets for refutation. The Platonists had taken a variety of approaches. In the wake of Antiochus' presentation of the ancient thinkers as one big happy family, some Platonists, like Alcinous, tried to show that Aristotle was just making explicit what was already implicit in Plato's dialogues. By contrast, Atticus issued scathing attacks on Aristotle's ethics, effectively erecting a big sign saying, this way to happiness, no external goods or pleasure required, all copies of the Nicomachean Ethics to be left outside. The Peripatetics too were unsure whether to engage in appropriation or polemic. Several summaries of Aristotelian doctrine derive from this period, and they tend to fuse Aristotle's teachings with those of other schools, especially the Stoics. And I've just mentioned the Irenic overtures we find in Aspasius. The earlier Boethius, though, seems to have been a strong critic of Plato. We have indirect evidence for a set of arguments he wrote against Plato's Phaedo and its defense of the soul's immortality. Admittedly, these are difficult to interpret. It is not even clear whether they derive from the Peripatetic Boethius of Sidon, or a Stoic thinker who annoyingly was also named Boethius, and who even more annoyingly also came from Sidon. Whichever Boethius wrote the arguments, though, he was no fool. For instance, he has a good objection to the crowning argument in the Phaedo that the soul is essentially alive and therefore not susceptible to death, the way that the number three is essentially odd and thus not susceptible to being even. Boethius says that the soul may well be essentially alive, but really we are worried that the soul will cease to exist completely, not that it will continue to exist but be dead, and if it does cease to exist it will lose even its essential properties. The philosophy of late antiquity will show that opposition to Plato was not essential to Aristotelianism. It could survive, even thrive, within a Platonist worldview. Thanks to Porphyry, the Platonists had their way with Aristotle, all the while promising to respect him in the morning. But before the dawn of this grand harmonizing vision there was still time for the Peripatetics to enjoy one last shining moment. It came in the work of a man who certainly considered himself a faithful Peripatetic, and not a Platonist, even if he borrowed from Plato now and again, and wound up serving as an indispensable guide for centuries of Platonists who wanted to understand Aristotle. An outstanding philosopher like Aristotle deserves an outstanding commentator, and in Alexander of Aphrodisias he got just that. So never mind Alexander the Great, join me instead for the Great Alexander, next time on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.