Pearcy, 'Philoponus, On Aristotle's Physics 5-8  with Simplicius, On Aristotle on the Void', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9410
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9410-pearcy-philoponus

Paul Lettinck and J. O. Urmson, eds. and trans.  Philoponus, On
Aristotle's Physics 5-8  with Simplicius, On Aristotle on the
Void.  Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1994.  Pp. x, 267. 
$44.50.  ISBN 0-8014-3005-4.
  Reviewed by Lee T. Pearcy -- The Episcopal Academy 

  As the tenth century turned into the eleventh, several
generations of scholars in Baghdad devoted their energies to
understanding Aristotle's analysis of motion.  They had texts of
the Physics in Greek as well as translations into Arabic and
Syriac, and they were able in addition to refer to commentaries,
among them the work of a commentator they knew as Yahya an-Nahwi. 
Yahya an-Nahwi means "John the Grammarian," and we know him as
John Philoponus, the Christian Neoplatonist of the sixth century. 
At some time before 1004 one of these scholars of Baghdad, Abu
l-Husayn al-Basri, prepared a variorum edition of the work of
several commentators on the Physics.  Al-Basri's collection
included a condensed paraphrase of Yahya an-Nahwi's commentary on
Physics 5-8.  That Arabic paraphrase here appears in English for
the first time.  Along with the Arabic Philoponus comes a work
more accessible to classical philologists, Simplicius' commentary
on Aristotle's idea of void, part of his vast commentary on Book
4 of the Physics .

  Barbara Obrist, reviewing an earlier volume in this series of
Ancient Commentators on Aristotle for BMCR,[[1]] pointed to the
richness of possibilities in these complex texts.  They look back
to ancient philosophy, for which the problems of motion, change,
and identity were fundamental.  They look ahead to medieval
European philosophy and its concern with motion through a
continuum or in a void, and thus to the beginnings of modern
mechanics and physics.  If Thomas Kuhn was correct in claiming
that the shift from Aristotelian dynamics to the medieval theory
of impetus constituted a paradigm shift, a scientific
revolution,[[2]] then Philoponus, because of his rejection of
Aristotelian dynamics and advocacy of something very like the
medieval European theory of impetus, becomes a crucial figure in
the history of science. This particular volume will add only a
little new evidence for antecedents of impetus-theory, but it
will call attention to other aspects of Philoponus' wide-ranging
dialogue with Aristotle.  In commenting on Physics 227b-229a, for
example, Philoponus raises questions about Aristotle's
understanding of what constitutes a single event or a single,
continuing state.  As philosophers become increasingly suspicious
of the Cartesian point-instant, Philoponus' contributions may
begin to take a more prominent place in the history of
philosophy.[[3]]

  The present volume is the nineteenth to appear in the series 
Ancient Commentators on Aristotle under the general editorship of
Richard Sorabji.  According to Sorabji, the series will
eventually include most of the commentaries in H. Diels'
Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (Berlin 1882-1909).  The
project's parerga include Philoponus and the Rejection of
Aristotelian Science (1987), Aristotle Transformed:  The Ancient
Commentators and Their Influence (1990), and of course Sorabji's
own important work on time, causation, and other Aristotelian
topics.   At the end of the last century Diels unlocked a
doxographical treasure-house; at the end of this one,  Sorabji
and his contributors have moved the treasures into the open air. 
They deserve praise and gratitude from everyone with any interest
at all in ancient and early medieval philosophy, the history of
ideas, or the techniques and mentalities of ancient commentators,
and these unglamorous, austere volumes in their plain
dust-jackets should be hailed as one of the most important
philological projects of our generation.



NOTES

1.  Review of <i>Place, Void, and Eternity</i>.  Philoponus,
<i>Corollaries on Place and Void</i>, tr. David Furley, with
Simplicius, <i>Against Philoponus on the Eternity of the
World</i>, tr. Christian Wildberg, BMCR 3.6(1992), 449-451.

2.  <i>The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i> (Chicago 1962,
ed. 2), 120.

3.  As suggested by Sorabji in his Preface, p. viii, with a
reference to Donald Davidson, "The Individuation of Events,"
<i>Essays on Actions and Events</i> (Oxford 1990), 163-80; see
also the wider-ranging lucubrations in Daniel C. Dennett,
<i>Consciousness Explained</i> (Boston 1991).