Table Of ContentALEXANDER OF APHRODISIAS
On the Soul Part 1
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ALEXANDER OF
APHRODISIAS
On the Soul
Part 1
Soul as Form of the Body,
Parts of the Soul,
Nourishment, and Perception
Translated with an Introduction
and Commentary by Victor Caston
LONDON(cid:2)(cid:222)(cid:2)(cid:48)(cid:39)(cid:57)(cid:2)(cid:38)(cid:39)(cid:46)(cid:42)(cid:43)(cid:2)(cid:222)(cid:2)(cid:48)(cid:39)(cid:57)(cid:2)YO(cid:52)(cid:45)(cid:2)(cid:222)(cid:2)SYDN(cid:39)(cid:59)
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First published in 2012
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Acknowledgements
The present translations have been made possible by generous and imaginative
funding from the following sources: the National Endowment for the
Humanities, Division of Research Programs, an independent federal agency
of the USA; the Leverhulme Trust; the British Academy; the Jowett Copyright
Trustees; the Royal Society (UK); Centro Internazionale A. Beltrame
di Storia dello Spazio e del Tempo (Padua); Mario Mignucci; Liverpool
University; the Leventis Foundation; the Arts and Humanities Research
Council; Gresham College; the Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust; the Henry
Brown Trust; Mr and Mrs N. Egon; the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research (NWO/GW); the Ashdown Trust; Dr Victoria Solomonides, the
Cultural Attaché of the Greek Embassy in London. The editor wishes to
thank John Thorp, James Wilberding, Michael Griffin, Donald Russell and
William Charlton for their comments, Sebastian Gertz for preparing the
volume for press, and Deborah Blake at Bristol Classical Press, who has been
the publisher responsible for every volume since the first.
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Note 23
Abbreviations 25
Textual Emendations 27
Translation 31
What is the soul’s essence? 31
Bodies act and are modified in virtue of non-bodily items 36
The demonstration that the soul is a form 39
‘In something’ [is said] in how many ways? 40
The soul is inseparable from the body whose soul it is 44
The soul is not one of the simple bodies 46
The soul itself just on its own is unchangeable 48
The soul is not a harmony 51
The parts of the soul: how many and which ones? 53
That there are not infinitely many powers of the soul 53
There are two kinds of nourishment 59
On the activity of being nourished 61
Heat is the soul’s tool for nourishing [oneself] 61
Why parts detached from plants live and develop, while those from 63
animals no longer do
On the soul for perceiving 64
On what is intrinsically and extrinsically perceptible 66
How there comes to be light in the transparent 68
Commentary 71
Bibliography 169
English-Greek Glossary 177
Greek-English Index 189
Index of Passages Cited 215
Subject Index 237
In memoriam
Robert W. Sharples
1949-2010
Acknowledgements
As a graduate student in London in 1985-7, I had the good fortune to study
Alexander of Aphrodisias with Bob Sharples. I met with him weekly to
read Alexander’s On the Soul and discuss the text’s finer points, while
attending the university lectures he offered on Post-Aristotelian philoso-
phy with my supervisor Richard Sorabji and the many seminars they
organised at the old Institute for Classical Studies on Gordon Square. It
was an exciting time to be in the UK working on ancient philosophy. The
turn to Hellenistic philosophy was still relatively new, Long and Sedley’s
collection had just been published, and the project to translate all the
commentators on Aristotle was just getting under way. They were wonder-
ful years.
In retrospect, I had no idea just how fortunate I was. No one in the
twentieth century did more to advance the study of the Peripatetics after
Aristotle, from Theophrastus to Alexander. His scholarship was exem-
plary, not merely for its erudition, which was remarkable, or for its range
and sheer quantity, which was impressive, but above all for his critical
judgement. He was unusually alive to the openness of texts to multiple
interpretations and the recalcitrance of counterevidence: short of decisive
refutation, which he took to be rare, one always had to acknowledge the
possibility of alternative readings, and he was ingenious at devising ways
in which they might be defended against even his own favoured view. In
others, these might merely have been methodological scruples. But in Bob
they were also a natural expression of his own characteristic modesty and
his charity towards others. As a teacher, he was unfailingly generous and
supportive. Bob immediately read any draft you gave him and returned it
with copious, thoughtful comments and acute criticisms, often within just
a day or two. I could not have studied Alexander with anyone better.
Like many others, I was greatly saddened to hear of Bob’s illness and
untimely demise, and he passed away while this volume was still in
preparation. Both it and the second volume are dedicated to his memory.
I would also like to thank several other people who were crucial in
bringing this volume to term, above all the editor of the series, Richard
Sorabji, who has my deepest gratitude for his detailed and invaluable
comments, his unwavering encouragement, and (not least) his patience
and trust. Thanks are also due to Ian McCready-Flora, who served as my
research assistant in the summer of 2009, and to Michael Griffin, the
viii Acknowledgements
editorial assistant through most of the project. Both made excellent con-
tributions, which I have tried to acknowledge in the notes. Sebastian
Gertz, the editorial assistant who saw the project through to its final
stages, also has my thanks for his yeoman’s service with all the corrections
and changes. I am grateful as well to the students in my graduate seminar
at the University of Michigan in the winter term of 2009, who worked
through an earlier draft of the entire translation, and to the participants
in a mini-conference on the present volume at the Humboldt-Universität
in Berlin in March 2011, especially my commentators Jakub Krajczynski,
George Karamanolis, and Miira Tuominen. I learned a great deal from
both groups, who helped save me from quite a few errors. In addition, I
owe a great debt to Ian Crystal for his Herculean efforts to assemble the
index locorum. Such tools are invaluable for making a scholarly work
useful, and they rarely get the thanks they deserve.
Finally, I would like to record my greatest debt of all, to my wife, Ruth,
for her love and support, and for all the joy that she and my two daughters,
Eva and Sarah, have brought me. Without them, I could not have accom-
plished any of the things I have.
Introduction
Alexander of Aphrodisias, easily one of the greatest commentators on
Aristotle – later Greek commentators sometimes refer to him as ‘the
Commentator’ (ho exêgêtês) on Aristotle1 or even as a ‘new’ or ‘second
Aristotle’2 – is also one of the foremost Aristotelians in the tradition,
alongside Thomas Aquinas and Ibn Rushd, a philosopher in his own right,
who developed a profound and systematic synthesis of Aristotle’s views
that was to have lasting influence.
Life and works
We know little of Alexander’s life, apart from the fact that he came from
Aphrodisias, a city in Caria (a region in the southwest of modern day
Turkey), and that sometime between 198 and 209 CE he was appointed by
the emperors Septimus Severus and Antoninus Caracalla to a chair in
Aristotelian philosophy in Athens, one of four chairs established for each
of the major schools of philosophy by Marcus Aurelius in 176.3 It has often
been assumed that Alexander is referring to this appointment in the
dedication of his treatise On Fate.4 But recently this has been confirmed
by an inscription from Aphrodisias, which Alexander had dedicated to his
father, who was also named Alexander and was a philosopher as well
(perhaps even the author of On Fevers and the collections of medical
problems attributed to an ‘Alexander of Aphrodisias’). The inscription
gives the full name of the younger Alexander (that is, the commentator) as
Titus Aurelius Alexandros.5 We also know that he studied with Sosigenes
and Herminus (who had been one of Galen’s teachers as well).6 Based on
these facts, we can infer that Alexander was born sometime between 140
and 165.7
Apart from commentaries on Aristotle’s works, Alexander also wrote
philosophical treatises, articulating and defending in his own voice an
Aristotelian point of view.8 The present work, On the Soul, is one of the few
surviving treatises, along with one on determinism and freedom of choice
(On Fate) and another on material composition (On Mixture). Alexander
also wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. But the commentary
is now lost and survives only in isolated quotations.9 The present treatise
is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a commentary, because of its
faithfulness to both the sequence of topics and the doctrines put forward
in Aristotle’s On the Soul. But the purpose of the two types of work is
