Table Of ContentPHILOPONUS
On Aristotle Physics 5-8
with
SIMPLICIUS
On Aristotle on the Void
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PHILOPONUS
On Aristotle Physics 5-8
with
SIMPLICIUS
On Aristotle on the Void
Translated by
Paul Lettinck &
J.O. Urmson
LONDON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SYDNEY
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First published in 1994 by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd.
Paperback edition fi rst published 2014
© 2013 Paul Lettinck and J. O. Urmson (Preface, Richard Sorabji)
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Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Authors of this work.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN HB: 978-0-7156-2493-7
PB: 978-1-4725-5804-6
ePDF: 978-1-4725-0182-0
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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
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 editor wishes to thank Dr Fritz
Zimmermann and Dr Peter Lautner for their comments on the translations, Elaine
Miller for additional editing of the Philoponus translation and Ian Crystal, Paul
Opperman and Dirk Baltzly for their help in preparing the volume for press.
Typeset by Ray Davies
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Preface Richard Sorabji vii
Philoponus: On Aristotle Physics 5-8
translated by Paul Lettinck
Translator’s Note 2
Introduction 3
Translation 19
Notes 137
English-Arabic-Greek Glossary 151
Index of Names and Subjects 154
Simplicius: On Aristotle on the Void
translated by J.O. Urmson
introduction and notes by Peter Lautner
Introduction 159
Translator’s Note 165
Textual Emendations 166
Translation 167
Notes 223
English-Greek Glossary 237
Greek-English Index 242
Subject Index 263
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Preface
Richard Sorabji
This volume presents works on Aristotle’s Physics by the two rivals,
Philoponus and Simplicius, both Neoplatonists of the sixth century
AD, the first a Christian, the second a pagan. Philoponus’ text, lost in
Greek except for fragments, is here translated for the first time from
the Arabic. The Arabic, included in an Arabic translation of Aristotle,
is a paraphrase of Philoponus’ commentary on Physics Books 5 to 7,
with two comments on the final book, 8.
The Simplicius text comes from his huge commentary on Physics
Book 4. The comments on Aristotle’s treatment of place and time and
Simplicius’ own corollaries on place and time have already been
translated by J.O. Urmson in two earlier volumes of this series. What
remains is the comments on Aristotle’s treatment of the void in
Physics Book 4, chapters 6-9.
Philoponus: On Aristotle Physics 5-8
It is of some interest to gain access to a commentary by Philoponus.
The first half of his commentary on the Physics, Books 1 to 4, which
is available in Greek, is full of daring innovation. The ‘scientific
revolution’ of postulating an ‘impetus’ in dynamics started here
before it came to the Latin West, and Philoponus’ able reply to
Aristotle in defence of motion in a vacuum was to be acknowledged
by Galileo.1 It has been suggested that these and other anti-Aristo-
telian ideas were inserted by Philoponus in a second edition of the
commentary after AD 532, whereas the first edition was produced in
517.2 Many of the later ideas are tailored to Philoponus’ Christian
beliefs. The subject matter of Aristotle’s work itself might raise our
expectations. Book 5 distinguishes changes and types of changes.
Book 6 discusses the continuum. Body, space, time and motion are
all argued to be infinitely divisible, rather than made up of indivisible
units, and the associated paradoxes are brilliantly handled. Book 7
1. Richard Sorabji, ‘John Philoponus’ in his (ed.) Philoponus and the Rejection of
Aristotelian Science, London and Ithaca NY 1987, ch. 1.
2. Koenraad Verrycken, ‘The development of Philoponus’ thought and its
chronology’, in Richard Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient
Commentators and Their Influence, London and Ithaca NY 1990, ch. 11.
viii Preface
introduces the need for a Prime Mover and Book 8 makes the final
case for this necessity.
Philoponus’ commentary on these books, as summarised in Arabic,
is not, however, as striking as his commentary preserved in Greek,
on the first four books. But this is no doubt because of the drastic
shortening. The commentary on the first four books of Greek will fill
six volumes of English translation; the Arabic summary relating to
the last four books fills less than one. On the other hand, Paul
Lettinck’s comparison below of the Arabic with the Greek for the first
four books suggests that, where comments are preserved in Arabic,
they do not diverge very significantly from the Greek. The most
interesting difference, perhaps, is that the Arabic seeks to confirm
the theory of impetus by drawing on a phenomenon which Philoponus
describes in another commentary (in DA 334,40-335,30). Sunlight
passing through a coloured glass can throw a pool of colour on a facing
stone, and an archer imparts impetus to an arrow, and neither has
to impart the effect to the intervening air. The eagerness of the Arabic
version to defend the idea of impetus strengthens the view of Fritz
Zimmerman that the concept of impetus reached the fourteenth-
century West from Philoponus through an Arabic route.3
It is also a pity that only two Arabic passages are recorded from
Philoponus’ commentary on Book 8 of the Physics, although both
comments reveal the innovative, anti-Aristotelian Philoponus.
One passage defends the Christian idea that time began, by insist-
ing that a temporal instant need not bound a preceding as well as
a following period. The other defends the Christian idea of bodies
being created out of nothing, by pointing out that Aristotle is
himself committed to an individual form of whiteness, for instance,
being created out of nothing. The example is familiar from Phil-
oponus’ other writings.4
The Arabic paraphrase presents Philoponus as making inde-
pendent contributions at other points too. He joins in the discussion
begun by Aristotle, continued, as he reports by Alexander, and still
of philosophical concern today, of what counts as one and the same
change (one and the same event, in Donald Davidson’s discussion),5
or one and the same outcome of change. Philoponus criticises Aris-
totle and maintains that a person can have the same health or process
3. Fritz Zimmermann, ‘Philoponus’ impetus theory in the Arabic tradition’, in
Richard Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the Rejection of Aristotelian Science, ch. 5.
4. Against Proclus on the Eternity of the World 340; 347; 365,3; Against Aristotle on
the Eternity of the World ap. Simplicius in Phys. 1141. Cf. Philoponus in Phys. 54,24-5;
55,12-13; 191,9-33.
5. Donald Davidson, ‘The Individuation of Events’, originally in Essays in Honor of
Carl G. Hempel, N. Rescher (ed.) Dordrecht 1969, pp. 216-34 and reprinted in Essays
on Actions and Events, Oxford 1990, pp. 163-80.
Preface ix
of becoming healthy as before, even if it changes in degree, but not if
it is altogether interrupted by illness.6
Another independent contribution is discussed by Paul Lettinck in
the list of interesting passages he picks out in his introduction. It may
be summarised as follows. Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus had asked how
the motion or change undergone by a whole could be the same as the
motions or changes undergone by its parts. For the parts of a moving
body do not travel only part of the distance, and Philoponus adds that
the parts of a whitening body do not go only to a small degree white.
Someone, perhaps Eudemus, had said that we do get the result under
discussion in the case of growth and diminution. For a person will
grow by one cubit when his various members grow by suitable
fractions of a cubit. Simplicius was later to discuss whether the time
taken by a whole body to make a given journey could be the sum of
the motions that the parts would take. He suggests that this would
be possible for parts thrown upwards or subjected to motion in other
unnatural directions, for then the parts move more easily and in less
time than the whole. But with falling bodies, and generally with
bodies moving in natural directions, though there will still be a
proportionality, it will be the inverse one, because the parts fall less
easily and in more time than the whole.7
With this last claim Philoponus would disagree. For he argues in
the commentary on Physics that even a much heavier body will fall
only slightly faster, and the difference in speed will be imperceptible
or nothing at all, if the heavier body is only double.8 He does not
contradict this claim when earlier in the same passage he emphasises
that a greater weight does indeed fall in (somewhat) less time, nor
when in the commentary on Physics 4 he argues that two weights of
a pound each joined together are (somewhat) more than two pounds.9
Since he does not take the same view as Simplicius on falling
bodies, he needs a different answer. As Lettinck says, his formula
here seems to be that the amount of body moved, when the whole
moves, is the sum of the amounts of body moved in the movements
of the parts.
Simplicius: On Aristotle on the Void
Aristotle denies the possibility of vacuum or void in On the Heavens
1.9, and in Physics 4.6-9. A void is thought of as a place deprived of
body. But Aristotle does not conceive place like other people, as a
three-dimensional expanse (diastêma) that goes right through
6. 560,10 ff.
7. Philoponus below 656,10 ff., Simplicius in Phys. 6, 473,21-474,8; 977,31-978,16.
8. Philoponus in Phys. 678,24-684,10 at 683,17-25
9. Philoponus in Phys. 429,7 ff.
