On Aristotle Physics 2 (Ancient Commentators on Aristotle)
Philoponus
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 2:00319614
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Book 2 of the Physics is arguably the best introduction to Aristotle's work, both because it explains some of his central concepts, such as nature and the four causes, and because it asks some gripping questions that are still debated today: Is chance something real? If so, what? Can nature be explained by chance, necessity and natural selection, or is it purposive?
Philoponus' commentary is not only a valuable guide, but also a work of Neoplatonism with its own views on causation, the Providence of Nature, the problem of evil and the immortality of the soul.
to topoi at 275,9. 554. Philoponus' ensuing argument may be thought to suggest he read hautoi ('itself) for autoi ('him') at 197al, but this is not essential. 555. See n. 305 above. 556. The verb horizo is used ambiguously in this passage. It is the word for 'define', but it is etymologically connected to horismenos ('determinate', its perfect passive participle) and aoristos ('indeterminate'), and I have therefore translated the perfect passive tense horistai as 'are (is) given determinately' at
something, but not at a monster, so why shouldn't nature be aiming at something even when it produces a monster? Vitelli quotes a marginal note added at 311,1 by an ancient reader of M S L making a point to the same effect. It reads: 'But the products of the arts are those which ... [illegible]. But things not of such a kind, which you, O philosopher, call monsters, are the works of arts gone wrong (mataiotekhnidn), not of arts. Therefore the Stagirite is right to say that what came to be by art
neither on grounds of reason nor on those of self-evidence is it reasonable to believe that it is not the job of a natural philosopher to discuss the per se properties of natural things but only about substances. Therefore this is not the distinguishing mark of the natural philosopher as against the mathematician. 229 5 230 231 232 233 10 15 234 193b31: So then the mathematician too busies himself about these things but [treats] each of them not as the limit of a natural body. Here he
the matter by reason or in thought, [that] does not seem reasonable to m e . For even if the substantial forms are hard to imagine standing on their own, still reason is of a nature to separate even these. We say at any rate that the form is different from the matter, and one and the same persisting matter receives different [forms] in turn, [which implies that] the forms are other things alongside it. And what do I mean by matter? Well, according to h i m the second substrate, i.e. that which is
necessity? I mean something like this: does the form follow the matter out of necessity, which would be [a case of] necessity tout court, for because the matter has such-and-such a capacity the form entirely and in every case has to follow? Or is it not thus, but if the form is to come to be, such-and-such a matter must be laid down previously? Now the natural philosophers postulated necessity tout court among things that come to be: for they all said the forms follow out of necessity on the