RESEARCH ON THE ANCIENT COMMENTARIES

The Institute’s seminar programme seeks to fill gaps in research in Ancient Philosophy, beginning with David Furley’s renewal of interest in Epicurus and A. A. Long’s seminal programme on the Stoics, and continuing through the more recent series conducted by Richard Janko, Bob Sharples and Richard Sorabji covering texts on papyrus and philosophy of the first six centuries AD.

Richard Sorabji's research project on the Ancient Commentators is based at King’s College but the relevant seminars and conferences are held here, together with some complementary ones at the Warburg Institute. In the current session, two Junior Research Fellows, working under Richard Sorabji's supervision, are based at the Institute.

The project is concerned with the period AD 200-600 when a major way of doing philosophy was to write commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. The largest corpus, the 15,000 pages of the ancient commentaries on Aristotle, had not previously been translated into a modern European language. It is now being translated in up to 60 to 70 volumes by over 60 translators in 14 countries. Forty volumes of translation have now appeared. In addition two descriptive volumes, both based in part on Institute seminars, are in print,   and a three-volume source book, prepared under Richard Sorabji's direction for the 1997 Institute Summer School on the Philosophy of the Commentators, is to b epublished in 2002. meetings. Selected volumes from this major series are available from the Institute at £12.50/$25 each including postage and packing (publishers price £50). See our Publications page for details.

The commentaries have preserved fragments from a thousand years of Greek Philosophy, including many of the celebrated fragments of the Presocratic philosphers, and constitute a missing link in the history of Western Philosophy. Faced with Christian charges of pagan inconsistency, the commentators replied that Aristotle agreed with Plato and transformed Aristotle by saying he believed, like Plato, in a Greater God and an immortal soul. By an irony, this anti-Christian move enabled Thomas Aquinas 700 years later to claim that Aristotle was safe for Christianity, a view that cannot be understood if the commentators’ influence on Aquinas is overlooked. Ideas in the history of science and philosophy, previously credited to the 13th and 14th centuries, have been shown to have their origins at least as far back as the commentators, and the Islamic route of transmission has been traced. One example is the idea of impetus in dynamics, which Thomas Kuhn called a scientific revolution. Another is the idea of intentionality which dominates modern philosophy of mind. The spate of English translations is now helping Arabists to identify the Greek authors of works in Arabic translation. The later commentaries reflect student lectures and reveal classroom practice in late antiquity.

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