Simplicius: On Aristotle's Categories 1-4

Introduction

doctrines, and the commentaries on the Timaeus and the Parmenides, intended as they were for the most advanced students of all, could expound late Neoplatonic ontology in all its grandiose architecture and complexity. The fact that tradition happens to have preserved commentaries on the Parmenides only by Athens-based philosophers — if we leave to one side the case of Porphyry of Tyre A Neoplatonic philosopher (c. 234–305 AD), student of Plotinus. — is, then, of much less explanatory value than the place occupied by this Platonic dialogue in the Neoplatonic school curriculum.

An important finding of recent research has been the extent to which Simplicius was influenced by his master and fellow-exile Damascius. This does not mean that we will find, in the commentaries by Simplicius, lengthy expositions of Damascius' complex metaphysics of the Ineffable, the Second One, or the One-which-is-Many and the Many-Which-are-One, from which arises the Unified (to hênômenon, meaning "that which is unified"), which then gives rise, through a series of intelligible triads, to the nine levels of reality which Damascius discerned in Plato's Parmenides. Given what we now know of Neoplatonic commentaries, we would not expect such doctrines, expounded at length in Damascius' treatise On the First Principles and in his Commentary on the Parmenides, to be set forth in the course of an exposition of works by Aristotle or Epictetus; Neoplatonic teachers did not attempt to explain ultimate reality to beginning philosophy students. Instead, Damascius' doctrines underlie Simplicius' work as a kind of background (toile de fond): they occasionally rise to the surface in the form of particularly abstruse passages, quotations, or allusions, but they are never pursued or made explicit. It was only after the student had digested Aristotle — Proclus took just over two years to accomplish this — and the introductory dialogues of Plato, that the ultimate truth — that, roughly speaking, the metaphysical system of Damascius, slightly modified — would gradually be revealed to those of Simplicius' students who had shown the talent and tenacity to last long enough.

3. Simplicius’ commentary on Aristotle’s Categories

Simplicius' commentary on the Categories is a strangely composite entity. At the very outset, the author candidly tells us how he has written his work. He mentions most of those among his philosophical predecessors who have previously commented on the Categories: Themistius, Porphyry, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Herminus, Maximus, Boethos, Lucius and Nicostratus, Plotinus, Porphyry again (in his lost Commentary to Gedalius), and finally the divine Iamblichus, whose major accomplishments were adducing the writings of (Pseudo-)Archytas, and introducing his 'intellective theory' everywhere he could. Indeed, writes Simplicius,