Commentary on the First Three Books of Aristotle's Physics

interpolations. For since the talkative little Greek repeats almost everything two or three times with a redundant abundance of words, it is not surprising that rarely has anyone enriched him with words; on the contrary, we do not grieve greatly that the scribes, often going astray due to the frequency of similar words, punished him for his excessive talkativeness.

Besides these, which contain either four, two, or one of Philoponus' books in their entirety, there survive not a few manuscripts of excerpts—A, B, C, D, E, F, O, R, S, T, V—of which A, C, D seem to contain Philoponus' excerpts from only the first four books, and those are almost useless (for if I found anything written more correctly in them, it does not exceed the ability of a moderately learned Byzantine man who scraped together such scholia marginal notes/commentary). B, E, F, O, T, V contain excerpts also from the later books, which it is to be lamented have not survived in their entirety. Of these, O, T, and V provided no use again; for the Philoponus scholia they exhibit on Aristotle’s Physics, Book VIII (Physics 259a13–262a2), are undoubtedly copied from F, as will be clear from the critical appendix which I shall add to the second volume. Some of these were published from V by Brandis; we, however, have edited everything from F itself, preserving the remarkable title "Of John Philoponus on the remainder of the Physics," which Diels touched upon. Furthermore, Brandis had published some scholia on books V–VIII taken from the most noble Parisian manuscript E, although he does not seem to have recognized Philoponus in them. However, when I noticed that the excerpt undoubtedly by Philoponus in Brandis' Scholia (p. 440b 16) agreed entirely with the Parisian scholion that Brandis himself had placed under it, and was then informed by the most learned P. Corssen that other scholia are also read in E that are entirely similar to the Philoponean scholia of manuscript F, I thought I would be doing something worthwhile if I examined the book more carefully. Nor did hope deceive me; for since the ancient scholiast, who uses reddish ink, excerpts Philoponus alone in books I–IV, and in book VIII exhibits many things which we know from elsewhere to be Philoponean, it was possible to establish with, as it seems to me, certain conjecture that the remaining scholia on books V–VIII also flowed from the same Philoponus. I have taken care to edit them all (pp. 796–851), with some things also interposed which Philoponus either explicitly claimed for himself in B, or...

¹ Perhaps others not sufficiently known to me, such as Vatican 256, 307, 1025, etc. Brandis had said doubtfully that the scholia of Vatican 256 were excerpted from Simplicius, but Diels taught us that there are no Simplicians, except for the prologue. Regarding manuscript S, see the list of books below.
² Here I refer to the correction on p. 26, line 5, "black" R (but "black" A!).
³ Certainly, it had not escaped him that Philoponus was being excerpted by the Parisian scholiast in the earlier books; cf. Scholia, p. 355b 3ff.