Commentary on the First Three Books of Aristotle's Physics

I would have thought it probable to attribute it to him. But when these pages had already been sent to the press, the Venetian codex F was sent to Florence, with which I had collated the fragment On the Remainder original: "εἰς τὸ ἐπίλοιπον" and Simplicius' Physics some years ago, without taking any account of the scholia marginal notes/commentary written in the margins. I found almost the same things I had transcribed from E, sometimes expanded, and more often mixed with those of Simplicius. It was more useful to publish everything together with the Parisian excerpts so that the scholia for the same passages of Aristotle would not have to be sought twice in the same volume. But, to say nothing of the other faults I know I have committed, I was not even allowed to be of service to the readers in this.

These points had to be mentioned beforehand regarding the reliability and authority of the manuscripts, an overview of which I shall present after concluding the duty of this preface. If I have been a bit too dull in my handling of these, I hope to obtain forgiveness easily, since even more learned men have often erred in such matters. On the other hand, I shall be deeply grieved if I appear to anyone, and not without cause, to have noted the variations in the text carelessly. From the manuscripts L and G, I transferred almost everything I had noted into the critical apparatus. For the manuscripts K, throughout all four books, and M, from the end of Book III, I generally discarded—with confidence—itacisms a common scribal error where different vowels are confused due to similar pronunciation and other such sphalmata errors/blunders of the scribes that pertain to Philoponus' explanations. However, I faithfully, and perhaps superstitiously, recorded them if they pertained to Aristotle's words, as I did not dare to neglect even the minute discrepancies in the readings of all the books in those instances. May I be allowed, however, to excuse the reverence due to such a supreme philosopher: for it must be held that the lemmata passages from the original text being commented upon, restored to the reliability of manuscripts LKM (for G has very few, and T interpolates from the published Aristotle), generally report accurately what Philoponus read in his own copy of Aristotle. Thus, we gain an aid for reviewing the philosopher’s words that is by no means to be despised.¹

However, I am not such a confident young man as to believe that I

¹ Furthermore, in these matters I myself have adhered to the principles of Diels, and therefore I have written sōzein to save, apothnēskein to die, zōion animal (written as zōion in the oldest manuscript E, while the letter iota has dropped out in the others) and similar terms against the will of the manuscripts. I have provided ss and tt according to the authority of the manuscripts (except that I grew tired of noting constantly and pedantically if any manuscripts had d' instead of tessares four). Finally, I only mentioned the paragogic letters extra letters added to the ends of words in places other than the lemmata where, for example, T wrote houtō instead of houtōs thus, with all manuscripts opposing it, or conversely, where the manuscripts gave houtō even though a vowel followed.

² It is certainly to be lamented that the lemmata in K are so atrociously truncated that we often use the authority of manuscript M alone in Book IV. In Aristotle, I use the Bekker apparatus, corrected by the efforts of Torstrik, and a new collation of the Aristotelian manuscripts EG (I inspected F occasionally) completed by myself. Furthermore, there is no need for me to state that I have reaped the richest fruits from the excellent dissertation of Diels, Zur Textgeschichte der Aristotelischen Physik On the Textual History of Aristotelian Physics (Abhandl. der Berl. Akad. 1882). From the same edition by Diels, I cite the books of Simplicius I–IV; the rest I cite from the Aldine edition, and Themistius from the Spengel edition.