P R E F A C E

Victor Trincavelli was the first to edit the Greek commentaries of John Philoponus on the first four books of the Physics in Venice in the year 1535 original: "MDXXXV". For books I–III and the Corollary on the Void see reference to p. 675, line 12, he used the Venetian manuscript M. For the others, he used a certain manuscript unknown to me. As I will explain, it will become clear from our critical notes that this manuscript was similar to, or rather derived from, the manuscript G. Besides GM, the manuscripts KLNP became known to me. The last of these, covering books III–IV, agrees so closely with M that anyone who can use the former will not miss the latter. Therefore, with the exception of a few places, I have excluded it from the critical notes so as not to burden them with useless material. KN are full of scribal errors, but they are of great value because they fill many lacunae in the other manuscripts and are almost always free from interpolations. However, since these manuscripts are essentially twins, I thought it sufficient to use K for all four books and to neglect N, for which only samples of a collation were available. Finally, the authority of manuscript L is not the same in all books. In books I–III, it provides almost the same recension version/edition as K and lacks the monstrous errors that deform it. However, in the fourth book, it depends entirely on G, the oldest of all, and I suspect it was copied from it. Therefore,

¹ The title of the commentaries, "Annotations by John the Alexandrian, the Philoponus, on Aristotle’s Physics, from the lectures of Ammonius Hermiae, with some individual observations," appears to have been largely invented by Trincavelli. It is certainly obliterated in M (the remains "κροάσεως ἀριστ-" survive), L has "Prolegomena to the Physics" (L² adds "Annotations by John the Alexandrian, the Philoponus"), and K omits it. Cf. pp. 194.1, 339.1, 496.1. For my part, I have proposed a title of my own making, and if anyone considers a more suitable one possible, I shall not object. Philoponus is called a scholasticus teacher/scholar or grammaticus philologist, or both, in the manuscripts of other commentaries. Cf. Simplicius, Physics, fol. 260v34, 265v41, 266v26, 268v42, etc.