Aristotle on His Predecessors Being the First Book of His Metaphysics Aristotle 9781356930593 Books
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Aristotle on His Predecessors Being the First Book of His Metaphysics Aristotle 9781356930593 Books
A.E. Taylor's "Aristotle On His Predecessors: Being the First Book of His 'Metaphysics,'" (1907; many later reprintings) is a lightly annotated translation of the opening portion of what Aristotle seems to have called "First Philosophy."In this case, "first" does not indicate "simplest," but refers to such fundamental questions as 'what is existence?' and 'why is there Being rather than Not-Being?' (The traditional name means literally "After Physics," and seems to refer to the "Physica," a treatise on the material nature of things which preceded "First Philosophy" in a standard list of Aristotle's writings.)
The whole book on "Metaphysics" presents difficulties to the reader; the first section is probably the easiest to understand on a first reading. Taylor's very literate translation helps, and he provides some guides to the novice reader, but the book, now over a century old, cries out for a bibliography of more modern studies. Making historical (rather than philosophical) sense out of this portion is difficult.
In its first "book" (or scroll), one of the great minds of Western Civilization examines what he supposes to be the answers to these fundamental questions by earlier philosophers, most of whose works now exist only in tiny fragments, including the quotations he himself provides. Most of the treatment consists of Aristotle's analyses of their arguments -- or supposed arguments -- and his evaluations of them. Taylor takes some pains to make clear what is (or may be) their original thoughts, as distinguished from what Aristotle makes of them.
For, as Taylor, among many others, points out, Aristotle doesn't seem to take into consideration that these predecessors may have been trying to answer other questions entirely. As a result, his analyses, while often acute in terms of his own, Post-Platonic, stage of thought, either miss the point, or, at best, obscure the argument. Still, this is the earliest surviving serious collection of such thoughts and opinions (although Plato mentioned some of them in the course of various Socratic "Dialogues"); and even the mistakes of a first-rate thinker can be of value.
Despite this Aristotelian filter, these ideas have had a long history in Western Civilization, preserved by Aristotle, his commentators, and by collectors of "wise sayings" ("Doxographers"). Sometimes their theories were presented as valid alternatives, but they sometimes were used as a foil for entirely different systems of thought. At least one Church Father tried to link all "heresies" to such archaic systems, in the happy belief that his own "orthodox" Christianity had no such intellectual vulnerabilities. These "First Philosophers" have been very popular with some twentieth-century philosophers, notably including Jaspers and Heidegger. One may wonder whether the very obscurity of their words has made them acceptable "authorities" to those in search of new departures in philosophy.
There is also a small but interesting literature comparing their ideas, so far as we can recover them, to the early philosophies of India and China. (Such comparisons between "Western" and "Eastern" thought, at least so far as India is concerned, go back to antiquity; often with assertions about who was 'borrowing' from whom. In modern times, claims, or assumptions, of influence of the West on early China, or of China on the West, have frequently been made as well.)
Outside these philosophical and comparative projects, a vast secondary literature on these thinkers, commonly known as the "Pre-Socratics," has grown around around this text, and material cited in ancient commentaries on Aristotle, plus second- or third-hand accounts in digests from later times. Of these, the most important is the "Lives of the Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius, a translation of which I have recently reviewed (as a companion piece to this one).
For those looking for a more modern introduction to the words (and perhaps the thoughts) of the earliest Greek Philosophers, there are two fairly up-to-date volumes available in English. The older, but up-dated, is a Penguin Classics volume edited by Jonathan Barnes , "Early Greek Philosophy" (1987, second edition 2002), and the other is Robin Waterfield's "The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and The Sophists" for Oxford World's Classics (2000), which, as the title shows, includes additional material. (I keep meaning to review both of them, one of these days.)
For a resolutely bare-bones translation of the "fragments" (mainly quotations in ancient texts) of the Pre-Socratics, see Kathleen Freeman's old (1948) but durable, "Ancilla to the Pre-Socratics." I have reviewed this one: it is confined to those passages which Diels, a nineteenth-century German scholar, considered authentic, known, after his arrangement as "B Texts" -- as opposed to the A Texts, or "Testimonies," statements *about* the early philosophers. (Freeman dealt with the "A Texts" in a long out-of-print companion volume.)
For those interested in the actual Greek (and some Latin) texts, including a lot of the "A" Testimonies, and some (usually) not-too-technical discussions of textual problems and philosophical issues, the first place to go used to be G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, "The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts" (Cambridge University Press, 1957; in paperback in 1971). This edition of the book was replaced by the extensively revised Second Edition, by Kirk, Raven, and M. Schofield, in 1983 (quickly issued in paperback, and reissued with a bibliographic update in 1995).
In the Second Edition, the translations, previously relegated to italics at the foot of the page, were moved into the main text in roman type; a great convenience to new Greekless readers, a distraction at first to those, like me, who had become accustomed to jumping back and forth on the page.) It included a section from the "Derveni Papyrus," the first closely datable "Orphic" text with philosophical content. Kirk-Raven-Schofield has received a mixed reception on Amazon; there are reviewers who insist that the first edition was better. Either is certainly worth reading.
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Aristotle on His Predecessors Being the First Book of His Metaphysics Aristotle 9781356930593 Books Reviews
A.E. Taylor's "Aristotle On His Predecessors Being the First Book of His 'Metaphysics,'" (1907; many later reprintings) is a lightly annotated translation of the opening portion of what Aristotle seems to have called "First Philosophy."
In this case, "first" does not indicate "simplest," but refers to such fundamental questions as 'what is existence?' and 'why is there Being rather than Not-Being?' (The traditional name means literally "After Physics," and seems to refer to the "Physica," a treatise on the material nature of things which preceded "First Philosophy" in a standard list of Aristotle's writings.)
The whole book on "Metaphysics" presents difficulties to the reader; the first section is probably the easiest to understand on a first reading. Taylor's very literate translation helps, and he provides some guides to the novice reader, but the book, now over a century old, cries out for a bibliography of more modern studies. Making historical (rather than philosophical) sense out of this portion is difficult.
In its first "book" (or scroll), one of the great minds of Western Civilization examines what he supposes to be the answers to these fundamental questions by earlier philosophers, most of whose works now exist only in tiny fragments, including the quotations he himself provides. Most of the treatment consists of Aristotle's analyses of their arguments -- or supposed arguments -- and his evaluations of them. Taylor takes some pains to make clear what is (or may be) their original thoughts, as distinguished from what Aristotle makes of them.
For, as Taylor, among many others, points out, Aristotle doesn't seem to take into consideration that these predecessors may have been trying to answer other questions entirely. As a result, his analyses, while often acute in terms of his own, Post-Platonic, stage of thought, either miss the point, or, at best, obscure the argument. Still, this is the earliest surviving serious collection of such thoughts and opinions (although Plato mentioned some of them in the course of various Socratic "Dialogues"); and even the mistakes of a first-rate thinker can be of value.
Despite this Aristotelian filter, these ideas have had a long history in Western Civilization, preserved by Aristotle, his commentators, and by collectors of "wise sayings" ("Doxographers"). Sometimes their theories were presented as valid alternatives, but they sometimes were used as a foil for entirely different systems of thought. At least one Church Father tried to link all "heresies" to such archaic systems, in the happy belief that his own "orthodox" Christianity had no such intellectual vulnerabilities. These "First Philosophers" have been very popular with some twentieth-century philosophers, notably including Jaspers and Heidegger. One may wonder whether the very obscurity of their words has made them acceptable "authorities" to those in search of new departures in philosophy.
There is also a small but interesting literature comparing their ideas, so far as we can recover them, to the early philosophies of India and China. (Such comparisons between "Western" and "Eastern" thought, at least so far as India is concerned, go back to antiquity; often with assertions about who was 'borrowing' from whom. In modern times, claims, or assumptions, of influence of the West on early China, or of China on the West, have frequently been made as well.)
Outside these philosophical and comparative projects, a vast secondary literature on these thinkers, commonly known as the "Pre-Socratics," has grown around around this text, and material cited in ancient commentaries on Aristotle, plus second- or third-hand accounts in digests from later times. Of these, the most important is the "Lives of the Eminent Philosophers" by Diogenes Laertius, a translation of which I have recently reviewed (as a companion piece to this one).
For those looking for a more modern introduction to the words (and perhaps the thoughts) of the earliest Greek Philosophers, there are two fairly up-to-date volumes available in English. The older, but up-dated, is a Penguin Classics volume edited by Jonathan Barnes , "Early Greek Philosophy" (1987, second edition 2002), and the other is Robin Waterfield's "The First Philosophers The Presocratics and The Sophists" for Oxford World's Classics (2000), which, as the title shows, includes additional material. (I keep meaning to review both of them, one of these days.)
For a resolutely bare-bones translation of the "fragments" (mainly quotations in ancient texts) of the Pre-Socratics, see Kathleen Freeman's old (1948) but durable, "Ancilla to the Pre-Socratics." I have reviewed this one it is confined to those passages which Diels, a nineteenth-century German scholar, considered authentic, known, after his arrangement as "B Texts" -- as opposed to the A Texts, or "Testimonies," statements *about* the early philosophers. (Freeman dealt with the "A Texts" in a long out-of-print companion volume.)
For those interested in the actual Greek (and some Latin) texts, including a lot of the "A" Testimonies, and some (usually) not-too-technical discussions of textual problems and philosophical issues, the first place to go used to be G.S. Kirk and J.E. Raven, "The Presocratic Philosophers A Critical History with a Selection of Texts" (Cambridge University Press, 1957; in paperback in 1971). This edition of the book was replaced by the extensively revised Second Edition, by Kirk, Raven, and M. Schofield, in 1983 (quickly issued in paperback, and reissued with a bibliographic update in 1995).
In the Second Edition, the translations, previously relegated to italics at the foot of the page, were moved into the main text in roman type; a great convenience to new Greekless readers, a distraction at first to those, like me, who had become accustomed to jumping back and forth on the page.) It included a section from the "Derveni Papyrus," the first closely datable "Orphic" text with philosophical content. Kirk-Raven-Schofield has received a mixed reception on ; there are reviewers who insist that the first edition was better. Either is certainly worth reading.
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