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ARISTOTELIAN AFTER ARISTOTLE1

R.W. SHARPLES

I will begin with three quotations: in his third book de Philosophia creates great confusion ... at one moment he attributes all to intellect; at another he says that the universe itself is a ; then he puts some other god in charge of the world and gives it the role of governing and preserving the movement in the world by a sort of counter-rotation; and then he says that it is the heat of the that is god ... when he wants god to be incorporeal, he deprives him of all sensation and wisdom.

"What," someone might say, "do you class Aristotle and Epicurus together?" Certainly, as far as the point at issue is concerned. For what is the difference, as far as we are concerned, between banishing the divine outside the world and leaving no association between us and it, or confining the inside the world but removing them from earthly affairs? ... For we are looking for a providence that makes a difference to us, and he who does not admit daimones ( 8atJ..LOVE~) or heroes or the possibility of the survival of at all has no share in this.

This outstanding investigator of and accurate judge of divine matters places human affairs beneath the very eyes of the gods but leaves them neglected and disregarded, managed by some "nature" and not by god's reasoning.

The first quotation is from Cicero, in a passage2 where the Epicurean Velleius is presented as tendentiously seeking to discredit theories of the gods other than Epicurus' own.3 The second and third quotations

1 Versions of this paper have been delivered at Edinburgh, as an A.E. Taylor Lecture; at Gothenburg; and at the Symposium Hellenisticum in Lille. I am grateful to all those who have contributed helpful comments: especially to Brad Inwood who read through the penultimate draft, and also to Monika Astzalos, Silke-Petra Bergjan, Enrico Berti, Bernard Besnier, Tad Brennan, Sarah Broadie, John Dillon, Philip van der Eijk, Michael Frede, Mats Furberg, Charles Genequand, Pamela Huby, Tony Long, Jaap Mansfeld, Jan Opsomer, Christopher Rowe, Mary Ruskin, Richard Sorabji and Emidio Spinelli. Responsibility for the views expressed here, and for any misuse of their advice, of course remains my own. 2 Cic. N.D. I 33 = Arist. fr. 26 Rose; cf. Cherniss 1944, 592-594. 3 Appeal to Aristotle's surviving works can give at least some degree of credibility to all the descriptions of Aristotle's god given by Velleius except the claim that god, being incorporeal, can have no wisdom, this being based on the 2 R.W. SHARPLES are from Atticus,4 of all Platonists in antiquity perhaps the most implacably anti-Aristotelian. There has been no shortage of discussion among modern scholars as to just what Aristotle's own views on god were. I cannot hope to reproduce that whole debate here, let alone develop it further. The identification of certain central questions will here be purely preliminary to consideration of how these are reflected in discussions of Aristotle's views in the subsequent half-millennium. On a strict interpretation of "Hellenistic " it is indeed only the first three of those five centuries that are strictly relevant. However, interpretations of Aristotle's position from the first two centuries of the Roman Empire reflect those developed in the Hellenistic period; and the views developed by Alexander of Aphrodisias and his school around the turn of the third century A.D., much more fully documented than what had preceded, are developments of, and reactions to, the preceding debate.5 Moreover, in terms of the contrast between Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic theology developed by Runia elsewhere in this volume, Alexander's treatment, just because it keeps so closely to the Aristotelian texts and the problems they raise, falls on the "Hellenistic" side of the divide, in spite of its later date. Recent scholars have rightly supposed that we can trace develop­ ments in Aristotle's thought about god and about the from one of his works to another. 6 The ancients, however, did not consider such developmental hypotheses; their aim was to extract a coherent position from consideration of Aristotle's works. This means that they had a motivation which we do not for reconciling apparently

Epicurean assumption that without sensation there can be no wisdom. Cf. Jaeger 1923/1948, 138-139; Bos 1989, 185-191. (I have throughout used a lower-case initial for "god" in the singular as well as in the plural, to avoid question-begging implications of where they are not necessarily present in the original Greek texts. I am grateful to Christopher Rowe for raising this point.) 4 Fr. 3, 52-57, 71-74 and 81-85 des Places. Cf. Happ 1968, 79-80. 5 On the general history of the in the Hellenistic period see Wehrli, F., 'Der Peripatos his zum Beginn der ri:imischen Kaiserzeit', in: Flashar, H., ed., Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, begriindet von Friedrich Ueberweg: Die Philosophie der Antike, 3, Basel: Schwabe, 1983, 459-599; in the Imperial period, Moraux 1973, id. 1984, and Gottschalk 1987. I have attempted an overview of the entire period in 'The Peripatetic School', in DJ. Furley, ed., From Aristotle to Augustine, London: Routledge 1999 (Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 2), 147-187. 6 Cf.Jaeger 1923/1948, especially 342-367; Ross, W.D., Aristotle's , Oxford 1936, 94-102; Guthrie 1939, xv-xxxvi; Frede 1971; Kosman 1994. Below, nn. 12, 14, 32.