Philosophy and Exegesis in Simplicius: The Methodology of a Commentator (review)

Most people who have heard of Simplicius know two things about him: he was a very learned man who included many quotations and reports of others' views in his writing, thus becoming one of our main sources for the pre-Socratics; but, unfortunately, he was a neo-Platonist, and his testimony is therefore to some degree suspect. So Simplicius has been studied more for the sake of assessing testimony about earlier philosophers than for his own sake; this is the first full-scale monograph on Simplicius in English, although virtually simultaneous with Pantelis Golitsis' Les commentaires de Simplicius et de Jean Philopon à la "Physique" d'Aristote: tradition et innovation (Berlin 2008). Simplicius, however, is not so neglected or undervalued as this might suggest: his projects of harmonizing Plato and Aristotle (and sometimes other philosophers), and of defending pagan philosophy against Christian attacks (leading to his polemics against Philoponus), have been much studied both by Anglophone scholars around Richard Sorabji and by Francophone scholars around Ilsetraut Hadot and Philippe Hoffmann. "Neo-Platonist" is no longer an insult, and it now seems normal that in later antiquity reading and commenting on Plato and Aristotle should also be a way of doing philosophy; if Simplicius' religious and harmonistic aims, and his scholarly methods, are not ours, we are interested in alternatives to our own way of doing things. But we have lacked a systematic study of Simplicius' methods in his commentaries, and of his strategies for using authors besides Plato and Aristotle (not just the pre-Socratics, but also Theophrastus and Eudemus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyry, and Proclus and his school, whom Baltussen discusses in turn). Baltussen's aims are laudable, but his book is not a safe guide; Golitsis, while not comprehensive, is much better.

Baltussen pursues some good questions: why does Simplicius quote so much (just to save the texts from the wave of Christian barbarism?), what are his sources, and how does he handle so much information? (Actually Simplicius discusses no more writers than Proclus, but he cites verbatim much more, and tries to go beyond secondary sources.) Baltussen needlessly defends Simplicius against the bizarre idea that he knew the pre-Socratics only through Alexander of Aphrodisias. However, it is true that Simplicius sometimes uses secondary sources, and also that Alexander was very important for him. Baltussen says that "overall Simplicius considered [Alexander a] reliable guide and interpreter.… Disagreement is expressed in muted form and head-on confrontation is rare" (192). This both understates and overstates Simplicius' relation to Alexander, and misses his method as a commentator. Simplicius' Physics and De Caelo commentaries are in effect metacommentaries on Alexander's lost commentaries (his Categories commentary starts instead from Porphyry and Iamblichus).

One important hermeneutic principle for Simplicius is that each treatise must have a single primary object—σκοπός—such that everything else it discusses is discussed on account of some relation to that object. Baltussen discusses this principle, but misleadingly. On 117 he has Simplicius attribute to Alexander (top of the page) the view that the σκοπός of the De Caelo is the world, and (lower down) the view that it is the four elements; attribute to Iamblichus the view that it is the universe; and Simplicius himself endorse the view that it is "both the universe … and the four elements." In fact Simplicius attributes to Iamblichus the view that it is only the fifth (heavenly) body, and to Alexander the view that it is both the world and the five simple bodies; Simplicius himself says that the σκοπός is just the five simple bodies. The mistake is particularly serious, because Baltussen suggests that Simplicius does not really make up his mind, and opts for plural σκοποί, when Simplicius emphatically insists that each treatise must have a single σκοπός, and criticizes Alexander for breaking that rule. (On 36 Baltussen seems to suggest that Simplicius took the single-σκοπός rule from Alexander, but in the passage he cites Simplicius is criticizing Alexander.)

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