Commentaries on Aristotle's "On Sense and What Is Sensed" and "On Memory and Recollection" (Thomas Aquinas in Translation)

Translator’s Introduction

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION The best way for the modern reader to approach this medieval commentary on an ancient text by Aristotle is to start by reading the ancient text—which is apparently a sequel to Aristotle’s On the Soul—on its own, outlining its structure, paraphrasing and summarizing, and noting any comments and questions that occur. The commentary can then be read with the greatest possible appreciation of its distinctive procedures and interests, in dramatic contrast to those of Aristotle. At that point, the reader with even slight familiarity with Aquinas’s work may wish to turn at once to his prologue (p. 14), which begins with a provocative quotation from On the Soul about things, the intellect, and separation from matter; Aquinas himself can take it from there. On the other hand, the reader who requires preliminary historical information about and a foretaste of the commentary may find the following brief introduction useful. 1. Origins of the Commentary The standard modern edition of the Greek text of Aristotle’s nine little books on psychological and physiological topics collectively called Parva naturalia was published in 1955 by Sir David Ross.1 The edition includes material by Ross—an introduction, divisions of the text, paraphrases of and comments on the divisions—which amounts to a commentary that, with respect to its treatment of the first two books, may be taken as a modern counterpart to the two medieval commentaries translated in the present volume. Ross begins by discussing the thirteenth-century term parva naturalia, which seems to have been coined shortly after Aquinas’s death and which means, roughly, “little books in natural philosophy,” although , as Ross says, “Aristotle sums up the contents better when, in 436a6–8, he refers to ‘the phenomena common to soul and body.’”2 Ross goes on to discuss the listing of these works in the ancient catalogues of Aristotle’s writings and their place in his development, arguing that, although they seem meant to be read after On the Soul, all of them were composed before at least the second book of the latter.3 3 After his death in 322 B.C., Aristotle’s works were transmitted to the Hellenistic, Byzantine, and Arabic worlds. Some or all of the Parva naturalia were occasionally the subject of commentaries, notably the Greek commentary on On Sense and What Is Sensed by Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. A.D. 200) and the Arabic “compendium” of Parva naturalia by Averroes (A.D. 1126–98). In the Latin world, after a long period in which Aristotle was known only in some of his logical writings, most of his other works, including Parva naturalia, were translated from Arabic versions in the latter half of the twelfth century.4 The standard introduction to Aquinas’s life, times, and works is JeanPierre Torrell’s Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume 1: The Person and His Work,5 the twelfth chapter of which is an excellent introduction to Aquinas’s Aristotelian commentaries. Aquinas was born in 1224 or 1225, about a quarter of a century after the University of Paris was founded. In 1210, 1215, and 1231, prohibitions were issued against the teaching of Aristotle ’s works at Paris, with particular reference to his writings in natural philosophy, but in the 1230s and 1240s some of the Aristotelian corpus, including On Sense and What Is Sensed, was included in two introductions to philosophy composed in Paris. Roger Bacon, who taught at Paris during the 1240s, and who later claimed to have been the first to lecture on Aristotle there, wrote a commentary on On Sense and What Is Sensed that may date from this period. In 1252, at about the time Aquinas arrived in Paris for his first stay in the Faculty of Theology, as a student during 1252–56 and a master during 1257–59, the English Nation of the Faculty of Arts included On the Soul in its official program of study; in 1255 the Faculty of Arts issued a comprehensive new program based on all available writings of Aristotle, which thus replaced the centuries-old tradition of liberal arts; the program indicates that On Sense and What Is Sensed was to be taught in six weeks and On Memory and Recollection in two. The available instruments for study of the Parva naturalia were the twelfth-century translations of them out of the Arabic and the compendium of Averroes, which had been translated in the early thirteenth century. Between 1254 and 1260 Aquinas...