Sorabji on Aristotle's curtains
Jul 17, 2013 1:47:25 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Jul 17, 2013 1:47:25 GMT -5
It is some time since we heard from Professor Sorabji, but this week he has attracted our attention with an acute observation regarding Aristotle's Physics. "The late-ancient commentary culture is not simply identifiable with the movement we call Neo-Platonism," Sorabji the tirelessly entrepreneurial historian of philosophy - recently retired from King's College London - reminds us. He has just put out volume 99 of his series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle. In to-day's more enlightened world, there are few men who any longer have much time for Aristotle, who rather like Kant when not obscure was simply wrong is that not so. Yet Sorabji hopes we might a little reconsider. "The obscurity could have been intentional!" he cries. And in justification of that blaze of insight he cites the later Platonist commentator Ammonius:
"Let us ask why on earth the Philosopher is contented with obscure teaching. We reply that it is just as in the temples, where curtains are used for the purpose of preventing everyone, and especially the impure, from encountering things they are not worthy of meeting. So too Aristotle used the obscurity of his philosophy as a veil, so that good people may for that reason stretch their minds even more, whereas empty minds that are lost through carelessness will be put to flight by the obscurity when they encounter sentences like these." (On Aristotle's Categories 7.7-14, translated by Cohen and Matthews, Volume 7, 1991.)
Have the purer among our members ever attempted to draw aside the curtain, or rend the veil, and if so what was there?