Page - 17 - in The Priority of Locomotion in Aristotle’s Physics

to Scepsis in Troad by Neleus, who took over the library of his teacher Theophrastus, who again was a close disciple of Aristotle and his successor in the Lyceum. In Scepsis these texts were stored and hidden in a cave, and for this reason were accessible neither to the Peripatetics nor to anyone else, and consequently fell into oblivion until they were rediscovered and brought back to Athens. Eventually, they were transferred to Rome where Andronicus of Rhodes used the manuscripts for his edition and catalogues of Aristotle’s works.10 There are reasons for rejecting the thesis of Andronicus’ editorship, or at least for suspecting that the role he played in the arrangement of the Corpus Aristotelicum was of much less importance than Porphyry’s statement seems to imply and the traditional view assumes.11 However, I will not say anything more about this question here, since, as I intend to show, the question whether Andronicus was the originator of the Corpus’ arrange- ment does not contribute anything to determining the context of Physics Book VIII. What we have to keep in mind, however, is that the arrangement of the Corpus Aristotelicum, i.e. also that of the eight books of our Physics, was not accomplished by Aristotle. Apart from the question what scholars think about how exactly the Phy- sics came down to us, a consensus exists that what we call the Physics today consists of at least two originally independent parts: a treatise dealing pri- marily with the principles of nature and another which focuses on examin- ing the phenomenon of change.12 Yet, scholarly debate has persisted since antiquity on which books of the Physics these treatises consisted of and founded by Aristotle, and treated philosophical problems in all their depth. In contrast to the less technical exoteric writings, the esoteric ones were not written for a broader audience. Apart from a few exceptions, only the esoteric writings have come down to us (see Brunsch- wig (1991), 21–22). 10 For this see Düring (1957), 413–25. See also Brunschwig (1991), 22–23, and Barnes (1997), 28–31, who both criticize this view for several reasons. 11 See Brunschwig (1991), 28, who argues that, despite what the traditional view claims, Aristotle’s esoteric writings were available to scholars even before Andronicus’ edition of Aristotle’s works. Barnes (1997) goes further and calls Andronicus’ activity “at best amateur tinkering rather than genial construction” (65) without any significance for Aristotelian scho- larship, as his edition involved the publication of faulty manuscripts, even though the impor- tant ones were available to scholars throughout the entire period (see 65–66). 12 See for instance Wagner (1967), 275, Brunschwig (1991), 28–32, Barnes (1997), 34–36, 59–61, Morison (2002), 13, n.11. Note that different names are used for the first work. For instance, as Barnes (1997), 66, n.279, points out, Simplicius uses different names in order to refer to what he takes to be this first part of the Physics, i.e. Books I–V. Sometimes he calls it Περὶ τῶν ἀρχῶν (see In Phys. 1, 6, 9–10) or Τὰ περὶ ἀρχῶν φυσικά (In Phys. 5, 801, 14– 16), while at other places he just uses (Φυσικά) (In Phys. 6, 923, 8). For my purposes, how- ever, it is only important that there are at least these two different parts, the second of which is called On motion, no matter what the name of the first is. The arrangement of the Physics 17 ISBN Print: 9783525253069 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647253060 © 2014, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen