This is the abridged edition of the volume published in 2020 with OUP as the proceedings of the 19th Symposium Aristotelicum, which took place in Munich in 2011 (see BMCR 2021.12.46). The present volume omits the eight essays on the chapters of the De motu (henceforth DM) which amount to a detailed commentary on the text, but retains the long and rich introduction in two sections by Christof Rapp and Oliver Primavesi, the precious new critical edition of the Greek text with the English translation by Benjamin Morison, and a full apparatus criticus of the text (apparatus plenior), along with a bibliography and two indices, locorum and nominum. The present volume aims, then, to be more accessible to non-specialists, those who want to read the new text of DM and learn about its philosophical point, its place in Aristotle’s philosophy, and also its history from antiquity to modern times.
The first part of the introduction by Rapp (pp. 1-66) gives us a succinct and illuminating overview of the philosophical scope of DM and its affinities to other works of Aristotle, such as De incessu animalium, Physics 7, the ethics, but also the Metaphysics, especially book Lamda, and De caelo. Rapp provides a valuable discussion on a number of other important issues regarding the DM, such as its authenticity, the treatment of practical syllogism in DM 7, of perception and phantasia, and, quite importantly, of self-motion. One central issue that Rapp discusses is how DM relates to the soul theory of De anima. This is a multifaceted issue involving the cardiocentrism of DM, which is absent from De anima, and the hylomorphic theory of soul in De anima, which is absent from DM. There is much debate about these issues, which Rapp summarizes well. As Rapp argues, such differences may have to do with the specific philosophical nature of the DM, which in a way is unique in the Corpus Aristotelicum. It is not necessarily the case that Aristotle moved from a cardiocentric account of the soul to a hylomorphic account, a developmentalist approach favoured by scholars such as Nuyens and Ross, which assumes that the two positions are distinct and incompatible with each other. Despite its title, the DM is not a zoological work but rather a work on motion and motivation. The central question addressed in it is how we are moved or how the soul moves the body. Aristotle speaks of mental states, phantasiai, that represent certain things in the external world as desired or avoidable and seeks to explain how an episode of desire occurs. The crucial question here of course is how these mental states that trigger desires cause alterations in the central organ of an animal, and how these alterations are then transmitted to our body and make us move. This role is apparently taken over in DM by the connate pneuma (πνεῦμα σύμφυτον), a kind of warm air located in the central organ of the soul, the heart, which transforms thermal alterations into mechanical movements of the limbs (see DM 10-11). Yet the DM surprises the reader as it goes beyond that and discusses motions of animals and motions of celestial bodies, for instance in chapters 3 and 4. This makes the DM a work that fuses biology and a cosmology in a way that no other surviving Aristotelian work does. This interdisciplinarity, as Rapp calls it, goes together with a level of generalization that we do not find often in Aristotle. Such features make the DM an intriguing philosophical work, which sheds light on discussions of topics treated in several other works of Aristotle, ranging from natural philosophy and cosmology most especially on ethics and metaphysics.
The second part of the introduction, by Primavesi (pp. 67-156), is illuminating not only about the manuscript tradition of the text but also about the practices and the assumptions of the various modern editors of the text and about the strengths and weaknesses of their editions. This part of the introduction explains what justifies the new edition of the text and also the new scholarly discussion of the DM (which is included in the 2020 volume). This is the first time that all witnesses of the text, that is, all forty-seven Greek manuscripts, ancient commentaries, and medieval translations of the DM are taken fully into account for the reconstruction of the text. Primavesi has collated all ancient manuscripts and has established a new stemma, guided also by the discoveries of Pieter De Leemans’ edition of the Latin translation of DM by William of Moerbeke. The new stemma crucially differs from previous ones in that it accepts a new hyparchetype (β). This is a major discovery by the editor, Oliver Primavesi, and shapes his edition of the text. This hyparchetype was hypothetised by Martha Nussbaum as a majuscule ms. in her stemma and as a possible independent source of certain Greek manuscripts by De Leemans. Now Primavesi argues convincingly that all Greek manuscripts of the text go back to two main ancestors, two hyparchetypes, alpha and beta. Yet all modern editions of the text, from Bekker to Nussbaum, rely on the hyparchetype alpha, that is, on the manuscript descendants from that. Primavesi has now reconstructed the beta branch of the tradition and has an instrument by means of which he can judge and correct the text of the alpha branch of the manuscript tradition.
This part of the introduction is extremely valuable for all students of ancient philosophy and of Aristotle’s philosophy in particular, because it outlines in a very clear and detailed way how problematic are not only the previous editions of the DM but also many of our editions of Aristotle’s works, either because they do not take into account all witnesses of the text, or because they operate on mistaken assumptions about them (like those of previous editors of DM), or because of both things. Primavesi does an excellent job commenting on each modern edition of the text in a clear and erudite way, discussing their editorial practices and highlighting their corresponding strengths and weaknesses. Everyone involved in an edition of an Aristotelian text should read Primavesi’s account very carefully. This part of the introduction is followed by four appendices: one listing all forty seven manuscripts of the DM; one listing all manuscripts of the Latin translation of the work by William of Moerbeke; a third listing all divergences of the new text from the last edition, by Martha Nussbaum in 1978; and finally a detailed defense of the view that the basic manuscript of the new hyparchetype, Berolinensis Philippicus 1507, belongs to that branch of the tradition, unlike previous accounts of that ms. as a witness of Aristotle’s texts.
The edition of the text that follows with a facing translation into English (pp. 162-89) is accompanied by two apparatuses printed at the bottom of the text, an apparatus fontium and a critical apparatus. The latter lists only the cases where the two main branches of the tradition, alpha and beta, differ from each other, or where the printed text differs from the beta branch. In a more detailed apparatus (the apparatus plenior, pp. 190-202) Primavesi lists the manuscript evidence for readings preferred in the text and for important variant readings. The book ends with a bibliography and two indexes, as mentioned earlier. The bibliography does not contain the items mentioned in the individual essays of the 2020 volume but adds some new entries, either recent ones or items mentioned but wrongly omitted from the bibliography of the 2020 volume.
To conclude, the volume offers a fresh new text and well-crafted English translation of an important Aristotelian work and renders the 1978 edition of Nussbaum obsolete. The rich introduction on the philosophical substance and on the history of the text is a model of its kind. On the other hand the omission of the essays that comment on the text makes the volume less valuable and less attractive than the 2020 volume. The present volume could have included some short notes on the text of each chapter that would help the reader to access the text better. In a way the present volume highlights the new edition of the text, which is an achievement in Aristotelian studies and presents a new standard for future editions of Aristotle’s texts.