Aristotle's De Caelo Research Articles

Robert Grosseteste’s Translation of Simplicius’s Commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo: Tracking down a Second Manuscript and the Greek Model

The note surveys the reception history of Robert Grosseteste's Latin translation of Aristotle's De Caelo and of Simplicius's commentary on the same treatise. It presents the analysis of previously unnoticed fragments from a second manuscript of the translation. Their discovery necessitates the revision of earlier ideas about the limited dissemination of the text. The note also confirms a neglected hypothesis about the Greek model that Grosseteste used for his translation. A late-15th-century manuscript must be considered a direct copy of Grosseteste's lost Greek codex.

Jerome of Moray: a Scottish Dominican and the evolution of Parisian music theory 1220–1280

ABSTRACTThis article examines the Tractatus de musica of Jerome of Moray (‘de Moravia’), affirming his Scottish identity, as proposed by Michel Huglo in 1994. It argues that the Tractatus de musica presents an important overview of Parisian music theory in the thirteenth century, relating to both chant and mensurable music in that century, because it combines the views of several generations: the Positio discantus vulgaris, which he says was used ‘among the nations’; the De mensurabili musica of John of Garland, who corrected its deficiencies; and the treatises of Franco of Cologne and Petrus Picardus. It considers Jerome's career in three phases: his exposure to music and music theory in Scotland; his studies in Paris, most likely under John of Garland, perhaps at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame; and his involvement in the liturgical reforms within the Dominican Order, implemented by its Master, Humbert of Romans in 1256. Rather than assigning Franco's Ars cantus mensurabilis to 1280 (as proposed by Wolf Frobenius) and Jerome's Tractatus to sometime after this, I suggest that Jerome was exposed to John of Garland's teaching in the 1240s and that the Franconian system may have started to gain ground in the 1250s. Jerome compiled his Tractatus over a period of time, adding an excerpt about cosmic music from the commentary of Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle's De caelo perhaps as early as 1271 or 1272, in response to the criticisms of John of Garland and his followers being made by Johannes de Grocheio.

Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination by Alexander N. Gabrovsky

Reviewed by: Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination by Alexander N. Gabrovsky Joe Stadolnik Alexander N. Gabrovsky. Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xix, 291. $119.99 cloth; $89.00 e-book. In Chaucer the Alchemist, Alexander N. Gabrovsky proposes to read Chaucer's poetry for the ways he "exploits the scientific thinking of his day in order to conceptualize and aestheticize his own unique philosophy of physics," and more broadly, of worldly change and mutability. Chaucer is cast as a perceptive observer of a world ever in motion and ever in flux; these natural-scientific interests encouraged him to study up on physics, alchemy, and logic, and then to translate this learning into a [End Page 469] number of his poems as narrative programs or interpretive keys. Gabrovsky praisingly calls these poems "thought experiments," and so described, these texts are made to exemplify Chaucer's genius as both literary maker and natural philosopher. Chaucer the Alchemist invites readers, in its title and in its arguments, to reimagine his poetry as the thoughtful, methodical reworking of elemental subject matter: contemporary medieval philosophies of the mutable, the transforming, and the contingent. An introduction argues that references to physical transformation across Chaucer's poetry together reflect that captivation by worldly change. Gabrovsky here provides a survey of "clerical cultures" that may have served as conduits of learning to medieval society broadly and Chaucer's London milieu specifically: namely the mendicant orders and medieval universities; he also places his arguments within the scholarship on Chaucer and medieval science. Four chapters then focus upon one poem matched with a series of academic concepts or modes of thinking. Gabrovsky argues that The House of Fame follows a "philosophical formula for [its] action" (29) as a "product of fourteenth-century debates on the science of mechanics" (28). Two subsequent chapters scour The Franklin's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde for "a network of alchemical imagery" that "guides Chaucer's whole narrative project" in each (189). The fifth chapter understands the avian debate of the Parliament of Fowls to be a logical exercise in conditionals and possibilities, written expertly after a Scholastic pattern of ars obligitoria. A conclusion suggests that the monadic and dyadic concepts of Neoplatonist thought offered Chaucer another way to think abstractly about change, and to write about it. Gabrovsky deserves praise for how Chaucer the Alchemist assembles anew a set of natural-scientific texts and ideas from the corners of medieval intellectual culture for a generalist Chaucerian readership. For instance, his chapter on The Franklin's Tale highlights an alchemical discourse of astrological and sexual conjunction with reference to the Latin Epistola solis ad lunam crescentem. This is the "book Senior" of the Canon's Yeoman's reading list, translated from the Arabic of Muhammad ibn Umail. The mingling of the astrological with the alchemical in the Epistola serves well to warrant Gabrovsky's claim that the zodiacal preoccupations of the learned "philosopher" of Orléans and his client Aurelius chimed with a cognate alchemical allegory, the wedding of sun and moon. Passages from the Epistola and texts such as Albertus Magnus's Liber mineralibus and the De compositione alchimiae of Morienus illuminate [End Page 470] how alchemical theory might underwrite an interpretation of the physical and psychological transformations wrought by the tale's narrative. Gabrovsky grounds another tidy claim for Chaucer's poetic adaptation of physical concepts on solid, convincing ground in his chapter on The House of Fame. Geffrey's changing sense of the wicker labyrinth's motion—whirling from without and "stente" from within—presents readers with a problem of relative perception and, more broadly, worldly and celestial mechanics. Gabrovsky tracks how such questions were taken up in Aristotle's De caelo and Aquinas's commentary upon it, as well as via figures of thought such as John Buridan and Nicole Oresme's example of the observer on a moving ship. When Geffrey claims to "know where he stands" with confidence, to his readers he appears to stand unsteadily and with uncertain shiftiness in the chaotic, spinning world of the poem. At a few points like these...

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Book Review: The Foundations of Copernicus's Book I: Niccolò Copernico e la Fondazione del Cosmo Eliocentrico, con testo, traduzione e commentario del Libro I de Le Rivoluzioni Celesti

THE FOUNDATIONS OF COPERNICUS'S BOOK I Niccolo Copernico e la Fondazione del Cosmo Eliocentrico, con testo, traduzione e commentario del Libro I de Le Rivoluzioni Celesti. Anna De Pace (Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2009). Pp. 450. euro32 (paperback). ISBN 978-88-6159071-7.This is a study of the philosophical foundations of Copernicus's planetary theory focused on the first book of De revolutionibus. It contains a new edition with an Italian translation of the manuscript version of Book 1,1-1 1, the original preface (absent in the editio princeps of 1543, published for the first time in the Torun edition of 1 873), and Copernicus's dedicatory letter to Paul DI. Appendices present Copernicus's Latin translation of Lysis's letter to Hipparchus, Osiander's anonymous preface, and Cardinal Schonberg's letter to Copernicus.This new edition aims at bring Book I of De revolutionibus back to the form in which it was presumably conceived by the author (Rosen has already provided the English reader with a translation, On the revolutions (1978), which integrates the printed and the manuscript versions of Copernicus's major work). De Pace explicitly distances herself from the editorial line of the Gesamtausgabe, which relies on the printed edition and relegates the original introduction to an appendix (NCG, ii, 487-8), as well as from the same decision by Lerner and Segonds for the announced Les Belles Lettres edition. De Pace's transcription is accurate and readable; she expands the ligatures and abbreviations and provides some normalization (e.g., capital letters and the distinction of 'u' and V). In some points, she improves and slightly corrects former transcriptions (as emerges from a comparison with NCG). However her normalization is not always consistent (ptolemaeus becomes Ptolemaeus whilst plutarchus is not standardized (p. 256). The Italian translation is elegantly agreeable, an improvement on the already available ones, the most important of which appeared in Barone's edition of Copernicus's astronomical works (Copernico, Opere (Turin, 1979)). The most original renderings of particular terms are discussed and justified in the notes (1,1, 'parte perfetta' for 'absolutae partes', Rosen: 'separate parts'; 1,2, 'cime delle montagne' for 'vertices', Rosen: 'poles'; 1,8, 'corpi integrali' for 'universi' as opposed to the 'partes', Rosen, more elegantly: 'wholes').De Pace presents Copernicus's achievement as essentially philosophical. This undertaking can be regarded as a continuation of a continental scholarly tradition that includes A. Birkenmajer and Bilinski, as well as Barone, Lerner and Hallyn. Moreover, she accepts Koyre's judgement on the importance of the geokinetic theory for the emergence of classical mechanics but questions the claim that no adequate philosophical and physical doctrine supported Copernicus's system. By contrast, she emphasizes his essentially Platonic commitment and the philosophical coherence of his program. Her solid background in the history of philosophy allows her to trace Copernicus's explicit and implicit references to Plato's works, especially Timaeus and Laws, but also Phaedo and Republic. As a strong evidence of Copernicus 's familiarity with Timaeus, she also cites (36-7 ana passim) a passage from Rheticus's Praise of Prussia (cf. Narrano prima, ed. Hugonnard-Roche and Verdert (Wroclaw, 1982), 85-6 and 144) reporting on Copernicus's and Giese's rebuttal of Aristotle's criticism on the geokinetic doctrines of the Pythagoreans and Timaeus. Yet, it should be remarked that this passage merely refers to Aristotle's De caelo 11,13, that is, to an indirect source of the Pythagoreans' and Plato's conceptions.She regards two Copernican ideas as essentially 'Platonic' (p. 38); (i) his claim that the main task of astronomy is to unveil the beauty underlying the cosmos, that astronomical geometries and physical causes shall be derived from higher purposes rooted in God's goodness; (ii) his assertion of the ontological and epistemological priority of astronomy over physics which undermines the Aristotelian hierarchy of knowledge. …

Book Review: Insights into de Caelo: New Perspectives on Aristotle's De caelo

INSIGHTS INTO DE CAELO New Perspectives on Aristotle's De caelo. Edited by Alan C. Bowen and Christian Wildberg. (Philosophia Antiqua, cxvii; Brill, Leiden, 2009). Pp. vi + 320. euro103. ISBN 978-90-04-17376-7.Familiarity with the main doctrines of the De caelo is a prerequisite for an understanding of much of the thought and culture of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, as Alan C. Bowen and Christian Wildberg state in the Preface to their edited volume of essays on Aristotle's work. Some readers of this journal may be attracted to this volume because of the influence of De cae Io on cosmological thought through to the time of Galileo and Kepler, for, as Bowen and Wildberg note, the work helped to shape the way in which Western civilization imagined its natural environment and place at the center of the others will be interested in considering particular issues in De caelo.The contributors to the volume are highly regarded specialists in ancient Greek philosophy; their papers aim to offer philosophically sound readings of difficult passages or topics in De caelo, with the goal of deepening our understanding of Aristotle's cosmology. As the editors explain in their Introduction, the Greek title Peri ouranou and the Latin De caelo indicate that the subject of the work is the entire universe; the English title On the heavens may suggest that the sublunary region is excluded. However, the work is concerned not only with the nature and movement of the sphere of the fixed stars and with planetary movements as well as other phenomena in the region between the sphere of the fixed stars and the Moon, but also considers the universe as a whole (including the Earth) and the natural motion of all the elementary bodies therein. The contributions here reflect the breadth of Aristotle's enquiry; several authors focus on issues relating to scientific method. In some instances the work of one contributor relates closely to and reinforces the arguments of another; in others, contributors disagree about particular questions.A list of the chapter titles gives a good indication of the contents. In the first essay, From Plato's Timaeus to Aristotle's De caelo: The case of the missing world soul, Thomas K. Johansen considers the title of Aristotle's work, noting that Aristotle himself discussed the different meanings oiouranos (heaven; at 278b9-21). Comparing topics treated in the Timaeus and the De caelo, Johansen argues that there is no world soul in De caelo, nor is there an explicit cosmic teleology, such as that found in the Timaeus. While the astronomy of the Timaeus provides a divine template for living ethically, in the De caelo Aristotle is not concerned with ethics. Several other contributors consider Aristotle's work in relation to that of Plato, including Sarah Broadie, who (in 'The possibilities of being and not-being in De caelo 1. …

Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity by Andrea Falcon

478 BOOK REVIEWS Second Vatican Council was an exercise in ecclesial self-consciousness that enabled the Church to relate to every dimension of human experience. The Church as communion rooted in Trinitarian life and made visible in the Eucharist, the Church as a network of relationships that begin with the spousal nature of the human body itself, works always to unite all people to one another in Christ, the redeemer who sacrificed himself for the entire human race. Pope John Paul's thinking strove to move beyond the intellectual and other divisions that can paralyze the Church and cause her death through the abandonment of her universal mission. Academics especially are right to be wary of a unity achieved by running roughshod over those distinctions that are necessary to understand the truth of things and to safeguard freedom. Nonetheless, Pope John Paul's synthetic vision traced the unity of the books of Scripture as a whole, the unity of body and soul in the human person, the unity of Christ and the Church in ecclesial communion, the unity of man and woman in marriage in order to understand the truth of things and to safeguard freedom. This volume is a tribute to him and to Cardinal Dulles as well as to all who contributed to it. Archdiocese ofChicago Chicago, Illinois FRANCIS CARDINAL GEORGE, 0.M.I. Aristotle and the Science of Nature: Unity without Uniformity. By ANDREA FALCON. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvii+ 139. $75.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-521-85439-3. The division of the natural world into two radically different kinds of physical substance-one often called "aether" and the other called "ponderable," or sometimes just "ordinary," matter-barely more than a century ago was not uncommon among natural scientists. The rudiments of the idea trace back to Aristotle, although for him these two substances were rigorously localized in the two principal regions of the cosmos, and thereby would acquire appropriate names: the celestial bodies and sublunary bodies. Copernicus and Galileo quickly did away with the isolation of the two substances, so aether's proponents found themselves positing it as much above as below. Yet after the acceptance of the theory of relativity, the idea of aether fell out of style among mainstream natural scientists, and ever since the very notion that nature should be thought to be so "bifurcated" has been considered to be a scandalous weakness in the Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Even among modern-day Thomists this bifurcation has often been held up as an instance of something that Aristotle simply got wrong, and so as a sign that the Stagirite's philosophy of nature is now of only historical BOOK REVIEWS 479 interest; we realistic Thomists (the story goes) should focus our interest on more relevant parts of Aristotle's corpus. Science has shown us that he was on the wrong track, so we must defer to it on these matters. There are, however, at least two problems with this approach: (1) few modern Thomists have tried to keep up with where modern science is going, so we are ignorant of what science thinks on these matters; and (2) even fewer Thomists have made careful study of the more obsolete parts of Aristotle's natural philosophy where he begins to spell out in detail his thoughts on the basic structure of the cosmos, so they do not know what they are dismissing. Andrea Falcon's Aristotle and the Science of Nature addresses the latter problem and is a superb introduction not merely to the text and substance of Aristotle's De Caelo, especially as it bears on this division of nature into the sublunary and the heavenly, but also to the scholarly work on the subject in the last thirty years. Trying to see nature the way Aristotle does, Falcon argues that, although his contemporaries and successors (especiallythe Platonists) rejected his view, Aristotle posits an important discontinuity in nature that may in fact be a philosophical virtue. Aristotle's principled acceptance of the radical diversity of kinds of activities and natures in daily experience leads to an openness to finding still more fundamental divisions in the cosmos; combining this with the equally...

On the Fringes of the Corpus Aristotelicum: the Pseudo-Avicenna Liber Celi Et Mundi

AbstractIn this article, I examine a Latin paraphrase of Aristotle's De caelo known as the Liber celi et mundi. The text was translated from Arabic in the third quarter of the twelfth century, and thus pre-dates all four Latin translations of De caelo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It was probably written by the ninth century Arab, Hunayn ibn Ishaq. I show the weakness of a previous theory that the Liber celi et mundi derives indirectly from Themistius's paraphrase of De caelo. The text was translated into Latin by Dominicus Gundissalinus and his Jewish colleague, Johannes Hispanus. From c.1250, it was mis-attributed to Avicenna, and there is evidence that it had earlier been attributed to Aristotle by certain English writers. I consider the function of the Liber cell el mundi within the corpus of early Aristotelian translations, and the date of its expulsion from the corpus.

Aristotle de Caelo and de Generatione et Corruptione - The Works of Aristotle translated into English: De Caelo. By J. L. Stocks, M.A., D.S.O.; De Generatione et Corruptione. By Professor H. H. Joachim. Two parts in one. 225 × 145 mm. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1922. 10s. net. - Aristotle on ‘Coming-to-be’ and ‘Passingaway’ (de Generatione et Corruptione). A

Aristotle <i>de Caelo</i> and <i>de Generatione et Corruptione</i> - The Works of Aristotle translated into English: De Caelo. By J. L. Stocks, M.A., D.S.O.; <i>De Generatione et Corruptione</i>. By Professor H. H. Joachim. Two parts in one. 225 × 145 mm. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1922. 10s. net. - Aristotle on ‘Coming-to-be’ and ‘Passingaway’ (de Generatione et Corruptione). A