Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

The Latin Tradition of Logic to 1100 9
and long commentaries, both lost, on this text and on On Interpretation. His important
follower, Iamblichus, produced a commentary on the Categories (also lost)
and Boethius’s contemporary at the School of Alexandria, Ammonius (435/45 —
517/26) seems to have concentrated on Aristotelian commentary. (See [Sorabji,
1990; 2004], for an introduction to these commentators.)
Porphyry’s Different Objects Theory gave Neoplatonists a way to be thoroughly
Aristotelian in logic (which was concerned with language, and language with the
world as sensibly perceived [Ebbesen, 1981, 133-70]), and he was certainly a keen
reader of the greatest of the later ancient Peripatetic, Alexander of Aphrodisias.
His Isagoge can be seen as fitting neatly into the Aristotelian Organon as an Introduction,
although modern assessments of its metaphysical commitments vary
(compare [Porphyry, 1998] and [Porphyry, 2003]). Some later Neoplatonists, however,
did not follow the Different Objects theory so consistently. Although the
Aristotelian texts remained for them the basis of the logical curriculum and much
of their discussion concerned the type of issues Porphyry had raised, views of a
Platonic kind influenced their exegesis. For example, in his Categories commentary,
now lost but witnessed through the commentary by Simplicius (early 6th
century), Iamblichus seems to have taken advantage of the idea that the originator
of the Categories was Archytas, a Pythagorean whom he claimed Aristotle
copied, and he attempted to apply the Categories to the supra-sensible realities
of Platonic metaphysics; and Ammonius, commenting on On Interpretation, tries
to insert the teaching of Plato’s Cratylus that words are not merely conventional
signs [Ammonius, 1897, 34:10–41:9].
Boethius and the Commentary Tradition
What was the nature of Boethius’s dependence on the Greek Neoplatonic commentators?
According to James Shiel, it was total. Boethius simply found a
Greek manuscript crammed with marginalia, themselves drawn from the writings
of several commentators. ‘The translation of these various marginalia and the
arrangement of them into a continuous commentary according to the order of
Aristotle’s words would seem to be Boethius’ only title to originality’, remarks
Shiel [1990, 361], even though he concedes [1990, 370, n. 83] that Boethius himself
contributed expansions and references to Latin authors. Shiel founds his position
on the fact that Boethius’s commentaries are not based on any one known, Greek
source. Most specialists now reject his view [Chadwick, 1981, 129-31; Ebbesen,
1990, 375-7], because it assumes the very point it claims to demonstrate, that
Boethius was incapable of making his own choice and arrangement of material.
Even if his sources included manuscripts with marginal scholia — and it is a moot
point whether any such codices existed at that time — there is no reason to think
that Boethius did not use them selectively, along with the complete texts of commentaries
[De Libera, 1999, 164-8; Magee, 2003, 217].
Boethius, then, was not a mere translating machine. But nor was he an original
thinker in his logical commentaries. He was happy in general, just like his Greek