Handbook of the History of Logic: - Fordham University Faculty

614 E. Jennifer Ashworth
who had “presented all the thoughts of Aristotle as if they were enveloped in a perverted,
corrupt, and noisome fog.” 23 In the same place he praised Burana for his
use of both Greek and Arab commentators, including new translations of the latter
from their Hebrew translations. An excellent example of the new Greek-based
texts is found in the Organon edition of Julius Pacius which was first published in
1584. In it we find the Greek text side-by-side with a new translation designed not
only to read well (as was the humanist goal) but also to capture the philosophical
significance of Aristotle’s words. In the margins we find a commentary dealing
with difficult points both of theory and of translation. 24
However, it must be noted that the humanist approach to Aristotle did cause
some problems both for commentators who wished to make use of medieval insights
and for publishers of medieval commentaries. The discussion of the Organon text
had been organized around a series of key terms which appeared in the old translations,
and whose disappearance from new translations could make the task of exposition,
or of simply locating references, rather difficult. 25 Thus although Johannes
Eck in 1516–17 produced a complete Organon commentary for the University of
Ingolstadt 26 which was based on the translations of Argyropulos, as indeed was the
Coimbra commentary of 1606, the Parisian humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’ Étaples
retained the translations of Boethius for his popular series of paraphrases and annotations
on Aristotle’s logical works first published in 1503. In the great 1570
edition of the Opera omnia of Thomas Aquinas two translations were included for
every commentary by Thomas. Thus, for the Perihermenias and Posterior Analytics
commentaries, we find both the translatio antiqua and the translation by
Argyropulos. 27 It is also significant to note that the popular and widely reprinted
translations of Aristotle into Ciceronian Latin by the French Benedictine Joachim
Périon seem to have been without much philosophical influence. 28
The other area in which humanism is particularly important for our purposes
is in the edition and translation of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle’s
logic. In his prefatory letter to the first volume of the Greek Aristotle published in
1495, Aldus Manutius had announced his intention of printing the commentaries
of Ammonius, Simplicius, Porphyry, Alexander, Philoponus, and Themistius, 29
and although he failed to complete the project, it was continued by his heirs,
23J. F. Burana, Aristotelis Priora Resolutoria (Paris, 1539), sig. A ii r: “[. . .] quòd anteà
non nisi per neotericos quosdam interpretes, qui omnia Aristotelis sensa depravata, corrupta, ac
teterrima quadam caligine involuta legebant, exponerentur [. . . ]”
24For discussion, see Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 83–85. Pacius also wrote an
analytic commentary on the Organon which was published separately in 1597.
25For discussion, see Cranz, “The Publishing History”, pp. 160–162, 169–178.
26This work was prescribed by the statutes of 1519/20, but it is not clear how much it was
actually used: see Terrence Heath, “Logical Grammar, Grammatical Logic, and Humanism in
Three German Universities,” Studies in the Renaissance 18 (1971), p. 59.
27Cranz, “The Publishing History”, p. 177.
28Cranz, “The Publishing History”, p. 178. For discussion of Périon as a translator, see
Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, pp. 72–79.
29C. B. Schmitt, “Alberto Pio and the Aristotelian Studies of his Time,” Study VI in The
Aristotelian Tradition, p. 55.