Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 37
win the admiration of Erasmus—were deployed in translations of the Parva
naturalia, Mechanics and other scientific works. In his prefaces all the standard
humanist complaints about contemporary scholastics were repeated: their
inability to understand Aristotle, their barbaric language and their futile search
for answers to pointless questions. And in his learned scholia ample space was
given to the Greek commentators, whose method of exposition he tried to
imitate. 118
For humanists like Leonico Tomeo the Greek commentators represented a
purer and more authentic exegesis of Aristotle than could be found in the scholastic
tradition. By the middle of the sixteenth century virtually all the ancient
commentaries on Aristotle were in print, both in the original and in Latin
translation. Access to these works affected the way that Aristotle was read in a
number of ways. Alexander of Aphrodisias’s doubts about the second book of
the Metaphysics set off a long-lived debate (continued in the twentieth century
by Werner Jaeger) about its authenticity and correct placement within the
corpus. While Alexander’s views on the soul decisively influenced Pomponazzi,
many in the Averroist camp preferred Simplicius’s exposition of De anima,
which they believed could be used in support of the unity of the intellect.
Simplicius, along with Themistius, also provided evidence for the essential
harmony of Aristotle and Plato. And Philoponus, by arguing for the existence of
a void in nature, gave ammunition to those—Galileo among them—who were
challenging the fundamental principles of Aristotelian physics. 119
The philhellenic bent of humanist Aristotelianism provoked a backlash among
scholastic philosophers, who feared that Arabic and medieval expositors were
becoming unfashionable as the Greek commentators gained in popularity. In
order to remain competitive, they produced up-to-date editions of approved
authors such as Thomas Aquinas, replacing the accompanying medieval
translations of Aristotle with modern ones, making editorial improvements to the
text and providing indexes, cross-references and other scholarly tools. 120 The
most elaborate of such enterprises was the eleven-volume Giuntine edition of
Aristotle and Averroes (1550–2). Its editors were happy to borrow what they could
from the humanists. They adopted the Aristotle translations of Bruni, Bessarion,
George of Trebizond and Leonico Tomeo; and they applied philological
techniques to Averroes, collating different texts, revising them to enhance
readability and including versions recently translated from Hebrew
intermediaries. But this edition was designed to strike at the heart of the
humanist assumption that the Greeks had a monopoly on philosophical
achievement. ‘Our age’, wrote the publisher Tommaso Giunta, ‘worships only
the Greeks’, while the writings of the Arabs are treated as ‘nothing other than
dregs and useless dirt’. Giunta and his editorial team set out to counter this
prejudice by presenting Averroes as the only Aristotelian commentator worthy of
the name and as a substantial philosopher in his own right, one who had
developed and refined the material he found in Aristotle. 121