Themistius: On Aristotle Metaphysics 12

About the Author Yoav Meyrav is a Research Associate at the University of Hamburg, Germany.Michael Griffin is Associate Professor of Classics and Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He is co-editor of the series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle and translator of two of its volumes: Olympiodorus: Life of Plato and On Plato First Alcibiades 1–9 (Bloomsbury 2014) and Olympiodorus: On Plato First Alcibiades 10–28 (Bloomsbury 2015).Richard Sorabji is Research Professor of Philosophy at King's College London and a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, UK. He is the author of many books, including Necessity, Clause and Blame, Matter, Space and Motion, and Time, Creation and the Continuum, all published by Bloomsbury, and general editor of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series. Product Description This is the only commentary on Aristotle's theological work, Metaphysics, Book 12, to survive from the first six centuries CE – the heyday of ancient Greek commentary on Aristotle. Though the Greek text itself is lost, a full English translation is presented here for the first time, based on Arabic versions of the Greek and a Hebrew version of the Arabic. In his commentary Themistius offers an extensive re-working of Aristotle, confirming that the first principle of the universe is indeed Aristotle's God as intellect, not the intelligibles thought by God. The identity of intellect with intelligibles had been omitted by Aristotle in Metaphysics 12, but is suggested in his Physics 3.3 and On the Soul 3, and later by Plotinus. Laid out here in an accessible translation and accompanied by extensive commentary notes, introduction and indexes, the work will be of interest for students and scholars of Neoplatonist philosophy, ancient metaphysics, and textual transmission.