John Bracegirdle's Psychopharmacon: A Translation of Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae (MS BL Additional 11401) (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 200) by Bracegirdle, John and a great selection of related books, art and collectibles available now at AbeBooks.com. Mar 16, 2017  Boezio De Consolatione Philosophiae Pdf Files. 3/16/2017 0 Comments The Consolation of Philosophy (De consolatione philosophiae). La tomba di Severino Boezio nella Basilica di San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro a Pavia. Boezio fu giudicato a Roma da un collegio di cinque senatori, estratti a sorte, presieduto dal. Dear Internet Archive Supporter. I ask only once a year: please help the Internet Archive today. We're an independent, non-profit website that the entire world depends on. Most can't afford to donate, but we hope you can. The average donation is about $41. If everyone chips in $5, we can keep this going for free.

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Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (born: circa 475–7 C.E.,died: 526? C.E.) has long been recognized as one of the most importantintermediaries between ancient philosophy and the Latin Middle Agesand, through his Consolation of Philosophy, as a talentedliterary writer, with a gift for making philosophical ideas dramaticand accessible to a wider public.

He had previously translatedAristotle’s logical works into Latin, written commentaries on them aswell as logical textbooks, and used his logical training to contributeto the theological discussions of the time. All these writings, whichwould be enormously influential in the Middle Ages, drew extensivelyon the thinking of Greek Neoplatonists such as Porphyry andIamblichus. Recent work has also tried to identify and evaluateBoethius’s own contribution, as an independent thinker, though oneworking within a tradition which put little obvious weight onphilosophical originality. Both aspects of Boethius will be consideredin the sections which follow. Life and WorksAnicius Severinus Manlius Boethius was born into the Roman aristocracyc.

475–7 C.E.—about the same time as the last RomanEmperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed (August 476). Boethius livedmost of his life under the rule of Theoderic, an Ostrogoth educated atConstantinople, who was happy to let the old families keep up theirtraditions in Rome, while he wielded power in Ravenna. Boethius’sprivileged social position ensured that he was taught Greek thoroughlyand, though it is unlikely that he travelled to Athens or Alexandria,the sites of the two remaining (Platonic) philosophical schools, hewas certainly acquainted with a good deal of the work which had beengoing on there. He was able to spend most of his life in learnedleisure, pursuing his vast project of translating and commentingphilosophical texts. The Roman aristocracy was, by his day, thoroughlyChristianized, and Boethius also became involved in some of theecclesiastical disputes of his time, centring mainly around a schismbetween the Latin and the Greek Churches which was resolved shortlybefore his death.Boethius’s final years are well known to anyone who has read his mostpopular work, the Consolation of Philosophy.

He agreed tobecome Theoderic’s ‘Master of Offices’, one of the mostsenior officials, but he quickly fell out with many others at court,probably because he attacked their corruption. Accused of treason andof engaging in magic, he was imprisoned and (probably in 526)executed, but not before he had the chance to write his literarymasterpiece.The Consolation of Philosophy, a prosimetrum (a prose workwith verse interludes) which recounts, in polished literary language,an imagined dialogue between the prisoner Boethius and a lady whopersonifies Philosophy, contrasts with the rest of Boethius’soeuvre. Besides writing text-books on arithmetic andgeometry, closely based on Greek models, Boethius devoted himself totranslating Aristotle’s logic and commenting on it; he produced acommentary on the Categories and two each on OnInterpretation and on the Isagoge(‘Introduction’) by Porphyry, which had become a standardpart of the logical curriculum.

He also composed logical text-books ondivision, categorical syllogisms, and on two branches of logic whichwill require further explanation (seebelow, ):hypothetical syllogisms and topical reasoning (along with acommentary on Cicero’s Topics). In three of his fourTheological Treatises (often known as the Opusculasacra), I, II and V, Boethius uses his logical equipment totackle problems of Christian doctrine; IV, however, is astraightforward statement of Christian doctrine, a sort of confessionof faith; whilst III is a brief, not specifically Christianphilosophical treatise.

The Logical Project and the Logical CommentariesBoethius’s work as a translator and commentator of Aristotelian logicmight appear to be just the beginning of a wider project, announced inthe second commentary on On Interpretation (c. 516), and cutshort by his execution, to translate and comment on all the writingsof Plato and Aristotle. Yet Boethius seems to have become so engrossedin his role as an expositor of logic, not limiting himself to a singlecommentary on each work, and writing extra textbooks, that it is hard notto see it as having diverted him, in any case, from his more grandiosescheme. Indeed, Boethius seems to have pursued a rather speciallogical project.The particular, deliberate nature of this project is not cast intodoubt by the fact that Boethius’s logical commentaries, althoughalmost certainly not merely servile translations of marginalia from aGreek manuscript (as James Shiel (1990) has argued), are not at alloriginal in their logical doctrines.

For what is important isBoethius’s choice of Porphyry as his main authority in logic. It wasPorphyry who, two centuries or so earlier, had been responsible formaking Aristotelian logic an important subject within the Neoplatoniccurriculum. He held that it did not conflict with Platonic doctrine,as his teacher Plotinus had believed, because its area of applicationwas limited to the sensible world, to which everyday languagerefers.

Later Neoplatonists accepted the importance of Aristotelianlogic, and the harmony between Platonic and Aristotelian teaching, butthey tended to try and discover Neoplatonic doctrines even in theAristotelian logical texts. In the case of the Categories,they even imagined that Aristotle had taken his doctrine from aPythagorean writer, Archytas, and that there was an underlying andwildly metaphysical strand to the text which it was the commentator’sduty to uncover. Boethius, however, although making occasional use oflater commentaries, usually followed Porphyry: on the Categorieshe stayed close to Porphyry’s surviving (and quite simple)question-and-answer commentary, whilst the long, second commentary onOn Interpretation is commonly accepted as the best guide toPorphyry’s exegesis, since his own commentary does notsurvive. Boethius’s commentaries were, therefore, because morePorphyrian, so more Aristotelian than what was being written in Greekin his period.Boethius’s Porphyrian approach is evident even in the two commentarieson Porphyry’s own Isagoge (an introduction to theCategories which had become accepted as a standard part ofthe logical curriculum)—one text on which, obviously, Porphyryhimself had never commented. Near the beginning of theIsagoge, Porphyry mentions, but declines in an introductorywork to discuss, three questions about universals. Do they exist orare they mere concepts?

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If they exist are they bodily or not, and, ifthey are not, are they separated from sensible things or do they existin them? By Boethius’s time, the Greek commentators had developed astandard way of glossing this passage. They explained that universalscould be considered as concepts (universals postrem—‘following the thing’), as intrinsic tobodily things (universals in re—‘in thething’) and as really existing and separate from bodies(universals ante rem—‘before thething’). Rather than proffer an explanation on these lines,Boethius turns to a train of thought (1906, 161:14 ff.) which goesback in part to Porphyry himself and, through him, to the greatAristotelian, Alexander of Aphrodisias.Boethius begins with an argument against universals as an object ofenquiry. Everything that really exists is one in number, but nothingthat is common to many at the same time can be one in number. Butuniversals are common to many at the same time. And souniversals do not exist in reality, but in thought alone.

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Thoughts,Boethius continues, are of two sorts: those which derive from theirobject in the way it is (call them ‘correspondingthoughts’) and those which do not. If the thoughts that areuniversals were corresponding thoughts, then universals would alsoexist in reality. Since they do not, universals are non-correspondingthoughts, and non-corresponding thoughts are empty. Enquiry intouniversals (and therefore into the five predicables studied in theIsagoge) should therefore be abandoned. Boethius’s way oftackling this objection is to challenge just the very finalstage. Non-corresponding thoughts, he argues, are not empty if theyare abstractions. Consider a mathematical object such as a line or apoint, which the mathematician contemplates by abstracting from thematerial body of which it is part.

No such thing exists in reality asan immaterial line or point, and yet the mathematician’s thought isnot empty or misleading. The case is similar if we disregard theaccidental features of some particular thing (John Marenbon, forinstance) and are left just with his nature of man. This line ofreply, as Alain de Libera (1999, 159–280) has shown, goes back toAlexander of Aphrodisias or his followers.

Boethius, however, goes onto give it his own particular twist, by suggesting that the universalsproduced by abstraction are not merely the constructions of the mind,but do grasp reality as it is. Although this line fits oddly with theargument from which Boethius set out, he may already be anticipatingthe Principle of Modes of Cognition, which he proposes in theConsolation(see below).The long, second commentary on On Interpretation is veryprobably based, as explained above, on Porphyry’s lost commentary. Itthus provides a full account of Porphyry’s semantics—a semanticsbased on Aristotle, because he takes ordinary language to be concernedwith material things rather than with the intelligible world. There isalso an extended discussion of the sea-battle passage in Chapter9. According to the principle of bivalence, ‘There will be asea-battle tomorrow’ is either true or false. But, if it istrue, then there will be a sea-battle tomorrow; if false,there will not be one.

Either way, is it not therefore amatter of necessity? Boethius’s strategy is to say that ‘Therewill be a sea-battle tomorrow’ is indeed either true or false,but, because the sea-battle is a contingent event, its truth orfalsehood is only indefinite. What does this position amount to?

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Thereare various interpretations of how it should be understood. Perhapsthe most plausible is that Boethius holds that, if an event eis contingent, then the sentence ‘ e will takeplace’ is false, even if it turns out that e does infact happen, because ‘ e will take place’ impliesthat e will take place necessarily. But a qualified sentencesuch as ‘ e will take place contingently’ is truejust in case it is not necessary that e happens, ande actually happens. The Logical Text-BooksThe two most interesting of Boethius’s logical text-books are thetreatises on topical differentiae (c. 522–3) and onhypothetical syllogisms (516–22), since each gives an insightinto an area of late ancient logic for which there are otherwise few,if any, sources.From Aristotle’s Topics, logicians of late antiquity hadelaborated a system of topical argument, which had been considerablyinfluenced by the needs of Roman lawyers.

The focus of topical theoryis on discovering arguments, and these arguments are notusually formally valid, but merely plausible. The topicaldifferentiae are the classifications of types of sucharguments; knowing the differentiae gives the arguer a readymeans to hit upon a persuasive line of reasoning. Suppose, forexample, I want to argue that we should praise Cicero. I start tryingto think what information I have which might help me to argue thispoint, and I remember that everyone is full of praises for anotherorator, Demosthenes.