Out of general interest, long before my “Aristotelian turn”, I first read Simon Van Den Bergh’s translation Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence) (1954) in the early 1980s. This was a deliberately less technical work that Averroes addressed to a non-specialist public, as a defense of philosophy and Aristotle against the attacks of the conservative Sunni theologian al-Ghazali. The most prominent of many disputed points concerned Aristotle’s thesis of the eternity of the world, which was understood to be incompatible with creationism. At the time, Averroes was only a name to me. But I was quite impressed with his overall defense of reason against Ghazali’s theological voluntarism and appeals to authority.
A bit later, I happened upon a translation of the Errors of the Philosophers attributed to Giles of Rome, and then the condemnations of 1270 and 1277. As a young contrarian, I became interested in the miscellany of propositions that were condemned. Later scholarship has pointed out the rather haphazard character of these lists. But conservative officials in the Latin Church were alarmed at the unbounded enthusiasm of some of their contemporaries for the influx of new, emancipating ideas from Greek and Arabic philosophy, the formulation of ethics independent of revelation, and the questioning of authority that accompanied it. The only kind of “authority” I accept is that based on actual merit that can be independently established. That rules out the possibility that any authority could be unconditional. In any case, I found that enthusiasm — even filtered through hostile representations — to be quite contagious.
It took many years before I was able to be more discriminating about all the many more or less sympathetic readings of Aristotle. I had first read Aristotle in 1977, in Richard McKeon’s Basic Works edition (1941). Even then I found many of the texts quite fascinating, but at the time I was more interested in Plato and Plotinus. Then in the 80s it was Foucault and Derrida and Deleuze and Nietzsche, and in the 90s Spinoza, then Leibniz. It was actually Deleuze who first put me onto Spinoza and Leibniz, but more and more I gravitated toward Spinoza and Leibniz themselves. I read more of and on Averroes during my Spinozist phase in the 1990s.
If you had told me in the 1990s that I would end up thinking of myself as an Aristotelian of sorts, in spite of my earlier moderate interest I would have thought you were crazy. At that point I was actually more interested in Averroes than in Aristotle himself.
It’s hard for me to say just when Aristotle became central for me, but it was some time in the early 2000s. Oddly enough, at this stage my first attraction was to the Categories. In my employment as a software engineer, I used to say to myself that Plato and Aristotle taught me more that I used on a daily basis than all my computer science courses and voluminous reading. Around the same time my father, who had been a philosophy professor, became very interested the work of Robert Brandom. It took a while for me to come to share that, but I read Brandom at first because I enjoyed the opportunities it provided for discussions with my dad. Eventually, Brandom taught me to appreciate Kant and Hegel, so I owe him a big debt.
I first read Brenet’s Transferts du Sujet shortly after it was published in 2003. Many of the distinctions Brenet makes went over my head at the time, but I was very impressed. I started collecting the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series. In the early 2010s a friend and I embarked on reading my former St. John’s tutor Joe Sachs’s marvelous Aristotle translations out loud.
I started this blog in 2019 after my father died, as a way of continuing the conversation. My first posts were very informal and brief notes on Aristotle; on what was then Brandom’s brand new book on Hegel, A Spirit of Trust; and some personal reflections on ethics and life in general.
Among other things I already wanted to work on Brenet’s book from the start, but I felt that a lot of preparation was needed. I envisioned the blog as a sort of expanding spiral, and said to myself that it might be five years before I had enough context assembled to do justice to it.
Now it has come full circle, and that forecast turned out to be about right. In no way did I engineer this; it has been very spontaneous at each moment. But this writing has taught me a great deal. Initially, it replaced my very informal handwritten journal, but I have come to use a lot of literal reproduction and commentary.
Averroes in his four surviving Long Commentaries reproduced the entire text of Aristotle that he discussed in each. H. S. Harris in his monumental Hegel’s Ladder — also a literal, paragraph-by-paragraph commentary that I greatly admire — mentions Averroes’ use of this literary style as a precedent.
My own habit of frequent heavy quotation may raise a few eyebrows, but ever since the 70s I have particularly found that manual transcription or doing my own translations really helped consolidate my relationship to a text. I fondly hope that others will find similar value in this endeavor.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 