Konstan David (ed.). Simplicius. On Aristotle Physics 6

Bloomsbury, 2014. — 188 p. — (Ancient commentators on Aristotle).Book Six of the Physics shows Aristotle at his best. Its subject is the continuum, and we can distinguish four main areas of discussion. First (chapters 1-4 and 10), he attacks atomism,1 but an atomism of a rather extreme sort, according to which the atoms of which matter is composed, despite having a positive size, are conceptually impossible to divide. Democritus and Leucippus, who should be regarded as the first atomists, had not been conscious of the need to decide whether the impossibility of dividing their atoms was conceptual or physical. For some purposes, e.g. the solution of Zenonian paradoxes, they needed the impossibility to be conceptual, for others merely physical. But in the circle of Plato's Academy, at least in the person of Xenocrates,2 atoms had been postulated which it would be conceptually impossible to divide. Aristotle does not ask himself the conceptual/physical question, but his attack is appropriate only against atoms of this conceptually indivisible sort.