These commentaries will obviously be of interest to students of Aquinas. They should also be of interest to students of Aristotle, but with one caveat. The translators have had the delicate task of rendering into English not Aristotle’s Greek but the Latin translation of it on which Aquinas is commenting. As the Latin translates Aristotle on something close to a word-for-word basis, so the translators have translated the Latin version of Aristotle into English almost word-for-word. Further, as M…
Read moreThese commentaries will obviously be of interest to students of Aquinas. They should also be of interest to students of Aristotle, but with one caveat. The translators have had the delicate task of rendering into English not Aristotle’s Greek but the Latin translation of it on which Aquinas is commenting. As the Latin translates Aristotle on something close to a word-for-word basis, so the translators have translated the Latin version of Aristotle into English almost word-for-word. Further, as Macierowski explains, they have taken care to preserve the opacity of terms that Aquinas explains in his commentary; to have clarified these opaque terms in the initial translation of Aristotle’s text would have made Aquinas’s later clarifications nugatory. The rationale is clear and the policy defensible, but the resulting translation of Aristotle can be rough going, for example, “for it is not just from a distance, and not close up, that one of the mixed colors appears, but from anywhere” ; “Therefore they seek in this way, and, not seeking, they still recollect in this way, when that motion comes into being after the other one; but it used to come about when the other motions such as we have.
