The philosopher, his predecessors, the commentator and his critics: on the criticism of Harold Cherniss's critique of Aristotle as a source for early Greek philosophy

Résumé

When studying the early Greek philosophers, it is usually not enough to recur solely to fragments. Testimonies are useful and sometimes key in order to reconstitute their doctrines. However, dealing with testimonies — and our major source of testimonies is Aristotle and the peripatetic tradition — may be tricky. Harold Cherniss's Aristotle's criticism of presocratic philosophy (1935) was a major milestone in the study of Aristotle's transmission of the doctrines of his Preplatonic predecessors. Cherniss's critics, however, have been hard over his reading of Aristotle. If Aristotle distorts presocratic doctrines intentionally, as Cherniss's critics charge him of accusing Aristotle, then it would be too risky to use Aristotle as a source. If he intentionally distorts his predecessors, we should expect him to do everything he can to hide all traces of it. However, if he is sincere, the so-called distortions may seem so because he cannot avoid seeing his predecessors through his own lenses. In this paper, I analyze three paradigmatic types of criticism raised against Cherniss: the one that aims to safeguard Aristotle's reliability as a source for early Greek philosophy, the one intended to safeguard his right to the title of historian, and another one that rejects both discussions as shadowing Aristotle's philosophical activity. Even if some of Cherniss's conclusions about the doctrines of the early Greek philosophers may seem outdated, his general method stands valid: Aristotle's testimony should be approached in a careful and systematic way in order to remove his misinterpretations and eventual distortions. The three types of criticism analyzed, however, do not seem to touch the kernel of this method. On the contrary, they seem to agree with the basic premises, but somehow insist that Cherniss's criticism is out of place.