Foreword
Crebro itaque illa iactabat: σπεῦδε βραδέως […] et: “sat celeriter fieri quidquid fiat satis bene”. Suet. Aug. 25.4
The present book is a substantially revised and updated version of my PhD thesis (“Aristotle on Self-Motion: Some Key-Texts”), which I defended in February 2017 at LMU Munich. However, my first foray into the topic of self-motion occurred much earlier. I was initially inspired by an advanced seminar on de Motu Animalium held by Prof. Dr. Ch. Rapp and Prof. Dr. O. Primavesi in preparation for the 19th Symposium Aristotelicum, which was to take place in Munich a few months later. Since then I have enormously profited from discussions with friends and colleagues in Germany and abroad. The people who in various ways have helped me develop my – still somewhat half-baked – views about self-motion in Aristotle are far too numerous to mention, yet some deserve to be named. First and foremost, I would like to thank my Doktorvater, Prof. Dr. Ch. Rapp for his unflinching support throughout my PhD, my co-supervisor, Prof. Dr. Peter Adamson, for helping me realise that my original presentation of the issues in the dissertation could be made more readable, and my third examiner, Prof. Dr. Oliver Primavesi, for sharing with me drafts of his (still forthcoming) monumental MA commentary for the AkademieAusgabe. I am also grateful to Prof. Marwan Rashed, who encouraged me to pursue this project at a very early stage, and to Prof. Thomas K. Johansen, who helped me improve on still very rudimentary drafts of Chapter 3 during my research stay at Oxford. Moreover, I should like to mention Prof. Henry Mendell and Prof. Orna Harari, with whom I had exhilarating exchanges of views during a workshop on Ph. VIII 5–10 in Tel Aviv, and whom I met again later both in California and during my post-doc at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows in Jerusalem. I am also much obliged to the organiser, the funders and all participants of the 26th meeting of the European Society for Ancient Philosophy (ESAP) on Aristotle’s Physics VIII 10, which was originally scheduled to take place in Rome last year, but then had to be held online only last March due to the ongoing pandemic: discounting the fact that my living room was a rather poor substitute for the Roman sky, the quality of the talks and the congenial atmosphere made the event not just plainly enjoyable, but also intellectually enriching.
