simplicity See CURVE-FITTING PROBLEM, DIVINE. ATTRIBUTES , PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENC. Simplicius (sixth century A.D.), Greek Neoplatonist philosopher born in Cilicia on the southeast coast of modern Turkey. His surviving works are extensive commentaries on Aristotle’s On the Heavens, Physics, and Categories, and on the Encheiridion of Epictetus. The authenticity of the commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul attributed to Simplicius has been disputed. He studied with Ammonius in Alexandria, and with Damascius, the last known head of the Platonist school in Athens. Justinian closed the school in 529. Two or three years later a group of philosophers, including Damascius and Simplicius, visited the court of the Sassanian king Khosrow I (Chosroes) but soon returned to the Byzantine Empire under a guarantee of their right to maintain their own beliefs. It is generally agreed that most, if not all, of Simplicius’s extant works date from the period after his stay with Khosrow. But there is no consensus about where Simplicius spent his last years (both Athens and Harran have been proposed recently), or whether he resumed teaching philosophy; his commentaries, unlike most of the others that survive from that period, are scholarly treatises rather than classroom expositions.
Simplicius’s Aristotle commentaries are the most valuable extant works in the genre. He is our source for many of the fragments of the pre- Socratic philosophers, and he frequently invokes material from now-lost commentaries and philosophical works. He is a deeply committed Neoplatonist, convinced that there is no serious conflict between the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The view of earlier scholars that his Encheiridion commentary embodies a more moderate Platonism associated with Alexandria is now generally rejected. Simplicius’s virulent defense of the eternity of the world in response to the attack of the Christian John Philoponus illustrates the intellectual vitality of paganism at a time when the Mediterranean world had been officially Christian for about three centuries.
See also COMMENTARIES ON ARISTOTL.
I.M.