Zeno again: sourcing that turtle

 Continuing a thought from last week ...

Aristotle is our main source for Zeno's paradoxes. As a side note, there is no mention of a turtle in Aristotle's account of the paradox of Achilles' race with a slower runner. The slower runner is just that. 

The paradox began to turn on Achilles against a turtle when Simplicius wrote up his paraphrase. 

Simplicius didn't come along and write his commentaries on Aristotle until the early 6th century AD -- three centuries after the flourishing of Diogenes of Laertius.  

I am still puzzled that D of L is so scattershot about Zeno and that when he does get around to the argument about motion, gives only one version of it, the idea that something is either at motion in a particular moment or at rest, and that a moving object can't really be either of those. 

But let us not go there. Let us go back to Simplicius. I wonder: was he simply paraphrasing Aristotle and adding some zoological pizzazz to it by throwing in the turtle as the slower runner?  Or did he have access to Zeno texts lost to us? He may for all we know have decided to include a detail that his master, Aristotle, had left out.    

Upon looking into it a bit I can tell you ... the more likely reading is that Simplicius made it up. 

First, and contrary to my earlier impression: Simplicius did NOT regard Aristotle as his master.  He became known as a great commentator on Aristotle, but his commentary was written from a neoplatonic point of view. The guiding idea was to show that the two figures weren't too too far apart from each other. But Simplicius was willing to criticize Aristotle from a [neo]platonic perspective when he could not reconcile the texts.

This makes it seem at least a little more likely that Simplicius would have introduced the turtle.  After all, making the paradox about a turtle makes Zeno seem more silly and less profound on the face of it.  If Simplicius had seen himself as an Aristotelean, I would have said he would have wanted to take the matter of these paradoxes with grand seriousness. So he would have been unlikely to introduce the turtle out of his own imagination. That would make it more likely he would add the turtle as an illustrative detail that his Master had, perhaps just under time pressures, simply omitted.  

But since Simplicius didn't see himself such, he might well have introduced the turtle without any supportive knowledge about a Zenonian original, without having any internal objection to the additional connotation of silliness.