sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, touch), 36–38 human body (face, body and color of
the skin).
This treatise clearly postdates A although he authored a work by the same title
(e.g. PA 3.15 [676a18]; GA 2.8 [747b5]). How much of Aristotle’s work has been incorpor-
ated into the extant Problems remains a matter of dispute: Louis accepts a greater proportion
as genuinely Aristotelian than Flashar. Other sources include T (sections 2,
5, 12–13, 23, and 26 bear the titles corresponding to his On Sweating, On Tiredness, On Odors,
On Waters, and On Winds), and medical writings (H, D K).
There is great variety in the treatment of sources, from wholesale quotations to loose
parallels.
Flashar considers the work a Peripatetic handbook collecting and summarizing know-
ledge in the fields of medicine and science. While the author utilizes the four Aristotelian
qualities warm and cold, wet and dry as fundamental explanatory principles, there are
significant conceptual differences: for example, the concept of vacua shows clear parallels to
S L.
It is generally agreed that the extant work is the result of several redactions, as evidenced
by contradictions and repetitions. Flashar convincingly argues that most of the material
dates to the mid 3rd c. BCE, though there are later additions, common with this type of
literature. A collection of problems known today as Supplementa Problematorum was attributed
to Aristotle or Alexander of Aphrodisias in antiquity: Kapetanaki and Sharples (2006).
Also surviving is H.unain ibn Ish.a ̄q’s Arabic translation of a version of the text composed
after 200 CE. Moses ibn Tibbon translated the Arabic into Hebrew in 1264.
Ed.: W.S. Hett, Aristotle, Problems, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Loeb: 1970 and 1965); P. Louis, Aristote, Problèmes,
3 vols. (CUF 1991 – 1994); L.S. Filius, The Problemata Physica Attributed to Aristotle. The Arabic Version of
H.unain ibn Ish.a ̄q and the Hebrew Version of Moses ibn Tibbon (1999); M.F. Ferrini (with Italian trans.),
Aristotele, Problemi (2002).
H. Flashar, Aristoteles, Problemata Physica. Aristoteles Werke in deutscher Übersetzung (1991); A. Blair, “The
Problemata as a Natural Philosophical Genre,” in: A. Grafton and N. Siraisi, edd., Natural Particulars
(1999) 171–204.
Oliver Hellmann
Aristotelian Corpus On Sounds (322? – 269? BCE)
A short document On Sounds (De Audibilibus = Peri akousto ̄n) quoted by P in his
commentary on P’s Harmonics (67.24–77.18 Düring), and attributed there to A-
(51.1, 67.17). The treatise survives in no other ancient source, and in his introduction
Porphurios confesses that he quotes only “some of it, abridging it on account of its length.”
Its Aristotelian authorship has been doubted since the 19th c., but on this issue there is still
no consensus; inconclusive arguments have been put forward in favor of H
P, T and S.
The text, as it stands, is concerned with the generation and transmission of sounds (vocal
sounds in particular), and offers explanations of the causes of their pitches and qualities
which differ in important details from other 4th c. accounts. Porphurios’ ten-page abridge-
ment opens with the general thesis, articulated already by A (fr.1), that sounds are
the result of impacts (ple ̄gai) between bodies or between a body and the surrounding air. But
where other theorists (both earlier [e.g. Arkhutas] and later [e.g. A “ P”]
had imagined that the impacts cause the air itself to move, the author of the De
ARISTOTELIAN CORPUS ON SOUNDS