5 - The Peripatetic De Audibilibus

Summary

The De Audibilibus is preserved only as a quotation in Porphyry's Commentary on Ptolemy's Harmonics. Porphyry quotes it at length but not in full, as he himself makes clear, and the missing passages have not survived elsewhere. It is plainly a work of the Peripatetic school, not later than the mid-third century b.c. (and probably rather earlier), but its authorship is uncertain. Porphyry ascribes it to Aristotle, and its general approach and the theories it propounds are certainly close to his, but few modern scholars have accepted the attribution. It has been variously ascribed to Theophrastus, Heraclides Ponticus and Strato. The most recent detailed discussion is that of Gottschalk (1968), who gives cogent reasons for rejecting Theophrastus and Heraclides as possible authors. His arguments for Strato and against Aristotle seem to me inconclusive. (Strato followed Theophrastus, Aristotle's immediate successor, as head of the Peripatetic school, a position he held from about 287 to 269 b.c. He was a physical theorist of some originality.)

I cannot pursue the issues in detail here, but two important ones may be briefly mentioned. First, Gottschalk draws attention to the treatise's view (especially in 800a) that sound is propagated not as a moving current of air, or as air particles travelling from a source to the ear, but by ‘vibrations’ (‘pulsations’ might give the sense better) through a medium that remains in its place.