Marginalia to Being and Time - Religious Studies at Stanford ...

Half-title page / Erstes Titelblatt [Schmutztitel]
A. Recto / Vorderseite (p. i) 30
[The half-title page reads: “Sein und Zeit / Erste Hälfte.” Under that Husserl writes in cursive:
amicus Plato magis amica
veritas 31
B. Verso / Rückseite (p. ii)
[This side is blank.]
30
This half-title page is found in SZ-1, but not in SZ-15. (BT-1 has a half-title page (the
unnumbered page 1) with only one line: “BEING AND TIME.”
31 (“Plato is a friend, truth a greater friend.”) The Latin phrase (spoken as if by Aristotle)
condenses the statement in Nicomachean Ethics (A, 6, 1096 a 14-17): “Perhaps it would seem to
be better S and, what is more, a duty S to destroy even what is closest to us for the sake of saving
the truth, especially since we are lovers-of-wisdom; for while both are dear to us, it is a matter of
divine ordinance to prefer the truth.” However, the provenance of the Latin phrase is complex:
[A] The Platonic dictum: The anonymous Liber de vita et genere Aristotilis records a
similar statement allegedly made by Plato about Socrates: “et alibi dicit [Plato] ‘Amicus quidem
Socrates, sed magis amica veritas.’” (In Ingemar Düring, Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical
Tradition, Studia Graeca et Latina Gothburgensia, vol. 5, Göteborg: Göteborgs Universitet, 1957,
p. 154 [28].) The Liber de vita itself is a late twelfth-century translation of one of the many Greek
lives of Aristotle (ΓΕΝΟG ΑΡΙGΤΟΤΕΛΟΥG) in circulation at that time, not unlike, for
example, the Greek Vita vulgata (cf. its nίλος µ¥ν Σωikάτης, •λλ µλλον nιλτάτη º •λήhgια,
Düring, p. 132 [9]; cf. also the Greek Vita marciana, (ibid., pp. 101-102 [28]).
[B] The Aristotelian dictum: Thomas Aquinas repeated the Platonic dictum of the Liber
de Vita (as above) in his commentary on the above passage from Nicomachean Ethics (In decem
libros ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum expositio, ed. Raimondo M. Spiazzi, Turin and
Rome: Marietti, 1949, lectio VI, no. 78, p. 21). Aometime thereafter the Latin of the Platonic
dictum was changed into the Latin of the Aristotelian dictum that Husserl inscribed in his copy of
SZ.