Principles and Proofs: Aristotle's Theory of Demonstrative Science (review)

294 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:2 APRIL 1994 Four essays that concern hamartm and katharsis merit special mention. Nancy Sherman carefully develops the case that hamart/a is a "failure to see what in principle, in optimal conditions (and sometimes only in hindsight), is accessible to human light" (188). This claim is echoed in Rorty's splendid introductory essay, which also reinforces some of Davis's central insights: "Sometimes, it is the very energy and vigor of our purposiveness--the fact that we act in a focused arc of attention--that blinds or at least blurs what appears at the periphery of our intentions" (7). Like Davis, Rorty asserts that tragedy is able dramatically to display the limitations of what we take to be perfection precisely insofar as it presents US with "recognizably enlarged and simplified versions of what is best in us" (9)" Aryeh Kosman similarly argues that tragedy is about the "pathology" of action (65). In his intriguing formulation, kathars/s involves both a "staged purification" of the tragic protagonist and a "sympathetic purification" of the audience: "through the ritualized and formalized action of tragic poetry, we as audience are.., enabled to participate in the restorative capacities of human society to forgive and thus to heal the guilty sufferers of tragic misaction" (68). Finally, Stephen White maintains in an equally compelling essay that Aristotle favors tragedies that highlight the noble responses of virtuous protagonists to moral misfortune, "bad situations for which they are not strictly responsible" (~5)The two books reviewed here leave us with several difficult issues. If even the most virtuous can fall prey to hamart/a, to what extent can tragedy help one to avoid hamart/a? Here one confronts the tension between philosophical ambiguity and political education. Rorty asserts that Aristotle understands fate in terms of ethos(character) rather than da/mon (fate), which fits well with the notion of educating individuals to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. But tragedy suggests that the nature of one's character and its relationship to action becomes fully intelligible (if at all) only in retrospect. To the extent that ethosremains opaque and mysterious within the prospective orientation demanded by action, it is itself daimonic. The odogon, it would seem, shows up as part of the tragic logos of ethos. It is in this partly intelligible guise, one might argue further, that Dionysus finds a place in Aristotle's tragic vision. J^cos HOWLANn University of Tulsa Richard D. McKirahan, Jr. Principles and Proofs: Aristotle's TheoryofDemonstrative Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, a99~. Pp. xiv + 34o. Cloth, $47.5 o. McKirahan's goal in Principles and Proofs is to "recapture Aristotle's view of the nature of science and scientific knowledge" (5). Thus, instead of merely reproducing the doctrines of the Posterior Analytics, he tries to "reconstruct" a theory Aristotelian in spirit, sometimes filling in what Aristotle left unsaid and sometimes suggesting places where Aristotle might have taken a better course. However, these reconstructions are generally conservative and tied to the text: each point is based on the analysis of relevant passages which McKirahan first translates and discusses. The result is a major work: in a few words, it is the best comprehensive account of Aristotelian science to date. BOOK REVIEWS 295 Chapters II-V spell out the general structure of Aristotelian sciences as proofs (b,xobeC~Lg) resting on indemonstrable principles (~Qgctf,): hence the book's title. McKirahan then subjects these two components to further analysis, investigating the types of principle (VI-X) and the types of proof (XI-XVI). Two longer chapters on the nature of scientific explanation (XVII) and the cognition of first principles (XVIII) integrate these materials into a comprehensive account. In the remainder of this review , I will give a sketch of his synthesis and mention some points with which I disagree. McKirahan defends the view that there are three, and only three, types of principle : (common) axioms, definitions; and existence claims. He takes the essential property of axioms to be the fact that each axiom can be used in proofs belonging to more than one science; then he compares (75-76) axioms to principles of superordinate sciences, which implies...