In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews Harold Tarrant. Scepticism or Platonism? The Philosophy of the Fourth Academy. Cambridge : the University Press, 1985. Pp. ix + 18~. N.P. The period for which Tarrant seeks to present "an essentially new view," is loo B.C. to 15o A.D. (vii). His focus is on the philosophy of the Fourth Academy as represented by the commentary on Plato's Theaetetus which Tarrant attributes to Eudorus of Alexandria , a pythagorizing platonist who flourished c.~5 B.C. The reader will remember that in the platonism of this time, the greatest good is defined as "becoming like unto God," in the words of the theological formula wrenched out of context from the Theaetetus (176B), and purged of its interlocutory or witty allusiveness. Eudorus, like the better known Philo, held the view of their times that Plato was a follower of Pythagoras (Dillon MP 143)? Eudorus is believed to be the author of commentaries on the Aristotelian Categories(Sext. in Ar. Categ.) and Plato's Timaeus (Plut. DeAnita. in Tim.), of a De Finibus as well as of a work on topical problems which followed the Stoic division of philosophy into physics, ethics, and logic (Stobaeus, Wachsmuth II.4~). According to Simplicius (in Arist. Phys.) Eudorus also wrote a treatise on the first principles of the Pythagoreans. According to Alexander Aphrodisias on Aristotle's Metaphysics , Eudorus emended the text of the latter at x6.988a7 in the interest of proving that Plato believed Matter to be the creation of the One. The amalgam of doctrine called "Middle Platonism," is not a mixture of platonism and revived pythagoreanism, but rather a reunification of Academic or official "platonism" (i.e., pythagorism platonized by association with propositionalized excerpts from the communicative interactions of the dialogues) with popular pythagorism. The former had been calling itself platonism since Speusippus, but it was really and successively a Speusippean- or Xenocratean-pythagorism, namely, a reasoned-and-systematic or learned-pythagorism: learned and officialbecause it picked, with doxographic selectivity at doctrines enunciated by speakers in Plato's dialogues, and adduced them as legitimation for the Academy's own successive dogmatic, non-dialogical philosophies. We must not forget that Speusippus is clearly identified as a pythagorean both by Aristotle (N. Eth. I.vi.7) and his fragments. The exclusivism of the Academy had probably driven "underground," or out of "the successions of philosophy," the popular forms Philo, of course, has turned the tables on the pythagorizers who ascribed all interesting or acceptable doctrines to Pythagoras, by laying it down that Pythagoras learnt h/s philosophy while sojourneying in Palestine among the followers of Moses. The Mosaic philosophy naturally turns out to be, in Philo, surprisingly similar to the Stoicized platonism of Antiochus. [137] 138 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY 1988 of pythagorism, the forms that called for faith rather than reasoning, and for simply written or didactically-oral communication. What occurs at this time is, thus, not a revival of the "old" pythagorism which had "died out" (as Dillon puts it following Cicero, MP 1t8), but the interassimilation of popular with Academic (and Stoicized) theologizing which was to eventuate in the Neoplatonism of the next phase of Hellenistic philosophy. The first effects of Arcesilaus's skepticism, which had tried to return the Academy (early third century B.C.) to a kind of antilogistic Socratism, and of Aenesidimus's identification of the fallacies of the dogmatists (just before or after Anno Domini) had long since dissipated, and served only to reinforce the religious piety which implicitly downgraded the ability of the human intellect to achieve its goals unaided. The skepticism to which Tarrant's title (English spelling) has particular reference is indeed that of the Academy; but the relation of the various "platonisms" he deals with to Plato's works themselves as dialogues, is not even broached by this monograph. While Tarrant makes a very good and carefully qualified case for the identity of A, as the author of the anonymous Commentary on the Theaetetus, and Eudorus, he sees Eudorus as "an Academic in the tradition of the Fourth Academy rather than as a PythagoroPlatonist under Antiochus' influence" (138). In the valuable chapter 4 which spells...

pdf

Share