Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 587 some 43~ items to the first listing, thus expanding it by some 40%. The addenda are inserted after page 112 of the first edition and run to page 16o; the incorporation of the new entries then required new indices, which now span pages 161-247 as compared to 113-87 in the original. Schmitt acknowledges assistance from Josef Soudek, who communicated much valuable information to him, and from Charles H. Lohr, with whom he has been collaborating on the Aristotle entry scheduled to appear in the Catalogus translationum et commentariorum, the sixth volume of which appeared in March 1986 from the Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D.C. This second edition of Cranz's work shows, among other things, the substantial number of omissions from the Index Aureliensis. Schmitt is under no illusions that his own listing is definitive, but he estimates that future bibliograpies will augment it by not more than five or ten percent--mainly from library holdings in Eastern Europe that have not yet been properly inventoried. Schmitt also observes that the combined holdings of the British Library in London and the Biblioth~que Nationale of Paris cover only about half of the entries he records, thus warning scholars that rare sixteenth-century books are much more widely diffused, many found only in small libraries, than has hitherto been supposed. WILLIAM A. WALLACE The Catholic University of America Edward Booth. Aristotelian Aporetic Ontology in Islamic and Christian Thinkers. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, Third Series, Voi. 2o. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I984. Pp. xv + 324 . $69.5o. Quite evidently, Aristotle rejects Platonic ontology with its commitment to the separate existence of universals. Yet there appears an ambivalence in his writings, since a commitment to universals is necessary for metaphysics to be a science. Booth's achievement shows, in the first of its six chapters, that Aristotle himself is aware of this ambivalence and expresses it as an aporia: on the one hand, empiricism demands that substance (ousia) be the individual; on the other, discourse (logos)and demonstration (apodeixis) require that substance be the universal, of which the individual is merely an instantiation. This difficulty, which Aristotle calls "the greatest of aporias," is never resolved to his satisfaction, and it accounts for his apparent vacillation between the relative merits of deduction and induction. This vacillation between the extremes of the aporia has value, Booth argues, as an adaptation of Plato's dialectic. In Aristotle the aporia becomes a pedagogical technique introducing others to the deep and central concerns of ontology. Despite the aporia, however, Aristotle's rejection of Plato is sincere and often explicit, but it is complicated by the irony of using Platonic vocabulary to express Aristotelian principles. In the remaining five chapters, Booth shows convincingly, with exhaustive and scholarly detail, that in peculiar ways the aporetic dimensions of Aristotle's writings influenced the development of Hellenistic and medieval ontologies. Oddly, the apo- 588 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:4 OCT 1987 retic was seldom appreciated for the pedagogical device Aristotle intended it to be, and often it was not consciously detected by the later commentators. This is not surprising since the ambition of most commentators was not to read Aristotle on his own terms but to achieve, often for rhetorical and theological reasons, doctrinal and syncretistic harmony. In practice it was the Platonic extreme of the aporia, which holds that universality, not individuality, is real, that often dominated the later Hellenistic and medieval traditions. Because of their zeal to reconcile Plato and Aristotle (a project they thought justified by the Platonic language to which Aristotle himself was committed), the commentators, except for the "radical Aristotelians" (such as Alexander of Aphrodisia and Ibn Rushd) and St. Thomas, reduced individuality to universality . Of course, the most elaborate attempt at syncretism was Neoplatonism, the most notable representatives of which were Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus and the Christian mystic, Pseudo-Dionysius. Neoplatonism achieved its reconciliation clearly in favor of Platonism. The aporetic of individual or primary substance is overcome (or ignored) by reducing the individual to an imperfect participant in a universal, in which alone its reality resides. Individuality is explained as a...