Der Protreptikos des Aristotles (review)

Book Reviews Der Protreptikos des Aristotles. By Gerhart Schneeweiss. Diss. phil. (Mianchen, 1966) Aristotelian scholarship has almost unanimously accepted the idea that Aristotle's Protrepticus was one of the sources of which Jamblich made extensive use in his writing with the same title. The reconstructions of I. DUring 1 and A. H. Chroust 2 seem to establish beyond doubt that Aristotle's Protrepticus can, to a great extent, be recovered from Jamblich. And yet, though the radical criticism of W. G. Rabinowitz 3 that Jamblich cannot serve as a source of reconstruction was rejected, there are still a lot of questions with regard to the problem of reconstructing the Protrepticus. Father E. de Strycker even says in a recent review that the subtitle of Diaring's book, An Attempt at Reconstruction, may be misleading because there is no thoroughgoing effort to reconstruct , but rather the more modest intention of presenting the material "in a reasonable order." * One finds, however, that Dtiring does not always follow the order of Jamblich's text but deviates from it several times without giving any reasons for it.5 Father de Strycker already criticized Dtiring's method of presenting indiscriminately all the recovered texts, numbered B 1-1 I0, regardless of their validity as authentic fragments. 6 The dissertation of G. Schneeweiss, supervised by Dr. Franz Egermann, has to be appreciated in the above mentioned context. Schneeweiss focuses on the reconstruction problem, and I think that everybody who makes use of Dtiring's or Chroust's texts ought to take notice of his investigations because they are a substantial and independent contribution towards a solution of this problem. Schneeweiss states his own objective as follows: "A sufficient basis for deducing further cogent conclusions is given only if one succeeds in arranging the fragments in such a way that at least a portion of the lost parts can be reconstructed. In the present study the attempt is therefore made to reconstruct the Protrepticus of Aristotle from the fragments . . ." (pp. 35-36). Schneeweiss discusses, first, previous reconstruction attempts, then advances his own (including the Greek text), and finally elaborates the strain of thought according to his arrangement of the fragments; six appendices study specific questions arising from the interpretation of the writing. Schneeweiss starts with the observation that Jamblich, the main source for a reconstruction , gathered protreptic motifs from various parts of the Platonic writings; we should therefore assume that he excerpted Aristotle's Protrepticus in a similar way and did not slavishly follow it, i.e., he disconnected Aristotle's sequence of arguments in order to make them fit his own context; the possibility that Jamblich used different writings of Aristotle is rejected, since the Protrepticus by virtue of its subject may be 1 Aristotle's Protrepticus. An Attempt at Reconstruction. (Goeteborg: Studia Graeca et Latina Gothoburgensia 12, 1961.) Aristotle: Protrepticus. A reconstruction. (South Bend, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964.) Aristotle's Protrepticus and the Sources o[ Its Reconstruction. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.) Gnomon 41, 1969, p. 251 note 10. Cf. index pp. 106-109. Ibid., pp. 250-251. [86] BOOK REVIEWS 87 assumed to have contained all the necessary material (pp. 38-39). The reconstruction alone is to be the criterion for what belongs and to what extent to the Protrepticus. Diiring remarked, Quot professores, tot protreptici: Schneeweiss, however, convincingly demonstrates that Diiring's B 1-110 do not further the understanding of the writing as a whole but cover a variety of illogical sequences (pp. 68-90). Other reconstruction attempts are briefly mentioned (pp. 45-47); only two are discussed in detail: K. Gaiser,7 since he "alone attempts to give a substantiation of his arrangement," and Dtiring, because of the influence his arrangement already exerted (p. 47). Though Gaiser substantiated his attempt from the subject matter itself, namely, the pre-Aristotelian protreptic method, he failed, according to Schneeweiss, to make this method evident from the fragments themselves. Diaring's reconstruction is examined in the light of the following principle, which serves Schneeweiss as the main basis for his own attempt: "one has to differentiate between fragments which elaborate an idea without any philosophical presupposition and are thus understandable by...