Aristotle on Dialectic: The Topics. Proceedings of the Third Symposium Aristotelicum (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 201 addition to the virtues of a watchdog, the difficult virtue of justice. What shall he study to learn the nature of this virtue7 Socrates replies, "mathematics." Is not this the same irony as in the Meno, with essentially the same problem "writ large"7 Plato is passionately committed to the ideal of knowledge, but he is dolefully and wisely conscious that the vital ability to produce a virtuous man or statesman is largely beyond the pale of knowledge; that is part of the main theme of his Republic, Statesman, and Meno. He agonizes about the general fate of worthwhile ideals. (p. 85) If Plato is thus passionately and dolefully committed to the ideal of knowledge, why does he dramatize the Socratic skepticism about the knowledge of virtue? [ get a somewhat different impression of the dramatic artist in Plato by adding The Laws to the Republic, which Eckstein does not do. In The Laws Plato explicitly refers to the problem of justice as it arises in a society in which the military problem is primary, and says (in the attitude of wishful thinking): if we were rid of this "guardian" problem that haunted us in the Republic, what would a community be like7 Unless I grossly misread him, his reply is: government would be centered (not in censorship) in the critical (moral) cultivation of the arts and virtues, whatever may be the fate of the sciences. The difficult problem that Eckstein raises in his concluding reflections concerns the relation between "the nature" of anything (especially of virtue and knowledge) and the general interpretation of "natural order." I have the impression that Eckstein may be complicating the problem by reading some of the modern conceptions of nature into Plato and Socrates. Certainly "the nature" of a thing is not learned by a study of physis. In Aristotle the problem may be a bit more like the modern problem, but I think it takes a careful study of both Greek language and Greek "knowledge" to answer the problem as it haunted Socrates and Plato. I-~lUSF.~TW. SCHNEIDER Claremont, California Aristotle on Dialectic: The Topics. Proceedings o/the Third Symposium Aristotelicum. Ed. G. E. L. Owen. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Pp. vii+ 346. $10.50) Unlike its predecessors, the third Symposium Aristotelicum, held in 1963, was devoted to discussion of a single work of Aristotle. In his preface the editor writes, "Most of the major problems associated with the interpretation of the work will be found raised in the following pages, and some of them, l am inclined to think, will be found solved." In fact three of the contributors (Brunschwig, Verdenius, and Soreth) deal with textual questions, six (Solmsen, Ryle, Moreau, De Vogel, Owen, and Elders) with the much discussed problem of the relation of Aristotle's early work to his Platonic background, five (De Strycker, Mansion, Diiring, Gigon, and Verbeke) with the use of the Topics as a source of information about the development of Aristotle's thought on various themes, such as the categories, that arc discussed or taken for granted in later works, one (Moraux) with the setting and procedure of the dialectical jousts for which Aristotle gives advice in Topics VIII, and one (De Pater) with Aristotle's conception of his task in writing about topoi. Together the papers provide a good deal of material that may be useful to students of Greek philosophy, but it is obviously impossible for a reviewer to comment on them all, and I shall therefore confine myself to three which I have found especially interesting. In the first paper, "Observations sur les manuscrits des Topiques," which contains 202 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY some of the material of the introduction to his edition of 1967, Brunschwig shows conclusively that the eleventh-century manuscript Parisinus Colslianus 330 is independent not only of our other manuscripts but also of Alexander's commentary. He does not pretend that this discovery will produce a profound change in future editions of the Topics, but he makes the interesting claim that in the passage 120a 6-11 it enables us to find a nearly obliterated trace of an early theory of determinate particular propositions (i.e., propositions...