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  • Proclus' Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming
  • Taneli Kukkonen
R. M. van den Berg . Proclus' Commentary on the Cratylus in Context: Ancient Theories of Language and Naming. Philosophia Antiqua, 112. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2008. Pp. xvii + 239. Cloth, $127.00.

This excellent new monograph does everything it promises: it sets the excerpts we have of Proclus's teaching on the Cratylus in their proper historical setting, carefully laying out what Proclus thought Plato's dialogue accomplishes in light of the questions the intervening philosophical tradition had posed. This alone would justify the use in the title of the otherwise tired "in Context" trope; but van den Berg does much more. In recounting the steps that bring us from Plato's Cratylus to Proclus's Cratylus, van den Berg provides a comprehensive history of ancient accounts of names and naming. The work thereby richly earns its subtitle as well.

The first of van den Berg's book's many virtues is the attention it gives to Plato's Cratylus itself. In chapter one, van den Berg persuasively argues that Plato is engaged in a different sort of project than his many successors: Plato's concern is with how names can be incorrectly assigned, and his answer hinges on the contention that such assignments reflect the divisions in being that they presuppose. Everyday language, crafted on the model of the sensible world, is thus an altogether unreliable guide to ultimate reality. This stands in stark contrast to Aristotle, who habitually starts from ordinary language-use in his investigations and whose famous program of "saving the phenomena" (which van den Berg curiously does not reference) reveals a fundamental trust in the ability of the pre-philosophical mind to fix upon relevant aspects of reality.

Chapters two and three review the developments in Hellenistic philosophy and within Plotinus's school in order to highlight how remarkable was Proclus's return to the Platonic standpoint. Crucial here is Porphyry's adoption of the conventionalist Aristotelian story concerning the signification of language, making it all the more difficult for scholars to discern how different Plato's view was. Indicative of the restraint exercised by van den Berg is the fact that the terms 'semantics' and 'philosophy of language' do not appear here, or indeed anywhere in the volume, in any explanatory capacity. Instead, van den Berg focuses squarely on the phenomenon of name-giving. This is entirely appropriate, given the background of the Cratylus, though it does mean that, e.g., the Epicureans' intriguing theory concerning the natural genesis of all expressions (not just nouns) gets rather short shrift.

After setting the stage, van den Berg outlines Proclus's contribution to the ancient discussions in three chapters. In chapter four, Proclus's theory on correct naming is revealed, with interesting asides made to contemporary theories concerning language-use and imposition; chapter five traces parallels between the activities of name-crafting and language-learning and the cosmic Neoplatonic movements of process and return; and in chapter six, the question of the divine names is broached, a topic on which Proclus unsurprisingly had much to say, despite the neglect that this aspect of the Cratylus (again, unsurprisingly) has endured in the modern age. All the while, van den Berg aptly shows how Proclus's Parmenides commentary and Platonic Theology, e.g., can shed light on the comments, sometimes scant, on the Cratylus preserved in his student's hand. [End Page 309]

Van den Berg's various remarks concerning the ancient tradition as a whole are judicious and informative, while his more detailed study of Proclus is truly groundbreaking in several respects. Following van den Berg's work, no one can any longer ignore the facts that, in the final phase of ancient philosophy, Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of name-giving were genuinely in contention and that the general acceptance of Aristotle's On Interpretation had to be balanced by deference to Proclus's emphatic Platonism. This conclusion, briefly sketched in chapter seven of the present work, will hopefully be expanded in future studies. Another significant gain has to do with van den Berg's situation of the Cratylus commentary within...

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