Aristotle and His School by Felix Grayeff (review)

406 BOOK REVIEWS It is to be hoped that the third volume will soon appear and provide access to the details of the text. A table listing all the Grosseteste Notulae, for instance, is much needed. There is in volume I, pp. 181*-184*, a Table of Proper Names in the Introduction; this is a great help. When complete , this edition will constitute an extremely valuable source of primary information for historians, theologians, ethicists, and philologists. VERNON J. BouRKE St. Louis University St. Louis, Missouri Aristotle and His School. By FELIX GRAYEFF. New York: Barnes and Noble, 19~4. Pp. ~80. $11.50. This book is about the authorship and arrangement of the treatises of Aristotle. Its central thesis is that Andronicus's edition of the Corpus Aristotelicum contained treatises which were neither exclusively nor even mostly written by Aristotle himself. Instead, according to Grayeff, these treatises were in part written and arranged by various members of the Peripatetic School over a considerable period of time after Aristotle's death. To substantiate his thesis, Grayeff first draws evidence from Aristotle's life, the history of The Peripatos after Aristotle's death, and the history of the school library. Then, in the main section of the book, he analyzes several books of the Metaphysics, especially Book Zeta, with a view to showing that not only external factors in the history of the Peripatetic School and the library but also, and most important, the internal structure of the texts themselves goes to establish that the Corpus was actually the work of many hands. As regards Aristotle's life, Grayeff concedes that, while nothing we know about it could show irrefutably that the Corpus was not the work of Aristotle himself, still, the fact that his life was an unsettled one would make it unlikely that Aristotle could have had the time or the opportunity to have authored the entire Corpus. But in addition to this, Grayeff points out that Strabo's account of what happened to Aristotle's books conflicts with what we know from other sources. First, points in Aristotle's philosophy were debated during the very period when, according to Strabo, the Aristotelian manuscripts were buried. Second, the text of the Corpus, Grayeff points out, is " a very good text and by no means bears out the story (of Strabo) of the motheaten manuscripts with their many gaps." (p. 75) Further, Grayeff presents ample evidence to show that, so far from being buried in a hole BOOK REVIEWS 407 by the heirs of Neleus, Aristotle's books were housed in the celebrated library of Pergamum. Moreover, Theophastus himself admits in a ·letter preserved by Diogenes Laertius that the Peripatetic philosophers had to revise and amend their lectures over and again, a procedure which was doubtless caused by the emergence of the new philosophical challenges of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Scepticism. The upshot of all this is that quite apart from internal evidence based on a detailed examination of the Corpus itself, there is external evidence to support the thesis that the Corpus was the work of many members of the Peripatetic School. Turning to the internal evidence for Grayeff's thesis, let us consider his examination of Metaphysics Zeta. Grayeff's holds that the discussion at several places in Zeta only makes sense if it is viewed as a response to Sceptical and Stoical inquiries. At Zeta X, for example, two problems of definition are discussed. (I) How are the parts of a definition related to the parts of the thing defined? and (2) Is the whole prior to the parts or vice versa? Grayefl' observes that it was the Stoics who " methodically set out the parts of the proposition " and " the Sceptics who questioned both the possibility of definition and of distinguishing a whole and its parts. Further, there is a close connection between Zeta XII and Sceptic Sextus Empiricus' discussion of definition," Grayeff argues. Sextus Empiricus had argued that, since genus is either identical with its different species or is none of them, it does not exist. There appears to be a reference to this at Zeta XII (36a6). But the Peripatetic writer answers this objection in Zeta XII...