Grundprobleme der Geschichte der antiken Wissenschaft (review)

388 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY for her reading there, she does not, I think, show that Di6s' reading of it cannot also "do justice" to the passage, and since his reading does not entail the odd metaphysical commitments hers involves, it seems preferable on that very basis. Space does not permit a full review of the various readings here. Mine. de Vogel's pages give the best presentation of her reading that one can find anywhere and they should be reckoned with in any treatment of the passage. The book has been ably and handsomely produced by Van Gorcum. I noticed a fair number of typographical errors (such as "deuz" for "deux" on p. 27, the word "identic," p. 197, garbled Greek on the bottom line of p. 105, "~r~xe~" for "rr~wD,~" on p. 227, n. 4, and the bottom line of text on p. 393 misplaced below the footnotes), but nothing really seriously interfering with the sense. (The author's English syntax does, however, occasionally seem to need correcting, charming though it is. Thus on p. 193, "We have really not to pass by Plotinus" means "We do not really have to pass by way of Plotinus. 9 . ," and the sentence crossing 191-192 does need some syntactic modification.) The volume has been provided with three excellent indices. It does seem unfortunate that it offers no full bibliography of the author's many articles and reviews in the field to date, and unfortunate, too, that it provides no indication of the precise location and extent of her revisions to the papers that she has here revised. But these are far from substantial complaints. Reading through this collection, one is struck repeatedly by a feature rare and remarkable in classical scholarship: a certain authorial presence, the palpable impress of a personality and temperament that infuse sheer learning (which of course is also there, and in abundance) with a humanity--something of a directness and simplicity and deep affection for the subjects and the figures treated that makes the reading of these essays a quite special experience. Exactly how this is conveyed I find it difficult to say. There are an unusual number of frankly personal remarks in the book like the Preface's allusions to the "circonstanees politiques" because of which Mine. de Vogel long avoided writing in German, though she does do so here ("comme symbole"), like her avowals on p. 91 about writing the critique of Burkert and her use of the adjective "discouraging" on p. 80, like the concluding remark in the new Plato paper (p. 209).... But the total impression is more a matter of a pervasive style of expression. She does not write to dominate , impress, or dazzle---there is even a certain stylistic flatness about these essays--but to communicate and to share: to share not only her views and her reasons for them, but her feeling for the views and figures dealt with. Even where she fails to convince, she enriches one's grasp of each subject she treats through her learning, the quality of her intelligence and feeling, her fidelity to her intuitions and perceptions--and just through sharing the subject in her company. She promises a second volume, containing her papers on Greek and Christian thought and Medieval philosophy. We can look forward to that with warm anticipation. EDWARDN. LEE University of California, San Diego Grundprobleme der Geschichte der antiken Wissenschaft. By Kurt yon Fritz (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971. Pp. xxxiii + 759) Kurt von Fritz, a scholar of the classics whose publications have ranged over Greek and Roman history, politics, linguistics, science, historiography, literature, and philosophy, has finally brought to fruition his long-promised sketch of the history of Greek learning (Wissenscha#). The first half of the work is a compact but comprehensive investigation of the development of the foundations of concept- and axiom-formation in the sciences, mathematics, and epistemology; of the application of principles of beauty in science, es- BOOK REVIEWS 389 pecially astronomy; and of the Aristotelian meaning of teleology, so completely misunderstood by contemporary thinkers. Von Fritz not only explicates the development of these ideas by the ancient Greeks, but traces the influences, applications, and...