Book Notes

254 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY past is constituted in historical research. The truly significant problems of the philosophy of history are related to the infrastructure, but virtually nothing has been produced on this in the English language community (p. 148). Because English-language philosophers attend only to the superstructure, their tendency is to identify one of its forms, the narrative, with the whole of the historical enterprise. Goldstein also cites extensively from Ronald Syme's Roman Revolution to show that this recognized and distinguished history does not satisfy the narrative thesis requirements for the production of a historical text. Syme's main concerns are with a logic of evidence rather than with the structure of narrative form. There are many other aspects of this interesting work that I could discuss, but I will close by stating my two reservations about this book: it seems to me that Goldstein does not provide an adequate statement of criteria for historical objectivity in the final chapter of his book, nor does he give a full or satisfying account of what historical knowing, as practiced by the historian, really is. While it is true that the author refers to many historians' works and to their methods, these references are presented largely as foils for theories of what historical knowing is not. It is not clear enough to me what Goldstein thinks adequate historical knowing is. We must realize, however, that this may be an unfair demand of a book meant to be critical in thrust and tone. Goldstein has written a careful and intelligent book. Perhaps in a future work he will provide us with the account for which I am asking. HOWARD N. TUTTLE University of New Mexico BOOK NOTES Life le Protagoras. By Louis Bodin. Ed. Paul Demont. Collection d'l~tudes Anciennes. (Paris: Soci6t6 d'l~dition "Les Belles Lettres," 1975. Pp. 116) Louis Bodin, the well-known Greek scholar, died before he could give the manuscript of this interesting little book the final shape for publication. He had been too busy establishing the authentic text of books 6 and 7 of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War for that work's bilingual edition (1953) that he was arranging together with Madame Jacqueline de Romilly. It was this scholarly lady who found in Paul Demont the right man for the delicate job of editing the Bodin manuscript and then, after the author's death, adding an illuminating, short introduction in praise of the achievements of "l'admirable helleniste que fut Louis Bodin" (p. 4). "How to Read the Protagoras"--as the French title could be rendered--is meant as a purely philological study (p. 8), as a guide, in the sense of those meritorious explications de texte, for the reader of Plato's Protagoras. And it is indeed a brilliant vivification of those famous discussions between Protagoras and Socrates. But the author's ambition was aimed beyond that. On the (perhaps questionable) assumption that Protagoras and the other sophists were not only teaching practitioners of rhetoric but also must have had an elaborated method, with strict rules--a "theory" of their art--Bodin scrupulously analyzes the dialogue with a view to reconstructing those rules and the theory behind the practice. And since he obviously believed (he was born in 1869, after all) that "still today" all of us were thinking with the concepts and regulations of Aristotelian logic, it seemed to him interesting and important to point out how much Aristotle owed to Protagoras and to demonstrate how, step by step, the whole logic evolved on the way from the early sophists to Aristotle. Yet, in remarkable modesty, Louis Bodin emphatically declares that all he has contributed in this respect is just a preface, as it were, a mere introduction with some elements only for a full reconstruction of the "dialectical method" of Protagoras and its elaboration into Aristotle's logic. But this great task, he says, will have to be undertaken by a professional logician, not by a philologist. --FELIX M. CLEVE BOOK NOTES 255 II "'De ldeis'" di Aristotele e la Teoria Platonica delle Idee. By Waiter Leszl. Edizione critica del testo a cura di Dieter Harflinger. Accademia Toscana di...