Cosmic and Meta-Cosmic Theology in Aristotle's Lost Dialogues (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 669 these statements: "we can contemplate our neighbours better than ourselves" (EN t 169b33); "when we wish to know ourselves we can obtain that knowledge by looking at our friend; for the friend is, we assert, a second self" (MM 1213a2a). Perhaps Plato and Aristotle worked with a very different notion of the self--and its orientation to others--than we do. Perhaps their sense of interiority and subjectivity is truncated compared with ours. If so, might this partially explain why relations with good "others"--whether they be friends or Forms--are important for them in ways that are inadequately described as egoistic or altruistic? In chapters on philia in the broader contexts of household and city Price gives Aristotle the nod for his more realistic account of basing civic cohesion on friendship without ignoring self-interest. The Republic, by contrast, is an overidealistic attempt to universalize friendship, i.e., to extend "mine" to everyone, as he felicitously puts it. Less instructive are obligatory lectures on "Plato the Misogynist" and "Plato the Fascist ." The latter travesties Plato's cosmic theology: comments in the Laws on the unimportance of a single lifetime are likened to Napoleon's characterization of 29,ooo corpses on the battlefield as "small change." Such interpretive dissonance, happily, is rare. This is an exceptionally difficuh book: Price's dense, allusive, and enigmatic style requires (but usually deserves) careful rereading. But creativity, ingenuity, and literary flair are indispensable for exploring its topics, and this it does far better than most studies. .JOHN BUSSANICH University of New Mexico A. P. Bos. Cosmic and Meta-Cosmic Theology in Ari.~totle~Lost Dialogues. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989, Pp. xx + 242. Cloth, $48.oo. Bos begins from the laudable methodological assumption that the doctrines of Aristotle 's lost dialogues are likely to have been consistent with those of the existing corpus. Bos expects to find in the dialogues both the transcendent Unmoved Mover and cosmic divinities, the fifth element as the material basis of celestial beings, and a strong distinction between theoria and prax/s (xiv). He supports this thesis with scholarly skill; he reinterprets several passages that have often been used to argue that Aristotle's philosophical positions changed between the Eudemus, De philosophia, and so on, and the existing corpus, showing instead that they can be read as propounding the same essential teachings, if in a more popular style. The case is presented most succinctly, and most within the ambit of current scholarship on the fragmentary works, in the second half of the book, chapters lO to 15, where Bos directly tackles Jaegerian and post-Jaegerian development theories. He offers, among other things: i) a novel interpretation of the phrases exoterikoi logoi and enkyklioi logoi--the first are logoi about that which is outside the heavens, the second about the operations of the heavens and their implications; ii) a thesis about the meaning of 670 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:4 OCTOBER 1991 manteia pert ton theon in De caelo 2. t ;~ iii) challenging readings of De philosophia, fragment 13a (Cicero Nat. Deor. 9.37.95-97), about people in a cave, and what they would conclude were they suddenly to see the heavens, and fragment 96 (Cicero Nat. Deor. 1. 13.33), where Aristotle is accused of having a confusing and self-contradictory theology ; iv) a speculative reading of Eudemus, fragment 1t, from AI-Kindi, abont the (;reek king whose soul was "caught up in ecstasy," and who, having returned to his body, prophesied about a number of things. Bos argues that the Greek king was Endymion of Ells, not only because of what Aristotle says about Endymion in EN 1o.8.~ The general objective of these interpretations is to lend support to the theory that the dialogues include a double theology, including accounts both of the Unmoved Mover and of at least one immanent deity. The confusion of Velleius would stem from his attempting to conflate the two parts of the account; the liberated cave-dwellers would come to understand the existence of the immanent deity, but would still have the further step to go to grasp the transcendent causality of the Unmoved...