Greek Philosophers of the Hellenistic Age (review)

5~4 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:3 JULY ~995 but the degree of exactness is different. Anagnostopoulos obviously favors the second alternative: differences in exactness.., stem from differences in the goals of the various disciplines" (334). But can one then expect ethical inquiry to result in universal principles? Anagnostopoulos is very worried about the logical principle that a statement in the form of a universal assertoric which turns out to have exceptions is thereby falsified; if ethical propositions turn out to be only "for the most part" then they are strictly speaking false (386). I think that Anagnostopoulos's problem is one of attempting to examine a teleological ethical theory from a deontotogicai mindset. A deontologist wants exceptionless rules; a teleologist wants advice about possibly more and less effective ways to bring about the same goals. To put this another way: Aristotle's reasoning about ethics is practical reasoning in the sense that the goal is assumed (happiness, health, virtue, whatever), and we reason back from that goal to an action that can be done now. But there might be any number of actions I could take right now that would tend to bring about one of the constituents of happiness; that's one source of variability. Another source of variability is in the relative likelihood that the choice I make will actually succeed in bringing about some constituent of happiness. Anagnostopoulos sometimes comes very close to getting this part of it right, but he has a hard time hanging on to that thought, because he has a fundamentally un-Aristotelian notion of what ethical reasoning is for or about. The book includes an exhaustive collection of passages from the ethical writings that deal with "exactness" in one way or another, and many interrelationships are found between those passages and texts from other works of Aristotle. One problem: Anagnostopoulos numbers those passages, and subsequently refers to them not by their standard page number, but by the numbers he has assigned to them. It isjarring to read "Consider what Aristotle says in 7.8 where he appears to deny that demonstration is possible in the case of the whole of nature," instead of "Consider what Aristotle says in Metaph. II.3.995al 5.... " The standard page numbers convey significant information to those who know the Corpus fairly well; losing them or hiding them has a significant cost. All the same, the book has lots of good things in it; it is well worth working through in detail, and it is often fascinating to see how Anagnostopoulos brings together insights about the logical writings with the interpretation of Aristotle's ethical theory. ANTHONY PREUS Binghamton University Paul Oskar KristeUer. GreekPhilosophers of the HellenisticAge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Pp. xiv + 19t. Cloth, $35.oo. This book is based on a series of lectures on Hellenistic philosophy delivered in 1989 at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. It is a translation (by Gregory Woods, a former student of Kristeller) of an Italian version previously published by the Scuola itself. The lectures themselves were based in large part on a course on post-Aristotelian philosophy which the author has given many times at Columbia. The first chapter is on BOOK REVIEWS 515 Epicurus, and stands to some extent apart from the rest. The remaining seven deal almost entirely with Stoics and Academics; in order, the chapters deal with Zeno and Cleanthes, Pyrrho and Arcesilaus, Chrysippus, Carneades and Philo of Larissa, Panaetius, Posidonius and Antiochus. The alternation between Stoic and Academic philosophers is primarily intended to emphasize the debate between the two schools, and the modifications which each underwent under pressure from the other. Since each chapter was originally designed as a self-sufficient lecture, aiming to present a rounded picture of the philosopher or philosophers in question, there is some repetition of material, especially in the Stoic chapters; but this is compensated for by the resulting clarity in the chronology of the ideas discussed. This book is valuable as a published version of the material contained in the Columbia course, a course which undoubtedly influenced many people over a long period. Unfortunately, it is hard to see what purpose the...