One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics : The Central Books (review)

292 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL 199 9 That audience, for example, knowing the actual lives of all the participants, would have been struck by the dramatic irony of the Laches, in which failed sons of famous fathers seek advice about raising their own sons from two generals involved in the Athenian failure in Sicily and a man who was later executed for corrupting the youth (55f.). With his emphasis on comedy, Arieti's interpretations are especially good on Plato's humor, helping us to recover parody, jokes, puns, satire, and farce from overly serious interpretations and translations. However, the experiment of a purely dramatic, indeed comedic, interpretation swings too far away from the philosophic. To interpret the arguments as subordinate to dramatic elements and to emphasize comic elements is appropriate, but sometimes it seems that serious philosophic ideas and arguments are ignored. Arieti writes, for example, that Socrates' arguments in the Gorgtas are not "entirely sensible or practical for this world" (8o) and criticizes Socrates for being "wholly indifferent to reality" (90), a "failure as a teacher of virtue" (85), and Alcibiades is identified as "Socrates' great failure" (1 lo, 117). But statements like these simply beg serious philosophic questions that are explicitly addressed in the dialogues. Is "this world" the one Socrates is really interested in? What is "reality"? Was Socrates a "teacher of virtue"? And if he was, does the misbehavior of a student make him a "failure"? Moreover, Arieti asserts as a general principle that "in dialogues where various extreme positions are rejected, Plato is, I think, suggesting that the answer lies somewhere in between" (6o; cp. 8o, 99). And he gradually insinuates, without ever arguing, that the dialogues are not serious philosophy at all, but rather advertisements for the Academy aimed at potential students and their fathers (59, 81, 9o, 1lo, 129, 163). Nevertheless, Arieti's book is an important contribution to the contemporary movement toward a less dogmatic and more dramatic Plato interpretation. He is surely correct that interpreters should not struggle "to show by some tangled ingenuity that the argument actually makes sense or could have made sense," but rather should ask "a different question: why did Plato have Socrates or another character make this statement ?" (5). Subordinating argument to drama helps us recognize much of the humor and restore the balance between seriousness and play or comedy. But the fundamental problem for Plato interpreters now is to find modes of analysis adequate to the dynamic unities of philosophy and drama that are Plato's dialogues. GERALD A. PRESS Hunter College, C.U.N.Y Edward C. Halper. One and Many in Aristotle'sMetaphysics: The Central Books. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 199o. Pp. xxxix + 3o9 . Cloth, $49.5 o. This book is the first part of a three-part study of Aristotle's Metaphysics. It consists of a detailed analysis of most of the arguments in Books ZHO of that work along with a brief treatment of Book E. There is a useful analytic table of contents and a discursive glossary explaining many of the author's translations of key terms. The work concludes with a lengthy chapter which draws together the results of the previous analysis. There BOOK REVIEWS 993 are extensive notes in which the author engages in spirited confrontation with a great deal of modern Aristotelian scholarship. A good though certainly not complete bibliography is provided. It is not evident from the author's sketch of his entire program how the other two projected works will divide up the rest of the Metaph~s~. Judging from the present work, however, they are likely to be demanding and thoughtful studies based on a very close reading of the texts. Two characteristics of this book deserve particular mention. First, the author's approach to the Metaphys~,.sdeparts from contemporary fashion in being resolutely contextual. I mean that he does not read that work from the perspective of one immersed in the array of problems and issues defining analytic metaphysics in the English-speaking world. This has been overwhelmingly the main approach to the Metaphysics,and particularly the central books. Rather, Halper is content to let Aristotle...