Thornton Lockwood

Aristotle’s discussions of natural slavery, ‘barbarian kingship’, and the natural characteristics of barbarians or non-Greeks are usually read as calling into question the intellectual, ethical, and political accomplishments of non-Greeks. Such accounts of non-Greek inferiority or inability to self-govern also appear to presuppose a climatic or environmental account that on the whole would imply severe limitations on the possibility of political flourishing for peoples living outside the Greek Mediterranean basin. In light of such accounts, it is somewhat astounding to find Aristotle praising the social and political institutions of Carthage within his discussion of the best constitution in the second book of the Politics. In the 4th century BCE, Carthage (modern day Tunis) was a Phoenician commercial empire that culturally and linguistically was Semitic and clearly non-Greek. That Aristotle contrasts Carthage, a non-Greek polis, favorably with both Sparta and Crete undermines both the claim that Aristotle embraced a categorical opposition between Greeks and non-Greeks and the claim that he was dismissive of the achievements of non-Greeks.

Pierre Destrée’s new translation of Aristotle’s Poetics notes the work’s “destin paradoxal”: How can a work on Greek tragedy remain silent on the political, social, religious, or performative aspects of an artform that in historical context was profoundly public? How can a handbook on the various aspects of playwriting produce a superior drama when Aristotle himself acknowledges that artistic production is a matter of imagination? Destrée’s answer: Aristotle’s Poetics is neither an historical study of a classical Greek cultural institution nor a handbook for aspiring playwrights. Rather, as is often the case with Aristotle’s treatises, Aristotle has created or carved out a new field for investigation and reflection; thus the Poetics creates the field of aesthetics, namely the study of beauty in the arts. Destrée has successfully produced a volume that provides general readers of Aristotle’s Poetics with the historical, literary, and philosophical tools that will allow them to appreciate that much of what seems odd about that text is only paradoxical.

“The law is reason free from passion.” Thus spoke Harvard Law School Professor Stromwell in the 2001 film Legally Blonde, quoting Aristotle in his Politics (Pol 3.16.1287a33, in Ross 1957). Although a single shout-out to Aristotle in a popular film does not prove a resurgence of neo-Aristotelian jurisprudence in the academy, it does illustrate the pitfalls we face in a culture that traffics in meme quotations risibly attributed to great minds. Thus, George Duke is to be commended for showing why, although there is a sense in which Aristotle believes that law is reason free from passion, things are more complicated than that. Duke argues that Aristotle’s seemingly dispersed statements on law and legislation are unified by a commitment to law’s status as an achievement of practical reason, and his book provides a systematic exposition of the significance and coherence of Aristotle’s account of law and indicates the relevance of this account to contemporary legal theory.

Aristotle’s Politics is a study of the political institutions of the 4th C. Mediterranean world, including both Greek communities (like Athens and Sparta) and non-Greek communities (like Persia and Carthage). The work is foundational for a number of modern scholarly disciplines such as political science, political theory, ancient history, and ancient philosophy; thus, the work annually is the subject of a robust number of scholarly studies (on average, about four monographs and 25 journal articles and book chapters per year). This chapter reviews scholarship on the Politics, focusing on work produced since 2010. The chapter first reviews general introductions, editions, and interpretative strategies for understanding the Politics. It then reviews major subsections or conceptual issues within the Politics. The chapter concludes with a review of major trends in scholarship and suggestions for future scholarly directions in understanding Aristotle’s Politics.

Martha Nussbaum has provided a sustained critique of Cicero’s De officiis (or On Duties), concerning what she claims is Cicero’s incoherent distinction between duties of justice, which are strict, cosmopolitan, and impartial, and duties of material aid, which are elastic, weighted towards those who are near and dear, and partial. No doubt, from Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan perspective, Cicero’s distinction between justice and beneficence seems problematic and lies at the root of modern moral failures to conceptualize adequately our obligations in situations of famine and global inequality. And yet a careful reading of Cicero’s On Duties shows many duties that appear to be partial. It is hard to believe that Cicero’s discussion of these “partial duties” was a mere oversight or omission on his part. Rather, Cicero seemed to have no problem endorsing what I will call the “partial coherence” of duties in the work—namely, the claim that asserting that duties are exhaustively partial or impartial is a false dichotomy. With the help of conceptual analysis by Richard Kraut, my paper aims to establish and defend Cicero’s “partial coherence” against Nussbaum’s criticisms.

Cicero’s ethical and political writings present a detailed and sophisticated philosophy of just war, namely an account of when armed conflict is morally right or wrong. Several of the philosophical moves or arguments that he makes, such as a critique of “Roman realism” or his incorporation of the ius fetiale—a form of archaic international law—are remarkable similar to those of the contemporary just war philosopher Michael Walzer, even if Walzer is describing inter-state war and Cicero is describing imperial war. But if it is clear that Walzer presents a detailed philosophy of just war, then I argue we should draw the same conclusion for Cicero. The result is a deeper appreciation of the insight and novelty of Cicero’s view of just war. The paper concludes by arguing against the claim that Cicero’s philosophy of just war is derivative from the Stoic philosopher Panaetius, whom Cicero drew upon in the organization of his On Duties. Just as Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars was written in response to America’s war in Vietnam, Cicero’s just war philosophy was written in response to the wars (both civil and external) of Gaius Caesar.

In the autumn of 430 BCE, the city of Athens was devastated by a plague, one chronicled by both the Athenian historian Thucydides and the Roman poet Lucretius. Albert Camus’ notebooks and novel The Plague (La peste) clearly show his interest in the plague of Athens and several scholars have detected comparisons between its narrator, Dr. Rieux, and the historian Thucydides. But a careful examination of what Rieux actually says about the plague of Athens complicates matters and suggests that Camus in some sense rejects accounts of the plague of Athens as a model for his novel. Such a rejection seems confirmed by the novel’s identification of Joseph Grand as its hero, an example of decidedly non-Periclean virtue. I argue that although one can find comparisons within the Plague between Athens and Oran, more pronounced are their contrasts.

Community (κοινωνία) is one of the most fundamental and distinctive concepts in Aristotle’s writings on human action; the political species of community (alongside spousal community, household community, and the community of friendship) is probably the most complicated iteration of the concept. Thus, scholars of Aristotle’s Politics (the primary audience of the volume under review) are much indebted to the publication of Riesbeck’s revised doctoral dissertation (University of Texas, Austin, 2012) that successfully and persuasively elucidates political community by showing both its likenesses and differences from the other forms of community Aristotle analyzes. The question that Riesbeck uses to explore these concepts in Aristotle’s writings: Is Aristotle’s praise for the constitution (πολιτεία) of kingship (which in places the Politics identifies as the ‘best constitution’ [(Pol. 3.17.1288a15-19, 28-29]) philosophically compatible with his theory of community and commonality?

Pierre Pellegrin has devoted his scholarly life to the understanding of Aristotle the political philosopher, Aristotle the life-scientist, and—perhaps most importantly—Aristotle the analyst of life-science who is also a political philosopher. Like D. M. Balme, Allan Gotthelf, and James Lennox—Pellegrin is one of the foremost scholars who has sought to understand Aristotle’s biological writings in a philosophically and philologically sophisticated fashion. Pellegrin is also one of the foremost scholars who has sought to understand the intersection between Aristotle’s biological studies and his other works, especially the ethical/political writings, like current scholars such as Sophia Connell, Mariska Leunissen, and Adriel M. Trott. The volume under-review, Anthony Preus’ translation of Pellegrin’s L'Excellence menacée: Sur la philosophie politique d'Aristote (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017, reviewed by J.J. Mulhern for BMCR) is especially welcome because it brings together in one volume—ably rendered into English by Preus—analytical threads that Pellegrin has pursued in a number of independent essays on topics such as natural teleology and the Politics, slavery, the composition of the Politics, the nature of political friendship, and the structure and diversity of Aristotelian constitutions.

My chapter explores Aristotle’s account of Greek democracy in three parts. The first part examines the notion of democracy taxonomically, namely as a kind of political organization that Aristotle classifies as a deviant politeia that admits of a number of species that are differentiated by the socio-economic classifications of its people (or δῆμος). The second part provides an overview of Aristotle’s historical remarks on prominent subjects of Athenian democracy in the Politics (Pol.) and the Athenian Constitution (Ath. Pol.) and then focuses on his analysis of the political reforms that Solon introduced to Athens in the early 6th century, a form of political organization that Aristotle characterizes as the “ancestral democracy” (δημοκρατίαν τὴν πάτριον [Pol. 2.12.1273b38]). I argue that Aristotle judges Solon’s reforms—specifically, assigning to the people the roles of electing and auditing magistrates, but limiting their access to the very offices of a magistrate—as a pre-eminent solution to the problem of democratic participation. Finally, in the third part of my chapter I examine Aristotle’s evaluation of democracy both in terms of its notion of democratic justice but also in terms of its relative stability. I argue that the features of moderate democracy and polity are very similar to those of the Solonian politeia, which further supports my claim that Aristotle views Solon as a pre-eminent democratic theorist of ancient Greece.

At first glance, Aristotle’s Politics is a repository of dry, professorial lecture notes. Although the work contains the occasional literary reference or historical digression, analysis, argumentation, and socio-political taxonomies predominate. Beneath the surface of such prose, Pangle locates an Aristotle who seeks to involve the reader in dialogical exchange—much like as in a Platonic dialogue—by means of dialectical, rhetorical and literary devices. Pangle—a student of the political theorist Leo Strauss, a translator of Plato, Aristophanes and Sophocles, and the author of books on modern political theorists such as Montesquieu, Locke, and the Federalist Papers—has written a study of the Politics informed not only by a close reading of the text, but also its relationship to modern republicanism, and the conflict between rationalism and religion. A previously published introduction presents what Pangle takes to be Aristotle’s rhetorical strategy in the Politics; it is followed by chapters organized around individual books in the Politics (a chapter each for Politics I, II, and III, and consolidated chapters for Politics IV-VI and VII-VIII—the last of which had been previously published in part). The text is followed by almost 50 pages of notes, notes in which Aquinas is cited as frequently (and sometimes more frequently) than contemporary Aristotle scholars like P. Simpson, R. Kraut, and E. Schütrumpf and Alfarabi is cited more frequently than F. Miller (although by far the most frequently cited authorities are the 19th century scholars F. Susemihl, R.D. Hicks, and above all, W. Newman). The book is clearly a mature work of scholarship, informed by extended reflection on Aristotle’s Politics and the subsequent western tradition of political theory and philological commentary which has responded to it.

Malcolm Schofield, the honorand of this Festschrift, needs no introduction to scholars working in classics and ancient philosophy. The volume includes a six and a half page bibliography of his works over the last 30 years, and his books, translations, edited collections, and articles range over all subsections and periods of ancient philosophy, from the pre-Socratics through Hellenistic Greek and Roman philosophy. His two most recent books--<i>Plato: Political Philosophy</i> (Oxford, 2006) and an edited volume of Plato translations (Cambridge, 2010)--have focused on aspects of classical political philosophy, and such is the main (although not exclusive) focus of the volume. Harte and Lane, two of Schofield’s most distinguished students, organized a Mayweek conference at Cambridge in 2011 honoring Schofield; fifteen of the seventeen papers in the volume derive from the conference, and many of the papers refer to what must have been spirited discussion from the conference (book chapters also make reference to relevant discussions amongst them). Each editor contributed a paper to the volume (which were not presented at the conference) and together they have produced a superbly and flawlessly edited collection that includes a general introduction which discusses the ample connections between Schofield’s work and the volume’s papers (and many thanks to the editors from individual authors for improving their contributions). In addition to a bibliography of Schofield’s published writings, the volume concludes with a general and index locorum. The quality of both the contributors and their contributions is very high--a testament (were it needed) to Schofield’s towering influence upon the field of ancient philosophy.

Aristotle's Politics claims that the polis or city-state "exists by nature" (Pol. 1.2.1252630). Thinkers as diverse as Marsilius of Padua, Thomas Hobbes, and Martha Nussbaum have struggled with how to interpret such a claim-some finding in it a salutary alternative to existing political theories, others finding in it the basis of deeply wrong-headed political thinking. In Aristotle on the Nature of Community, Adriel Trott seeks both to elucidate and to defend Aristotle's claim about the naturalness of the polis by interpreting nature in the Politics through the notion of nature as an internal principle of motion ( a notion central to the understanding of natural things articulated in his treatise thereupon, viz. Physics2.1).

It is a truism that Aristotle distinguishes theoretical, practical, and productive sciences; but Aristotle’s Metaphysics begins with a discussion of the nature of the free person and his Nicomachean Ethics concludes with one of his clearest statement of the nature of theoria, so perhaps the boundaries between those sci-ences in existing works are more porous. Curtis Johnson, author of Aristotle’s Theory of the State (New York: Macmillan, 1990), in his current volume seeks to clarify the boundary between theoretical science (the ‘Philosophy’ of his title) and practical science (the ‘Politics’) in Aristotle’s Politics in order to identify the theoretical philosophy that he believes undergirds the work and to engage some of the perennial practical problems in the text (such as the identity of what Aris-totle calls ‘the best constitution’).

Arriving at definitions in philosophy is as time-honored as it is controversial. Although learned reflection in the west about sport goes back at least to the time of ancient Greece, the sub-discipline of the philosophy of sport emerged in the world of Anglophone analytic philosophy in the 1970s. Shawn Klein’s edited volume, Defining Sport: Conceptions and Borderlines, is both the fruit of and a valuable contribution to such an emerging field (indeed, it is the first book-length study of its topic within philosophy of sport). Although Huizinga had sought to define the phenomenon of play very broadly in his Homo Ludens (1938), investigation of the overlapping questions of what is sport? what is a game?, and what is play? were central to the sub-discipline at its inception. Foundational was the work of Bernard Suits, whose Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (1978) sought to refute Wittgenstein’s claim that the notion of game was indefinable. In order to refute Wittgenstein, Suits sought to establish the conditions or properties both necessary and sufficient of the concepts of game and sport such that all instances of those concepts share such properties.

This is a big book. Literally. Each of its almost 800 pages is 6.75” x 9.75” (rather than the somewhat more usual 5.75” x 8.75” sized page of an academic hardcover book), with words in a small font and short margins all-around. It would appear that the publisher used a number of production tricks to squeeze in as many words as possible. Which is understandable because Politics & Philosophy at Rome contains the collected papers (mostly published, but several unpublished) of Miriam T. Griffin, one of the biggest and most important Anglophone scholars of Roman philosophy, who passed away shortly before the book was completed in 2018. Students of Cicero, Tacitus, and Seneca are especially in debt to her for the rigorous and richly contextualized studies she has produced of their ethical, historical, and political works. And all students of ancient Rome are in debt for the republication of fifty of her papers, which range over three areas (and are organized into three subsections in the book). The first part of the book includes ten papers on Roman history (in both the republican and imperial periods). The second part of the book includes seven published papers, five unpublished lectures, and three “occasional pieces” on Roman historiography (especially in the case of Tacitus). A third and final section of the book includes 25 papers on Roman politics and philosophy (which includes almost 400 pages of material).

The nature of the edited scholarly collection has undergone a sea change. Whereas once upon a time edited collections brought together conference papers or previously published landmark studies—whose mark of excellence is scholarly rigor—more recently libraries have been inundated by Guides, Companions, and Handbooks. The Guide/Companion/Handbook model has its uses, perhaps especially for introductory essays or overviews of topics in which clarity, rather than cutting-edge scholarship, is the mark of excellence. Between these two models falls a new and somewhat unprecedented (at least in Aristotle scholarship) genre of collection, what Cambridge University Press is characterizing as a Critical Guide. The volume’s self-description claims that it is a “collection of newly commissioned essays…present[ing] a thorough and close examination of the work” which will “challenge and advance the scholarship on the Ethics</i>, establishing new ways of viewing and appreciating the work for all scholars of Aristotle.” Clearly, one is no longer looking at introductory essays.

The image of a copy of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite—nude but demurely shielding her pubic region—which adorns the dust cover of Pearson’s superb monograph, Aristotle on Desire</i>), suggests to the casual book buyer that the volume encased therein will explain Aristotle’s thoughts about sexual desire—perhaps as a central part or the paradigm case of his general theory of desire. But the goddess likes being tricky: Aristotle has very little to say about sexual desire (at best it is a subcategory of <i>epithumia</i>, set alongside the desires for eating and drinking and reduced to tactile stimulation), and it is not immediately apparent that he possesses a general theory or account of desire. No doubt, Aristotle discusses many aspects of <i>orexis</i> (Aristotle’s general term for desire) in relationship to human action, in his consideration of the rhetorical manipulation of the emotions, and in his examination of animate motion. But as Pearson notes, neither in Aristotle’s catalog of writings nor in his surviving works is there an Aristotelian <i>peri orexeôs</i>. Pearson’s monograph, which is the “distant descendant” of a Ph.D. completed at Cambridge in 2004, thus is an exercise in detective work which combs through Aristotle’s discussions of desire throughout the corpus (albeit with focus on the ethical treatises, the <i>Rhetoric</i>, and <i>De Anima</i>) in order to reconstruct what a general theory of desire would look like for Aristotle. Pearson does a masterful job at drawing together into a coherent whole many of Aristotle’s scattered remarks about the different aspects of desire and provides a model for textual analysis of philosophically abstruse passages. Along the way, he overturns a number of scholarly orthodoxies (for instance, that Aristotle’s account of <i>thumos</i> retains elements of Platonic <i>thumos</i> or “spiritedness” or that <i>thumos</i> has a unique relationship to the <i>kalon</i> or what is fine) and situates Aristotle’s theory amidst contemporary philosophers of desire such as Thomas Nagle, Thomas Scanlon, and G.F. Schuler. The result is a landmark work of scholarship that scholars working on Aristotle’s moral psychology will need to engage and argue with. Whether the work warrants the adornment of Aphrodite is a question to which I will return in my conclusion.

The eight contributions in this volume result from three conferences held at the Université Michel de Montaigne Bordeaux 3 between 2005 and 2007 on nature and household relations, nature and regime-types (politeiai), and nature and education. Three of the chapters examine Aristotle’s notion of nature through consideration of his remarks about the household (specifically, the relationship between family relations and constitutions in cities, the critique of Plato’s dissolution of the family, and the different senses of nature in the Politics), two are focused on the nature of regime-types (specifically kingship and the relationship between politeia and laws), and the final three chapters are concerned with the nature of the best regime described in Politics VII-VIII (specifically the discussion of thumotic peoples in VII.7, the implicit critique of Plato in the account of the material conditions of the best regime, and the place of leisure in Politics VII.14). Pierre Pellegrin, a major translator and scholar on Aristotle’s political and biological writings provides a preface on the tension between universality and cultural specificity in contemporary reading of the Politics.

Epictetus, a former slave who lived in Rome during Nero’s reign but was exiled (along with all those who practiced philosophy in Rome) to Greece by Domitian’s decree in 93 CE, espoused an austere ethical philosophy which aimed at happiness (eudaimonia), or tranquility (ataraxia), through the delimitation of valuation to things within one’s control. Although Epictetus never set to writing his beliefs, his disciple Arrian recorded eight books of his sayings (entitled Discourses [ διατριβαί ] of which only four books survive) and edited a compendium entitled the Handbook ( Ἐγχειρίδιον). In his preface to the volume under review, editor Theodore Scaltsas writes that “there is no message that would be of greater value in the face of today’s threats to society than Epictetus’ ‘bear and forbear.'” (1) Although Epictetus’ “forbearance” is not exactly the philosophy of hope much in vogue in contemporary politics, there is no doubt that Epictetus offers a perennial source of strength and self-reliance.

For the last four decades, David Keyt has devoted substantial scholarly energy to the reconstruction of political and ethical arguments in Aristotle’s <i>Nicomachean Ethics</i> and <i>Politics</i>, and to a lesser degree the same in Plato’s <i>Republic</i>. Although Keyt’s translation of and commentary on <i>Politics</i> Books V and VI in the Aristotle Clarendon series (1999), to my mind, is his most substantial contribution to ancient philosophy scholarship, close competitors are his scholarly articles which seek to reconstruct the philosophical positions of Aristotle (and to a lesser extent Plato) with pain-staking logical and philological care. <i>Nature and Justice</i> contains eleven such articles, eight previously published and three appearing for the first time. (Titles are listed at the end of the review.) Several of the articles are landmark works of Aristotle scholarship both for the scholarly controversies which they have sparked and for the methodological approach they exhibit.

What is at stake in determining how to translate the central term of Greek ethical philosophy, that of eudaimonia? The volume Eudaimonia and Well-Being (a collection of ten papers presented at a conference at the University of Cincinnati in 1993) shows that English terms such as happiness, well-being, and flourishing can have significantly different connotations which complicate our understanding of the Greek term. The volume’s contributors work in both ancient Greek ethics and Anglophone contemporary moral philosophy, and although not all the papers bridged the divide between classics and philosophy, on the whole the volume succeeds in elucidating the different meanings “happiness” has for both contemporary and ancient Greek philosophers. The ten papers address five topics, in each case with one author presenting a thesis and another responding as discussant. Most of the papers were revised for publication, and many of the discussants’ papers can stand as independent contributions. Additionally, the editor (who was a participant at the conference) provides a helpful introduction which underscores key themes addressed by many of the papers. The topics examined were whether virtue is sufficient and necessary for happiness (Annas and Sumner); the relationship between fear of death and happiness in Epicurean philosophy (Mitsis and Lesses); the development of the concept of happiness amongst peripatoi in the Hellenistic Lyceum (White and Inwood); the nature of the ethical philosophizing in the sixth book of Polybius’ Histories (Hahm and Jost); and the neo-Aristotelian “capabilities” social philosophy espoused by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. The volume includes an index locurum, but no comprehensive bibliography. Let me first summarize the debate on the individual topics and then speak to a couple general themes. Given the richness of the papers, space constrains me to restate only the main arguments.

Natural philosophers make mistakes. Descartes got the laws of inertia wrong, Kant misunderstood the primacy of Euclidian geometry, and almost everyone (except perhaps Aristarchus of Samos) prior to the discovery of the telescope mistakenly thought that the solar system was geocentric. That we find Aristotle mistaken on questions in the life sciences — questions which required advances such as the microscope to even articulate — should come as little surprise. There seems nothing remarkable in the fact that Aristotle mistakenly thought that the constitutive elements of the world were four (earth, wind, air, fire) or that the “organ” of thought was not the brain, but the heart. But the matter is otherwise when scholars examine Aristotle’s remarks about the female in his biological writings. When Aristotle claims that the leader of a hive is the king bee (HA 8 [9].40.623b9-10), that woman have smaller brains than men (PA 2.7.653a28-9), and that the female of the species have fewer teeth than the male (HA 2.3.501b19-21), Aristotle’s critics have suspected something more nefarious than simply poor observation at work. When Aristotle goes on to claim that “the female is, as it were, a mutilated male” (GA 2.3.737a27-8) or that “the female is more dispirited and more despondent than the male, more shameless and more lying, readier to deceive and possessing a better memory for grudges” (HA 8 [9].1.608b10-12), critics have accused Aristotle of trying to pass off misogyny as science.

To modern ears, the word Epicurean indicates (if anything) an interest in fine dining. But at least throughout the early modern period up until the 19th century, Epicureanism was known less for its relation to food preparation and more so, if not scandalously so, for its doctrine about the annihilation of the human soul at death, its denial of human immortality, and its attempt to justify the claim that death should not be feared since “Death is nothing to us” ( Kyriai Doxai [hereafter KD] 2). Epicureans — like many ancient schools of thought — sought to establish an objective “morality of happiness” or rational teaching about right conduct which allowed its practitioners to arrive at a kind of well-being. Epicureans identified such well-being or happiness with “freedom from disturbance” ( ἀταραξία), and insofar as the fear of death undermined such contentedness in life, they presented arguments against the claim that death was a bad thing. Put more concisely, Epicureans believe that (as James Warren [JW] puts it), “if we think about death correctly, we think about living a good life correctly, and vice versa” (7). But whereas other ancient thinkers — most famously Socrates and his students — had sought to cure the fear of death by positing an immortal soul which philosophy was to prepare for life after the death of one’s body, Epicureans took the opposite route and argued that in part it was the longing for an impossible immortality that contributed to the fearfulness of death.

Few concepts in Greek philosophical thought are more multi-faceted, analyzed, and disputed than that of “nature” ( φύσις). Although the term is rarely used in epic literature, at least since the 6th century publication of Anaximander’s ἱστορία περὶ φύσεως, the notion of nature has been central to Greek thought. Whether the question was that of providing an account of the kosmos, discerning the relationship between what is merely customary and what is eternal in the norms of a people, or seeking guidance about the standard according to which one should live, Greek thinkers turned to the notion of nature as a cause, as a process, and as a goal or end.

Few ideas are more central to Aristotle’s thought than that of the causal purposiveness of natural things. Few ideas in the Aristotelian corpus are more controverted—whether historically, by early modern natural philosophers seeking to break with Aristotelian science or currently, by modern scholars of ancient philosophy seeking to interpret Aristotle’s physics—than what has come to be called Aristotle’s “teleology” (a term coined in the 18th century, apparently by the German philosopher Christian Wolff). In this ambitious study (derived from the author’s 2003 doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto), Monte Johnson [J.] aims at two goals: to determine both how Aristotle uses the notions of “ends” or purposes in his natural philosophy and what are the limits to Aristotle’s teleological explanations.

Balot’s (B.) Greek Political Thought aims to provide an “introductory guide” for undergraduate and graduate students to ancient Greek thinkers (broadly construed) from Homer through Epicurus who wrote in both systematic and unsystematic ways about life in the Greek polis (viii). B. notes that he has not tried to locate his arguments within current scholarly discussions (although he does include a 19 page bibliographic essay that provides an overview of Anglophone scholarship on Greek political thought). Nonetheless, he states that he hopes scholars will be able to recognize his take on scholarly arguments and appreciate what is distinctive in his approach, which combines normative and historical analysis. B. also characterizes his volume as distinctive in that it approaches Greek political thought through ethical thought, or what he calls “the perspective of ‘virtue politics'” (ix), a point I will consider at greater length below.