A Short Account of Greek Philosophy by G. F. Parker, and: Plato and His Contemporaries by G. F. Field

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS '277 ality is explained in terms of being. One cannot help wondering what would have happened if Professor Anderson had asked himself what kind of analogy is operative in his claim that his three (or four) kinds of analogy are analogously analogies. From the very outset of the book, what is to be explained is invoked to explain itself. This reviewer hopes that the present book represents a warm-up exercise and that Professor Anderson will soon turn his genial and cultivated mind to some, at least, of the difficulties that have been advanced against his Cajetanian views during the past several decades. As an echo of his past work, this book is disappointingly anachronistic; as possible fanfare for further and more persuasive stuff, it whets the intellectual appetite. University fY/ Notre Dame South Bend, Indiana RALPH MciNERNY A Short Account of Greek Philosophy. By G. F. PARKER. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1967. Pp. 194. $5.00. Plato and His Contemporaries. By G. C. FIELD. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc. Pp. 242, University Paperback Edition, 1967, $2.25. Deny to the life of mankind any semblance of continuity, deny any value to history and the role of the historian amounts to little more than a collector of facts, interesting perhaps but unrelated to modern life. Affirm a community to life, accept the experience of living as a fact which, while ancient with years, has maintained its identity through the passage of time, the appearance and disappearance of cultures, of social and political institutions, then the search into the past of life must be viewed as a labor capable of yielding authentic values for life in the twentieth century. The authors of these two works share the conviction that life is an experience of both the past and the present. They also share a commitment to the thesis that history, the recorder of the experiences in living from the past, can be profitable for life in the present. It is this double assent which explains the two studies of Greek Philosophy. G. F. Parker's A Short Account of Greek Philosophy draws its incentive from an awareness of the gulf that separates the " two cultures." And its purpose is to provide a bulwark against the possible tragedy of " Science, adrift from its moorings in humanism and history, (becoming) a ravening monster, while the Arts, oblivious of new areas of reality revealed by Science, (become) as arid as the deserts of the moon" (p. 4). For the author, the study of Greek Philosophy is one "of a number of common platforms on which those who wish to be both literate and numerate can 278 BOOK REVIEWS meet " (p. 5) , since " Greek civilisation is the common source from which the divergent streams of art and science flow down to us" (ibid)· G. C. Field is more modest in his appeal to history. He addresses his study on Plato and His Contemporaries primarily to those whose interest in philosophy is already assured. Describing the book as a " preliminary or supplementary essay to a study of the philosophy of Plato " (preface, p. v), Field directs his major effort to the task of bringing into proper focus the circumstances of history in which that philosophy emerged and developed . Only in a minor way does the platonic system itself occupy the author's attention. In the pursuit after his purpose Field achieves an admirable success. His study of the platonic historical milieu offers the initiated valuable insights into the genesis of the problems to which Plato addressed himself. It gives that philosophy a sense of being involved in the cross currents of the life of those days. For those who have yet to encounter Plato through a systematic study of his philosophy the work makes that philosopher and the problems with which he wrestled something more than academic incidents far removed from life. And Parker, too, achieves a goodly measure of success in his effort to construct a bulwark against the tragedy of mutually distrustful science and art. His invitation to today's men of science to spend time in the company of the philosophers of the 7th to the 4th centuries B. C. is cleverly...