Abstract
400 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY turbed by passion and desire. We are on the threshold of a view of man----one favoring "the development of a more stable personality structure" (p. 260). To begin with, this is not a new view at all; it is at least as old as Democritus. Adkins is aware of the objection and has tried to anticipate it: Democritus, and the atomists generally, do not represent the ethic of the more articulate and prominent members of Greek society, whose views are, for the most part, what we possess; for they wrote most of the surviving literature, and it is only from written documents that knowledge of values can be obtained [sic!]. (P. 111) One hardly knows what to make of such an argument, it is so redolent of special pleading. Did not Democritus' writings survive, albeit in fragmentary form? Then they must, according to the argument, represent the ethic of the more articulate and prominent members of Greek society--which was, Adkins adds in a footnote, the "dominant " ethic. Why, then, is Democritus passed over? Because, one suspects, he upsets the theory according to which the values of the polis are those of a shame-culture. Secondly, the Epicurean philosophy is, Adkins admits, one of withdrawal (p. 263). How likely is it that such a philosophy would favor the development of "a more stable personality structure"7 As described by Adkins (p. 264), Epicureanism is a philosophy for drop-outs; and it has not, so far I know, yet become even fashionable, let alone true, to say that such a philosophy makes for a more stable personality. It would be a mistake to reject, out of hand, the application of even merely fashionable ideas to the elucidation of Greek life and thought. In the hands of a master such an approach can be suggestive; at the very least it can have the virtue of breaking up the staleness of vision induced in us by habit, making us see the familiar in a new perspective. But here I think the categories take charge, facts are made to fit them, willy-nilly, or are disregarded, and we end with as simplistic and misleading a pictua'o of Greek life and thought as we should got from a theory of European history which professed to plot the rise and fall of the population as a simple function of the avail, ability of salt at any given time. It would be magnificant, but it would not be history. JOHN ROBINSON Windham College Avicenna's Treatise on Logic. Part one of Danish N~meh-i 'Alai (A Concise Philosophical Encyclopedia) and Autobiography. Trans. by F. Zabeeh. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972. Pp. 48. $3.75) Avicenna's Treatise on Logic--translation of part one of Avicenna's Persian work Danish N~meh-i "Al~i ("The Book of Scientific Knowledge"), as well as his autobiography and biography by his pupil, Abu-Abid Gorgani--contains some of Avicenna's salient points on logic. Ibn Sin~ (980-1038), known to the Latins as Avicenna, wrote a number of books that dealt with logic; four were written in Arabic and one in Persian. The Arabic ones are: Kit~b al-Shifd~ ("The Book of Healing"), Kitdb al Ndjdt ("The Book of Salvation "), Kitdb al-lsl~r~t wa'l-Tanb~h~t ("The Book of the Indications and Remarks"), and Mantiq-al-Mashriqiyyin ("The Logic of the Easterus"). One finds close similarities BOOK REVIEWS 401 between lsharat, al-Shifa" and al-N~jat. As a matter of fact, al-Na]at is to some extent a summary of some sections of al-Shi]d'. The Persian work Danish Nameh contains many points that were discussed in Avicenna's other works. Arabic logic---or as the translator prefers to call it, Islamic logic-- did not substantially differ from Aristotle's logic, as evidenced in their accounts of the kinds of categorical propositions, the three figures and their moods, categorical syllogisms, etc. However, one should not conclude .that Arabic logic was simply a duplication of Aristotelian logic, for it is more comprehensive in scope and subject matter. No one is certain about the actual influences on Arabic...
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