General

Abstract

If you have ever had a premonition, or if ever some inner voice has dissuaded you from a certain action, you might have noticed that this experience involves a different kind of knowledge than that preceded by an inference. We call it a ‘hunch’, an ‘intuition’, or a ‘gut feeling’; in the nineteenth century this particular subvolitional form of thinking was called ‘unconscious cerebration’, and modern cognitive science recognizes it as a specific type of cognition characterized by quick, pre-attentive, and preconscious processing – Daniel Kahneman's famous ‘thinking fast’. The most fascinating aspect of Peter Struck's book on divination is an attempt to distinguish the type of cognition it entailed. The book offers an insightful analysis of Plato's, Aristotle's, the Stoics’, and the Neoplatonists’ views on divination, concluding that they saw divination as ‘surplus insight’, a specific kind of cognition. Since ‘our ability to know exceeds our capacity to understand that ability’, ‘our cognitive selves are to some…degree mysterious to us…The messages that we receive from the world around us add up, sometimes in uncanny ways, to more than the sum of their parts’ (15). Struck argues that, in the ancient world, the process by which we arrive at such surplus knowledge was acculturated as divination. He focuses on the philosophers’ views and does not attempt to provide an analysis of the technical and practical side of divination, which was based on knowledge and skill (though it must have involved intuition to some degree as well), or of the popular views on divination. Nevertheless, his book will be very useful to those interested in the philosophical views on divination and in the cognitive history of intuition. Cognitive science has spurred several important recent studies in Greek religion and is continuing to provide a useful framework for conceptualizing ancient (and modern) religious thinking and behaviour.