Hellenistic Philosophy and Some Science

Abstract

These book notes mainly deal with some recent books on Hellenistic philosophy, but the final section will be devoted to three books on ancient science (post-Hellenistic as well as Hellenistic). Let us begin with Hellenistic scepticism. Its students are well served by three recent books (one edition and two monographs) published by Oxford University Press. Aristocles of Messene is one of the most important sources for our knowledge of (or perhaps better: for our ideas about) Pyrrho and early Pyrrhonism, since he reported a summary of an account of Pyrrho's central ideas by his 'pupil' Timon, a report which has been preserved for us by Eusebius. The other fragments (all, as it happens, preserved by Eusebius) also offer interesting critical accounts of other schools. We now have a new edition, with English translation and extensive commentary, of the fragments and testimonia of this Aristocles, prepared by Maria Lorenza Chiesara, which supersedes the earlier editions of Mullach (1881) and Heiland (1925).' In her introduction C. depicts Aristocles as an acute and faithful representative of the Aristotelianism of the first century AD (although his date can still not be established with certainty). She rejects the idea of a specific debt, on Aristocles' part, to either Antiochus of Ascalon or Middle Platonism, while acknowledging that Aristocles seems to have shared the idea of a philosophical continuity between Plato and Aristotle, and that it may be significant that Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics were lumped together in book 7 of his On Philosophy, whereas the schools to be rejected (Pyrrhoneans, Cyrenaics, Metrodorus, Protagoreans, Eleatics and Epicureans) were discussed in book 8. She also discusses such meagre indications as there are of the original structure of the ten books of Aristocles' On Philosophy, and offers a plausible reconstruction of the sequence of the available fragments from book 8 (showing, on the basis of the introductions and connecting texts, that the original sequence in Aristocles was not the same as the sequence in Eusebius hence the numbering of the fragments in this edition