Abstract

This is a volume of four studies on Plato and Aristotle by one of the best of the young French specialists on ancient philosophy. The most important paper is perhaps the first, in which Brague attempts to refute the traditional interpretations of Timaeus 37d5ff., according to which time is a moving image of eternity. I can merely give his conclusion here, which is that the moving heavens are an image of the eternal, and that there is an image of the moving heavens, but not of the eternal. Next in interest, for this reviewer, is the second study, "L'isolation du sage. Sur un aspect du mythe de Politique." The reference is to the Eleatic Stranger's myth of the reversed cosmos. M. Brague focuses his attention on the passage from 271d3-6 and, in a manner that defies summary, combines philological Spitzfindigkeit and philosophical phronesis to arrive at two main conclusions: whereas the purpose of politics is to safeguard the minimal conditions of philosophical contemplation, the tasks of government cannot be included in philosophy; the highest activity of this same god, when he does not govern, is contemplation. Hence god is characterized by a "duality" of activity, not simplifiable into a unity. Two further studies follow, one on the Aristotelian formula ὁ ποτὲ ὄν the other on the priority of οὐσία with respect to time in Metaphysics Z 1. In the first, Brague analyzes the "centrifugal" force by which time advances, as the "now of nows,": by ejecting at once past and future. In the second, Brague concludes that "that which is first with respect to the ousia is also first with respect to the logos. But the converse is not true. That which is first with respect to the logos is not necessarily first with respect to the ousia. This has important consequences, among them that we speak of the predicates of ousia via logos; hence the priority of ousia to its predicates is established by logos."--Stanley Rosen, Pennsylvania State University.