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APA NewslettersSpring 2001
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Julia
Annas, editor, Voices of Ancient Philosophy: An Introductory
Reader (Oxford University Press, 2001) 454 + xxiii pp. Reviewed by Nickolas Pappas The City College and Graduate Center, CUNY |
The instructor who wants to construct an introductory ancient philosophy
syllabus out of complete works faces considerable obstacles. Ancient
philosophical writings tend to be only tangentially related to contemporary
lay or philosophical concerns and the long writings tend to intimidate
students, who need to be led through them one careful step at a
time. As a result, ancient philosophy courses at the introductory
level generally end up focused around a small and perforce unrepresentative
selection of readings so that the undergraduate emerges with no
sense of the breadth of ancient thought. In particular, the works
of Plato and Aristotle so dominate the tradition that the five centuries'
worth of extraordinary philosophy that succeeded them simply disappear
from view.
Annas' book, like other recent offerings, responds to these difficulties.
Unlike most those other collections of ancient philosophical writings,
Annas' collection is topically organized. Professor Annas does not
line up the great thinkers from Thales to Plotinus and provide samples
from each; her focus is rather on the ancient debates in ethics,
in metaphysics, and in epistemology, in connection with each of
which she presents the positions held by both major and minor figures
of ancient philosophy.
In addition to the selections themselves, the book contains biographical
notes on the ancient authors, introductory blurbs to the readings,
and extensive "Comments" after each reading. These Comments
manage to be simultaneously clear enough for untrained undergraduates
to understand and thoughtful enough for their instructors to worry
over while preparing their lectures.
The roughly 90 readings are divided among six sections: Fate and
Freedom; Reason and Emotion; Knowledge, Belief, and Skepticism;
Metaphysical Questions; How Should You Live?; and Society and the
State. Each section comprises four or five topics specific enough
to let the ancient voices organize themselves into different sides
on an issue. Thus, Fate and Freedom, a particularly satisfying section,
opens with many readings on praise, blame, and responsibility before
moving to divine foreknowledge and thence to logical determinism
(where the reader is rewarded with "The Master Argument"
of Diodorus Cronus, followed by Professor Annas's expert elucidation).
Plato and Aristotle still dominate the conversation, but the book
gives other authors and schools of thought the space they deserve.
The Stoics are particularly well represented-as they should be-sometimes
in synopses by ancient popularizers (Cicero, Plutarch, etc.), but
also in works of Seneca and Epictetus. Annas responsibly includes
Alexander of Aphrodisias, Epicurus, and Sextus Empiricus. She ranges
further afield with selections that no one would have blamed her
for leaving out, but that immeasurably enrich the topic under discussion
and the undergraduate's understanding of ancient thought. I was
delighted to find a sizable extract from The Fourth Book of Maccabees,
part of the Hippocratic work, The Sacred Disease, and the Old Oligarch's
crotchety complaints about democracy. The effect of this inclusiveness
is neither relativism nor chaos, but a sense of the broad landscape
traversed by ancient thought.
This book's main drawback is part of its essence: while some pieces
are longer than others (the shortest run to a paragraph, the longest
to around ten pages), none is long. The student gains an overview
of ancient philosophy but loses the opportunity to work through
an entire medium-sized dialogue of Plato's, or several books of
the Nicomachean Ethics. Anthologies make it harder to grasp the
concerns and methods that drive a philosopher such as Aristotle
or Plato leading the one to bring 'nature' to bear on a wide span
of questions, and the other to believe that the Forms will address
both scientific and ethical problems.
Moreover, while good anthologies like this one communicate the breadth
of a topic, sometimes even the best enter the classroom for a more
questionable reason. Many professors assume that the degraded skills
of today's college students mean that they must be given a number
of very short readings, the one as different from the next in content
and manner as one music video is from another. No doubt undergraduates
are unpracticed at taking up a long and difficult text and chewing
it over for a month (as no doubt they always have been). But one
may just as reasonably respond to this situation by limiting the
number of authors students are required to read in one semester.
The unskilled reader will likely be better off and happier coming
to know one author slowly than shifting gears with each assignment,
when each assignment is so different from any reading that the student
has done before.