![]() ![]() Thus if there is a single most characteristic move here, we might call it the 'William Blake': the ability to see the world in the grain of sand, the macrocosmic philosophical stakes in the inconspicuous point of textual detail - even, as in a case I will discuss below, a question of punctuation. The smaller-scale papers tend to start from an unrecognised or misunderstood oddity in some short but crucial stretch of text, and to focus on first eliciting, then resolving aporiai which point well beyond it. These forces are mustered with sweep and panache: there is real literary skill here, and it is used above all to convey the fun and excitement of the intellectual detective work. Burnyeat moves effortlessly from minute questions of philological detail - a point about variant mss or lexicography - to large-scale philosophical argument from rigorous textual analysis to comparisons with Wittgenstein, Gassendi or Hume. Can Pyrrhonian scepticism work at all? Does Plato succeed in refuting relativism? Is idealism even a live option in Greek philosophy? The path to an answer is always rich, detailed, and complex, a fascinating tour through texts both central and obscure. The discussion is organized around a single, thorny philosophical puzzle, and the stakes are always high. Seen together, these papers display some common patterns. Non-specialists who want to see what the fuss is about would do well to dive into some of the characteristic blockbuster papers here on scepticism or Greek epistemology: 'Protagoras and self-refutation in Plato's Theaetetus', 'Can the sceptic live his scepticism?', 'Enthymeme: Aristotle on the logic of persuasion', 'Idealism and Greek philosophy: what Descartes saw and Berkeley missed', or 'The Sceptic in his place and time'. ![]() 1, 57, and "by imagine" cannot be right on vol. The production is handsome, and I have noticed only two really disorienting typos (a missing (1), I assume, on vol. There are no revisions or significant introductory material, but neither does one feel the need for any. But all the other important articles seem to be here, and almost any reader will also discover something new. (eds.), Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Burnyeat would presumably prefer to refer us to ' De Anima II 5' ( Phronesis (47) 2002, 28-90), which falls outside the chronological scope of the present volumes.) Some may also feel a pang for 'The Material and Sources of Plato's Dream' ( Phronesis (15) 1970, 101-22) (presumably superseded by his epic 'Introduction' to the Levett translation of the Theaetetus (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990)). (Both are available in the updated version of M.C. Not quite everything one might have hoped for is here in particular, two Aristotle papers are missing which, notoriously, spawned a frenzied debate while still circulating in typescript: 'Is an Aristotelian philosophy of mind still credible? (a draft)', and 'How much happens when Aristotle sees red and hears middle C? Remarks on De Anima, 2. More of a catchall, it also includes papers on Heraclitus and on the opening words of Platonic dialogues, as well as Burnyeat's classic debunking of Straussianism. ![]() These parts are of very roughly equal weight but the last, notwithstanding the presence of the very influential 'Virtues in action' and 'Aristotle on learning to be good', is not wholly devoted to ethics. They are divided into two volumes, each in turn divided into two parts: 'Logic and Dialectic' and 'Scepticism Ancient and Modern' constitute volume 1, 'Knowledge' and 'Philosophy and the Good Life', volume 2. The papers included here date from 1964-96, the period during which Burnyeat taught first at University College London and then at Cambridge, including twelve years as Laurence Professor. The only problem is that many of these will be too heavily annotated to throw out but with clean copies we can at least begin the process of being enlightened, inspired, and provoked all over again. Burnyeat is a dominant figure in the field, a model for generations of scholars: for most of us, the publication of these papers represents a welcome chance to upgrade from a huge folder of mangy photocopies. The only thing historians of ancient philosophy really need to know about these volumes is that they exist. ![]()
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