What is Ancient Philosophy?

69    entails, as an important component of the pleasure the audience takes in tragic drama, the pleasure of moral understanding (Chapter 6, passim). My objections to this type of interpretation are already on record (‘Aristotle’s Literary Aesthetics’, Phronesis 44/3 [1999], 181–98). H. continues to hold that tragedy’s transformation and integration of the painful emotions of pity and fear into aesthetic pleasure (p. 203) is parallel to the case described in Poetics Chapter 4 of viewing with pleasure a painting of something we would µnd unpleasant to view in reality—a parallel that would support his cognitivist interpretation of Aristotle’s aesthetics. In the Phronesis piece I pointed out a problematic consequence of this belief: Aristotle in Chapter 4 would be making the plainly false claim that the pleasure we take in the painted image of something disgusting derives from the disgust, rather than despite it. It is no objection to this point to complain as H. does (p. 180 n. 10) that I should not have imported the term ‘disgusting’ back from the moral context of Chapter 13 to the non-moral one of Chapter 4, but should instead have spoken only of the ‘perceptually disagreeable’. My argument took aim at a structural correspondence. To substitute ‘perceptually disagreeable’ for ‘disgusting’ leaves the argument no less e¶ective against µnding in Chapter 4 the implied grounds of an Aristotelian theory of mimesis. For all that, H.’s Aristotle is an attractive intellectual µgure. I could even wish that his Aristotle rather than mine had written the Poetics. University of California, Berkeley G. R. F. FERRARI QU’EST-CE QUE LA PHILOSOPHIE ANTIQUE? P. H : What is Ancient Philosophy? Translated by Michael Chase. Pp. xiv + 362. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. (Originally published as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique?, 1995.) Cased, £19.95. ISBN: 0-674-00733-6. The title of Hadot’s What is Ancient Philosophy? is at once both deceptive yet accurate. It is deceptive because this volume is not really an introduction to ancient philosophy at all, and much of it reads more like a manifesto than a survey. It is accurate, however, insofar as the volume is concerned with how philosophy was conceived in antiquity. Ancient philosophy, according to H., was fundamentally the choice of a certain way of life and central to the volume is the distinction between philosophy as a mode of existence and philosophies as intellectual discourses. H. begins in Part One with a brief account of ‘philosophy before philosophy’ under which heading he places the Presocratics and Sophists. He does this because he claims that they would not have called themselves ‘philosophers’ (and so doubts the attribution of the word to Pythagoras). Philosophy proper for H. begins with the µgure of Socrates as he is represented in Plato’s Symposium, for it is here that the self-conscious use of the word philosophia occurs for the µrst time. This Socratic–Platonic articulation of the concept of philosophy established an intimate link between philosophical discourse and an individual’s way of life (p. 55). This The Classical Review vol. 54 no. 1 © The Classical Association 2004; all rights reserved 70    connection remained fundamental for all of the subsequent philosophical schools and traditions. In Part Two H. guides the reader through the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Hellenistic schools. In each case his objective is not to introduce their respective doctrines but rather to emphasize their shared assumptions about the rôle of philosophy. The heart of the volume is the chapter on philosophy and philosophical discourse at the end of Part Two (pp. 172–233). Here H. tries to downplay the doctrinal di¶erences between the philosophical schools in order to show their common assumptions about the function of philosophy and the rôle of what he calls ‘spiritual exercises’. In Part Three H. is keen to emphasize the continuity between ancient philosophy and early Christian thought. Both had similar aims and similar methodologies: the transformation of one’s way of life via a series of spiritual exercises. The µnal chapter asks why modern philosophy no longer has an existential dimension. The answer is that during the Middle Ages Christianity took over the existential task, leaving philosophy as merely a system of theoretical discourse. H.’s approach may come as something of a jolt to those brought up on Guthrie’s A History of Greek Philosophy. While Guthrie focuses upon the Presocratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, H. ignores the Presocratics altogether and passes only brie·y over Plato and Aristotle, devoting most of his attention to Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism, each conceived as an existential mode of living. Although H. does at a number of points note the inter-relationship between philosophical discourse and a philosophical way of life, in general he tends to underplay the rôle of argument, supposing that questions concerning philosophy as a way of life can be addressed separately. It is not clear to me that they can. The Pyrrhonian way of life, for instance, is meaningless without continual reference to the arguments that force one into a state of suspended judgement (contra pp. 144–5). Those arguments and the theoretical discourse in which they are expressed are the necessary preconditions for the Pyrrhonian way of life. Moreover, ancient philosophers were often explicitly interested in arguments, something that H. tends to overlook. That concern with arguments took place within the context of the conception of philosophy that H. so eloquently outlines. While I agree with H. that an account of what look to modern philosophers like interesting arguments in Plato and Aristotle is hardly an adequate way in which to understand ancient thought, his own account tends to swing too far in the opposite direction, sidelining the rôle of argument altogether. Overall, H.’s volume is highly readable and certainly valuable. As a survey of how philosophy was conceived in antiquity, it is superior to W. Jordan’s Ancient Concepts of Philosophy (London, 1990). I suspect that it may inspire some but no doubt infuriate others. Either way, it does force one to think further about the way in which modern conceptions of philosophy a¶ect how one approaches ancient philosophy. A µnal note on production. An inexpensive French paperback has been transformed by Harvard University Press into a hardback three times the price that is more awkward to use insofar as the original footnotes have been turned into endnotes and the table of contents has been simpliµed, making it considerably less useful than that in the original edition. King’s College London JOHN SELLARS