Journal of the History of Philosophy

366 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~2:3 JULY 1984 the essay on Lebendige Kri~fte (sec. 8), which he does not mention, proposes the existence of worlds not part of the system and therefore intrinsically unknowable. Though the former writing has been influential in the history of science while the latter has been almost forgotten, the concept of unknowable worlds was more important in the development of Kant's own philosophy. Just as Aristotle's teaching of the uniqueness of the world was the main obstacle to the acceptance of plurality, scriptural teaching (at least ex silentio) of the uniqueness of man was the main obstacle in the way to belief in extraterrestrial life. But when good apologetic grounds were found for asserting the compatibility of extraterrestrial life with Christian monotheism, the question of the actual existence of extraterrestrial life was, unlike the question of plurality, still far from being answered by observation. The only genuinely empirical investigations then relevant to extraterrestrial life were limited to the moon; but in the absence of data and with confidence in plurality, fancy was encouraged by natural theology to speak of an infinity of inhabited worlds, Each stage in the process of'filling the sky with worlds and peopling the worlds with intelligent beings required pari passu some changes in the conception of the earth and its inhabitants. A general homogenizing of the universe, a recognition of the relativity of motion and direction, the terrestrial-celestial value-boundary, the great chain of being, the relation of God to man and to other creatures, the principle that nature does nothing in vain and still other principles of teleology and design, the principle of the uniformity of the laws and the matter of nature, the principle of plenitude--every one of these was repeatedly employed in the debates, often equally by adherents of both sides. Where thinkers start from different points and end with the same conclusions, or start from the same apparent facts but end with different conclusions, one suspects that premises bidden from both may be decisive. Mr. Dick has brought to light many of the premises which they explicitly formulated, and has suggested others to explain , for instance, the reluctance of Cartesians to assert the existence of an infinity of worlds and the rapprochement between natural theology and exobiology especially in England in the eighteenth century. Mythic and eschatoiogical considerations may have affected speculation about extraterrestrial life. The author, perhaps correctly , avoids these even more speculative themes in a subject already quite speculative enough. His book is an excellent contribution to the history of science and philosophy, but it leaves room also for more consideration of the bearing of history of culture on attitudes in astronomy. It would, however, be churlish to be less than grateful for the excellent book that he has written. LEwis WHITE BECK University of Rochester ]. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor. The Greeks on Pleasure. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1982. Pp. xiv + 497- $37.5 TM The authors of this substantial work claim that it is a genuinely collaborative effort, and they accept joint responsibility for all parts of it. The subject of the book has BOOK REVIEWS 367 received attention from each author previously, for each has published a volume in the Clarendon Plato Series on a dialogue in which pleasure is a major topic (Gosling on the Philebus, 1975; Taylor on the Protagoras, 1976), and Gosling has published a philosophical study of hedonism (Pleasure and Desire: The Casefor Hedonism Reviewed, Oxford , 1969). While the results of this earlier work make themselves felt here, by no means is this book simply repetition. The aim of the book is to examine, in the classical Greek period from Democritus to Epicurus and the early Stoics, "the development of philosophical views on the nature of pleasure and the importance it does or should have in human life" (l). The authors do not assume knowledge of Greek on the part of their readers, but they do assume familiarity with the ancient works which they discuss, and they address themselves in the first place to readers with philosophical interests. The reader learns quickly that "the...