Journal of the History of Philosophy

1 I8 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~4: ~ JANUARY 198( To possess and read the texts of Aristotle, however, is not automatically to under stand them. Here Latin translations of the Arabic commentators, and particularly o Averroes, were of decisive importance. So true is this that,just as the Latin West calico Aristotle "the Philosopher," so too Averroes was called simply "the Commentator" everyone knew who was meant. Nevertheless, in the case of the Categoriesand DeInterpre tatione, Averroes's importance in this regard was minimal. For not only had the Latin possessed these Aristotelian works ever since Boethius's translations in the sixth century They also had Boethius's own commentaries on them, commentaries far more elaborat~ and detailed than Averroes's concise presentations in his Middle Commentaries. In addition to the Preface, the present volume contains a separate Introduction tc each of the two works translated here, separate outlines or tables of contents for eac] of the translations, the translations themselves, and an index. Bekker numbers in th~ margins coordinate the sections of Averroes's commentaries with the correspondint passages in Aristotle. Notes are confined mainly to giving cross references and tc explaining certain terms in the translation. I do not read Arabic, and so am in nc position to judge the accuracy of the translations, but they read smoothly enough ir English. (This is not to say of course that the doctrine is always easy going.) Wherever possible, Butterworth has adhered to the terminology of Ackrill's trans lations of the Categories and De lnterpretatione. In the Middle Commentary on the D~ Interpretatione, however, Butterworth renders the notion of logical subcontraries a~, "subordinate contraries." The term "subcontraries" is a standard and familiar term ir logical vocabulary, and as far as I can tell, there is no reason to think Averroes mean1 anything else here. The volume is well produced, and the printing remarkably accurate. I found onl) one small misprint: on p. 137 in n. 2, the transliteration of Aristotle's Greek sould read pathemata, not pathesmata. PAUL VINCENT SPADE Indiana University Myles Burnyeat, editor. The Skeptical Tradition. Major Thinkers Series, vol. 3, Berke. Icy and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Pp. 45o. Cloth $38.5° . Paper, $1o.95. During the quarter-century which has passed since the first edition of Richard Popkin 's The History of Scepticism was published, skepticism has attracted much attention principally in two ways: first, as a field of research into the history of ancient renaissance, and modern philosophy; and second, as a problem in its own right in connection with contemporary discussions about epistemology and the history and philosophy of science. This book is an outstanding example of the first-mentioned class of research and to a lesser extent an instance of such attempts to relate the twc approaches as the recent works of Naess and Rescher. The originality of this book lies in that, for the first time, it gives us a quite satisfactory view of the history of skepticism as a tradition stretching from the fourtl~ BOOK REVIEWS 119 century B.C. up to Kant. The competence of the different contributing specialists, and the importance of the authors studied and the subjects explored, combine to make this a singularly important book. Any detailed analysis of the contents of this anthology would require far more space than what is here available and so I shall give a list of the essays included and then indicate a few aspects of the approach taken to skepticism in this book. The list of essays and their authors is as follows: M. F. Burnycat, "Introduction" and "Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism?"; David Sedley, "The Motivation of Greek Skepticism"; Pierre Couissin, "The Stoicism of the New Academy"; Micheal Frede, "Stoics and Skeptics on Clear and Distinct Impressions"; Gisela Striker, "The Ten Tropes of Aenesidemus"; Jonathan Barnes, "Ancient Skepticism and Causation"; Christopher Kirwan, "Augustine against the Skeptics"; C. B. Schmitt, "The Rediscovery of Skepticism in Modern Times"; Lisa Jardine, "Lorenzo Valla: Academic Skepticism and the New Humanist Dialectic"; Terence Penelhum, "Skepticism and Fideism"; Ralph Walker, "Gassendi and Skepticism"; Bernard Williams, "Descartes' Use of Skepticism"; Martha Brandt Bolton, "Locke and Pyrrhonism: The Doctrine of...