Journal of the History of Philosophy

Most of the essays in this excellent collection give clear and persuasive arguments about difficult topics, and several break new ground. They are demanding but accessible to the non-specialist, with all Greek transliterated and translated; footnotes send the specialist reader to other published works where the case for a point is made in more technical detail.

The book’s stated aim casts a wide net: “to expose some of the ways in which the received view has overestimated the gap Aristotle sees between science and ethics and suggest some possible avenues for bridging that gap” (4), and the essays are divided into three naturally distinct sections. The essays of part 1 make the case that Aristotle’s ethics resembles, or is, a science to a greater degree than is commonly thought—and that for all Aristotle’s emphasis on the distinction between theoretical and practical inquiries, there is much to be learned about each from careful consideration of their similarities. The essays of part 2 characterize the method of ethical inquiry. They show that Aristotle employs more than one such method; and they offer several interpretations of these methods—interpretations that [End Page 155] explore the similarities between ethical and empirical inquiry. Devin Henry’s contribution aims to secure the analogy between natural science and ethics developed in earlier chapters by showing that matters of conduct “hold for the most part” (171) in just the way that natural phenomena do. The essays of part 3 show that there is much to be learned about Aristotelian ethics from Aristotelian natural science, and also that Aristotle presupposes that the student of ethics will have a detailed grasp of natural science and psychology.

The editors have thoughtfully selected and organized the papers, so that the effect of reading the volume from beginning to end is illuminating. Thus, for example, James V. Allen argues that theoretical knowledge has a practical counterpart not to be identified with phronēsis. This is followed by David Charles’s contribution, a highly original account of the nature of such practical knowledge. Any Aristotelian, but not only Aristotelians, can appreciate the thoughtful placement of the argument “that it is” before the argument about “what it is.”

Further, although each piece stands alone, there is dialogue among the authors. For example, Karen Margrethe Nielsen likens ethical claims about what is usually the case to similar claims in sciences such as medicine, and argues that there are ethical generalizations that, though not without exception, are true by nature and not merely by convention. This, she argues, opens the door for a theoretical science of ethics. In the book’s last piece, Charlotte Witt distinguishes between natural, normative, and conventional kinds, and argues that certain ethical kinds are not merely conventional but normative—but that nevertheless they are not suitably stable objects for a science of ethics. Witt’s essay, which casts doubt on the book’s thesis, is a nice surprise—coming as it does after twelve essays attempting to bridge the gap.

Among other interesting dialogues is one that concerns what to call the method of inquiry famously described in Nicomachean Ethics (EN) 7.1. Joseph Karbowski and Carlo Natali refer to the ‘dialectical method,’ as it is typically called, while Daniel Devereux, following Jonathan Barnes, reserves ‘dialectic’ for the practice described in the Topics, and instead calls the EN 7.1 procedure the ‘method of endoxa.’ This nominal difference reflects a subtle but important distinction in Karbowski’s and Devereux’s interpretations. Since Karbowski aligns it with dialectic, on his view it is not essential that the phainomena (endoxa) be true, but only that they be believed. For Devereux, such phainomena—which can be false—are suitable only for dialectical discussions as described in the Topics. On his view, the EN 7’s method involves the underlying assumption that each endoxon, or most of them, is in some way or...