Journal of the History of Philosophy

Book Reviews Philosophia. Part I: Studies in Greek Philosophy. By C. J. de Vogel. (Assen: Van Gorcum & Co., 1970; distributed in U.S.A. by Humanities Press, New York. Pp. iv + 451. $15.00) In this handsome volume, Mme. de Vogel has collected eighteen of her papers in Greek philosophy: four of them--more than eighty pages--have not been published before (all these date from 1968-1969), three are English translations of papers previously available only in Japanese and/or Dutch (about seventy pages), and the other eleven (five in French and six in English) reprint several of her better known papers in the field, most here somewhat revised. There are three papers on "Pythagorica" (all entirely new), two on Socrates (one newly translated from the Japanese), six on Plato (one new, and one newly translated from the Dutch, on Plato's view of God), two on Aristotle, three bearing on Neoplatonism (one newly translated from the Dutch), and two others besides. It is a rich, and richly welcome, collection. I shall be discussing only two of her many areas---the new papers on Pythagoras and on Plato--but every item in the collection rewards careful and thoughtful reading. PYTHAGORAS Mme. de Vogel's general approach to Pythagoras is well known from her 1966 book, Pythagoras and Early Pythagoreanism. (She holds, in brief, that we can recover a quite detailed picture of Pythagoras' philosophy, and that it is that: a unified body of philosophical thought, not merely a religious program.) That book, however, despite its length (about 300 pages) and its date, failed to confront in any detailed way the most extensive--and the most "tough-mindedly" skeptical--modern scrutiny of the evidence concerning Pythagoras, Walter Burkert's 1962 Weisheit und Wissenscha/t (about 500 pages). Especially welcome here are two new papers, one specifically concerned with his book (pp. 78-91)1 and one with the fragments of Philolaus, to which Chapter 3 of Burkert's book was also devoted (pp. 27-77). Across the entire wide range of scholarly approaches to Pythagoras (I speak only of the responsible ones), one could scarcely find a contrast in temperament more extreme than that between Mine. de Vogel and Herr Burkert. They are so divergent as to be almost incommensurable, and it has clearly cost Mme. de Vogel to undertake this "confrontation" with his views. (I have in mind her own, rather touching avowals at the end of the essay ["Anyhow, although I did not really like it, these pages had to be written"] as well as a certain tonality of discomfort and reluctance that can be sensed throughout the essay and in the Preface.) We are the gainers from her efforts, however, for the very contrast between these two is instructive for all interested in the problems of writing the history of philosophy, and any dialogue between them is more instructive still. Mme. de Vogel's position contra Burkert might be "boiled down" (just for the sake of our discussion) to the following two stages: first (A) she argues that the weight of early secondary evidence (e.g., Heraclitus B129, B40, Xenophanes B7 and Herodotus IV.95) suggests that more intellectual achievement should be attributed to Pythagoras himself than Burkert will concede; then (B) that the absence from Aristotle's reports of any substantial role for Philolaus implies that neither he nor any others after Pythagoras did (as Burkert believes) play any major role in originating any "Pythagorean" views--so that all (or almost all) of Pythagorean doctrine--religious, ethical, and cosmological and mathematical ---can and should be traced back to Pythagoras himself (for this argument from 1 Somepoints from this article also appear in her brief review of Burkert in Gymnasium, 77 (1970), 69-71 (in German). 138~] BOOK REVIEWS 385 Aristotle's silence about Philolaus see pp. 75, 84-85, 97-98). Now, thesis (A) is, by itself, no doubt discouragingly vague: so.me sort of "core of original doctrine" is to be assigned to Pythagoras, but we now know it only as developed by later writers. Exactly what it was, we may thus be unable to say--though even to say that there was something does represent...