Journal of the History of Philosophy

108 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY central threads running through Plato's philosophy, both largely plausible and, at times, compelling . I was convinced at least that the search for such principles does require rethinking certain generally accepted positions, a valuable exercise in its own right, l must admit that Clegg never quite convinced me about Plato that "there is a sense in which his entire philosophy is an exercise in self-justification" (p. 21; see also pp. 33, 190), nor even that Clegg must read Plato that way ---but no matter. Given its general unorthodoxy, and its valuable general enterprise, Clegg's works is both refreshing and challenging, even if sometimes incomplete or convincing. At least Clegg has seen a unity of Plato's doctrines "as in a dream." Unluckily for the rest of us who might have hoped for more, a clear waking vision is yet to be achieved. NICHOLASD. SMITH Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University J. D. G. Evans. Aristotle's Concept of Dialectic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Pp. x + 150. $12.95. Aristotle's Topics has been relatively neglected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship . Though there are a number of reasons for this neglect, perhaps the most important is the fact that scholars have thought the Topics to be an early and ultimately unsuccessful Aristotelian attempt at logic, still heavily dependent on Plato and later superseded by Aristotle's discovery of syllogistic and demonstration. So the Topics has been passed over as having little to contribute to our understanding of Aristotle's logic or the rest of his mature philosophy, and there has been a tendency to study it just for the sake of illuminating Aristotle's development as a logician. Some recent work on the Topics, such as that produced by the third Symposium Aristotelicum,~constitutes an exception to this general pattern insofar as it studies some part or feature of the Topics in its own right and for its own sake. But the accounts of the Topics produced by such work have tended to be only partial, focusing on particular features of the work such as the rules for a dialectical disputation or the nature of a dialectical topos, and they are compatible with the general view of the Topics as a failed attempt to do what Aristotle finally succeeded in doing in the Analytics. Evans's book Aristotle's Concept of Dialectic reexamines the nature and function of the Topics as a whole; it provides a reevaluation of Aristotelian dialectic that is careful, scholarly, and, I think, successful. It should have an important impact on our understanding of Aristotle's logic; it certainly has significant implications for our view of the chronology of his logical works and his development as a logician, though Evans does not deal explicitly with these last two issues. The style and organization of the book make it very difficult to read, however. Much of the book, for example, involves complicated and elaborate analyses of various Aristotelian texts, not always immediately relevant to the issue under discussion, so that it is often hard to extract Evans's main theses from the mass of details surrounding and supporting them. Because of this flaw, which tends to obscure the scholarly significance of the book, this review will be devoted mostly to a description of Evans's most important theses and the general nature of his support for them. Though I disagree with some of the details of Evans's account (and with many of the expressions he chooses to convey what he means), it does not seem worthwhile presenting those differences of detail in light of the overall accomplishment of the book. Evans's concern is with Aristotle's theoretical understanding of dialectic. He is not interested in any of the specifics of Aristotelian dialectic, such as the method for the discovery of arguments G. E. Owen, ed., Aristotle on Dialectic:Proceedingsof the ThirdSymposiumAristotelicum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). BOOK REVIEWS 109 which Aristotle claims to be teaching. What Evans is undertaking to investigate is not the practice but the metaphysics of dialectic, the status Aristotle assigns to dialectic with regard to the sciences and the other logical disciplines. He begins by pulling...