In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:256 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The book is both stimulating and provocative, and rather worth the reading, particularly by those who find Plato less philosophically "sophisticated" than Aristotle, less alert and relevant for some contemporary philosophical tastes. And it may be, of course, that some such readers will be led on to a larger sampling of the Platonic dialogues, with the result-doubtless pernicious---that their reading of Plato may corrupt their (...) "understanding" of Aristotle, rather than as currently the other way round. Differently oriented philosophers will find Runciman's essay, as well as others of the same vein, worth a careful reading at least as the proverbial reminder of what the interpreter can take along with him when he seeks to clothe his ancestors in the habiliment of a more recent fashion. In his discussion of the Theaetetus, Runciman rightly argues that the acquiring of knowledge, for Plato, is rather by acquaintance, than a matter of knowing that or how. His interpretation of the dream-theory (p. 202) suggests that Plato does not therefore distinguish between "intellectual knowledge" and knowledge by acquaintance (pp. 15-16). The "whole passage from 184B to 186C offers clear evidence [of this]," says Runciman (p. 15). But, in this treatment of the arguments brought against Protagoras, particularly that perception is not knowledge because it is not of "truth" and thus not of "ousia," Runciman wants additionally to argue that Plato, perhaps for him unfortunately, comes close to saying that simples become knowable in propositions and that knowledge is essentially propositional What Plato has argued is that "truth and existence are taken to entail each other" (p. 15), but what he has shown is the propositional nature of knowledge. There is thus surprisingly a failure on Plato's part to distinguish between kinds of knowing. Perhaps. But the dream-theory may easily enough be read as showing only that physical objects are alone knowable. To take "ousia" as meaning "existence," as Runciman does, is perhaps also to remake rather than to restate the argument at 186E. Runciman's arguments for his treatment of the Sophist seem to come off rather more convincingly, and of the two dialogues which he treats, the Sophist appears to be far more interestingly contrived in his interpretation than the Theaetetus. For Runciman, the Sophist, while more "sophisticated" in content, shows still that Plato has not disabused himself of the view that the highest knowledge consists in the apprehension of the Forms, and that Plato's emphasis now on the method of Division continues to assume the "preexistence of an ontological structure, which the true philosopher can ascertain" (p. 60). Indeed, Runciman adds (p. 62), "all its [i.e., the Sophists's] questions are, for Plato ultimately ontological questions." This is an interesting comment and one to bear in mind when following Runciman further in the discussion of how Plato seeks to determine the nature, properties and relations of "certain selected Forms." There is a variety of suggestion in his treatment of several themes found in the Sophist. And while they are not all of equal force or equally penetrating, the book and its treatment of the Sophist reads well, It may be that Runciman is most convincing in his argument that Plato distinguishes the identity sense of "to be," while he assimilates both the existential and copulative senses (pp. 86ff.). Although this reader would not call Runciman's book "good Plato" (or "good history"), it is perhaps---"good philosophy"? J. L. SAUNI)ERS University of California, San Diego A Portrait of Aristotle. By Marjorie Grene. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Pp. 271. $5.00.) Harold Cherniss, in his review of the first edition of Robinson's translation of Jaeger's •ristoteles (AJP, 1935, pp. 261-271), says that when the whole body of Aristotle's writings "consists of lectures that were repeatedly delivered and bound together by backward and BOOK REVIEWS 257 forward references which may have been added at various times, it is apparent that the author looked upon the whole corpus as forming a self-consistent, unified system, and philosophically his work must be judged as such, if it was such that he intended it to be" (p... (shrink)