SHIELDS (C.) Aristotle. (Routledge Philosophers). London: Routledge, 2007. Pp.
xvi + 456. £60.00 (hbk). £16.99 (pbk). 9780415283311(hbk).
SHIELDS (C.) Aristotle. (Routledge Philosophers). London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xvi + 456. £60.00 (hbk). £16.99 (pbk). 9780415283311(hbk). 9780415283328(pbk). Purported contributions to scholarship need to be evaluated relative to the standards of the discipline, but introductions are free to set for themselves the task they aim to accomplish. No one could reasonably criticize W.D. Ross’ Aristotle, for instance, for its being an uncritical paraphrase of Aristotelian doctrines, when Ross says explicitly in his Preface that that is the sort of book he has intended to write. This particular introduction says that it aims “to motivate the principal features of Aristotle’s philosophy [sic] ” for students and non‐specialists approaching Aristotle for the first time (xi, 1), which is ambiguous: Does it aim to motivate readers like that to study Aristotle more (1‐2), or does it aim to give an account of the philosophical motives for those features, which would be convincing to readers like that? Shields takes two features to be principal and discusses them first: the four causes as necessary for explaining generation and change; and the identification of the essence of a thing as necessary for our really knowing it. Then he goes through the corpus in the standard order except for a significant omission—he passes over the biological writings almost entirely—and also a significant change in order—namely, he discusses metaphysics immediately after the physics (fair enough), on the grounds that Aristotle’s psychology, ethics, and politics presuppose his metaphysics. As regards motivating readers to study Aristotle, one may wonder whether a 500 page book is the best instrument: presumably someone with the motivation to study Shields would a fortiori have the motivation already to study Aristotle. At a slim 88 pages originally, J. Barnes’s Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction (strangely not mentioned in Shields’ bibliographies) would seem to fit that bill better, as in its short scope it convinces readers brilliantly that Aristotle was a great genius who simply cannot be ignored. Typically we motivate others with a hook: we convince them that what we are offering enables them to get something they already want. Aristotle’s own motivator, the Protrepticus, proceeds in that way: it attempts to persuade readers to devote themselves to his philosophy on the assumption that they already have deep‐seated desires for wisdom and happiness. In our day, the excellent introduction by J. Lear (Aristotle: The Desire to Understand) presupposes that we would want our knowledge to be coherent and integrated, and it makes the convincing case that Aristotle’s philosophy provides a framework for realizing this—in implicit contrast to the evident disunity of knowledge that prevails in the aftermath of Descartes and Bacon. Yet Shields’ book has no hook, or at least no noteworthy one. Why study Aristotle? Shields’ answer seems to be, not the desire for wisdom or happiness, but mere curiosity. Suppose you are hiking in the high mountains and find a bronze statue (his example). You want to know about it. “Why do we wish to know this? We simply do: so much is unreflective, even automatic” (43). But our curiosity is not sated, Shields asserts, until we know what it is made of, by whom, in what shape, and for what purpose—which are the four causes (material, efficient, formal, final). Thus, because we are naturally curious, we will want to learn all the four causes. Is that a hook, then? Not really: if we “just do” want
to know these things, unreflectively and automatically, then we would hardly need Aristotle’s philosophy for telling us to look for them. Obviously, too, if we are curious today about “how things work”, and that sort of thing, we do not turn to Aristotle for insight. As regards giving an account of Aristotle’s philosophical motives for those “principal features” of his thought, Shields’ order of exposition sometimes seems at odds with itself. Consider for example his explanation of the four causes. As mentioned, Shield’s approach is distinctive for placing a discussion of the four causes at the very start, before any consideration of the Categories. But that creates a difficulty in explaining the formal cause. A formal cause, Shields says, is something like a shape or structure imposed on stuff. But if every formal cause were related to underlying stuff as is the shape of a bronze statue to the bronze, then all form would be incidental, and the distinction between nature and artifact would be eliminated. Thus Shields rightly draws a distinction: in some cases, he says, form is imposed by a process by which something does not merely “come to be” or change in some respect, but rather “unqualifiedly comes to be”. What does this phrase mean? Shields is obliged to explain it through a highly abbreviated appeal to the notion of “substance” from the Categories, which has not yet been introduced (62‐3). I find that frequently, and contributing to the excessive length of the book, what Shields offers as an explanation is in reality no more than a repetition. To give one example: explanandum, “it will turn out that some of Aristotle’s efficient causes can be causes of motion without being themselves in motion”; explanans (next sentence), “Evidently, for Aristotle, something may serve as a cause of motion without imparting its own motion to its effects, precisely because the cause in question is not in motion” (66). The book contains many typos and infelicities of expression, some of them substantive (such as “Boyle” for “Bacon”, 79), extending even to translated passages. Consider the issues simply at 75‐6 in the translated passage from Physics II.8: the passage is identified as 198b32‐199a8, yet it actually begins at b34 and ends at a7; αҮλλὰ µήν (a5‐6) is rendered as ampliative, “Moreover,” yet here it clearly serves, rather, to introduce a minor premise in an argument (see for example Ross’s translation: Shields can overlook this because by ellipsis he omits the particular examples at b36‐a2, which support that minor premise); δοκειә at a3 is not rendered, nor the optative at a5, nor πάντα at a6; and generally Shields’ rendering of φύσει by “natural” in the passage is off the mark, as φύσει γ' εҮστὶ τὰ τοιαυәτα πάντα, for instance, means not “such things are natural”, as Shields has it, but rather “all such things exist by nature” (compare a8). Obviously infelicities like that will not quite destroy the sense; yet neither will they help anyone in understanding an already perplexing text. MICHAEL PAKALUK Ave Maria University
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