Review: The Presocratic Philosophers Author(s): M.R.

Wright Reviewed work(s): The Presocratic Philosophers by Jonathan Barnes Source: The Classical Review, New Series, Vol. 30, No. 1 (1980), pp. 43-45 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3063546 Accessed: 04/10/2008 04:30
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THE CLASSICAL REVIEW

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THE PRESOCRATICPHILOSOPHERS
JONATHAN BARNES: The Presocratic Philosophers. Vol. 1, Thales to

Zeno; Vol. 2, Empedocles to Democritus. ('The Arguments of the Philosophers' Series.) Pp. xiv + 378; x + 353. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. ?10 each vol.; two-vol. set ?18.
Jonathan Barnes's analysis of the Presocratic philosophers coincides with the appearance of the paperback version of the first two volumes of W.K.C. Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy. Such is the nature of the subject however that there is little overlap between the philosophical and the historical accounts; at times the two barely converge. Barnes divides his work into three main sections, the tides of which indicate his general approach and bias: (1) Eden (the Milesians, Heraclitus, Xenophanes and Pythagoras-in that misleading order), (2) The Serpent (Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno), and, comprising the second volume, (3) Paradise Regained (the neo-Ionians, Philotaus, and some Sophists). The first volume deals in the main with individual philosophies, the second is more thematic, and either may be read independently of the other. Each volume has particular bibliographies corresponding to the chapters, and its own notes and indexes; the appendices on sources and chronology, with the concordance and general bibliography, are given in each. Unfortunately the Indexes of Persons are mostly of ancient names only (exclusively so in the second volume), and the consequent absence of cross-reference necessitates a microscopic reading of the notes to reveal the admittedly highly selective involvement with the secondary literature. All Greek is transliterated, and most of the translations are original. The Preface proudly installs the Presocratics as philosophers in their own right. 'My main thesis' writes Barnes (l.ix)'is that the Presocratics were the first masters of rational thought; and my main aim is the exposition and assessment of their various ratiocinations', and again (1.5): '[Presocratic opinions] are characteristically supported by arguments, buttressed by reasons, established upon evidence'. But high hopes are dashed in individual assessments, e.g.: 'We may hazard it that nothing was clear either in the writings or in the minds of those men' (1.44, on Thales and Anaximander), 'Parmenides' metaphysics is based upon a falsehood and defended by a specious argument' (1.172), Zeno was not a philosopher but the first of the 'Sophists'-'negative, destructive, polemical' (1.294); the second volume is thus dismissed: 'the neo-Ionian revival is fundamentally a flop' (2.140). These are disheartening conclusions for the work on which they are based, and typify the author's habit of belittling his arguments with snap judgements and flat sententiae. To those he favours credit is given, and often in abundance. Anaximenes provides a final theory that has many of the hallmarks of science (1.47), Heraclitus' Theory of Flux, Unity of Opposites, and Monism together form a metaphysical system (1.60), and Xenophanes is upgraded into an a priori monotheist: 'pure logic moulded his conception of god; science gave his conception substance and matter' (1.99). Philolaus' fragments (accepted as authentic) reveal the discoverer of Aristotelian 'form' (2.94), Diagoras is brought from obscurity to invent an argument crucial to the Problem of Evil (2.151-4), and the surprising conclusion of the full treatment of Protagoras' Homomensurasatz is that 'he trod the lonely path of idealism' (2.249).

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For the main arguments of the early chapters there can be nothing but praise; the sections are lucid and informative, an expert introduction to the history of some key issues in philosophy. Barnes is marvellously direct, whether analysing first moves on the principles of human knowledge or on problems of responsibility and chance; in the psychology of both Pythagoras and Empedocles he reveals rational theory rather than religious dogma or mystery-mongering. Characteristically, in a dozen pages in the second volume (112-24), he 'reconciles the irreconcilable', expounding Empedocles' six different explanatory principles, clarifying the confusion in the Mind of Anaxagoras, and undoing Democritus' 'horrible muddle' about necessity, chance, and causation. But he is brusque with Parmenides, treating the Way of Truth as a preliminary to the work of Melissus, to whom he gives all the best arguments. Monism is denied to Parmenides, and he is left with a brightly coloured spherical O, surrounded and close-packed by other entities (cf. 1.2034, 229, 333 n. 7). The two chapters on Zeno, for all their logical brilliance, are similarly basically derogatory. The most striking feature of the work is the pervasive formalism. A method, described as a necessary translation into a modern idiom, starts with the 'harmless pedantry' of turning Hippias' sentence on Thales into a syllogism, and swiftly becomes the practice of presenting the content of Presocratic fragments and doxography in a complex and ruthless logical form. Sometimes the practice is enlightening and generous, and a salutary reminder of the seductions of the Greek language, but its unremitting application does not always clarify a Presocratic attack on a problem. On Zeno, for example, it takes fourteen lines of formidable logic (1.244) to express the mundane truth that any object is made up of the parts of its parts. Empedocles' universe is cited as a perfect example of Eternal Recurrence (2.201); the logical form given makes it an extreme case, so that K*1 is a mirror reflection of K1 in the movement from sphere to sphere, but a simpler version of K2 following K1 is probably closer to what can be fathomed from the original. A different example, but typical of the method, is the argument for the eternity of atomic motion (2.128): 'The explanandum is: (1) For every object, x, and time, t, x is moving at t. For every case of (1), there is available, in theory, a truth of the form: (2) a moves at tn because Q. Hence (1) itself is explained'. A deal of expertise is needed to unravel the 'hence' here. In general, more philosophical help for the Hellenist, and linguistic in-filling for the philosopher, would widen the readership. There are many signs of haste. Anaximenes' assertion that the sun is flat like a leaf is assumed to be a joke (1.54), but it counters Anaximander's 'sun-ring', and is an example of the kind of criticism earlier found wanting in the Milesians. At 2.141 we are told that Empedocles and Ion do not deny the existence of chalk and cheese but three pages later Empedocles denies the existence of men and clouds. The 'larger context' required at 2.183 could be supplied from 186. Pages 11, 23, 80, 85, 99, 106, and 151 of volume 2 have misprints, and Pythagoras has wandered into the chapter on Protagoras at p. 147. Examples of dubious translation are of Parmenides' B.8.47-8 which begins 'nor is there anything that is,' (1.179), and of panta in Empedocles' B.110.10 as 'all [my words] '. More serious is the mistake at 1.177 where two sentences are set out as direct quotation from Professor Owen (with a wrong

REVIEW THECLASSICAL page-reference), the first of which is garbled and the second invented. Barnes comments: 'I find myself unable to understand the suggestion'. No wonder! The overall impression is of an undisciplined embarrassment of riches, of provocation and some prejudice, essential reading for the specialist, but daunting for those on the fringe and beyond.
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth

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M.R. WRIGHT

HERACLITUS FROM THE DEEP END D. HOLWERDA: Sprunge in die Tiefen Heraklits. Pp. x + 138. Bouma's Boekhuis, 1978. Groningen:
'A primaeval jungle of misunderstandings and "mechanical" errors of transmission grew luxuriantly' over and about the text of Heraclitus 'shortly after his death (or perhaps even during his lifetime)'. Socrates confided to Euripides that he could not understand the whole of Heraclitus' ovy7paC4ua 6' (D. L. 2.22); Theophrastus thought that he wrote ra glev i,ureX?i, rdT adXXore a\XXco eXovra (D. L. 9.6): today we are immeasurably worse offnot least because the texts we pore over are wholly unreliable. Such reflections, at once sombre and challenging, set Dr. Holwerda off on his adventures: philological machete in hand, he hacks his way, step by step, through the undergrowth, determined to rediscover the Lost Word of Heraclitus. His monograph exhibits some twenty-five fragments, and records the explorations which led to them: in each case, detailed textual study uncovers or restores Heraclitus' ipsissima verba, and provides a literal reading of them. Philosophical interpretation, and the reconstruction of Heraclitus' system of thought, must wait until there is a legible text to interpret. The general flavour of Dr. Holwerda's researches is most easily conveyed by an example. Chapter V of his book deals with the first page of Heraclitus' auyypajiua. By amazing good fortune, fifteen of the surviving fragments can be glued together to reconstitute that exordium. Of the fragments, most scholars take B 1 DK (preceded perhaps by the words "HpdKXeIroC ... rdJe Xeyet') to mark the beginning of Heraclitus' work; after all, Aristotle says that the words occur tv r7 apr X awvri [Richards; avrov codd.] TOV (Rhet. 1407b6; cf. Sextus, M.VII.132). But Dr. Holwerda avypcidalroq argues that B 108 came before B 1. For the content of B 108 is comparable to the opening lines of, e.g., Hipp. V. M., Vict., Nat. born., X. Apol; and B 108 heads a series of quotations in Stobaeus which are otherwise in alphabetical order-the extraordinary precedence of B 108 is best explained on the hypothesis that it originally began the ov'yypapua. (In fact, Stobaeus' list is only alphabetical-well, almost alphabetical-if you emend B 109 and excise B 112; but no doubt Stobaeus' source was an alphabetical anthology of Heraclitean aphorisms.) B 108 is to be read thus: bOKOJcw iKOvaa oei6te aL4Kveirac eq X67ovYuc d [ot codd. edd.] oo4ov roUro [e1i rovro LtOKvedrata, b' p. 36] jWare jltvWCaKew arn t rdv'TovKeXcoptLajLpov. And the last clause translates: '.. . so as to know what a wise thing that surpasses all is'. B 1 now naturally follows: its initial rTV6E' contrasts neatly with the '6e' causes no problem; its 'Tro X56yov