Striker, Gisela. From Aristotle to Cicero: Essays on Ancient Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022, x + 249 pp.

An excellent collection of essays and articles by an important authority on ancient logic, epistemology, and ethics. Three of the sixteen have not been previously published; the others have appeared in journals and collections from 1979 to 2021. Together they bear witness to some of the main conclusions from Striker’s extensive research program. As her insights are invariably well informed by the ancient evidence, rigorously argued, and carefully structured for clarity, the volume merits attentive study, even where subsequent contributions to the literature have complicated the picture since these were written.

A short introduction situates the chapters that follow against the backdrop of Striker’s intellectual trajectory, going back to her education and early teaching at the University of Göttingen and sketching the genesis of her subsequent projects as a philosopher at Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge. These bits of biography help to make sense of the structure of the volume: first the two earliest pieces, both on Aristotle’s Analytics and both translated from the original German by Joshua Mendelsohn; then six more on Aristotelian logic, followed by eight pieces that range from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Ethics, and Politics to various topics in Hellenistic epistemology and ethics, drawing on works of Epicurus, Cicero, and Seneca. Otherwise, the introduction does not seek to introduce the contents of the volume, that function being performed instead by a synopsis at the beginning of each individual chapter.

Striker is particularly wonderful as a teacher and guide through the intricacies of Aristotelian logic. As the first study (“Aristotle on Syllogisms ‘from a Hypothesis’”) bristles with technicalities, readers not deeply versed in the Prior Analytics may wish to begin with one of the later chapters, perhaps the relatively elementary Chapter 6 (“Aristotle’s Three Theories of Argument”) or Chapter 5 (“Aristotle and the Uses of Logic”). Writing at different times and for readers at different levels, Striker works repeatedly through those chapters in the Analytics that are most revelatory of Aristotle’s understanding of his project and of the advantages and disadvantages of his system. She gives special attention to such terms as ἀνάγειν (‘to reduce’), ἐπιτελεῖν (‘to perfect’), and ἀνάλυσις (‘analysis’). This last is the primary focus of one of the previously unpublished essays (Ch. 7: “The ‘Analysis’ of Aristotle’s Analytics”), where she suggests that the title refers not so much to the process of reducing arguments to syllogistic form as to that of taking a proposition down to its constituent terms and quantitative relations. She also covers such basics as the conventions for discussing Aristotle’s syllogistic system and the relationships among the treatises in the Organon, with the Categories serving as introduction and the Topics (including Sophistici Elenchi) as a manual for dialectical debate, while the Prior and Posterior Analytics lay out a general theory of deductive argument. Less conventionally, she shows in Chapters 5 and 6 how the Rhetoric, too, belongs in its own way to Aristotle’s theory of argument, since it is centrally concerned with the kinds of argumentation that are useful in public speaking in politics and the courts.

Aristotle appears to say in the Prior Analytics that his syllogistic system is complete, but then discusses a series of highly problematic arguments that seem not to work within that system. The point of these, Striker suggests, is not to disprove the completeness claim, which perhaps means only that an argument that has probative force must at least contain a syllogistic deduction. Aristotle’s intention is merely to work through some tricky and therefore illuminating cases. Much depends on what the premises mean, especially those using the verb ὑπάρχειν (‘to belong’). To say that A belongs to B might mean that A is B or an instance of B, but it could also mean that A is at least sometimes an attribute of B or that B can be the object of A, as of a science. But these are quite different relations, so that if premises in a syllogism slide from one meaning of ὑπάρχειν to the other, the logic is flawed. In addition, there are arguments “from the hypothesis,” treated in Pr. An. A23 and A44. Striker argues that since Aristotle did not know Stoic propositional logic, these can hardly be arguments containing a conditional premise. Rather, they are, in some cases, substitution arguments like that of Plato’s Meno, where the claim that virtue can be taught stands in for the claim that virtue is a form of knowledge: if the one is proven, so is the other. In other cases, one is dealing with the reductio ad impossibile, where one proves that the contradictory of the demonstrandum cannot be true. Either way, a rule of deduction is employed that is non-syllogistic.

The point about “belonging” is relevant also to Chapter 8 (“A Note on the Ontology of Aristotle’s Categories, Chapter 2”), which emphasizes that work’s fundamental departure from Platonic metaphysics. Without attacking Plato directly, Aristotle points out that the terminology of “participating” (μετέχειν) in the Forms is ambiguous between belonging to a genus and having an attribute. In its place he proposes a fourfold ontology: universals that are not attributes, attributes that are not universals, attributes that are universals, and individuals that are neither attributes nor universals. In labeling these last οὐσίαι (either “substances” or “beings”), Aristotle makes clear where ontological priority lies.

While all these points are illuminating, perhaps the most satisfying read of the book’s first half is Chapter 2 (“Necessity With Gaps”). In this 1985 study, originally published in German, Striker makes the case that Aristotle’s enigmatic remarks in Pr. An. A13 about what happens “for the most part” or “by nature” are meant to adapt his system of logic for use in the natural sciences, particularly in biology. Aristotle holds that knowledge is only of necessary truths, but he also wants scientific demonstration to be possible. Hence, he needs to give a role to such regularities as that grapevines lose their leaves in autumn or that human beings go gray as they age. Such events are not mere coincidences and should, it seems, be knowable, and yet they are not ‘continuous’ necessities, since contingencies may sometimes prevent their occurrence. Striker observes that the statements in question could be reframed as necessity statements incorporating a conditional on “if there is no obstacle.” Yet Aristotle himself could not state them that way, since his logic does not have room for conditionals as premises. Instead, he spoke of necessity “with gaps.”

Three additional chapters address topics in Aristotle’s works outside the study of logic and argumentation. Of these, Chapter 9 (“Emotions in Context”) studies the account of emotions in the Rhetoric and draws a brief comparison to the Stoic system; Chapter 10 (“Aristotle’s Ethics as Political Science”) makes a strong case, grounded in the treatment of justice in Nic. Eth. 5.1, for why readers of the Ethics are expected to study the Politics as well; and Chapter 11 (“Two Kinds of Deliberation: Aristotle and the Stoics”) studies προαίρεσις in the Nicomachean Ethics and compares it with Stoic ideas about practical wisdom (φρόνησις). In effect, Chapter 11 serves as the hinge that connects the preceding Aristotle chapters to the five that follow on Hellenistic philosophy. Previously unpublished, it is most valuable for its careful review of Aristotelian προαίρεσις, from which Striker builds a convincing case for her view that deliberation, for Aristotle, is essentially the process by which one arrives at a plan of action.

The comparison to Stoic wisdom I found less convincing. Striker appeals to the Stoic theory of value to explain the absence of any Aristotle-style discussion of προαίρεσις from extant Stoic texts, stating that “since the success of an action does not affect its moral character, they [the Stoics] did not find effective means-end reasoning necessary for virtue” (142). But surely they did, for while Stoic eudaimonia is certainly not dependent on the material success of one’s endeavors, virtue-as-knowledge still entails doing everything in one’s power to put one’s intentions into effect. The sage’s ship can be blown off course – but a captain who failed to consult the weather forecast could not be the sage.

The most important of the remaining essays is Chapter 12 (“Academics Fighting Academics”), which was previously published in the Symposium Hellenisticum volume Assent and Argument (1997). Striker pulls apart the layers of Cicero’s Lucullus (i. e., the first edition of the Academics) to reconstruct a plausible position for Philo of Larisa in the work that roused the ire of Antiochus of Ascalon. The title picks up on a remark of Aenesidemus, that the Academics of his day were just “Stoics fighting Stoics.” Aenesidemus means that philosophers like Philo and Antiochus were no longer sceptics, and Striker supports that view. While Antiochus accepted the Stoic claim that knowledge is attainable, grounded in catalepsis, Philo backed away from the Stoic requirement that the cataleptic impression should be “such as what could not come from what is not”: for him, knowledge is possible, but under a weaker definition. He thus put forward a form of fallibilism, or what we might call provisional dogmatism. Yet neither Antiochus nor Philo can really be called a Stoic, for the interpretation of Stoic epistemology they were working with, the one found in the Lucullus, had been reshaped in Academic circles and was no longer what real Stoics would put forward.

Rounding out the volume are a 2001 article on Sextus Empiricus (Ch. 13 “Skepticism as a Kind of Philosophy”); a first-rate summary of Epicurean epistemology (Ch. 14), written for the 2020 Oxford Handbook of Epicurus and Epicureanism; a chapter on moral progress in Seneca (Ch. 15 “Mental Health and Moral Health: Moral Progress in Seneca’s Letters”); and the last of the new pieces, a study of Panaetius’s notion of decorum as reported by Cicero (Ch. 16 “Panaetius’ Peri tou kathēkontos in Cicero’s De Officiis”). Concerning the De Officiis, Striker merits an exclamation of gratitude for remarking that rather than the usual English title On Duties, a more adequate translation Cicero’s title would be On Appropriate Action, matching Panaetius’s Greek. As for decorum, she notes that Panaetius’s own term was τὸ πρέπον, a term of Greek aesthetic theory, close to τὸ καλόν (which she renders properly as “the honorable”) but capable also of referring to socially agreeable behavior. Helpfully adducing Seneca, Ep. Mor. 120.11 as well as Off. 1.94–95, she determines that attractiveness in the wider sense is “a quality that goes with virtue and virtuous action in general” (228). She could at this point also have made good use of Tusc. Disp. 4.31, where pulchritudo is defined as “an evenness and consistency in the opinions and judgments, together with a certain toughness and stability, either following upon virtue or identical with it.” Beauty of character is, then, a supervenient virtue as in Stob., Ecl. 2.7.5b4 (62 Wachsmuth) and Diog. Laert. 7.90–91: a good quality that always accompanies the knowledge-virtues but that is not itself a form of knowledge. More particularly, it is the outer manifestation of virtue that “allows people to appreciate virtue and to try to attain it without having a deeper understanding of the inner state that is the cause of the observable conduct” (229–230). As such it can play a role in guiding progressors, persons who have not yet attained wisdom but hope to find their way to it eventually through continual improvement of conduct.

In reprinting her earlier work, Striker has chosen not to include bibliographical updates, and even the essays that have not been previously published tend not to refer to very recent scholarship. In Chapter 16, for example, it struck me as odd to find no reference to Malcolm Schofield’s 2012 chapter “The Fourth Virtue” (in Nicgorski, ed. Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, 2012), nor to P. A. Brunt’s “Panaetius in De Officiis” (in his Studies in Stoicism, 2013), which could have been quite useful for supporting Striker’s view on the relationship between Cicero’s treatise and that of Panaetius. Users of this volume will need to keep in mind that these are snapshots of the author’s research at various points in the past and that they must do their own work to locate and compare other scholarly contributions on the same topics. But the effort is more than compensated by the opportunity to spend time with a scholar of Striker’s expertise and by her many sharply focused observations on the ancient record.