book Reviews 443

Jon Miller, ed. The Reception of Aristotle’s Ethics (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), x + 310 pp. $99.00. ISBN 9780521513883.

Karen Margrethe Nielsen explores the possible influence of the Nicomachean Ethics in the Hellenistic period, in particular its possible influence on Stoicism. There is no direct reference to the NE from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to 45 BC, when Cicero wrote De Finibus. But what about an indirect or inferential case for influence? Nielsen argues that we should take with a grain of salt those passages in Plutarch and Strabo that seem to suggest that Aristotle’s esoteric works were completely lost from the early third century to the early first century BC, as well as the scepticism of F.H. Sandbach about the possibility of Aristotelian influence on Stoicism. While not claiming that the Stoics simply take over ideas or terminology from Aristotle, she presents the Stoic teaching on virtue and happiness as responding to issues about happiness and external goods that Aristotle left unresolved in NE I. In a similar vein, she presents with sympathy A.A. Long’s case that the Stoic distinction between kathêkonta and katorthômata mirrors Aristotle’s distinction of two kinds of actions in NE II 4. Her conclusion: ‘Though we should indeed proceed cautiously in this terrain, it would be premature to conclude that Aristotle’s ethics exerted no influence on ethical thought in the second and third centuries BC’ (p. 30). Where Nielsen argued that Aristotle likely influenced philosophy in the pre- ceding Hellenistic period, Christopher Gill’s ‘The transformation of Aristotle’s ethics in Roman philosophy’ argues that in the post-Hellenistic period (roughly 100 BC to 200 AD) something rather different took place: Aristotelian ethics was reformulated in response to Hellenistic and especially Stoic views. Aristotelian teaching about the emotions was reformulated in Stoic terms but in opposition to Stoic views of the emotions. Aristotelian teaching about hap- piness incorporated the Stoic vocabulary of primary natural things and of appropriation (oikeiôsis). Aristotelian teaching about the necessary conditions of happiness responded to the Stoic claim that virtue is necessary and suffi- cient for happiness. While ‘Aristotelian ethical ideas remained a significant philosophical presence throughout the period’ (p. 51), it is clear that ‘these ideas were substantially reshaped, or at least reinterpreted, in the light of Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic debate, and that Stoic ethics played a key role in setting the agenda for this process of transformation’ (p. 52). Dominic O’Meara’s ‘Aristotelian ethics in Plotinus’ comes to two main con- clusions. On the one hand, ‘The two philosophers share issues and principles: the question of the goal of human life, the criteria for what is to count as happiness, the place of pleasure, the role of virtue, a distinction between types

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi 10.1163/20512996-12340027 444 book Reviews of virtue, one type concerning affects and actions, the other being higher and relating to the soul as rational, the question of the acquisition of the virtues and their ranking with respect to happiness’ (p. 65). On the other hand, where Aristotle’s ethics is either independent of his metaphysics, or at all events not influenced by his metaphysics in any obvious way, O’Meara identifies the fol- lowing metaphysical claims as crucial for Plotinus’s ethics: ‘the theory of the ultimate first cause above being, the One; divine transcendent intellect’s deri- vation from and relation to the One; the origin of soul in intellect and soul’s descent and relation to the body’ (p. 65). Plotinus has assimilated many of Aristotle’s ethical themes and concepts, but has also reworked them into a new ethical theory in the light of his own Platonist metaphysics. In ‘St. Augustine’s appropriation and transformation of Aristotelian eudai- monia’ Michael W. Tkacz argues that while there is no good reason to suppose that Augustine knew the Nicomachean Ethics, he was decisively affected by Aristotle’s conception of happiness as philosophical contemplation, mediated by Cicero’s Hortensius, which Tkacz understands as a Latinized version of Aristotle’s Protrepticus. With this conception of happiness as a key, Augustine was able in his Contra Academicos to understand the New Academy not as skeptical but as committed to the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. In his De beata vita and later works, however, he moves beyond an Aristotelian posi- tion: the end of human life is not just philosophical contemplation but union with God. ‘Having been himself brought to philosophy by Aristotle, Augustine was able to transform Aristotelian eudaimonia in a way that both preserved its philosophical character and extended it in the direction of the transcendent’ (p. 84). Anna Akasoy’s ‘The Arabic and Islamic reception of the Nicomachean Ethics’ brings together information and critical judgment about a variety of topics: the movement to translate Greek texts into Arabic and the character of the result- ing translations; the different methods employed to translate the Nicomachean Ethics (word for word and sentence for sentence) and the difficulties that Arabic translators faced in making sense of aspects of Aristotle’s Greek culture unfamiliar to them; the circulation of the Ethics with an additional eleventh or even twelfth book; and the circulation and influence of summaries of the Ethics. The big news, however, is that while the Ethics did influence various Islamic thinkers, it had much less influence in the Arabic and Islamic world than Aristotle’s logic, physics, and metaphysics. Some explain this on the ground that Aristotle’s ethics was rooted in a culture radically different from that of Islam. Others explain it on the ground that those scholars who were genuinely familiar with Aristotle’s ethics were few and far between and that their work was not influential. polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 31 (2014) 425-473