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THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF HELLENISTIC PHILOSOPHY. Edited by KEIMPE ALGRA, JONATHAN BARNES, JAAP MANSFELD, AND MALCOLM SCHOFIELD. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. xix, 916.
THIS IS BOTH AN IMPRESSIVE SCHOLARLY ACHIEVEMENT and an enormously useful resource for study and teaching. It would be difficult to imagine a better time for producing such a volume or a better team of contributors. In the last thirty years or so, Hellenistic philosophy has changed from being a relatively minor part of the subject to a central area of innovative research in ancient philosophy. It is more widely taught to students and is increasingly recognized in philosophy generally as being of substantive importance. This has been a period of intensive fundamental work in editing new or poorly understood texts, particularly in Italy. This work has centred on Philodemus and on the continuing decipherment of the Herculaneum papyri but has embraced Stoic and Academic texts such as Hierocles' Foundations of Ethics and the Anonymous Commentary on Plato's Theaetettis. A related line of research, pursued especially by scholars based in Holland, has been on the reconstruction of the transmission of the knowledge of the Hellenistic period to later antiquity (and so to us) through shadowy but crucial figures such as Arius Didymus and Aëtius. The publication of source-books and commentaries (above all, the invaluable two-volume Hellenistic Philosophers by A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley [Cambridge 1987]) has made this work available to a wider public. In analysis and interpretation, a key role has been played by the series of volumes of essays based on the triennial meetings of the Symposium Hellenisticum, bringing together the work of European and American scholars on areas such as epistemology, ethics, political theory, and theology. The editors and contributors to this collection have figured prominently in those volumes, and this History is in a sense a culmination of the work of that Symposium over the last twenty years and more.
The aim of this book, set out crisply in the Preface, is to provide an expert overview of Hellenistic philosophy as a whole, designed both as an introduction and as a means for students and scholars to explore the material and issues. All Greek and Latin has been translated (at least in the main...