¹ See however (e.g.) Donini, 15–16, on Ryle on future events.

² See e.g. p. 54, where she says that ‘t[he] idea that expert counsel counts as part of one's own resources is perhaps most explicit [my italics] in the discussion of practical reasoning in NE III.3’ (where the passage referred to, 1112b 27–8, is at least primarily about the possible in the context of action), or p. 93 (‘there is no persuasive evidence that Aristotle wants to restrict reason in this way [sc by disallowing the re-thinking of ends]’).

³ ‘In a sense’, she goes on, ‘this is the aim of interpretation—to show the permanent importance of a text to issues of fundamental human concern. And Aristotle himself urges us to take this role seriously: time (and future generations), he says, must be co-workers and co-discoverers in the development of his theory (1098a 22)’. For Donini and Wardy, I suppose, the texts are just assumed to be ‘of fundamental…concem’ in any case.

⁴ Similarly, the attribution to Aristotle of the idea that ‘[e]motions are well as reason ground the moral sense, and these emotions include the wide sentiments of altruism as much as particular attachments to specific others’ (p. 2, my italics) surely needs at least some kinds of qualification, which it does not get.

⁵ In the same context, we find her first quoting Aristotle in EE as saying ‘…not to arrange one's life with respect to some end is a sign of great foolishness’, but then paraphrasing this with ‘Aristotle says that to fail to arrange one's life with regard to ends is a sign of foolishness’ (my italics), which in the context of her interpretation of Aristotle—which attributes to him, to a degree controversially, a plurality of ends—is at best ambiguous.

⁶ This may look like Ross's conclusion; however Wardy is at pains to emphasize that he does not, like Ross, regard β just as a distorted version of α, but rather (perhaps) as a partly independent dialectical encounter with the same set of issues.

⁷ The judgement is meant to be more positive than it sounds; it partly reflects Wardy's own circumspection in stating his conclusions, in the absence of any explicit signals from Aristotle about the connections between the various parts of the book. The only real alternative to the analysis offered is to treat it as a rag-bag. If that is unsatisfactory, then the question is whether Aristotle is capable of an ingenuity to match Wardy's—which seems about an even bet.

⁸ The only blot on its escutcheon is the Greek in the footnotes, in which thetas and phis seem to be systematically malformed. Of the other two books, the standards of production of the CUP book are noticeably higher than those of the one from OUP, which contains a small but irritating number of typographical errors.

⁹ Cf. also 1112b 8–9. Donini's discussion here, and elsewhere in the book, could usefully have been filled out by a treatment of Aristotle's use of the notions of necessity and ‘for the most part’ in the Poetics: see now D. Frede, ‘Necessity, chance, and “what happens for the most part” in Aristotle's Poetics' in Rorty, Essays on Aristotle's Poetics.

¹⁰ The underlying issue in the chapter is how to deal with future events, given the principle of what W. calls the ‘isomorphism’ of language and things; part of the key is that Aristotle is not talking about some sea-battle's happening between some fleets, somewhere, but about these two fleets, which are now in this part of the sea and heading for each other (p. 15).

¹¹ This chapter, like De Int. IX, is now established as one of the loci classici for the treatment of determinism in Aristotle.

¹² Donini here depends on Martha Nussbaum's claims in The Fragility of Goodness.

¹³ EN 1.9, 1099b 9–25: 1.2, 1094b 7–10.

¹⁴ The exceptions are G.E.M. de Ste Croix on Aristotle on history (from Levick, B. [ed.], The Ancient Historian and his Materials (1975)Google Scholar: among other things, de Ste Croix argues that Aristotle probably had read his Thucydides, which philosophers have often thought difficult to square with his treatment of history in the Poetics— but see now Dorothea Frede in Rorty, 218, n. 28); a collection of excerpts under the title ‘Myth and Tragedy’ from Jean-Pierre Vernant's Myth and Society and Myth and Tragedy; Jonathan Lear on ‘Katharsis’ (from Phronesis for 1988); Leon Golden's ‘Aristotle on the pleasures of comedy’ appeared in Hermes for 1987; and Amélie Rorty's own scene-setting essay on ‘The psychology of Aristotelian tragedy’ appeared in an earlier form in French, P., Uehling, T. and Wettstein, H. (edd.), MidWest Studies in Philosophy 15.Google Scholar (An extended version of Nussbaum's, Martha ‘Tragedy and self-sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on fear and pity’ is in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 10 [1992].)Google Scholar

¹⁵ They will also have a good perspective on the history of the interpretation of the Poetics: see e.g. Belfiore ch. 8, and Stephen Halliwell's Epilogue to Rorty, ‘The Poetics and its Interpreters’, which should be supplemented with ch. 10 of his Aristotle's Poetics (1986). The (deserved) influence of the latter book can be measured by the extraordinary frequency with which it is cited by the other contributors to Rorty; by no means all of its detailed interpretations are universally, or even widely, accepted, but it is very widely used as a starting (or sighting) point for discussion.

¹⁶ See Nehamas, Alexander, ‘Pity and fear’, 309–10 (in Rorty).Google Scholar

¹⁷ For his handling of the fourth, see his n. 10 (336 of Rorty)—though Nehamas's version is perhaps not (quite) so easily dismissed.

¹⁸ See also Kosman on Lear (Rorty, 66), although in this case the honours are about even.

¹⁹ Lear, for one, considers it, but rejects it as unhelpful (316–17 in Rorty).

²⁰ The jury ought perhaps still to be out on Janko's detailed case, which also brings in the Neoplatonists and the Tractatus Coislinianus; and certainly, if he were right, a fair number of people would be freed for more profitable occupations.

²¹ A similar point is made by Nehamas, in Rorty, 312, n. 27, against an earlier version of this part of Belfiore's thesis.

²² Again, the statistical evidence is not in itself particularly useful: the fact that Aristotle predominantly uses a multivocal term in one particular sense (usually in one particular kind of context) has no great tendency to show that it will be used in the same sense somewhere else (and in a different kind of context).

²³ It has to be said that there are also some rather odd things in the book, e.g. in the literary/artistic connections made in ch. 1; or the use made of the ‘parallel’ between Poetics 4 and PA 645a 5–17 (pp. 68–70).

²⁴ Cf. Halliwell, in Rorty, 241: ‘…we cannot be confident just what Aristotle meant by catharsis; but I am at least prepared to say that, if we had fuller evidence about Aristotle's special use of this term, we would find that it in some way complemented or reinforced the larger view of the experience of art which I ascribe to him’.

²⁵ Donini's Aristotele e il determinismo (on which see above) is a useful complement to Frede's treatment, though it does not itself touch on the Poetics.