Plato’s Epistemology: Being and Seeming

Abstract

ution’ Charles envisages for our mind-body problem, and then also the contribution the study of Aristotle makes to our problem as currently conceived. Charles is surely right to imply that no mind-body problem worth the name can be mounted without relying on some manner of categorial distinction between the mental and the physical. Here, then, ‘impurity’ brings clarity rather than murkiness: if indeed the current orthodoxy relies on there being definitional purity where none is to be had, then inextricability undercuts the presuppositions needed to articulate any mind-body problem worthy of the name. Not solved, then, but rather dissolved. Pulling back further still, one can say of this book: it is demanding and challenging in equal measure, in the very best senses of these terms; it repays the careful study its nuanced investigations require; and it demonstrates in the plainest way possible how the study of philosophy’s past can yet illuminate its present. It is that rare book which will be read and then reread, put aside, and then reread yet again, each time with increasing profit. So filled is it with careful, intelligent, and fruitful speculation that this review has, of necessity, prescinded from discussing the many measured investigations of Aristotelian texts it offers. These investigations are none the less surely worth studying, in one way by any scholar interested in Aristotle’s psychology and in another way by any metaphysically informed philosopher of mind. Charles, as these pages make clear, is both.