Sara Brill: Aristotle on the Concept of Shared Life. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 281.)

Abstract

ity.” She asks: “Will this hope prove more solid than Priam’s, or is it, like his, a child of the inability to come to terms with the inescapable limits mortality imposes on us?” (233). Pangle nevertheless concludes on amore positive note. By her book’s end, the wholeness possible through philosophy becomesmore transcendent, and in her final word on the matter, Pangle finds Aristotle teaching that, however much we ought to make our home in the world, “we are right to divine that what is the very best in us somehow transcends, somehow must transcend this plane. . . .We can be true to ourselves only when we strive, in one such way or another, to reach the divine” (275). In the end, does Aristotle counsel against religious pursuit? Is the highest life incompatible with hope for what is beyond our human limits? Or is the deep desire for the divine that we hear in St. Augustine’s cry in fact part and parcel of the philosophic life?