Review of Josiah Ober’s The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021, xxv + 425 pp

With the provocative title The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason , Ober chooses two fundamental works as his reference point: E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) and Bruno Snell’s Die Entdeckung des Geistes (1946). Whereas Dodds famously argued against Greece presenting a ‘triumph of rationalism’ by pointing out pre-modern attitudes and modes of thinking, Bruno Snell asserted that the Ancient Greeks in Homeric times lacked a conception of the self and later gradually discovered introspection and a theory of mind. Following the line of his earlier books, Ober argues the exact opposite: the Ancient Greeks did not only behave rationally but also had a discourse about various aspects of rationality. The general claim of Ober’s book is that a so-called ‘Folk Theory’ of instrumental rationality emerged in the Greek world in the first half of the fifth century BCE. Although this Folk Theory does not resemble the form of modern rational choice theory, it made similar assumptions, such as that people employ their cognitive capacities to form ordered preferences and consistently act to obtain the best possible outcome. Ober (6) illustrates this by quoting Xenophon, Memo-rabilia 3.9.4: "that all persons deliberately choose, out of what is available to them, what they think is most advantageous to themselves, and they do this". This theory of instrumental rationality was first propagated by the Sophists and, through their education, their ideas permeated Greek public discourse, leading to numerous reflections in the late-fifth and early-fourth-century Greek philosophical and historical texts. When this popular theory was brought into practice in ancient Athens, it led to a process of