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Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 10, Number 4, October

1972, pp. 478-479 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/hph.2008.1211

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478 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Damascius' Demiourgos. Here Simplicius is closer to Aristotle's notion that time

is merely potentially infinite, although they do not employ quite the same terminology.
This very dense work concludes with an examination of time as a philosophical
problem in antiquity, particularly in Plato and Aristotle, as illuminated by Simplicius.
That commentator's interpretation differs, however, from Aristotle, according to whom
the difference between before and after is not just an abstraction. In Aristotle, before
and after possess a real mathematical and physical being in the continuum of time
(p. 236). Simplicius thinks of before and after as if they were a mere order of ordinal
number, without reality outside mind. (Or, perhaps Plotinus was right in holding
that Aristotle's philosophy can be understood only by those who heard his lectures.)
Simplicius' interpretation is part of the wider movement of thought in later antiquity,
when time as the number of motion is forgotten and replaced by a more abstract
definition.
The great interest of these thinkers, Damascius and Simplicius, lies in their
providing us with variants or subspecies of the two great masters, Plato and Aristotle.
Plato held that time is a succession of now-times, constituted by the relation of older
and younger. The mathematical presentation of these now-times constitutes the con-
tinuity of time. In Aristotle, movement itself provides a real, not a merely mathe-
matical, succession. Time is not a mere predication of number to motion, but is
realized in physical movement. Soul numbers before and after, but the basis of time
is the endless becoming of the natural world. The commentaries of Damascius and
Simplicius shed new light on these two fundamental views of time.
Meyer's learned work makes these obscure texts widely accessible; his interpreta-
tions of the rich material are cautious and sound. The presentation is not [iir die
Menge; and, it is sometimes not very clear just what Greek distinctions are being noted
by certain G e r m a n distinctions (e.g., p. 127). There are misprints in French (p. 6),
G e r m a n (pp. 78, 231, 293), and Greek (pp. 17, 127). The work is a fine contribution
to scholarship.
PAUL J. W. MILLER
University o[ Colorado

The Fihrist of an-Nad~m, A Tenth Century Survey o[ Muslim Culture. Ed. and trans.
Bayard Dodge. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. 2 vols. Pp. 1149. $40)

Composed at the close of the tenth century, an-Nadim's Fihrist or catalogue "of
the books of all peoples, Arab and foreign, existing in the language of the Arabs"
has been, especially since the printing of its Arabic text in 1871, the constant resource
of all students of Muslim culture. With a thoroughness fed by his unflagging
enthusiasm for the written word a n - N a d i m catalogues works in all areas of study
practiced by the Arabic-reading peoples of his day including language arts, scriptural
studies, grammar, history, poetry, theology, law, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics,
medicine and (what we would call) anthropology. Often anecdotal but always in-
formative, he provides an overview of the entire process of intellectual fusion which
marked the growth of Islam as the (self-conceived) heir to Greek, Persian, and even
Indian civilization. To the historian of philosophy the Fihrist is a sine qua non, as a
primary source of knowledge of translations from Greek (and Sanskrit) into Arabic as
well as valuable accounts of the works of KindS, R~z~, and F~r~bL Since many of the
titles listed are no longer extant, the Fihrist has served as a touchstone for testing the
authenticity of rediscovered works; and often, of course, titles alone can tell the story
 BOOK REVIEWS 479

as to what the Arabs knew or what they thought. Bayard D o d g e ' s careful, somewhat
literal translation now puts this wealth of information af the fingertips of the non-
Arabist. The extensive notes and indices provided should help in securing this work
its well-deserved place on the reference shelf of the historian of philosophy, allowing
him to replace the too often heard banalities about the "passage of philosophy into
Europe" with trenchant specifics based upon primary research.
LENN EVAN GOODMAN
University of Hawaii

Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame o[ Time. By Giorgio de Santillana
and Hertha yon Dechend. (Boston: G a m b i t Press, 1969. Pp. x x v + 505. $10.00)

The authors, both seasoned historians of science, have concocted a b o o k that reads
like Velikovsky bouncing along the R o a d to Xanadu. Their thesis is that certain
archaic societies in the F a r East, Middle East and South America possessed a
profound knowledge of the kinematics, if not the dynamics, of astronomy, and that this
knowledge, entailing "prodigious feats of concentration and computing," was encoded
in their respective mythologies. "The gods are really stars . . .; all the stories, charac-
ters and adventures narrated by mythology concentrate on the active powers among
the stars, who are the planets . . ."; Hephaistos trapping Aphrodite and Ares in a net
refers to " a conjunction of Mars and Venus . . . in the Pleiades"; Phaeton's scorching
trip represents a planetary deviation, "a destruction, occurring at long intervals, of
things On earth by a great conflagration." M a x Mtiller and George Cox in the last
century and Leo Frobenius in this held similar views on the correspondence between
mythic narratives and celestiaI phenomena; Marcel Griaule's more recent work among
the Dogon and Dr. yon Dechend's own study of Polynesian myths are cited here to
show that present-day preliterate societies--in the manner of "our great scientific
ancestors"--are also disguising esoteric cosmogonies under innocent stories of gods
and heroes.
This archaic astronomical monomyth, diffused f r o m China to Peru, no longer
exists in its pristine integrity but has to be painfully teased out of the flotsam and
jetsam that surfaces sporadically in chronicles, epics and latter-day literary myths, and
it is to this task that the authors address themselves. The result is unconvincing.
Erudite references are heaped together with too little attention to designing a credible
argument; tenuous associations are passed off as sensational and indubitable proofs:
there is much sleight-of-hand with etymologies; passages in epics are eccentrically
explicated to yield the desired interpretation. Though Jung might well have sponsored
this enterprise, the authors sneer at both brands of depth psychology. N o r do fellow
mythologists fare much better: Dum6zil, L6vi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell are not so
much as mentioned, and Cassirer is dismissed in a few ill-natured paragraphs. But
what is most exasperating about the b o o k is the authors' coy way of paying out their
findings. Just as a train of argument is about to come to the point, a digression is
maddeningly introduced to heighten the suspense; the startling promises of topic sen-
tences and paragraphs somehow never get realized in the tangle of forced facts and
dubious speculations that follow. To be sure, the b o o k is full of fascinating items of
learning and now and then an arresting idea emerges, but these tidbits hardly com-
pensate for the frailty of the thesis and the overly calculated exposition.
ALBERT B. FRIEDMAN
Claremont Graduate School