Book 7 of the Collection Review Author|s|: Alan C. Bowen Isis, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), 115-116. Stable URL hitp:/ links jstor-org/siisici=0021-1753%28199103%2982%3A 1%3C 115%3ABTOTC%3E2.0,CO%3B2-M Isis is currently published by The University of Chicago Press, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use ofthis work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupulwww.jstor.org/journals‘uepress html. Each copy of any part of @ JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission. STOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @jstor.org, bupslwww jstor.org/ ‘Sun Jun 27 08:57:01 2008BOOK REVIEWS—t takes too lightly difficulties in. Plotinus's position. This is a pervasive feature of the ook. To take just one example, we are told that the immateriality of intellect is fundamental in the account of unity and participation that the analogy from the sci fences is supposed to elucidate. But there is hardly any attempt to explain just how is 0, oF to address philosophical difficul- ties and questions concerning the notion of the immaterial. There is little truly pene: trating textual analysis or clear philosophi- cal argument employing logical reconstruc tions or illuminating examples or analogies. ‘There is too much uncritically and unre- flectively used philosophical jargon at the cost of attempts to think genuinely through the problems at hand. Plotinus is a very difficult author who needs and deserves sympathetic treatment. But the sort of respect he is shown in the present work does not help prove to the ‘modern world that he was a deep and sub- tle thinker, as Gurtler claims he was—a view that, incidentally, I share with him. EIOLFUR KJALAR EMILSSON Pappus of Alexandria. Book 7 of the Collec- tion, Edited with translation and commen- tary'by Alexander Jones. 2 parts. (Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences, 8.) xii + 748 pp., figs., apps., indexes. New York / Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 1986. $109 Pappus of Alexandria, who was active in the late third and early fourth centuries A.D., wrote a number of books that have survived and are now of great importance in the history of the Greek mathematical sciences. His major work is the Collectio, loosely unified compilation of his shorter, separate treatises that some editor or li ary executor made shortly after Pappus's death (pp. 24-26). Though this compilation addresses treatises by Apollonius, Auto- lycus, Euclid, and so on, itis at the same time & primary source for our understand: ing of the Greek mathematical sciences, especially when it deals with writers and texts not known otherwise. So historians and philosophers of the exact sciences will certainly welcome Alexander Jones's very fine edition and annotated translation of Book 7 of this valuable work. Like the other books of the Collectio, Book 7 is a guide or companion to the 82:1: 311 0991) 15 study of specific treatises in afield of some Greck mathematical science. As. is an- nounced at its outset, the subject of Book 7 ig the so-called Treasury or Domain of Analysis, a body of results obtained by way ff, and exemplifying, the twin techniques ‘of analysis and synthesis, which are useful for solving geometrical problems. After siving what are now the classic definitions ‘of Greek analysis and synthesis, Pappus lists twelve treatises (by Apollonius, Aris taeus, Eratosthenes, and Euclid) whose ‘contents make up the Domain. Then, for the first nine of these, he provides sum- ‘aries that were probably to be read before studying the treatises themselves, Finally, Pappus presents a corpus of lemmas oF proofs of matters taken for granted in the treatises which the reader might not be able {o justify immediately on the strength of el- ementary geometry and what followed be- fore. These lemmas seem intended for use as one actually worked through the particu- lar treatises. Tones's edition of the text of Book 7 is based on the manuscript Vaticanus graecus 218, which probably dates from the early tenth century. This manuscript is the etl est witness in Greek to the Collectio, and it is the ultimate source for all the other ex- tant. versions. in Greek and Latin (pp 30-31, 75). (There is an Arabic version of Book 8 that is independent of Vat. gr. 218.) AAs for the figures, Jones chooses to place at the end of his edition versions that aim to reconstruct Pappus’s originals so far as possible (pp. 76-77). Though he is careful to signal where his figures depart from those in the Vatican manuscript, it would, I think, have served the documentary evi- dence better if instead he had included the figures from the original in his edition, along with an apparatus to record the v: ants in the manuseript tradition. This would have left him free to insert proper modern figures in the translation ‘ones prefaces his edition with an infor- ‘mative account of the history of the text of the Collectio (pp. 15-65). One of the many virtues of his edition is that he restores ‘many passages wrongly thought to be inter- polations made by Friedrich Hultsch, who prepared the standard critical edition of the Collectio more than a century ago (pp. 18-20, 65). Thus we now have a text of Book '7 of the Collectio that is soundly based on the primary witness and un- ‘marked by such scholarly interference. (It116 is regrettable, however, that the Greek typeface is difficult to read: the diacritical marks are not well designed, for instance, and they are placed too far above the ac- tented characters.) Tones's translation of Book 7 is the frst to be based on a reexamination of the text since Hultsch’s edition and Latin transla- tion, The translation Jones offers is a very readable and reliable representation of the Greek. And such difficulties as may arise in understanding what Pappus has written are nicely addressed in Jones’s copious notes ‘explaining the historical, philosophical, and ‘mathematical issues. More general matters are taken up in the three concluding essays. There are also two ample indexes—one for subjects and names and the other for Greek Words—that will further facilitate using this book. In sum, readers interested in the history and philosophy of Greek mathematics now have available an authoritative version and interpretation of an important book from Pappus’s Collectio concerning geometrical analysis and synthesis. ALAN C. Bowen Middle Ages Gregory Chioniades. The Astronomical Works of Gregory Chioniades. Volume 1 The Zi al-“Ala", Edited by David Pingree. Part I: Text, Translation, Commentary. 412 pp., slossary, index. Part I: Tables (Corpus des Astronomes Byzantins, 2.) 235, pp. Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1985, 1986 (Paper.) Alexander Jones. An Eleventh-Century ‘Manual of Arabo-Byzantine Astronomy. (Corpus des Astronomes Byzantins, 3.) 199 pp. Amsterdam: J.C. Gieben, 1987, (Photo-offset from typescript.) With the publication of these two works the history of Byzantine astronomy is well served, There is no substitute for the publi- ‘ation of texts, translations, and commen- taries to put the history of astronomy on a firm footing. Until now, however, no text in the history of Byzantine astronomy has ever been published in this format Both authors work in the tradition of the late Otto Neugebauer, whose labors pro- vided the soundest of bases for our know! edge of Babylonian and Hellenistic astron- BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 82:1 311099) ‘omy. But David Pingree has branched off into the virtually uncharted wastes of In- ian and Byzantine astronomy (as another student of Neugebauer’s, E. S. Kennedy, has explored the vast sources available for the Islamic tradition). Alexander Jones, a former student in the history of mathemat- ics at Brown University, is a classicist who hhas already made his mark in the history of. ancient astronomy. Byzantine astronomy is of interest on the fone hand for what it preserves of the Hel- Tenistic tradition (most manuscripts of an- cient Greek scientific works are of Byzan- tine provenance) and on the other for the ‘way in which it incorporated Islamic mate- rial The two texts studied in the books under review illustrate this later trend; in- deed, they represent two separate and inde- pendent stages of transmission from the Is lamic world to Byzantium. In 1969 Neugebauer published a critical analysis of a fourteenth-century manuscript aris, Bibliotheque Nationale Greek 2425) ‘of an’ cleventh-century Byzantine astro- rnomical compendium containing rules and calculations with a few tables. No obvious ‘order prevailed in the volume: it was not an astronomical handbook after the model of the Almagest or the Islamic zijes, rather, ‘more of a manual or notebook. The topics dealt with are aspects of spherical astron- ‘omy, trigonometry, syzysies, eclipses, and astrology, with a few related tables. Jones has painstakingly edited and trans- lated the entire text (with variants from five other recensions and abridgments) and pro- vided a commentary. He has left_no stone unturned, and one could only wish that a {ew folios of the manuscript had also been included in facsimile (instead, the rete of a Byzantine astrolabe of a.D. 1062, now in Brescia, has been used 0 illustrate the front cover of the volume). Thanks to the labors of Neugebauer and his student B. R. Goldstein on the one hand, and of Kennedy and his students on the other, we now have ‘Some measure of control over the three ‘major works of the early ninth-century Baghdad astronomers, two of which—the Zj of al-Khwarizml and the Zjj of Habash were the major sources of Jones's elev: centh-century Byzantine astronomer. Jones identifies as much material from these as he ‘can, and his efforts are commendable. The tables of normed right ascensions, sines, lunar latitude, and solar declination have been edited because they were clearly