BOOK REVIEWS
Abstract
<p>Daniel Robinson has provided an excellent introduction to an overview of Aristotle’s psychology, giving background necessary for understanding that psychology, teasing a psychology out the variety of Aristotle’s work, and placing Aristotle’s psychology sympathetically within the broader scope of his scientific inquiry. Robinson takes on difficult issues such as the relation between Plato and Aristotle, Aristotle’s theory of causation, and what Aristotle meant by soul, and he deals with them lucidly and deftly. His writing is clean and to the point, never requiring one to become a philologist or classicist, but at the same time dealing with the issues with sufficient depth and sophistication not to caricature Aristotle’s work.</p> <p>I have problems with parts of what Robinson has done. For example, though he is at some pains to develop Aristotle’s theory of causation carefully, Robinson nevertheless occasionally drops back into the assumption that efficient causation is the primary way of thinking about causation. (See, for example, the discussion of the cause of the Trojan war on pages 3–5 and his discussion of the Greak word aitia (“cause”) on page 77.) And, I believe Robinson sometimes equivocates on the term science, using it to mean “theoretic knowledge” in some