Spring 2010 - Interpretation

Book Review: Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates
3 1 7
Ronna Burger, Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean
Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 320 pp., $22.50 (paper).
Eva n t h i a S pe l io t i s
Bellarmine University
espeliotis@bellarmine.edu
In Aristotle’s Dialogue with Socrates, Ronna Burger invites
the reader to examine the Nicomachean Ethics with a fresh eye, and to consider
that it is perhaps not the treatise that it appears to be but rather the dialogue
that Plato never wrote: a dialogue between two philosophers. To structure and
animate her reading, Burger introduces each chapter with quotations from
various Platonic dialogues, and proceeds to show how Aristotle is concerned
with many of the same issues that concerned Socrates, which are addressed
across the Platonic corpus. Probing further, in her investigation and discussion
of Aristotle’s argument Burger also notes the numerous times Plato and
Socrates appear in the text—sometimes named directly, more often quoted
without being named—and argues that these references offer a guide to the
structure and argument of the Ethics. Perhaps most iconoclastically, Burger
finds Aristotle, in the end, to be very much in agreement with Socrates on the
biggest questions: what is virtue (or, what is the relation between knowledge
and virtue), what is the highest or best life for a human being, and what is the
true nature of philosophy. To come to see this agreement, however, takes a lot
of work: following the details of the discussion carefully, noticing not only
what the speeches declare about the highest activity of a human being, but
how Aristotle’s action of writing and presenting those speeches exemplifies
the activity about which he is speaking.
As Burger leads us into the labyrinth of Aristotle’s text, the
first impression we get from her reading is the density and complexity of
the work. Nothing is as it seems. What are often taken to be the most assertoric
claims, she reveals to be invitations to question. Pointing out Aristotle’s
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