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1 7 2 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 2each essay. These overviews are of necessity distortions, presenting, in thespace allotted, a brief bird’s-eye view of the questions covered by the essays.Suffice it to say, scholars of the thinkers, texts, and questions discussed inthis review will want to read the essays in this collection.The volume opens with Robert Bartlett’s “Sophistry as a Way of Life,” onthe figure of Protagoras. The Protagorean sophist is a hedonist who rejectsthe distinction between good and evil (though not good and bad) (7). Nonetheless,since he teaches politically ambitious students, his teaching mustnot weaken that ambition. His theoretical teaching (9–11) culminates in aradical skepticism that would be corrosive of such ambitions (and thereforeundermines Protagoras’s own financial well-being). He may consider himselfbeyond good and evil, but he is not beyond recognizing his interest and actingaccordingly. Therefore, he takes up the challenge of his great competitor,the mantic art. Philosophy is only possible if denials of “natural necessity orcausation are false.” However, “Protagoras knows that he cannot prove the‘prophet’ to be wrong, and he instead retreats into an extreme relativism thatat a minimum protects his own view of the world from attack. …The extremeversion of Protagoras’s relativism, then, may not so much defend philosophyas fend off belief” (14). Protagoras may offer, in the end, a theoretical agnosticism,but it is a practical atheism (15). “Protagorean relativism and skepticismrepresent a profound challenge to the philosophic life, and in the end, holdthat “wisdom or science is finally impossible” (16). In light of this radicalclaim of the impossibility of philosophy, or of the profound and insurmountableobstacles presented to the discovery of even merely “human wisdom,”Bartlett’s essay is a fitting place to begin the collection, for Protagoras presentsthe rational case against the philosophic life in an extremely clear way.Bartlett’s essay is followed by two essays on Aristotle, one by ChristopherBruell and one by Thomas Pangle, both of which are essential reading forany student of Aristotle, and to neither of which can justice be done here. In“Aristotle on Theory and Practice,” Bruell takes up a consideration of Aristotelianrationalism as an alternative to modern rationalism in the wake ofthe latter’s collapse, on the grounds that the Aristotelian version seems topossess resources insulating it from the postmodern critique of rationality(17). We seek to know that the ends to which Aristotelian prudence directs usare the best and highest ends, and that knowledge of these ends is “genuineknowledge,” but as Bruell points out, there is a difficulty: Aristotle himself“has made no such case” (18). However, the case for prudence turns out torest “upon a prior acceptance of the very principles that we wished him to