1G0xxeB

Book Review: Political Philosophy Cross-Examined1 7 5aware of the powerful moral effect that writing can have: “the very existenceof truthful history…can have a beneficial effect on human action, by holdingforth the incentive of gaining honor from the memory of virtuous deeds andby deterring evil deeds through fear of infamy” (70). Tacitus has a moral anda political goal—and the moral goal must be considered in relation to thepolitical circumstance: “If one is to act well—morally but not futilely—oneneeds not only good character and upright intention but also knowledge ofthe political regime within which one must act” (72). Philosophical Tacitus’saccount of Roman political history is rooted in the “natural human passions”that are “unleashed by imperial possessions” (73). He “never” tries to explainwhich events are by divine intervention, yet as belief in divine punishmentcan restrain evildoers, “a prudent man can have no sound reason to undermineit, and Tacitus therefore does not do so” (74). Nichols’s Tacitus comesto light as truly philosophic in a Socratic mode, “seeking to know throughdiligent and prolonged inquiry into human deeds and speeches” (76). Nichols’sessay in particular does an excellent job of highlighting the way in whichcontemporary assumptions can prevent readers from recognizing the philosophicalin Tacitus.Ronna Burger takes up Maimonides’s teaching on the knowledge of goodand evil and the fall of man in The Guide of the Perplexed. She ably shows thatMaimonides writes for both careful and careless readers. The careless readerwill not be challenged in his orthodoxy (and if lacking it will perhaps findhimself pulled toward it). The careful reader will find a Maimonides alive tothe tension between revelation and the philosophers. Burger emphasizes theway Maimonides both wrestles with and obscures from the careless reader“the biblical distrust of the human desire for wisdom” which is “the ultimatecause of human resistance to the authority of God” (87). Her Maimonidesdiscerns two different modes of cognition: “intellection of truth and falsehood”and “reliance on generally accepted opinions of noble and base.” Thisis seen in the postlapsarian human condition: nakedness comes to be seen asshameful or base. The original state was beyond noble and base. Burger writes:“What a genetic account presents as the loss of a capacity that was once ourown and rightfully belongs to us could be translated into an eidetic accountas the awareness of a standard of which we fall short, to which we mightaspire. Such awareness is not necessarily an experience of shame; it couldtake the form of knowledge of ignorance” (88). The fall leads to a “new selfawareness,”which turns us in a different direction. Maimonides presents thisas a descent, but the scriptural proofs upon which he relies suggest somethingelse: “The uncovering of mental vision that comes with eating the forbidden