K.’s thoughtful new volume begins with the claim that ‘Aristotle is not a modern philosopher’ (p. 1). In K.’s view it emerges that Aristotle is not only pre-modern but somehow post-modern as well, anticipating both the methods and some of the views of post-modern thinkers such as Heidegger and Bergson, particularly on the nature of time. The book argues that Aristotle sees being as inseparable from absence, the present moment as constituted by an archē (‘origin’) emerging from the seemingly absent past and a telos (‘aim’) arriving from the apparently absent future.

The major basis of this argument is not the limited, explicit treatment of time in the Physics, briefly dealt with in K.’s conclusion, but the Poetics. K. contends that the mysteriousness of the past and the indeterminacy of the future circumscribe human decision-making, giving a tragic dimension to our lives. Phronesis (‘prudence’) offers us a way to navigate our lives with the less precise precision that praxis (‘action’) requires, partially mitigating the tragedy. K. prepares us for these claims by first presenting summaries of other philosophical accounts of time and then defending his approach to Aristotle.

Certainly, the most decisive influence on K.’s hermeneutic method is Martin Heidegger. In his lecture courses of the early 1920s Heidegger treated Aristotle, Plato and other Greek philosophers in a startling way. Hannah Arendt writes: ‘These lectures dealt with texts that were generally familiar; they contained no doctrine that could have been learned, reproduced, and handed on. There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king’ (New York Review of Books 17/6 [21 October 1971], 50–4, translated by A. Hofstadter). The charisma of Heidegger’s readings had to do with his exposing an affinity between the ancients, especially Aristotle, and the phenomenology of his mentor Edmund Husserl. Husserl’s examination of the phenomena as they present themselves echoes the way in which Aristotle roots philosophy in a critique of the received opinions.

Heidegger’s Husserl-inspired hermeneutics contains a tension within it. On the one hand it is guided by an overarching historical narrative in which the Greek thinkers played a foundational but ambivalent part: they were the last thinkers open to the question of being and the first to participate in its forgetting, a forgetting that was to become ever more pronounced in history. On the other hand Heidegger’s readings, simultaneously daring and detailed, suggested to some of his students possibilities counter to or outside of his official narrative. Among the most influential of these, we might mention Arendt herself as well as Jacob Klein, Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer. These thinkers, obvious differences aside, share a willingness to question Heidegger’s historical narrative, combined with a clear indebtedness to his hermeneutics. Often informed by one or more scholarly lineages going back to these first generation of Heidegger students, this phenomenological approach represents an important alternative to analytic readings of ancient texts in the scholarship of the last few generations.

Among its other virtues, Aristotle and Tragic Temporality is an inviting introduction to this way of reading the ancients. K. acknowledges and reflects on his debts to the phenomenological tradition at large and to Heidegger in particular. While admitting the power of Heidegger’s historical narrative, he confesses in the introduction to finding it more persuasive when applied to modern texts than to Aristotle. As for so many of those first students of Heidegger, K.’s major debt to Heidegger is to his uncovering of an already phenomenological quality to ancient thinking: K. calls Aristotle’s method ‘proto-phenomenological’ (p. 27) and devotes the whole of the book’s second chapter to defending this characterisation. This is perhaps the chapter with the broadest appeal, and I could even imagine assigning it to undergraduates ready to think about different modes of reading Aristotle. K. helpfully spells out how a phenomenological approach can clarify the difference between Aristotle’s philosophical dialectic, with its roots in the examination of opinions, and dialectics of the sophistical sort. The first chapter, too, has the character of an introduction, in this case to a few different philosophies of time, some modern and radically incompatible with Aristotle, some post-modern and strangely compatible. Its aim is to problematise what K., with Heidegger, takes to be our default view, in which the present represents the only real moment. I suspect it will be of particular use to those coming to Aristotle without a grounding in these philosophical questions or their history. It is in the third and the fourth chapters that K. offers his main contribution.

The third chapter builds a strong case that tragedy, for Aristotle, is what lets us learn that ‘our way of being in relation to our past and future in praxis, our way of presuming to grasp completely and indeed to master the archē or “origin, beginning” and the telos or “end, aim” of that action, is an illusion, even if a necessary one’ (p. 144). K.’s Nietzsche-inflected reading of Aristotle’s account of the genesis of tragedy out of the dithyramb at Poetics 1449a9–26 is particularly thorough and interesting, suggesting that what distinguished tragedy was the establishment of distance between a speaker and the chorus. This distance made room for both chorus and audience to wonder about what has happened to the speaker and what might happen. The famous tragic hamartia (‘error’) comes to light as something in which we all participate to some degree in our daily lives, since to choose to act in one way and not another can only be done on the basis of a presumed, but ultimately impossible, understanding of the relevant origins and ends.

Are we all, then, doomed to live tragically? In a sense, yes, as there is something tragic to our existence as temporal beings. In another sense, no, as it turns out there is a way in which we can meet our finitude with caution and good cheer and therefore hope to diminish, at least, this tragic dimension. This way is via ethical virtue generally and phronesis particularly, the subjects of K.’s fourth chapter. K. first locates temporality in the Ethics by observing that ‘we seem to “have” the ultimate Good, the ground on which ethical life establishes itself, for Aristotle, only as the futural aim of desire and the past memory of habituation’ (pp. 185–6). The prudent person looks to the kairos (‘opportune moment’) for guidance on how and when to act and refuses to impose a uniform standard of judgement on diverse situations. This prudent recognition of the kairos is possible only on the basis of some prior habituation and is done for the sake of and in view of some later telos. Because of this, K. compellingly suggests, action in the present takes shape thanks to the ongoing power of the future and the past.

The philosophical core of Aristotle and Tragic Temporality is provocative and as duly questionable as all real questioning must be. The appeal and the utility of the treatment of various issues will vary across readers, and those most immersed in the relevant traditions may be content to skim the earlier chapters. In addition to insightful engagement with the primary texts, K. deals with the secondary literature knowledgeably and at considerable length, indeed sometimes at the cost of philosophical momentum. I wished that more of this scholarly material were condensed and/or transposed to the endnotes: an impatience rooted in my sympathy with the volume’s essential telos. On the whole, K.’s unorthodox decision to ground his account of Aristotelian temporality in the Poetics is a successful gamble, and it opens up an intriguing angle on the Ethics, too.