Frustrated at being asked for the eighth time to read and report on The Concept of Mind, the young Richard Sorabji, having read Ryle in the first week, asked for something else. His tutor replied: ‘the books – read the books’. He soon discovered that what was meant were the two classic Greek texts which S. explores here in this stimulating study, works that every Oxford-educated philosopher has had to come to grips with since Victorian times. S.’s focus is ‘methodological’, on how Plato and Aristotle approached the problem of rigour in practical philosophy, on whether either required readers to expect ‘systematic investigation into metaphysics, epistemology, and psychology’ (p. 3) or allowed for a less heavily freighted understanding. S. believes that both authors provided a more and a less precise path of argument, the first targeted at philosophers, perhaps, the second at those seeking a political career or a more general education. The result is a very penetrating study, with subtle argument and clarification, imagined objections met by ingenious defences, all in a style that should appeal to both those new to these works and seasoned fanciers. One cannot hope to do justice to S.’s book in a short review.

In Chapters 1–4 S. describes a ‘longer’ and a ‘shorter’ route employed by Socrates in his defence of the nature and value of justice, a distinction marked at 6.504b1–5, recalling 4.435c9–d8, with the ‘longer way round’ requiring due absorption of the key doctrines of Forms (especially that of The Good), the levels of cognition depicted in the Divided Line as well as the diachronic description of the epistemological ascent from sensible particulars to their intelligible paradigms prescribed for the education of the ‘philosopher-royals’. The shorter, easier, less precise, route occupies Books 1–4 together with 8 and 9; this path is said to be ‘in a certain sense self-sufficient: it can stand on its own … can be understood, and accepted as demonstration, without reference to the Form of the Good, or more broadly to the metaphysics of the central books’ (p. 41). Since D. Sachs first raised the basic problem of how ‘Platonic justice’, conceived as ‘psychic harmony’ or ‘mental health’, could be expected to issue in actions of ‘conventional justice’, such as keeping promises, not stealing and so on, interpreters have struggled to meet the challenge. Many have decided that the only remedy is to invoke the ‘metaphysical solution’ of the middle Books 5–7, to suggest that those who have come to know and love the Form of the Good will be duly motivated to behave justly, to put their own self-interest on hold, as it were, out of an overriding desire to do that which is good. Those ruled by the philosophers, of course, will obey their betters, either with enthusiastic ‘spirited’ support or more truculent conformance, compensated by the physical pleasures the lower classes are allowed to enjoy.

Another solution explored by S. is the ‘psychological’ one, especially since the devolution of the polis and its citizens described in the social psychology of Books 8 and 9 supplements the tripartite soul analysis of Book 4, showing how ‘psychic disharmony’ threatens the kallipolis. S. argues that the seeds of the later account were already planted back in 1–4, leading him to summarise his reply to the ‘Sachs problem’ as follows: ‘So the answer to the question of why Platonic justice converges with conventional justice lies in the state-soul parallel’, the crucial point being that ‘if the individual is really parallel to the just state, he will have limited his desires and their pursuit to what is necessary’ (pp. 39, 38). This provisional conclusion, which seems to satisfy Glaucon and Adeimantus early on does require supplementation by the elaborate description of what happens when ‘things fall apart’ later in Books 8 and 9, but together with the early books the ‘shorter route’ suffices for the immediate needs of the interlocutors. The touchstone here seems to be what is dialogically adequate to the interests of Plato's brothers and, presumably, to a lay audience as well.

The ‘longer route’ of the middle books occupies the bulk of Chapters 3–5 and depends on metaphysical and epistemological positions adumbrated at the end of Book 5 and developed at length in 6 and 7. Its purest version would require precise knowledge of the Good, which Socrates admits he does not have at 505a5–6 (p. 54), and this leads S. to posit a hybrid or middle route which can come in two forms, both of which take but a glimpse at the full-blown metaphysics (p. 57). A distinction is drawn between an approach employing ‘rational reconstruction’, which sticks to Platonic concepts and argumentation but uses such to show how Plato might have solved his problems, and the approach S. favours, one that restricts itself to the actual things Socrates says in the work. In that regard S. finds the middle books devoted not to strengthening the defence of justice but to the rather different task of ‘justifying why philosophers should rule’ (p. 60). Chapter 5, on the allegory of the Cave, its relationship to the Divided Line and the structure of the dialogue as a whole, is a fine example of careful, even exquisite, exegesis, providing many very plausible solutions to puzzles commentators have raised about matching the four levels of the Line with the four stages of progress from the initial stage of the prisoners to their final appreciation of all that awaits outside it.

Part 2, Chapters 6–10, is devoted to a very searching discussion of the Nicomachean Ethics and its methodology, especially its concern to warn against expecting too much precision (akribeia) in ethics and political science and the care with which Aristotle touches on what might be termed a longer route via acquaintance with key metaphysical, scientific and psychological doctrines elsewhere in the corpus without actually requiring his listeners to be in close contact with these ‘bedrock’ views. S. interprets the description of the project offered at 1094b11 as ‘some sort of political science’ to indicate that Aristotle meant his inquiry to be one that would facilitate legislative science, especially as it emerges in the last chapter of Book 10 (p. 111), the famous ‘bridge passage’ to the Politics. S. takes the audience to include would-be politicians but also ‘people who might one day act as advisors’, viz. ‘philosophers in his own school’ (p. 113). Even these latter folks, however, need not be required to take the ‘longer route’, to look deeply into ‘his metaphysics and psychology’ (p. 153) for a thorough grounding such as might be suggested by the famous ‘function argument’ of 1.7. S. sees this as largely a rhetorical appeal with only ‘rough and ready arguments, addressed to people who need little convincing that human beings, like other animals, have a naturally given function’ (p. 152). We could turn to the De anima or Metaphysics to provide fuller explanations, but we need not do so within the limits of the Ethics in search of a ‘bedrock interpretation’ that would ground Aristotle's practical philosophy in theoretical investigations. Hence, while there are many hints along the way suggesting something like a longer route in imitation of Plato's model, S. suggests that this ‘would have us do more or less precisely what he is telling us to avoid’ (p. 153). Further topics explored in detail include a subtle account of Aristotle's use of the race-course analogy found in Plato and commended by Aristotle at 1095a30–b1, a penetrating discussion of ‘endoxic method’ in ethics as well as some novel suggestions about how the Politics was not actually ‘written as the sequel to the NE’ although it could be intended to ‘function as’ such (p. 179), although not, perhaps, in its entirety. This is mainly because Pol. 7–8 does not seem to refer us to the NE as such but rather to certain, unspecified ‘exoteric works’, whether written by Aristotle or others (p. 181). S.’s thoughts about Aristotle's work here open many lines of investigation well worth exploring, and the book as a whole is highly recommended as both a readable and fresh approach to ‘the books’.