INTUITION AND CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHERS - (P.T.) Struck Divination and Human Nature. A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity. Pp. xii + 288, figs. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. Cased, £34.95, US$45. ISBN: 978-0-691-16939-2.

Abstract

In this fascinating study on the cognitive history of intuition in Classical antiquity, S. seeks to show how for many of the Classical philosophers, notably Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and the Neoplatonists, divination was not so much a practice to be associated with magic or other occultic practices, but rather one that helped people to make sense of unconscious knowledge. In the introduction, S. elaborates on the well-established view in the field of cognitive science that human beings are not entirely capable of developing an exhaustive account of the information that they know, what S. labels 'surplus knowledge'; thus, a central proposition of this study is that the ancient practice of divination was simply one version in a long history of human attempts to grasp this 'surplus knowledge'. In the chapters that follow, S. examines the enquiries submitted to divination in the philosophical literature of Classical antiquity, showing how divination was seen as a practice that challenged conventional epistemologies on human knowledge. The resulting picture that ultimately emerges is one of divination functioning not as some kind of obscure practice (akin, say, to palmistry or tarot card reading in the modern world), but rather as an institution that is 'analogous to the position of the modern concept of intuition' (p. 16). In Chapter 1, 'Plato on Divination and Nondiscursive Knowing', S. investigates Plato's multiple and diffuse references to the practice of divination, particularly in a section of the Timaeus that concerns the placement of the soul (71c-e). S. illustrates how the verb manteuomai was frequently used by Plato in contexts where discursive reasoning had not been applied; in this way, Plato deployed the verb metaphorically to convey the concept of intuition. In the latter part of the chapter, S. analyses a complex passage in the Timaeus, in which Plato expands on the idea of the liver (in the lower part of the soul) receiving divinatory signs at times of calmness (e.g. during sleep). As the discussion shows well, Plato believed that the appetitive soul had the ability to receive non-discursive knowledge through the medium of divination. Chapter 2, 'Aristotle on Foresight Through Dreams', the most substantial and dense section of the book, explores Aristotle's specific interest in prescient dreams, as evidenced in a triptych of treatises all concerned with divinatory behaviour during sleep (On Sleep and Waking; On Dreams; On Divination during Sleep). Here, S. argues powerfully against the scholarly consensus concerning Aristotle's approach to the divine's relationship with dreams by showing that Aristotle assigned predictive dreams to the daimonic (a term used by Aristotle to point to the 'causal function of the divine within the natural world', p. 168). As S.'s reading shows, both Plato and Aristotle conceived of discursive, reasoned knowledge and divined knowledge (or intuition) as separate poles of understanding. Given this conscious rejection of ostensibly empirical methods of divination (for insta...