GARVER, E.,
Aristotle's Politics. Living Well and Living Together.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London, 2011. XI,300p. Cloth wrps. Eugene Garver offers what might be termed a 'Talmudic reading' of Aristotle’s Politics. The Rabbis were guided by the principle that the Torah had divine authority and thus had to be treated as a perfectly composed text. As a consequence, their task was to expound upon and explain, to take seriously, its every word and to articulate the teaching or meaning that would render coherent passages that initially seem at odds with one another. While Garver of course does not think that the Philosopher was divine or his work without blemish, he does argue that the Politics, which in the eyes of many contemporary scholars is taken to be a disjointed hodgepodge, is a unified whole. The result is a challenging and extremely useful commentary, one that attempts methodically to account for the entirety of the work. (The only exception here is Book VI, which, quite un-talmudically, Garver describes as 'for me the least philosophically exciting thing Aristotle ever wrote' (p. 2) and then proceeds to ignore.) This is a book that should be read carefully by every serious student of the Politics.' (DAVID ROOCHNIK in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2013.04.30).
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