Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/125

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No. 1.]
SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
111

be conditioned by a phenomenon. Speaking generally, the antithesis between thought and "things" fails, because philosophy cannot begin with an isolated inquiry into either cognition or reality, but must necessarily begin and end with one inquiry into the cognition of reality. Divorce the two, and they become abstractions which never can unite themselves, but have to appeal to a third party to effect their union; and E. fails to see the piety of a philosophy which makes the fact of its own helplessness the ground of an appeal to God.

E. A.

HISTORICAL.


Epikureische Schriften auf Stein. H. Usener. Rheinisches Museum, Neue Folge, Bd. XLVII, 3, pp. 414-456.

The Bulletin de correspondance hellenique (XVI, 1-3) contains thirty- one pages filled with the fragments of an immense inscription found in Oinoanda in the interior of Lykia. The contents are what one might call the collected works of an Epikurean philosopher. An old teacher of the Epikurean philosophy, by name Diogenes, conceived the notion of carving in stone his exposition of the doctrines of Epikuros. He knows little of the philosophy of other schools, confuses Aristotle with Ainesidemos, and in his exposition is not free from garrulity and tautol- ogy. The inscription dates probably from the last part of the second or the first part of the third century. The writing was originally on the wall of a large hall, after whose destruction the stones containing the inscription were used for other purposes. Part of them, with the writ- ing turned to the interior, were employed in the building of another wall. U. supposes that only about a fourth part of the original inscrip- tion has been found. After describing the form of the characters, the number and dimensions, etc., of the columns of stone, and after giving in general the external history of the discovery with an estimate of the editorial work of the French savant who in the above-mentioned num- ber of the Bulletin published the first account of it, Usener in thirty- five pages prints an emended text of this latest treasure-trove. He divides the inscription into six parts: 1. Address of Diogenes to the citizens of Oinoanda. 2. Letter of Epikuros to his mother. 3. Letters of Diogenes to Antipatros. 4. Dialogue of Diogenes with Theodoridas. 5. Epitome of the Epikurean physics. 6. Manual of the Epikurean art of life. In the letter to his mother (9) the key- word for the evolu- tion of Epikuros' ethical teaching is given, v0v/x,ia. This is the char- acteristic notion in the ethics of Demokritos, and it is from Demokritos through Nausiphanes that Epikuros derives his ethical doctrine. This is