Book Review: Divination in the ancient world, from Plato to the Neoplatonists by way of Aristotle and the Stoics

The word “divination” conjures mystical overtones, the existence of paranormal powers to access a divine realm, something that nowadays is the hallmark of cheap psychics in places like New York’s Greenwich Village, and whose activities are rightly relegated to the category of pseudoscience. And it is precisely that categorization that made me a little tentative before agreeing to review Peter T. Struck’s Divination and Human Nature, as understood by Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists. I must admit to a little prejudice, initially not seeing the point of a volume devoted to the exploration of what was clearly a dead end in ancient thought. Indeed, I accepted the assignment (from the Journal of Cognitive Historiography, where a version of this essay was published earlier this year) only because of my personal and scholarly interest in Stoicism, with little reason to expect much out of it.

I am glad to report that I was seriously mistaken. There is much in Struck’s carefully argued and well researched volume to attract the attention of anyone seriously interested in ancient philosophy, and particularly in the figures of Plato, Aristotle, Posidonius, and Iamblicus. But I would like first of all to briefly discuss the author’s general framework, which I find both novel and fruitful.

Struck effortlessly steers the course between two equally dangerous monsters: the Scylla of dismissing ancient knowledge as the result of primitive minds, and the Charybdis of accepting it as a type of lost wisdom that is somehow to be recovered and valued over and above modern science. The latter attitude is the very same one that I mentioned above and leads to the embracing of pseudoscientific notions; the former one is an error Paul Feyerabend has warned against in his intriguing posthumously published Philosophy of Nature. Plato & co. were not country bumpkins, they were brilliant human beings, equipped with the very same reasoning abilities we possess today. True, their knowledge and understanding of the world was not as advanced as ours, but it is to our peril if we too easily dismiss their insights as only historical curiosities.