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Vicky Roupa. Articulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ISBN: 978-3-030-52126-4 (hbk). ISBN: 978-3-030-52129-5 (pbk). ISBN: 978-3-030-52127-1 (ebook). Pp. 201.

Vicky Roupa’sArticulations of Nature and Politics in Plato and Hegel focuses on the role of nature in Plato’s and Hegel’s political philosophy. In a link that connects ancient andmodern thought, the concept of ‘nature’ is an unavoidable horizon that in both periods conditions politics (4). The author guides the reader step by step, through tight demonstrations and precise textual references to texts that at first glance look unrelated, such as Plato’s Cratylus and Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Each passage of Roupa’s dense volume is perfectly justified. The project to focus a study on the concept of nature is risky, because it will necessarily disappoint some readers: the word ‘nature’ is extremely vague and it is not possible to take in consideration all its meanings in a single volume—let me recall that in his famous ‘Some Meanings of “Nature”’ (Appendix to A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas) Arthur O. Lovejoy identifies up to 66 senses of the word. By contrast, Roupa’s explicit decision to focus on only two meanings of the word ensures that this vagueness will not affect her research. Through Plato and Hegel, in fact, the author identifies two key concepts of the word ‘nature’ (9), which are then related to the duplicity identified by Hegel in his Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right § 2 (156): on the one hand nature is something immediate and unconscious, on the other it is the essence (or the concept) of something. The author’s decision to focus on these two senses of the word is not simply an arbitrary positioning, since throughout her book she demonstrates that they are strictly interconnected in both Hegel’s and Plato’s philosophy. Moreover, it is precisely one of the two concepts that helps to understand the vagueness of the term ‘nature’: it is not possible to define precisely what nature is, since it is what allows the question of the essence (the nature of something) to be raised (179). The volume is divided into two parts, the first of which (Redefining the Natural: Language and Logic) discusses Plato’s Cratylus and The Sophist and Hegel’s Science of Logic. Roupa considers the Cratylus as a crucial text not only for elucidating Plato’s philosophy of language, but also for reshaping the concept of ‘nature’ occurring in it (24). Whereas nature is initially linked to the sensible sphere, and as such hinders thinking, ‘nature’ becomes the guide for thought itself towards doi:10.1017/hgl.2022.9 Hegel Bulletin, 43/2, 344–347 © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Hegel Society of Great Britain