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(J.) Mansfeld Prolegomena: questions to be settled before the study of an author, or a text . ( Philosophia Antiqua 61). Leiden: Brill, 1994. Pp. viii + 246. FL 100/$57.25. 9004100849.

F.'s monograph does not cover the whole of that field, but Alexander wrote at great length, and much is tedious, and it was wise to pick out three important topics and concentrate on them. This work should appeal not only to the small and growing band of logicians interested in Alexander, but also to the larger one, which includes some modern logicians, who are interested in Aristotle, for two of the three topics bear on the interpretation of Aristotle. The third, on logical matter, is more speculative but raises questions of general interest, and indirectly helps in the interpretation of Aristotle. Ch. I is on ekthesis, a notion of Aristotle's which has puzzled many commentators. Alexander pays considerable attention to it, and F. finds three types of proof, though he says that the definitional proof is not strictly ecthetic, accepting only the perceptual and the syllogistic proofs. F. studies all in detail, making use of modern conventions and theories, but translating the original texts without introducing more assumptions than are absolutely necessary, important when we are not concerned only with strictly formal logic. Ch. II is an attempt at the reconstruction of Alexander's lost On Mixed Premisses, dealing, as the full title shows, with the issues between Aristotle on the one hand and Theophrastus and Eudemus on the other about modal arguments. Alexander refers to it frequently in his own commentary on the Prior Analytics, but does not tell us much about it, assuming that his readers would have easy access to it. F. studies all the available material, starting with Philoponus and pseudo-Ammonius, who seem to have had a common source, probably the real Ammonius, and also uses Arabic evidence, arguing that although it is clear that Averroes did not have access to On Mixed Premisses itself he knew quite a lot about it. F. also uses Alexander's On the conversion ofpremissses, available in Arabic and translated for him by Robert Hoyland. He shows that a central issue of On Mixed Premisses was the interpretation of the assertoric proposition. Since our information here comes almost exclusively from Averroes, it is at some remove from Aristotle and Theophrastus, but it makes sense and need not be doubted. Averroes distinguished between the views of Theophrastus and those of Alexander: for the former the assertoric proposition was one which lacked a modal term, but which could become either necessary or possible with the addition of the appropriate mode. It is a premise that exists only in the mind. For Alexander, on the other hand, it is 'a possible premiss when it actually exists'. The differences discussed in this work also concerned the conclusion of a syllogism with mixed premises: Aristotle claimed that when the major premise is necessary and the minor assertoric the conclusion will be necessary, but Theophrastus and Eudemus said that if either premise was assertoric the conclusion would also be so. There was also a problem about the nature of necessity, and our rather confused evidence suggests that Theophrastus distinguished various kinds. Ch. Ill, on logical matter, tackles a wide-ranging subject but starts from Alexander. Barnes has already raised this problem, and F. studies it from both ancient and modern points of view, particularly that of natural deduction. He covers especially Alexander and Philoponus, but also studies the argument between interpreters of Aristotle about dummy-letters, and considers contingent and necessary 'stuff; for Alexander matter 'takes up a middle position between things and form ... and is tied up also with the body of knowledge within which a proposition appears'. He considers what Alexander means when he says that 'matter concludes', arguing that 'matter' here is not mere 'stuff, i.e. the metaphysical counterpart of form, but finally he returns to the view that matter is indeed stuff. Much of what he says is speculative, and one sometimes wonders whether Alexander had a unified theory of logical matter, but this study is well worth reading.