Experience is the cornerstone of Epicurean philosophy and nowhere is this more apparent than in the Epicurean views about the nature, formation, and application of concepts. ‘The Epicureans on Preconceptions and Other Concepts’ by Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna aims to piece together the approach to concepts suggested by Epicurus and his early associates, trace its historical development over a period of approximately five centuries, compare it with competing views, and highlight the philosophical value of the Epicurean account on that subject. It is not clear whether, properly speaking, the Epicureans can be claimed to have a theory about concepts. However, an in-depth discussion of the relevant questions will show that the Epicureans advance a coherent if elliptical explanation of the nature and formation of concepts and of their epistemological and ethical role. Also, the chapter establishes that, although the core of the Epicurean account remains fundamentally unaffected, there are shifts of emphasis and new developments marking the passage from one generation of Epicureans to another and from one era to the next.

The Introduction by Gabor Betegh and Voula Tsouna outlines the historical and philosophical objectives of the volume, identifies principal questions and challenges that the authors are invited to address, gives summaries of the individual chapters, and specifies the contribution of the volume to the history of scholarship and to contemporary philosophical thinking about concepts. Especially useful is the survey of the technical or quasi-technical terminology used by the ancient authors in order to talk about concepts and related notions. This terminology is rich and nuanced and, as the editors point out, sorting it out is not merely a lexical matter but an inextricable part of the analysis of substantive philosophical questions.

The chapter aims to show that Plato’s engagement with mystery cults – the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphic cults in particular – can illuminate centrally important topics of Plato’s philosophy, including his conception of the philosophical life, its relation to the human good, the role of memory in the knowledge of the Forms, and the soul’s kinship to the divine. It explores why and how Plato presents philosophy as the true initiation which can fulfil the promise of the mystery cults to offer the best human life and afterlife. It analyses why and how Plato describes the knowledge of the Forms on the model of the direct encounter with the divine at the culmination of a mystery ritual. It further suggests that the ‘birth’ announced at the highest point of the Eleusinian mysteries can shed new light on the role of ‘giving birth’ at the culmination of the philosophical life in the Symposium. Finally, it shows how Pythagorean and Orphic focus on memory offered Plato a framework to develop his account of the relationship between the soul and the divine Forms, reincarnation, and the fate of our soul in the afterlife.

Chapter 6 is the longest and the most elaborate chapter of De mundo. The topic of the chapter is God and his relation to the cosmos. This relation is explained by a sequence of no less than twelve analogies. It is argued that this proliferation of analogies is not an extravagant rhetorical profusion, but an elaborate explanatory device that affords the reader a fuller grasp of God: the sequence is composed in such a way that one analogy corrects or supplements another, thus building a complex conception of God in the mind of the reader. Following a detailed analysis of the analogies and their relations, the conception of God that emerges is discussed. It is argued that this conception is a distinctly Aristotelian one, albeit with some interesting elaborations and additions. The absence of Aristotle’s technical terms in the explanation of God and his relation to the world, it is suggested, is a consequence of the author’s attempt to make the Aristotelian conception of God attractive to non-Aristotelians as well. This contribution ends with a note on the use of quotations in Chapter 6, since nine out of the twelve quotations in De mundo are found in this one chapter.

Betegh explores to what extent the Presocratic philosophers made the motive power of heat topical, and how they tried to provide an explanation of that power. He argues that while the motive power of heat never seems to obtain a principal role in the cosmological theories of the Presocratics, it appears to take a more important role in the explanation of living beings in a number of theories.