When I started reading Aristotle many years ago, I wondered why it was so hard. My fellow students felt the same way. Indeed, when reading Aristotle my flatmate regularly fell asleep — not because it was boring, but because it’s too much to take in if you don’t know how to read it. Generations of students have had the same experience: Aristotle is really interesting, but inaccessible to many.

As a teacher I respond by assigning smaller and smaller portions of the original text. But this response suggests that we can profitably read, say, a chapter of Aristotle. The editors of the volume under review caution against such an approach in favour of a more holistic approach. They not only charge analytic interpreters with a tendency to focus myopically on individual arguments, but they also contend, more surprisingly, that developmentalists neglect the larger context of an argument (2). So we need to keep in mind the macro-level of text organisation (whole treatises, books) if we are to understand the arguments at micro-level (topics, individual arguments). The editors put a new spin on this fairly wide- spread insight by stressing that Aristotle’s treatises consist in the search for the principles appropriate to the enquiry, where ‘the organized pursuit of principles is carefully and deliberately structured both at the level of fine detail and across the unfolding exposition.’ In short, we cannot ignore those expository principles at any level of analysis (3).