Pragmatism has been called America's only major contribution to philosophy. But since its birth was announced a century ago in 1898 by William James, pragmatism has played a vital role in almost every area of American intellectual and cultural life, inspiring judges, educators, politicians, poets, and social prophets. Now the major texts of American pragmatism, from William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty and Cornel West, have been brought together and reprinted unabridged. From the first generation of pragmatists, including (...) the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and the founder of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce, to the leading figures in the contemporary pragmatist revival, including the philosopher Hilary Putnam, the jurist Richard Posner, and the literary critic Richard Poirier, all the contributors to this volume are remarkable for the wit and vigor of their prose and the mind-clearing force of their ideas. Edited and with an Introduction by Louis Menand, Pragmatism: A Reader will provide both the general reader and the student of American culture with excitement and pleasure. (shrink)

Argues that outdated institutional structures and higher educational philosophies are negatively contrasting with significant changes in today's faculties and student bodies with a result that higher education is more competitive and less ...

While Caesar as man of letters is most famous for his commentarii, it should not be forgotten that he also wrote two volumes on Analogy and was the author of various verses, one set of which, on the comic playwright Terence and his relationship to Menander, runs as follows : tu quoque, tu in summis, o dimidiate Menander,poneris, et merito, puri sermonis amator.lenibus atque utinam scriptis adiuncta foret uis,comica ut aequato uirtus polleret honorecum Graecis neue hac despectus parte iaceres! 5unum (...) hoc maceror ac doleo tibi deesse, Terenti. (shrink)

DR. G. Zuntz's excellent paper on these verses in Proc. Brit. Acad. xlii , 209–46, deserves all our thanks for the clarity and good sense of its exposition, and for clearing away much unnecessary comment that has been encumbering the fragment, especially Bignone's theory that it derives its philosophy directly from Aristotle's Protreptikos, with Körte's supplement that it is indivisible—that there is no break at v. 7; see Körte's Menandri quae supersunt , ii. 147–8. There is, however, I think, room (...) for further comment on Zuntz's interpretation of the lines, and on his view that die fragment known as Papyrus Didotiana b may belong to the same play, Hypobolimaios. (shrink)

Menander Gallograecvs, as one may call the text constructed by the joint labours of Messrs Gustave Lefebvre and Maurice Croiset, did not come into my hands till three months after its publication, and I am not surprised to find that over sixty of the corrections which I made on a first reading were proposed by Mr Leo in November last, five-and-twenty more by Mr Wilamowitz in December, and another five-and-twenty by other scholars at other dates. The remainder, and the fruits (...) of a second perusal, are the following. (shrink)

In a recent article, I discussed vocative uses of οὗτος in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, showing that there are two types of vocatives: ‘calls’, which are utterance-initial and directed at one whose attention is turned elsewhere, and ‘addresses’, which are non-initial, employed by a speaker who is already conversing with a hearer, and typically indicate a speaker's annoyance at the hearer. Menander uses οὗτος as a vocative in the same ways as the other dramatic poets, but (...) there is one instance in Dyscolus that has been routinely misconstrued and merits clarification. (shrink)

Eduard Norden, in the second half of his Agnostos Theos, has maintained with great learning and ingenuity the thesis that predications in the style ‘Thou art ,’ ‘I am ,’ are due to Oriental influence; purely Greek religious language does not go beyond ‘Thou dost ,’ ‘We are indebted to thee for .’ This view appears to be substantially correct. To Oriental influence we may, I think, trace also the custom of stringing together a series of brief predications in or (...) of the second person, for the most part not connected by conjunctions, and producing the effect of a rapid fire of assertions. The earlier Greek examples are not, as a rule, asyndetic. In the Hellenistic age and later we see the other style, as in Catullus 34. 13: ‘tu Lucina dolentibus Iuno dicta puerperis, tu potens Triuia et notho es dicta lumine luna, tu cursu dea menstruo … exples’ 61. 51: ‘te suis tremulus parens inuocat, tibi uirgines zonula soluunt sinus, te timens cupida nouus captat aure maritus’; in Lucretius' proem; in Ovid, Met. IV. 17: ‘tibi enim inconsumpta iuuenta est, tu puer aeternus, tu formosissimus alto conspiceris caelo, tibi cum sine cornibus adstas, uirgineum caput est’; in the invocation of Apollo at the end of the first book of Statius' Thebaid; in Capaneus' prayer to his strong right arm : ; in the Orphic hymns, II. 10-, though they consist mostly of accumulations of epithets; in Menander Rhetor περ πιδειкν : περ [al. Θοραι], περ σ Θνδες, παρ σοкα σελνη τν ετνα λαμβνει; in Valerius Maximus VI. (shrink)

THE closing lines of Act I, Scene n of Terence's Eunuchus pose certain difficulties; in particular it is far from clear when Phaedria and Parmeno leave the stage-if indeed they do so at all. Taking this small difficulty as a starting-point, I wish to examine the text of Eunuchus at this place in order to see what information can be gained about the structure of the play and about any alterations Terence may have made in adapting his Greek original. In (...) this I shall mainly be confining myself to Terence's adaptation of Menander's Eunuchus at this one point, and shall not re-examine the welltrodden ground concerning the introduction of the parasite and the boastful Captain from Menander's Colax. (shrink)

This passage was attributed to Menander Protector by Bernhardy, who, influenced apparently by Men. Prot. fr. 43 , suggested that here the name disguised the of Menander. This explanation, besides interfering with the text without due cause, ignores altogether the name . In fact, the incident occurs a century earlier, in the period A.D. 467–70. Anagastes is then found in Roman service in Thrace during the reign of Leo . Moreover, the name of Anagastes is linked with an easily recognized (...) variant of in Jo. Ant., fr. 205. (shrink)

‘Menander has set up a confrontation between this law [the law about epikleroi] and love… He wants the audience to regard the law as stupid and wrong… Surely one of Menander's purposes in writing this play was to make the Athenians consider seriously whether the law ought to be changed.’ Thus Professor D. M. MacDowell in the concluding paragraph of his article ‘Love versus the Law: an Essay on Menander's Aspis’. A similar view was already implicit in E. Karabelias' treatment (...) of the play as indicative of the general attitude to this law in Athens in Menander's day: ‘A n'en point douter, l'épiclérat est ressenti, á l'epoque de Ménandre, comme une anomalie intolérable pour les mceurs de la societe athénienne à la fin du ive s.av.n.è L'épiclérat est odieux et ridicule… L'hostilité envers l'épiclérat est done un signe des temps’. And Professor E. G. Turner has written: ‘it is hard to imagine that the institution of the epiclerate emerged in good standing from this derisory treatment’. (shrink)

The paper examines the surviving references to the setting of the rapes in New Comedy. It argues that the fact that rapes are commonly set in the course of nocturnal festival activities should not be seen merely as a convenient plot device. By using Menander's Epitrepontes as a case study, the paper suggests that there is a close relationship between the character of the festivals where rapes are set and a major theme in the plays themselves: namely, the maturation of (...) the young protagonists and their transition into adulthood. The paper also offers a reassessment of the evidence we have for the Tauropolia—the Attic festival where the rape is set in the Epitrepontes. (shrink)

In the twentieth century the question of the relationship of Terence's Heautontimorumenos to its Greek original has been largely neglected or else dismissed on the grounds that it presents no major problem. It is true that, because of the new light which the discovery of the Cairo codex of Menander shed on the nature and role of the chorus in Greek new comedy, there was a flurry of activity concerning the difficult passage 167 ff.; but the far more fundamental problem (...) of contaminatio in general and of the meaning and interpretation of lines 4 to 6 of the play's prologue has attracted comparatively little attention. H. Marti produced a two-part survey of work done on Terence in the years 1909 to 1959; in it he says that in the period under review the question of contaminatio in Heauton–in the sense of the fusion of two originals –has been totally abandoned, with the exception of one article by F. Skutsch in which he holds to his earlier views on the subject. Marti also refers to Kohler's earlier work on the same problem, and to the discussion to be found in Kuiper's more comprehensive work on Roman comedy, but that is all. (shrink)