This collection contains many stimulating and important articles from the Plutarch renaissance, especially on the interaction between divine and human worlds, ...

Victorian scriptural hermeneutics : history, intention, and evolution -- Intertext 1 : Victorian legal interpretation -- Carlyle : between biblical exegesis and romantic hermeneutics -- Intertext 2 : Victorian science and hermeneutics : the interpretation of nature -- George Eliot's hermeneutics of sympathy -- Intertext 3 : Victorian literary criticism -- Subjectivism, intersubjectivity, and intention : Oscar Wilde and literary hermeneutics.

The sixty years between 43 BC, when Cicero was assassinated, and AD 17, when Ovid died in exile and disgrace, saw an unexampled explosion of literary creativity in Rome. Fresh ground was broken in almost every existing genre, and a new kind of specifically Roman poetry, the personal love-elegy, was born, flourished, and succumbed to its own success. Latin literature now became, in the familiar modern sense of the word, classical: a balanced fusion of what was best and most (...) stimulating in earlier Greek and Roman writing, charged with new and original life by the individual genius of, most particularly, Virgil, Horace and Ovid. Augustan literature, conventionally viewed as the expression in writing of the age itself - political and social stability reflected in artistic equilibrium - turns out on a close and critical reading to have been subject to the same stresses and strains as the society in and for which it was produced. In appraising the monumental literary achievements of the age the underlying tensions and contradictions are not ignored. The critical discussions in this volume do full justice to the complexity and subtlety of the literature itself. (shrink)

This paper aims at reconstructing how the positive image of Octavian resp. Augustus, which can be found in the Greek literature of the early 2nd century AD (e. g. in Plutarch), was formed. During their conflict with Octavian, Marc Antony and his party were creating an image of their opponent which displayed numerous forms of disparagement and of invective elements. After his victory, Octavian faced the challenge to restore his reputation also in the Greek East. As a starting point (...) for this restoration he provided his autobiography, which was probably published at an early date, i. e. about the late 20s BC. At the same time, both in poetry (Crinagoras) and prose (Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Strabo) an image of the princeps as a bringer of peace and culture was created. After a cooperation with Timagenes had failed, Nicolaus of Damascus added to the positive image of Augustus by composing a panegyrical biography of Augustus which incorporated also his childhood and youth. (shrink)

In Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation, Michael Davitt Bell charts the important and often overlooked connection between literary culture and authors' careers. Bell's influential essays on nineteenth-century American writers—originally written for such landmark projects as The Columbia Literary History of the United States and The Cambridge History of American Literature—are gathered here with a major new essay on Richard Wright. Throughout, Bell revisits issues of genre with an eye toward the unexpected details of authors' lives, and invites us to (...) reconsider the hidden functions that terms such as "romanticism" and "realism" served for authors and their critics. Whether tracing the demands of the market or the expectations of readers, Bell examines the intimate relationship between literary production and culture; each essay closely links the milieu in which American writers worked with the trajectory of their storied careers. (shrink)

This book, which transcends the boundaries between literature, social history, and philosophy, studies Plutarch's practical ethics, a group of twenty-odd texts ...

How to read Plutarch in the context of New Testament studies? Almost 50 years after the seminal project on the topic led by Hans Dieter Betz, this volume elevates once again the issue's priority. Bridging discourses is a fitting description both of the religio-philosophical spirit of Plutarch, the Platonist philosopher and priest of Apollo at Delphi, and the task of bringing his writings into fruitful dialogue with the writings of the New Testament, Hellenistic Judaism, and Early Christianity. Taken together, these (...) authors constitute the religious Platonism of the early imperial era. Contributions from the fields of New Testament, classics, philosophy, religious studies, and patristics explore various ways of how to establish these bridges. (shrink)

Aristotle figures significantly in the recent boom of literature on forgiveness, particularly accounts wishing to construe forgiveness as a virtue. While his definition of anger is often invoked, he is also a foil for accounts valuing forgiveness more than did Aristotle. I argue through interpretive exegesis of Aristotle’s texts that, while there are definite limits on forgiveness in his thought, so that his notion of forgiveness does not extend as far as in Christian ethics, it does play a significant (...) role in his ethics. Forgiveness is particularly connected with the emotion and dynamic of anger, and my paper examines Aristotle’s discussions of anger, hatred and righteous indignation, indicating how forgiveness fits into these. Finally, I express my suspicions of recent accounts attempting to construe forgiveness itself as a virtue, arguing it is traditionally and more adequately understood as governed by virtues, in particular mildness (praōtēs) as Aristotle articulates it. (shrink)

Aristotle figures significantly in the recent boom of literature on forgiveness, particularly accounts wishing to construe forgiveness as a virtue. While his definition of anger is often invoked, he is also a foil for accounts valuing forgiveness more than did Aristotle. I argue through interpretive exegesis of Aristotle’s texts that, while there are definite limits on forgiveness in his thought, so that his notion of forgiveness does not extend as far as in Christian ethics, it does play a significant (...) role in his ethics. Forgiveness is particularly connected with the emotion and dynamic of anger, and my paper examines Aristotle’s discussions of anger, hatred and righteous indignation, indicating how forgiveness fits into these. Finally, I express my suspicions of recent accounts attempting to construe forgiveness itself as a virtue, arguing it is traditionally and more adequately understood as governed by virtues, in particular mildness (praōtēs) as Aristotle articulates it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private LifeDavid FredrickKristina Milnor. Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life. Oxford Studies in Classical Literature and Gender Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii + 360 pp. Cloth, $99.It is the often-difficult task of social history to explain how a given institution (e.g., marriage, education, the army) changed across different types of cultural expression (e.g., (...) legal and moral prescriptions, representation in visual art and literature) and in lived experience. In this fruitful and sometimes brilliant study, Kristina Milnor explores the repositioning of women during the Augustan period with respect to the distinction between public and private life. Over the course of an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, she develops the argument that the Augustan period "invented" private life or, more precisely, new strategies for representing private life, in order to make the imperial system look like a return to traditional Roman family values. In making this argument, Milnor looks back to the Republic and forward to Nero; she assembles a wide range of literary and material evidence and makes judicious use of theory. Milnor is primarily concerned with textual representation; as she puts it at one point, the volume is "a study of representation rather than reality" (40–41). However, she does include substantial sections on architecture and space, and in the end it is not clear whether Milnor sees architecture in the Augustan period as a mode of representation or as something that by reshaping behavior necessarily transformed private life in lived experience.The introduction uses Vergil's simile of the housewife spinning in Aeneid 8 to set up the much-debated distinction between "public" and "private" in Roman culture. Milnor notes that the original meaning of privatus during the republic is narrowly oppositional, "a man without a political or military position," but broadened during the empire to mean more generally, "anyone... who did not hold the ultimate 'public' role of emperor" (20). Hence privatus and "domestic" do not mean the same thing: "privatus is necessarily a political word," while "the domestic... functions as a kind of moralized privacy, a concept whose strength lies in its allegiance to supposedly transcendent and apolitical ethical truths" (27). Women emerge during the Augustan period as the preferred symbols of this "moralized privacy," and while the physical and social circumstances of Roman women were highly disparate, the representation of female virtues remains consistent: "the domestic ideal was a construct which did not 'truthfully' represent any woman's life, even at the same time as it purported to represent them all" (38).In the first chapter ("Reading and Writing Gender on the Augustan Palatine"), Milnor argues that Augustus' Palatine complex is "engendered" by the prominence of Niobe, Cleopatra, and the Danaids in its decorative program, pointing to the problematic display of female virtue in the princeps' house. Because of Augustus' unprecedented political position, the "private" behavior of the women in his house became a kind of public performance, a tension that persists in Augustus' larger treatment of the city. In Tristia 2, Ovid addresses Augustus as a fellow author whose "text" is the city of Rome, and just as women [End Page 605] have misread Ovid's poetry licentiously, they frequently appropriate Rome's temples and porticoes for sexual liaisons. Milnor observes that this disingenuous argument at least recognizes women as active and resisting readers of texts, noting further that imperial women (Octavia and Livia) are paradoxically empowered as "authors" of significant public spaces precisely because they were seen to be expressing politically disinterested virtues. The chapter concludes with a look back at Cicero's de Domo Sua, which casts Clodius as a feminized abuser of public space in his appropriation of the Portico of Catulus for his shrine of Libertas; the restoration of Cicero's house, meanwhile, represents the restoration of the Roman state. Milnor argues that this anticipates Augustus' use of his own house as a symbol for Rome, and thus as the site for a paradoxically public performance of the traditions of Roman domesticity.The second chapter, "Domesticity and Display in Vitruvius' de Architectura," begins with two significant questions. Why, if... (shrink)

It is generally assumed that whatever else has changed about the human condition since the dawn of civilization, basic human emotions - love, fear, anger, envy, shame - have remained constant. David Konstan, however, argues that the emotions of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from our own, and that recognizing these differences is important to understanding ancient Greek literature and culture. With The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, Konstan reexamines the traditional assumption that the Greek (...) terms designating the emotions correspond more or less to those of today. Beneath the similarities, there are striking discrepancies. References to Greek 'anger' or 'love' or 'envy,' for example, commonly neglect the fact that the Greeks themselves did not use these terms, but rather words in their own language, such as orgê and philia and phthonos, which do not translate neatly into our modern emotional vocabulary. Konstan argues that classical representations and analyses of the emotions correspond to a world of intense competition for status, and focused on the attitudes, motives, and actions of others rather than on chance or natural events as the elicitors of emotion. Konstan makes use of Greek emotional concepts to interpret various works of classical literature, including epic, drama, history, and oratory. Moreover, he illustrates how the Greeks' conception of emotions has something to tell us about our own views, whether about the nature of particular emotions or of the category of emotion itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 143-146 [Access article in PDF] William V. Harris. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 468 pp. Cloth, $49.95. It is a mark of evolving interests in the discipline that a well-known ancient historian should choose to write a major book on the ancient understanding of a single emotion. This reflects both (...) an ever-widening conception of what social history can include (and of how social and political history are interconnected) and the intense study in recent years of ancient ideas about the nature and therapy of the emotions, especially in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. This book combines specificity of focus with breadth of evidence examined. The topic is not just anger but, more precisely, the ideology, broadly understood, of anger control. The evidence discussed ranges from Homer to early Christian ideas in late antiquity; it embraces literature, historiography, and philosophy, among much else. The combination of a single line of enquiry and comprehensiveness of material is crucial to the character and value of this study.The project of the book can be defined more exactly. Harris sets out to examine the evidence for ancient thought about anger and to contextualize it, placing it in a socially oriented history of ideas. This project explains the structure of the book. Part 1 considers the relevant material, above all the Hellenistic-Roman philosophical treatises on control of anger, and explores questions of method and approach. Key points include the difference between Greek or Roman and modern English vocabulary, such as the Greek distinction between violent temper ( orge \) and "spirit" or impulse ( thumos), and the importance of placing the Hellenistic treatises in a developing tradition of emotional self-control from the fifth century B.C. onwards. Part 2, the largest, connects Greco-Roman thought about the restraint of anger with salient features of political and social structure; this is extended, in part 3, to family life and the treatment of slaves. Part 4 returns to ancient ideas, especially in philosophy, about anger as a "sickness of soul" to be treated by "therapy"; these ideas are now placed within a larger history of anger control from archaic Greece to late antiquity.Inevitably, with a topic of such breadth, some of the discussion surveys material examined more fully by scholars writing from more specialist standpoints. This is so, for instance, in the review of philosophical ideas on control of anger in chapters 6 and 14-15 (though these ideas have not, I think, been assembled before in a single study). The main originality of the book lies in the social contextualization of ideas, particularly in parts 2 and 3. Here, a set of substantively new claims are offered, bearing especially on the explanation of the [End Page 143] prominence of the theme of anger control in Greek and Roman culture. For instance, the presentation of Achilles' rage in the Iliad as intensely problematic, taken with the more positive characterization of Odysseus' revenge (which depends on restraint of anger) in the Odyssey, is seen as expressing a growing awareness of the dangers of heroic or kingly rage in a period (ca. 700 B.C.) when the Greek archaic city-states were emerging from their pre-polis form (chapter 7, especially 145-46). Analogously, the preoccupation with the destructive impact of violent anger ( orge \) and the reiterated stress on emotional control ( so \ phrosune \) in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., in contexts such as drama, historiography, and oratory, are taken as integral elements of the growth of cooperative life in the polis. Harris draws on Norbert Elias's thesis that the internalisation of doctrines restraining the motives (including anger) that generate violent aggression constitutes a key part of the development of civilized society (150).A comparably wide range of sources is reviewed for Roman attitudes; much of the evidence is drawn from the late Republic, a period when violent anger played a major role in the disruption of social and political order—although this connection is not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Life of Roman Republicanism by Joy ConnollyT. P. WisemanJoy Connolly. The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xix + 228 pp. Cloth. $39.95.This book was written for the best of reasons. Joy Connolly explains in her preface that she began to study the republican tradition in 2001, when “the Bush administration’s imprudence, paranoia, and disregard of democratic values stoked in me an anger equalled (...) only by the disgust I felt at my own and my fellow citizens’ inability or unwillingness to stand up to it” (xiv). The failure of the Left caused her “to ask questions that might help us to respond more intelligently and humanly to the situation in which we find ourselves” (xv). In particular, in this book her aim has been to exploit texts from the late Roman republic, to which students of political science have not paid enough attention, and thus recover “the suppressed history of republican political thought” (204). As she says in [End Page 372] conclusion, “I have sought to offer practical tools for civic education by articulating learnable practices of knowing the world that characterize late republican texts” (208, author’s emphasis). How well has this admirable ambition been achieved?According to the introduction, “[t]his book seeks to place Cicero’s Verrines, Caesarian orations, Republic, and Laws; Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha; and Horace’s Satires at the center of the republican tradition” (1); however, the Verrines and De legibus get only a couple of paragraphs each, and only one of the “Caesarian” orations is discussed at all. The actual contents are: chapter 1 on De republica (“Where Politics Begins”), which “presents Cicero as a thinker concerned with a collective of antagonists and competing interests, against conventional portrayals of his ideal republic as a homogeneous, unified, harmonious community” (20); chapter 2 on Sallust (“Justice in the World”), which argues that “Sallust’s withholding of judgment at the end of Jugurtha signifies the ways in which agents in the decaying republic withhold justice on a larger scale” (20); chapter 3 on Horace Satires I (“Non-Sovereign Freedom”), in which the obvious question (asked only at the end), “what might political and social progressives find worthy of consideration in Horace today?”, is answered with “Horatian satire undoes the claim to sovereignty that usually partners claims to moral judgment” (154); chapter 4 on Cicero’s view of oratory (“Dividual Advocacy”), which “reflects on the Roman preoccupation with faces, situations, the mutability of selfhood, and the degree to which the divided self mirrors the division of the polity” (21); and chapter 5 on Pro Marcello (“Imagination, Finitude, Responsibility, Irony”), which argues that “[b]y adopting hyperbole as the governing figure of this new style of senatorial speech, Cicero holds out the promise not of a morally legible universe, but of a recognition that every Roman now lives in conditions virtually ‘impossible to believe’, the emergence of one ruler, under whom the chains of traditional obligations do not consistently hold” (183). The short conclusion (“The Republic Remastered”) attacks “the tendency, dominant since the nineteenth-century emergence of sociology and economics, to treat human beings primarily as rational calculators or creatures of practical wisdom” (203) and expresses the hope that “close attention to these texts has the capacity to reshape the way we think about civic wisdom—the way schools teach history, literature, civics, and philosophy—about public discourse, especially public commentary on political oratory, and about the conversations we citizens hold among ourselves” (207).I have deliberately used the author’s own words to indicate what the book attempts to do, because I would find it impossible to summarise its argument any other way. Even with these formulae to help, Connolly’s selective and apparently random approach imposes a heavy burden on the reader to construct a coherent framework for her ideas. I think there are two main reasons for this. The first is a direct result of Connolly’s impressive mastery of the political-sciences literature. It is an excellent thing to be so thoroughly familiar with the works of Hannah Arendt, Simon Critchley, John Dewey, Michel Foucault, Dean Hammer, Bonnie Honig, Andreas Kalyvas, George Kareb... (shrink)

This book examines the entire range of sacred literature produced between the sixteenth- and nineteenth century to give a comprehensive account of Sikhism. Dealing with the historical evolution of the Sikh tradition, it discuss issues like self-image, identity, and ideology.

Plutarch’s account of Lucullus unsuccessfully begging his soldiers to follow him further, shortly before being forced to leave his command, is commonly read as the apex of his failure as a military leader. A close reading, however, reveals two hitherto overlooked aspects. Firstly, the story offers valuable information on late Republican military history, regarding the duration of military service before Augustus’ reform and the existence of clearly defined subgroups within the army. Secondly, the conflict between Lucullus and his soldiers allows (...) us to get a glimpse of the political debate of the time, characterised by the competing claims to Sulla’s heritage, the shift of military loyalty towards specific individuals, and above all the question of who really represented the interests of the res publica. (shrink)

The history of British political thought has been one of the most fertile fields of Anglo-American historical writing in the last half-century. David Armitage brings together an interdisciplinary and international team of authors to consider the impact of this scholarship on the study of early modern British history, English literature, and political theory. Leading historians survey the impact of the history of political thought on the 'new' histories of Britain and Ireland; eminent literary scholars offer novel critical methods attentive (...) to literary form, genre, and language; and distinguished political theorists treat the relationship of history and theory in studies of rights and privacy. The outstanding examples of critical practice collected here will encourage the emergence of fresh research on the historical, critical, and theoretical study of the English-speaking world in the period around 1500-1800. This volume celebrates the contribution of the Folger Institute to British studies over many years. (shrink)

As a field of study, literature and science has gradually expanded to encompass both the impact of science on literary culture and the literary‐linguistic practices intrinsic to the production of scientific knowledge. Such transformations both reinforce and fundamentally recalibrate the detailed attention focused on scientific practice by historians of science since the 1980s. As a result, this essay and the Focus section it introduces suggest that history of science and literature and science are, in fact, interdependent fields. Attention (...) to their convergences will yield better understanding of the performative dimensions of scientific practices and thence of science itself as a form of making of knowledge of things and events in the world of nature. Science as a form of making involves the convergence of things, material practices, and a panoply of meaningful artifacts—instruments of thought and action—that refuse any simple dichotomy between “text” and “action.” -/- . (shrink)

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS: Building blocks -- The wheel of yoga -- Yoga and the other Hindu traditions -- PART TWO: PRE-CLASSICAL YOGA: Yoga in ancient times -- The whispered wisdom of the early Upanishads -- Jaina Yoga: the teachings of the victorious ford-makers -- Yoga in Buddhism -- The flowering of yoga -- PART THREE: CLASSICAL YOGA: The history and literature of Patanjala-Yoga -- The philosophy and practice of Patanjala-Yoga -- PART FOUR: POST-CLASSICAL YOGA: The nondualist approach to God (...) among the Shiva worshipers -- The Vedantic approach to God among the Vishnu worshipers -- Yoga and Yogins in the Puranas -- The yogic idealism of the Yoga-Vasishtha -- God, visions, and power: the Yoga-Upanishads -- Yoga in Sikhism -- PART FIVE: POWER AND TRANSCENDENCE IN TANTRISM: The esotericism of medieval Tantra-Yoga -- Yoga as spiritual alchemy: the philosophy and practice of Hatha-Yoga. (shrink)

By way of essays and a selection of primary sources in parallel text, Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing provides an introduction to a vast, significant, but neglected corpus of early modern literature: collective biography. It focuses especially on the various related strands of political, philosophical, and intellectual and cultural biography as well as on the intersection between biography, historiography, and philosophy. Individual texts from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century are presented as examples of how the ancient collective (...) biographical tradition--as represented above all by Plutarch, Suetonius, Diogenes Laertius, and Jerome--was received and transformed in the Renaissance and beyond in accordance with the needs of humanism, religious controversy, politics, and the development of modern philosophy and science"--Provided by publisehr. (shrink)

Nach dem Monumentum Ancyranum, Apolloniense und Antiochenum. Die philosophischen, biographischen und poetischen Werke des Kaisers Augustus sind verloren. Erhalten ist nur sein Rechenschaftsbericht, der einst auf Bronzetafeln vor seinem Mausoleum in Rom aufgestellt war. Eine Abschrift des Originals, von dem keinerlei Reste überliefert sind, wurde in Ancyra gefunden, weshalb die Inschrift als "Monumentum Ancyranum" bezeichnet wird. Eine weitere lateinische Kopie - das Monumentum Antiochenum - und eine griechische Übersetzung - das Monumentum Apolloniense - sind in Bruchstücken erhalten. Beide Überlieferungen, die (...) lateinische und die griechische, sind hier dem deutschen Text gegenübergestellt. Eine große Anzahl antiker Zeugnisse - Zitate aus der Literatur, Inschriften, Münzlegenden -, die ebenfalls aufgenommen wurden, geben die Möglichkeit des unmittelbaren Vergleichs mit der Parallelüberlieferung. Mit Einführung, Erläuterungen, Literaturhinweisen und Register. (shrink)

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed on (...) a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works (...) of Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

To approach philosophy as a way of working on the self means to begin not with the experience it clarifies and the subject it discovers, but with the acts of self‐transformation it requires and the subjectivity it seeks to fashion. Commenting on the variety of spiritual exercises to be found in the ancient schools, Pierre Hadot remarks that: Some, like Plutarch’s ethismoi, designed to curb curiosity, anger or gossip, were only practices intended to ensure good moral habits. Others, particularly the (...) meditations of the Platonic tradition, demanded a high degree of mental concentration. Some, like the contemplation of nature as practiced in all philosophical schools, turned the soul toward the cosmos, while still others—rare and exceptional—led to a transfiguration of the personality, as in the experiences of Plotinus. We also saw that the emotional tone and notional content of these exercises varied widely from one philosophical school to another: from the mobilization of energy and consent to destiny of the Stoics, to the relaxation and detachment of the Epicureans, to the mental concentration and renunciation of the sensible world among the Platonists.1 While successfully applied to ancient philosophy,2 this approach has not been widely exploited in the history of philosophy more broadly. There is, however, at least one study of medieval metaphysics in these terms,3 and there are some important discussions of early modern Stoicism and Epicureanism.4 And a recent study of Hume shows the fruitfulness of the approach for Enlightenment philosophy.5 It is all the more surprising then that there seems to have been no serious attempt to approach Kant’s moral philosophy in this way. (shrink)

Drawing on ancient writers, from Aesop to Ovid, classicist and working farmer, Mark Usher compiles in this book an anthology of Greco-Roman passages illustrating how they thought about animals and illuminating they might help us to rethink our relationships with them. Not many contemporary readers will know, for example, the compelling arguments the second century AD Greek philosopher Porphyry makes for vegetarianism, long before a plant-based diet began to garner headlines. Plutarch's serio-comic exposition of the rationality and inherent dignity of (...) non-human creatures-put on the lips of one of Circe's pigs-is so fresh that it sounds like it was formulated just yesterday. The knowledge the poet Theognis derived from Greek sponge divers about the behavior of octopods rivals our contemporary fascination with the octopus. Aristotle's introduction to the scientific study of animal morphology and behavior remains unparalleled for its elegance and insight, and it represents one of the first forays into natural history writing. Seneca, employing an ingenious etymological pun on the word animal, endeavors to show that we humans are morally inferior to our animal cousins, who instinctively know and are satisfied with their place in Nature. The Greeks and Romans, amidst all their magnificent cultural achievements and reckless, destructive behavior, lived closer than most of us to the perils and prospects of their environments. This afforded them a sensitivity to their environments and, in particular, to their fellow creatures that can perhaps help to disabuse us of our disconnectedness from animal life. This small volume demonstrates how astoundingly relevant the ancients still are in this regard. (shrink)

The central subject of Aristotle's ethics is happiness or living well. Most people in his day (as in ours), eager to enjoy life, impressed by worldly success, and fearful of serious loss, believed that happiness depends mainly on fortune in achieving prosperity and avoiding adversity. Aristotle, however, argues that virtuous conduct is the governing factor in living well and attaining happiness. While admitting that neither the blessings not the afflictions of fortune are unimportant, he maintains that the virtuous find life (...) more satisfying than other people do and, with only modest good fortune, they lead happy, enjoyable lives. Combining philological precision with philosophical analysis, the author reconstructs Aristotle's defense of these bold claims. By examining how Aristotle develops his position in response to the prevailing hopes and anxieties of his age, the author shows why Aristotle considers happiness important for ethics and why he thinks it necessary to revise popular and traditional views. Paying close attention throughout to the internalist dimension of Aristotle's approach - his emphasis on how the virtuous view their own lives and actions - the author advances new interpretations of Aristotle's accounts of several major virtues, including temperance, courage, liberality, and 'greatness of soul'. This work sets Aristotle in the broader cultural context of his time, tracing his attemps to accommodate and amend rival views. The author examines literary and historical sources as well as philosophical texts, showing the inherited values and traditional ideals that inform Aristotle's discussions and provide some of the basis for his conclusions. Presupposing no knowledge of Greek or specialized philosophical terminology, the book is designed to be accessible to all students of philosophy or classical antiquity. All quotations from ancient texts are translated. (shrink)

The impossibility results of Bovens and Hartmann (2003, Bayesian epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press) and Olsson (2005, Against coherence: Truth, probability and justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) show that the link between coherence and probability is not as strong as some have supposed. This paper is an attempt to bring out a way in which coherence reasoning nevertheless can be justified, based on the idea that, even if it does not provide an infallible guide to probability, it can give us an (...) indication thereof. It is further shown that this actually is the case, for several of the coherence measures discussed in the literature so far. We also discuss how this affects the possibility to use coherence as a means of epistemic justification. (shrink)

Frederick Brenk is a specialist, but, as this third volume of his collected essays makes clear, a multiple specialist, as skilled in dealing with visual materials as with texts, with epigraphy as with prosopography, with Christian writers as with pagan, with Egypt as with Greece, with style and language as with philosophy and religion. Few scholars have such wide learning, and fewer still can use it to weave together insights from so many different ways of thinking, feeling, seeing, and writing.

The first in a two-volume anthology of Hayden White's uncollected essays from the last two decades of his life, revealing White as a public intellectual. It places White's thought in context, explaining its major themes, sources, and frames of reference, and features five previously unpublished lectures as well as more complete versions of several published essays.

This book review discusses the new research of the Russian philosopher and cultural study scholar Olga A. Zhukova. What is special about the Russian intellectual movement Russian Europeanism? Zhukova reconstructs the ideas of Russian Europeanism, and she evaluates the approaches of Russian thinkers to national cultural history. The author manages to introduce the reader to current discussions about the specifics of the Russian cultural and philosophical “project” and to propose new approaches for the interpretation of the intellectual and literary heritage (...) of Russia. In addition to offering a critical analysis of Zhukova’s volume, the book review presents this thought provoking monograph as a great piece of scholarly work. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Latin Literature. A HistoryRichard F. ThomasGian Biagio Conte. Latin Literature. A History. Translated by Joseph B. Solodow. Revised by Don Fowler and Glenn W. Most. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xxxiii 1 827 pp. $65.00.The work under review is a translation of Gian Biagio Conte’s 1987 book Letteratura latina; Manuale storico dalle origini alla fine dell’ impero, a book whose title page (...) acknowledged the collaboration of Alessandro Barchiesi, Emanuele Narducci, Giovanni Polara, Giuliano Ranucci, and Gianpiero Rosati. In the translation these scholars have been moved into C.’s “Acknowledgements,” making room for the new group on the title page, as given above. Of these, Don Fowler provided a bibliography and “in a sense has helped to direct the whole editorial enterprise,” while Glenn Most (like Solodow, one of C.’s English translators), rewrote sections on reception. Elaine Fantham introduces the work with an encomiastic “blurb” and general appreciation of the scholarship of C. C.’s own preface adds to the “gang of five” original collaborators a new group of three (Mario Labate, Alessandro Schiesaro, Rolando Ferri) who “have freely given me the support of their attentive and considerate criticism.” One recent reviewer talks of “the thorough control of the material by the single mind of the original author” (Robert P. Sonkowsky, The Key Reporter 61.3 [1996] 13), as does another for whom “the book is the production of a single mind” (J. Griffin, “The Long Latin Line,” review in New York Review of Books [Oct. 6, 1994] 43); it therefore seems only right to register my dissent from such a judgment.Much in Latin studies right now seems to involve a pack mentality: teams toil away for their grex, writing encomiastic and disingenuously uncritical reviews, or footnotes acknowledging the help of other teammates, attending conferences, organizing group-solidifying essay collections, even new series and manifestoes promising a “New Latin”—a term that seems to have no particular theoretical or intellectual content, nor a purpose other than to appeal vaguely for some sort of postmodernist approval. Barbara F. McManus’ summary of a paper on the uses of e-mail for mobilizing interest groups, delivered at a conference on computers and the classics by the very editor of the book under review, Don Fowler (“The Scroll and the Screen: Computers and Classical Literary Criticism”), gives a clear account of procedure and techniques in use:Electronic communication allows small groups with strongly related interests to form, cohere, and influence the larger disciplinary community; because such groups start with fundamental agreement on intellectual frameworks and approaches, they can develop ideas rapidly and in depth.(2/8/97 )What happens when other, less organized and more individual, insights fail to coincide with the “fundamental agreement” of the “group,” and how, we might wonder, will such individualism hold up in the face of this mission to “influence the larger disciplinary community”? [End Page 471]Be all this as it may and whatever the realities of authorship, the achievement of Gian Biagio Conte’s volume is a signal one. Latin Literature is a work of considerable value, a work which I have already used with success in teaching the history of Latin literature. Whatever the state of its authorship, I would now move to a review of some of its merits, which are considerable, and in which C. himself is obviously a participant throughout. The book begins with the origins of Latin literature and extends to Bede and the national literatures that were to transmit Latin literature into the vernaculars, that would in turn connect the essential themes and fundamental concerns of classical Latin literature to the cognate and evolving experiences of later antiquity and the middle ages. The original authors worked to a formulaic scheme: generally “Life,” “Works,” some treatment of cultural/political/social context, “Literary Success” (for the Italian “Fortuna”—I would have preferred “Reception”), and bibliography. This latter, again by Fowler, is developed from the Italian version and is generally made more international, often with the result that it sits somewhat uneasily with the original articles, which are largely unchanged, and whose authors presumably made... (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine the problem of loneliness in Hannah Arendt in the light of her considerations about totalitarianism. We seek not only to clarify this concept, but to examine to what extent it is important for understanding certain aspects of Arendt's critique of philosophy in general and political philosophy in particular.

This note argues that, insofar as contemporary mathematics is concerned, there is overwhelming evidence that if mathematical objects are structures, then isomorphism should not be taken as their identity condition. This goes against a common version of structuralism in the philosophical literature. Four areas are presented in which identifying isomorphic structures or objects leads to contradiction or inadequacy. This is followed by a philosophical discussion on possible ways to approach the distinction, and a section on the possibility of proceeding (...) intensionally, as is done in e.g.\ the Univalent Foundations program. (shrink)

1. Bd. Die Relativitätstheorie fällt : physikalische, philosophische, wissenschaftssoziologische und allgemeinverständliche Korrektur : hundert Jahre Kultus des Irrtums sind genug -- 3. Bd. Die Urknalltheorie fällt.