This article documents and explores the relationship between Horace Epist. 1.5 and Ode 4.7, one a verse epistle, the other one of Horace's most magnificent odes, both addressed to a certain Torquatus. It first analyzes each poem individually in detail and then goes on to examine the overlap between the two in search of Horace's purposes behind the interaction. The epistle, an invitation to a convivium at the speaker's home on the evening before Augustus' birthday, deals with the importance of (...) self-discovery in a private setting where confidentiality is crucial. The ode pits this individuality against far larger spatial and temporal universals, and it reminds us of our mortality and of the loss of self that accompanies death. (shrink)

One of the most extensive yet least conclusive methodological debates within religious studies revolves around the question of what, precisely, the phenomenology of religion is and what contribution it can make to the study of religion. I do not intend to answer this important question here. To do so satisfactorily would require a range of historical, philosophical and methodological inquiry which would go quite beyond the bounds of a single article. My intention in this paper is, by comparison, unambitious. It (...) is to take one view of what phenomenology of religion is and to consider an area outside that usually explored by students of religion which can, nonetheless, shed some light on how religions might be studied in a way which is in accordance with the phenomenology of religion so understood. What follows will offer an answer to the question of what contribution one particular understanding of phenomenology might make to the study of religion, but no attempt will be made to establish whether or not this particular understanding ought to be regarded as normative. (shrink)

In a discussion-note in Mind, Father P. M. Farrell, O.P., gave an account, in what he admitted to be an embarrassingly brief compass, of the Thomist doctrine concerning evil. There is one sentence in this discussion which at first glance appears paradoxical. Father Farrell has been arguing that a universe containing ‘corruptible good’ as well as incorruptible is better than one containing ‘incorruptible good’ only. He continues: ‘If, however, they are to manifest this corruptible good, they must be corruptible and (...) they must sometimes corrupt.’ The final words, despite Father Farrell's italics, strike one as expressing, not a self-evident truth, but a non sequitur. The fact that I am capable of committing murder does not entail that I will at some time commit it. It is not immediately obvious that a similar entailment holds in the case of corruption and corruptibility. (shrink)

This book describes a program of research in computable structure theory. The goal is to find definability conditions corresponding to bounds on complexity which persist under isomorphism. The results apply to familiar kinds of structures (groups, fields, vector spaces, linear orderings Boolean algebras, Abelian p-groups, models of arithmetic). There are many interesting results already, but there are also many natural questions still to be answered. The book is self-contained in that it includes necessary background material from recursion theory (ordinal notations, (...) the hyperarithmetical hierarchy) and model theory (infinitary formulas, consistency properties). (shrink)