Seneca the Younger's tragedies are adaptations from the Greek. C. A. J. Littlewood emphasizes the place of these plays in the Latin literature and in the philosophical context of the reign of the emperor Nero. Stoics dismissed public reality as theatre, as illusion. The artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds are literary constructs, responds to this contemporary philosophical perception.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient SatireCedric LittlewoodRalph M. Rosen. Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire. Classical Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiii + 294 pp. 4 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55.This book ranges from pre-literary myths and rituals of abuse to the verse satire of Juvenal in pursuit of a poetics of mockery largely abstracted from the historical contexts of its production. We set (...) the various poetic modes of Greco-Roman mockery more successfully in their historical contexts, Rosen argues, with a synchronic appreciation of the literary phenomenon we recognize broadly as satire. The Roman practitioners of this famously home-grown genre themselves demand that we broaden our horizons: Persius, for example, prefaces his satires with fourteen lines of choliambics, while Horace (mis)represents his satiric predecessor Lucilius as deriving entirely from Old Comedy (Satires 1.4.1–7). Rosen’s study is bounded by the limits of poetry: Lucian’s comic sketches have no place in this book because they lack the “otherness” of poetic speech to demarcate them from the rhetoric of the everyday. This is a distinction with which I think one may valuably take issue—the prose of Petronius’ Satyricon hardly lacks markers of its own fictionality—but it is an important one for Rosen (see below on Callimachus, Iambus 1). Drama provides the fundamental model for the satiric posture: the poet, whether or not he plays a role himself in his comedy, stages a performance of mockery for an audience. Poetic mockery is a ritual act, and the chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs (368–76) could draw an analogy between the abuse performed in one Dionysiac ceremony (the initiates’ procession to Eleusis) and in another (comic drama). How exactly comic mockery may have evolved from religious ritual is neither Aristophanes’ nor Rosen’s concern: their aim is to invoke the ritual of religious practice as a model for the conventions of art.Comic mockery is an ugly and potentially dangerous art. For his first case study, Rosen discusses the myth of Iambe, etymological kin to the iambus of poetic invective. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Iambe interrupts the grief of her mistress with jests ( 1, 202). Demeter laughs and ends her grieving fast. Rosen argues that Iambe’s comic interlude was abuse directed against the goddess who, with her laughing response, recognized the performance of mockery as something different from an act of hostility. Whether Demeter was the target of abuse or simply the audience of a breach of decorum is hard to determine from the text, but N. J. Richardson (The Homeric Hymn to Demeter [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974], 215) usefully records the parallel Alexandrian myth of Ascalabus, whom Demeter turned into a gecko because he laughed at her in the same circumstances. The fate of the obscenely joking Cercopes who are released [End Page 433] by a laughing Hercules rather than killed in anger provides another model not just for the restorative power of laughter but for the appropriate reaction to comic mockery. What, then, are we to make of Homer’s Thersites? Gregory Nagy argued (The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 260–62) that the base and ugly Thersites personifies the poetry of blame. His depiction and his fate show this genre’s inferiority to the epic poetry of praise. For Rosen, although many poetic characters engage in the practice of blame, “there can only be one playing the role of blame poet... and the criterion for identifying him as such is the level of “righteousness” he can persuade an audience he has on his side” (76). This, in my view, is a very difficult argument to sustain. Rosen acknowledges that an inscribed audience (here the Achaeans) does not offer a secure guide to the righteousness of the speaker, that the high moral stance of a poetic mocker is typically compromised by irony and by comedy, and that the terminology of mocker and mocked is “labile and unstable” (116). Nevertheless, a satirist whose righteousness is only intermittently convincing (as is often the case) is to be seen... (shrink)

C. A. J. Littlewood approaches Seneca's tragedies as Neronian literature rather than as reworkings of Attic drama, and emphasizes their place in the Roman world and in the Latin literary corpus. The Greek tragic myths are for Seneca mediated by non-dramatic Augustan literature. In literary terms Phaedra's desire, Hippolytus' innocence, and Hercules' ambivalent heroism look back through allusion to Roman elegy, pastoral, and epic respectively. Ethically, the artificiality of Senecan tragedy, the consciousness that its own dramatic worlds, events, and (...) people are literary constructs, responds to the contemporary Stoical dismissal of the public world as mere theatre. (shrink)

This study aims to highlight how an existential-humanistic perspective can inform athlete support and in doing so, emphasize the importance of explicating the philosophical underpinnings of athlete lifestyle support. Drawing on applied experience with elite youth cricketers over a 12-month period, ethnographic data were collected through the observation, maintenance of case notes, and a practitioner reflective diary. Based on thematic analysis, we created three nonfictional vignettes that we use to illustrate how existential-humanistic theorizing can inform lifestyle support. We discuss the (...) implications of this professional philosophy in terms of considerations for performance and talent development programs, and how holistic support for athletes is positioned. We also discuss implications for athlete lifestyle and performance psychology practitioners, with regard to training, underpinning theoretical grounding of support and the strategic positioning of their practitioner roles. (shrink)

Generic oppositions create an interplay of different voices in Satires 12, particularly between the genus tenue, variously nuanced, and the big genres of epic and tragedy. The integrity of the poetic idylls of a lyric Horace is contrasted with the more compromised sanctuary of Juvenal, struggling to accommodate his luxurious friends or, less kindly, practising friendship in a world in which everything is negotiable. Beyond an ahistorical opposition of generic voices emerges a narrative of intertextual influence in which Juvenal is (...) drawn from an idyll of Augustan purity into the mercantile space of his contemporary Martial. (shrink)

Aetiological poetry tends to be mature poetry in both a literary and a political sense. Interest in antiquarian lore belongs in general to a poet's middle and later years when youthful and audacious quests for what is avant-garde and anti-establishment have yielded to conservatism and a desire to preserve the past. Propertius and Ovid both turned to aetiological poetry after a long apprenticeship in amatory ‘nugae’ which enabled them, like their predecessor, Callimachus, to embellish their work with a diversity of (...) artistic devices founded on considerable poetic skill and literary experience. With this, a vital ploy to engage the sympathy of a sophisticated audience, went the poise and urbanity with which the aetiological poet found humour in the pose of earnest researcher, in the naivety of primitive cult and in clever literary adaptations. Moreover, dedication to a form of writing essentially nationalist and conservative encouraged a tone of patriotic pride and allusions, even compliments, to the ruling powers. In the light of such considerations we may examine Ovid's account of the ‘Ludi Megalenses’. The ‘Megalensia’ furnished Ovid with a goddess who had enjoyed fame and even notoriety in the pages of Roman literature. In addition to showing a poetic and neoteric interest in the orgiastic elements of her cult and the alien music of her retinue Roman poetry could reflect too the awe and reverence inspired of old by the Great Mother and expressed in the Greek poets, whom Lucretius claimed as his sources in his powerfully beautiful excursus on Cybele worship. Again, Cybele's importance in Rome had been augmented by her Trojan origins, concerning which a canonical Augustan theology had been established by Vergil in the Aeneid. (shrink)

A recent meta-analysis by Munafò, Durrant, Lewis, and Flint [Munafò, M. R., Durrant, C., Lewis, G., & Flint, J. . Gene × environment interactions at the serotonin transporter locus. Biological Psychiatry, 65, 211–219] questioned the meaning of studies searching for endophenotypes associated with the serotonin-transporter-linked promoter region polymorphism, including our study on visual perspective during autobiographical memory retrieval. However, the association of 3rd person perspective with vulnerability for depression does not rely only on genetics. External consistency is provided by the (...) influence of the 5-HTTLPR polymorphism on brain regions involved in emotion regulation and autobiographical memory retrieval . Internal consistency is provided by the increased prevalence of 3rd person perspective in both currently and previously depressed patients, as well as in depression-prone individuals. Further studies should examine therapeutic opportunities. (shrink)

We consider the question: under what circumstances can the concept of adaptation be applied to groups, rather than individuals? Gardner and Grafen (2009, J. Evol. Biol.22: 659–671) develop a novel approach to this question, building on Grafen's ‘formal Darwinism’ project, which defines adaptation in terms of links between evolutionary dynamics and optimization. They conclude that only clonal groups, and to a lesser extent groups in which reproductive competition is repressed, can be considered as adaptive units. We re-examine the conditions under (...) which the selection–optimization links hold at the group level. We focus on an important distinction between two ways of understanding the links, which have different implications regarding group adaptationism. We show how the formal Darwinism approach can be reconciled with G.C. Williams’ famous analysis of group adaptation, and we consider the relationships between group adaptation, the Price equation approach to multi-level selection, and the alternative approach based on contextual analysis. (shrink)

Despite hundreds of definitions, no consensus exists on a definition of life or on the closely related and problematic definitions of the organism and death. These problems retard practical and theoretical development in, for example, exobiology, artificial life, biology and evolution. This paper suggests improving this situation by basing definitions on a theory of a generalized particle hierarchy. This theory uses the common denominator of the “operator” for a unified ranking of both particles and organisms, from elementary particles to animals (...) with brains. Accordingly, this ranking is called “the operator hierarchy”. This hierarchy allows life to be defined as: matter with the configuration of an operator, and that possesses a complexity equal to, or even higher than the cellular operator. Living is then synonymous with the dynamics of such operators and the word organism refers to a select group of operators that fit the definition of life. The minimum condition defining an organism is its existence as an operator, construction thus being more essential than metabolism, growth or reproduction. In the operator hierarchy, every organism is associated with a specific closure, for example, the nucleus in eukaryotes. This allows death to be defined as: the state in which an organism has lost its closure following irreversible deterioration of its organization. The generality of the operator hierarchy also offers a context to discuss “life as we do not know it”. The paper ends with testing the definition’s practical value with a range of examples. (shrink)

This work offers a new theory of what it means to be a legal person and suggests that it is best understood as a cluster property. The book explores the origins of legal personhood, the issues afflicting a traditional understanding of the concept, and the numerous debates surrounding the topic.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Uroboros of Consciousness: Between the Naturalisation of Phenomenology and the Phenomenologisation of Nature” by Sebastjan Vörös. Upshot: Vörös proposes that we phenomenologise nature and, whilst I agree with the spirit and direction of his proposal, the 4EA framework, on which he bases his project, is too conservative and is, therefore, unsatisfactory. I present an alternative framework, an enkinaesthetic field, and suggest further ways in which we might explore a non-dichotomised “betwixt” and begin to (...) experience our world in a non-individuating, non-dual aspect. (shrink)

The primary aim of this essay is to present a case for a heavily revised notion of heterophenomenology. l will refer to the revised notion as ‘enkinaesthesia’ because of its dependence on the experiential entanglement of our own and the other’s felt action as the sensory background within which all other experience is possible. Enkinaesthesia2 emphasizes two things: (i) the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent, including the givenness and ownership of its experience, and (ii) the entwined, blended and situated co-affective (...) feeling of the presence of the other(s), agential (for example, human, horse, cat, beetle) and non-agential (for example, cup, bed, apple, paper) and, where appropriate, the anticipated arc of the other’s action or movement, including, again where appropriate, the other’s intentionality. When the ‘other’ is also a sensing and experiencing agent it is their - in this case, the pair’s - affective intentional reciprocity, their folding, enfolding, and unfolding, which co-constitutes the conscious relation and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of the deep integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies which bind us together, even when they pull us apart. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasise the dialogical nature of the backgrounded feeling of being. (shrink)

Regulated secretory proteins are stored within specialized vesicles known as secretory granules. It is not known how proteins are sorted into these organelles. Regulated proteins may possess targeting signals which interact with specific sorting receptors in the lumen of the trans‐Golgi network (TGN) prior to their aggregation to form the characteristic dense‐core of the granule. Alternatively, sorting may occur as the result of specific aggregation of regulated proteins in the TGN. Aggregates may be directed to secretory granules by interaction of (...) a targeting signal on the surface with a sorting receptor. Novel targeting signals which confer on regulated proteins a tendency to aggregate under certain conditions, and in so doing cause them to be incorporated into secretory granules, have been implicated. Specific targeting signals may also play a role in directing membrane proteins to secretory granules. (shrink)

Deterministic models in population dynamics often are really approximations to stochastic models, justified by an appeal to the law of large numbers. It is proposed to call such models pseudodeterministic. Four questions are discussed in this article: (1) What errors may be made by equating deterministically predicted values to expectations? (2) When, and in what sense, may numbers be assumed to be large? (3) How large are the variances, coefficients of variations, etc., as assigned to the variables in the stochastic (...) versions of the models? (4) What role may pseudodeterministic models play in empirical research, where problems of statistical reliability arise?As an example, a modified Nicholson-Bailey model of the interaction between insect parasitoids and their hosts is discussed; the modification consists of assigning a random (density-independent) mortality to the parasitoid population. A stochastic version of this model is discussed. The expectation of the final host density is compared with the value computed from the deterministic model. The latter value is systematically lower than the former. The magnitude of the difference depends on parameter values. The variability to be expected with the stochastic model is characterized by the coefficient of variation of the final host density; its dependence on parameter values and initial conditions is discussed. It is concluded that it is worthwhile in practical applications to estimate parasitoid mortality, and that the coefficient of variation in real situations may be far from negligible. (shrink)