Cardinal Bessarion (1408–1472), in the second chapter of the first book of his influential work In calumniatorem Platonis, attempted to reply to Georgios Trapezuntios’ (1396–1474) criticism against Plato in the Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis. Bessarion investigates why the Athenian philosopher maintained, in several dialogues, that the sacred truths should not be communicated to the general public and argued in favor of the value of oral transmission of knowledge, largely based on his theory about the cognitive processes. Recently, Fr. (...) Bessarion Kouotsis has argued that Cardinal Bessarion’s reasoning draws primarily on the “Disciplina Arcani”, i.e., the rule of secrecy, which was an established practice of the Early Christian Church, aimed at protecting and preserving the core elements of the religion from outsiders. While I find Kouotsis’ approach interesting and thought-provoking—for instance, the idea that Bessarion’s argumentation was likely influenced by Eastern Christian views on the rule of secrecy—I intend, first of all, to discuss why Bessarion did not explicitly mention it. Moreover, I would like to argue that Bessarion’s good knowledge of the long Platonic tradition and Eastern mysticism, encompassing both pagan and Christian elements, should also be considered a significant source. Furthermore, I would like to question Kouotsis’ implicit argument that Bessarion’s views were dominated by his training in Orthodox theology and discuss the possibility that Pletho’s (1355–1454) teaching was the obvious influence for Bessarion’s defense of secrecy. After all, we should bear in mind that Anastos has already pointed out Pletho’s reverence for the rule of secrecy. Finally, I would like to support that Bessarion, in the specific text, focused predominantly on the epistemological and cognitive aspects of oral teaching, resorting to the rule of secrecy only to enhance his views. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper examines Heidegger’s remarks about the worldlessness of Judaism in his Black Notebooks. In the first part of the paper I examine Heidegger’s concept of the world in Being and Time and subsequent writings. In the second part, I analyze a distinction that Heidegger draws between mere human actuality and genuine human existence in a 1932 lecture course on The Beginning of Western Philosophy. This distinction, I suggest, relates to the development of Heidegger’s thoughts on nihilism and what (...) he conceives as its gravest danger. In the third part, I argue that the above-mentioned distinction can help us to better understand Heidegger’s remarks on Judaism. In particular, I suggest that the Jewish figure comes to symbolize for Heidegger a kind of unessential human actuality that is irredeemably detached from the question of Being. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 3, July 2020, Page 313-316.

Cardinal Bessarion (1408–1472), in the second chapter of the first book of his influential work In calumniatorem Platonis, attempted to reply to Georgios Trapezuntios’ (1396–1474) criticism against Plato in the Comparatio Philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis. Bessarion investigates why the Athenian philosopher maintained, in several dialogues, that the sacred truths should not be communicated to the general public and argued in favor of the value of oral transmission of knowledge, largely based on his theory about the cognitive processes. Recently, Fr. (...) Bessarion Kouotsis has argued that Cardinal Bessarion’s reasoning draws primarily on the “Disciplina Arcani”, i.e., the rule of secrecy, which was an established practice of the Early Christian Church, aimed at protecting and preserving the core elements of the religion from outsiders. While I find Kouotsis’ approach interesting and thought-provoking—for instance, the idea that Bessarion’s argumentation was likely influenced by Eastern Christian views on the rule of secrecy—I intend, first of all, to discuss why Bessarion did not explicitly mention it. Moreover, I would like to argue that Bessarion’s good knowledge of the long Platonic tradition and Eastern mysticism, encompassing both pagan and Christian elements, should also be considered a significant source. Furthermore, I would like to question Kouotsis’ implicit argument that Bessarion’s views were dominated by his training in Orthodox theology and discuss the possibility that Pletho’s (1355–1454) teaching was the obvious influence for Bessarion’s defense of secrecy. After all, we should bear in mind that Anastos has already pointed out Pletho’s reverence for the rule of secrecy. Finally, I would like to support that Bessarion, in the specific text, focused predominantly on the epistemological and cognitive aspects of oral teaching, resorting to the rule of secrecy only to enhance his views. (shrink)

It has been repeatedly stated that Maximus the Confessor’s (c. 580–662) thought is of eminently philosophical interest, and his work has been approached from a philosophical point of view in a number of monographs. However, no dedicated collective scholarly engagement on Maximus the Confessor as a philosopher has been produced. Although Maximus’ treatises reflect a strong philosophical background, prior research has failed to determine with clarity his specific philosophical sources and predilections. Besides apologetic purposes, he referred occasionally to purely philosophical (...) topics, which are more adequate to reveal Maximus’ philosophical education and knowledge. Among these topics are representation and imagination, which have a significant role in epistemology. Maximus’ epistemology proves his dependence on ancient Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle, Stoicism and Alexandrian Neoplatonism. A few centuries later, Abū Naṣr Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad Al-Farabi (c.870—c.950), the founder of medieval Arabic philosophy, dealt with the same topics in his epistemology. Al-Farabi’s philosophy has been studied extensively and we have a good idea about his possible sources. There are several indications that Al-Farabi and Maximus the Confessor share common insights, for they resort to the same ancient Greek tradition. In this paper, I attempt to compare Maximus’ and Al-Farabi’s epistemology in order to reveal affinities and differences that permit us to analyze and assess Maximus’ philosophical education. (shrink)

Although there has been significant scholarly attention on just war (jus ad bellum) in Byzantium and an increasing interest in the study of the Byzantine culture of war, military trickery and jus in bello (just conduct of war) remain largely unexplored by Byzantinists. This paper aims to fill this gap by studying the theory of military trickery and ethics in Byzantium, c. 900 -1204. It explores and analyses this aspect of jus in bello in Byzantium by employing methods and concepts (...) from Byzantine history, war studies and military ethics. The paper begins by examining the impact of dominant literary traditions (Classical and Biblical) on Byzantine perceptions of military trickery, and then explores the reception and development of Classical and Biblical notions of military trickery and ethics by different sub-cultures in Byzantium (e. g., theologians, jurists, tacticians, historians, orators, poets). The author then attempts to frame a more complete theory of Byzantine military trickery and ethics, and to reflect on the relationship between jus ad bellum and jus in bello in Byzantium. (shrink)

The paper offers the study of two late antique epigrams from Rhodes that belonged to public monuments dedicated by a certain Anastasios. Both monuments display traditional mythological themes in text and decoration: the first inscription was part of a relief panel or a statue which depicted Heracles and his labours, while the second, it is argued, accompanied a relief figure of mythical Maron as an old Silenus, being part of a public fountain. The author discusses Anastasios' religion and tries to (...) place these monuments within the history of Christian mythological classicism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article recovers Henry Brailsford’s reflections on south-eastern and east-central Europe in a transformative period in international politics. Although the British journalist has been considered as key influence in the development of international relations in Britain, his commentary on the national questions in eastern Europe has remained relatively unexplored. The article argues that in response to the international politics of the Eastern Question and to concurrent imperial questions in Britain, Brailsford articulated an imperial anti-imperialist vision of international order based on (...) the support for local autonomy and self-government across eastern Europe and the colonial world. It then proceeds to chart his gradual distancing from the politics of self-determination during the Great War and argues that Brailsford’s international thought was influenced by a series of pragmatic considerations regarding the future of central and eastern Europe. The intricacies of Brailsford’s international thought offer an informative case-study of the symbiosis of liberal and socialist varieties of internationalism in early twentieth century Britain. (shrink)

Resumen Este artículo ofrece una lectura de la pintura renacentista según los principios establecidos por Leon Battista Alberti, uno de los primeros teóricos de la perspectiva en cuyo Tratado de pintura se refiere al cuadro como “una ventana abierta a la historia”. El concepto de historia empleado por Alberti, que se presta a numerosas interpretaciones, es abordado a partir de las reflexiones de Erwin Panofsky en torno a la perspectiva como “forma simbólica”, avanzando hacia una hipótesis en torno al carácter (...) simbólico de la configuración y representación del tiempo en el cuadro-ventana albertiano.This paper offers a reading of the renaissance painting according to the principles established by Leon Battista Alberti, one of the first theorists of perspective in painting which Trattato della pittura define the frame of the painting as “an open window into history”. The concept of history employed by Alberti, which lends itself to many interpretations, is approached from the reflections of Erwin Panofsky about the prospect as “symbolic form”, moving towards a hypothesis about the symbolic nature of the configuration and representation of time in the alberti’s window. (shrink)

Georgios Mantzarides; Globalization and Universality: Chimera and Truth, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 8, Issue 2, 1 J.

The purpose of the present study was to predict and explain the academic cheating behaviors of elementary school students with learning disabilities by applying the cusp catastrophe model. Participants were 32 students with identified LD from state governmental agencies although all both them and the typical students participated in the experimental manipulation. Academic cheating was assessed using an empirical paradigm where true achievement was subtracted from achievement in a test without proper invigilation. Data analysis supported the proposed cusp catastrophe models, (...) where mastery-related motives acted as asymmetry and performance goals as bifurcation variables respectively. These findings were confirmed with application of the interactive goal hypothesis, where the interactive approach and avoidance performance goal term functioned as a splitting factor in the relationship between adaptive motivation and performance. (shrink)

"A valuable book... it very nicely relates Aristotle's views about exactness to more general ethical and epistemological themes in Aristotle."--Charles M. Young, The Claremont Graduate School "A valuable book... it very nicely relates Aristotle's views about exactness to more general ethical and epistemological themes in Aristotle."--Charles M. Young, The Claremont Graduate School.

_The Blackwell Companion to Aristotle_ provides in-depth studies of the main themes of Aristotle's thought, from art to zoology. The most comprehensive single volume survey of the life and work of Aristotle Comprised of 40 newly commissioned essays from leading experts Coves the full range of Aristotle's work, from his 'theoretical' inquiries into metaphysics, physics, psychology, and biology, to the practical and productive "sciences" such as ethics, politics, rhetoric, and art.

In section I of what follows, I will briefly discuss the reasons for taking the Cratylus to be concerned with the origin of language and explain what the question is which concerns Plato in the Cratylus, viz., what is the correctness of names? I will then state the two answers to this question he considers, i.e., conventional and natural correctness; finally, I will explain the criticisms that Plato advances against the two answers and, in particular, the sense in which he (...) "believed" the theory of the natural correctness of names. In section II, I will turn to the question of the significance of the dialogue. By this I mean to try to answer the following two questions: 1) Why does Plato raise the question of the correctness of names in the first place? i.e., What philosophical problem is he trying to solve by seeking a theory about the correctness of names? and 2) How would each of the two theories about the correctness of names examined in the Cratylus solve Plato’s problem? We shall then see that the importance of the dialogue for us is not so much that it is the first attempt at providing an empirical linguistic theory, nor that it is the earliest extant attempt to discuss the origin of language; but rather that it is perhaps the earliest attempt to solve a perennial philosophical problem about the relation between the nature and structure of language and the nature and structure of the world in order to use our knowledge of the nature and structure of the former to arrive at knowledge of the nature and structure of the latter. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to shed light on some main interpretative aspects of George Pachymeres’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. This Commentary –the only Byzantine Commentary on a platonic work ever to have been hitherto discovered– displays a unique specificity, since it marks a decisive turning point in the traditional interpretation of dialogues of Plato as an authority in terms of metaphysics or of philosophy in general. Not only does the Byzantine scholar limit himself to giving a logical exegesis of (...) the arguments of a dialogue which already bears the imprint of the Neoplatonists’ theological interpretations, but he also assumes the role of an active and impartial judge of its logical scope. This innovation, of great historical value, lies in the Aristotelian reading-interpretation of a Platonic dialogue, specifically of Parmenides’ dialectical arguments. Thus, I intend to analyze Pachymeres’ numerous references in specific Aristotelian doctrines that are spread throughout all of Pachymeres’ ad hoc scholia on Parmenides’ arguments and serve as both supplementary and corrective exegetic premises within his analysis, by giving a new perspective through the citation and the transcription of similar commentaries drawn from his edited and his unedited philosophical works, as well as to demonstrate, through a thorough investigation of Pachymeres’ unedited works mainly on Aristotle’s Organon, the key-role that Aristotle’s theory on dialectic plays in Pachymeres’ thought and specifically the dialectical value that the scholiast accords to the Platonic dialogue. My main concern is to prove, in the end, that Pachymeres’ usage of Aristotle for commenting on Plato’s text is a form of exercise, a way to train his students in proper philosophical non-fallacious argumentation. (shrink)

Heidegger’s reading of Plato is variable and multifaceted, giving way to different and, at times, opposing interpretations of Plato’s work. To give an example that is relevant to the following pape...

The study of Maximus the Confessor’s thought has flourished in recent years: international conferences, publications and articles, new critical editions and translations mark a torrent of interest in the work and influence of perhaps the most sublime of the Byzantine Church Fathers. It has been repeatedly stated that the Confessor’s thought is of eminently philosophical interest. However, no dedicated collective scholarly engagement with Maximus the Confessor as a philosopher has taken place—and this volume attempts to start such a discussion. Apart (...) from Maximus’ relevance and importance for philosophy in general, a second question arises: should towering figures of Byzantine philosophy like Maximus the Confessor be included in an overview of the European history of philosophy, or rather excluded from it—as is the case today with most histories of European philosophy? Maximus’ philosophy challenges our understanding of what European philosophy is. In this volume, we begin to address these issues and examine numerous aspects of Maximus’ philosophy—thereby also stressing the interdisciplinary character of Maximian studies. (shrink)

The object of this thesis is the examination of the concept of political representation in the corpus of Hobbes, Locke, Hegel and Marx. Through the method of textualreconstruction I foreground the concept’s salience in their writings. Political representation constitutes a unitary political society as the basis of representative government by entrusting to a separate part of the political community the exercise of the legislative and executive functions on behalf of the political society. Hobbes’s author-actor model grounded the concept of political (...) representation by introducing the act of the transfer of will to a representative by authorisation. Thereby he established the problematic relationship of permanently alienated, absolute, representative power acting in the name of the political community. Locke conceptualised political representation in a way that restored to political society the power to determine the legitimacy of its representative government in case the latter transgressed the norm of acting for the public good of society. Hegel, in turn, assigned to political representation the crucial function of integrating civil society into the power system of the state thus securing the identity of subjective and objective freedom in the rational state, though political representation bestows only formal freedom to civil society’s involvement in the affairs of the state. For Marx, the relationship of political representation makes the representative polity appear as a democratically governed political society within which individual freedom and the public good are secured. This is vitiated by the rift between political society/state and civil society. Marx censures liberal and republican theory for ignoring the primacy of civil/bourgeois society over the representative political society. As a consequence,he argues,the representative polity is not a form of self-government but other-determined and neither freedom nor the public good are realised. Instead, under the regime of private property, money assumes the authorial function of organising social exchange and human relations, shaping the representative polity after its own image, and thus it renders democracy as popular sovereignty a lie. (shrink)

Die hiermit herausgegebene Briefsammlung des Bischofs von Athen Michael Choniates ist unter zweierlei Aspekten besonders wichtig: Einerseits wegen der Information, die uns über die Zustände im byzantinischen Reich im allgemeinen und in Athen und Umgebung bzw. auf einigen Inseln der Ägäis insbesondere sowie über die Gesellschaft jener Zeit (Ende des 12. – Anfang des 13. Jahrhunderts) bietet, andererseits wegen der Briefe selbst, die nicht nur die starke Orientierung der zeitgenössischen Gelehrten auf die Literatur des alten Hellas verraten, sondern auch unter (...) den anmutigsten und stilistisch interessantesten, die je in byzantinischer Zeit abgefaßt wurden, zählen. (shrink)

The essay examines both the main contributions Mill made to thinking about democracy and the reasons why his own democratic credentials have been a matter of dispute and highlights some common misunderstandings on Mill on democracy. It is argued here that a key to understanding Mill's pronouncements on democracy from the mid‐1830s onwards was his strong attachment to the idea that no power, value, or group should be allowed to preponderate exclusively in any society and that instead a healthy level (...) of diversity and antagonism had to be kept up, artificially if necessary, in order to prevent societies from stagnating. It was therefore as defensive means of keeping up an “organized antagonism” that he proposed devices such as “personal representation” or “plural voting”. (shrink)

P. Papageorgiou was the last to edit the complete set of the scholia vetera to Sophocles in 1888. The narrow manuscript basis of the edition, the reluctance of the editor to use a sufficient amount of conjectural emendation and the lack of a methodology specific to editing scholia are responsible for a great number of corrupt passages in his text. This article is concerned with the critical restoration of eight such passages from the scholia to the Trachiniae: schol. Trach. 7, (...) 48, 56, 104b, 105b, 379, 434b and 556. (shrink)

In his book Περὶ τῆς τοῦ λόγου συντάξεως Michael Syncellus includes a section on the rules for accenting prepositions that occur in anastrophe. This section is also part of the chapter on the accentuation of prepositions preserved in the Τονικὰ παραγγέλματα by John of Alexandria, an important epitome of Aelius Herodian's lost work Περὶ καθολικῆς προσῳδίας. Further below, Michael's treatment of the various functions of the conjunction ἤ/ἦ again presents very strong similarities with the corresponding unit of the chapter on (...) the accentuation of conjunctions in the Τονικὰ παραγγέλματα. In this article I first argue that Michael's sections, which have gone entirely unnoticed by students of the Cath. Pr., have drawn directly upon the Cath. Pr., and I identify the ways in which they add to our picture of Herodian's and John's aforementioned works. Then I turn my attention to John's chapter on the accentuation of prepositions: I provide additional evidence to support Eduard Hiller's view that it does not form a coherent whole, and I discuss the implications of this problematical structure for defining the contents of Book 18 and the Appendix of the Cath. Pr. (shrink)

Confucius associates the good and the beautiful. Li (translated variously as “ritual propriety,” “ritual,” “etiquette,” or “propriety”) embodies the entire spectrum of interaction with humans, nature, and even material objects. I argue that Confucius attempts to introduce an ethical ontology, not of “what,” but of “the way.” The “way” of reality becomes known with the deliberate participation to the Dao. In other words, through interaction. The way people co-exist demonstrates the rationality of the associations of living and functioning together. Li, (...) as an aesthetic-moral principle, embodies the entire spectrum of one’s interaction with humans, nature, and even material objects. Li is a constitutive element of Confucian ethics and politics, highlighting the importance of beauty, and not only goodness, in human action. The worthiness of human action is judged both aesthetically and morally. Moreover, I hold that Confucius’ ethical ontology is not an ontology of “whatness” but of “howness,” according to the Dao, since Confucius primary concern was not to define the Dao, but to restore the Dao of the ancient sage-kings. The morality of the action is dependent on the way it is performed, according to the mandates of the Dao. (shrink)

Book review: Alexander Lee, Humanism and Empire, The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy. By Georgios Steiris, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.

Cet ouvrage se propose de confronter les problématiques relatives à la falsafa et à la religion islamique dans leur approche du corps. Le corps a toujours été marginalisé au profit de la notion de l'âme. Pendant que les penseurs ont été intéressés par l'étude de l'âme, le corps a toujours été leur point de départ. Son statut éthique et ontologique doit être réexaminé en refusant de se limiter aux dualismes classiques corps/âme ou matérialisme/spiritualisme qui masquent par leur dimension formelle ou (...) réductrice l'enjeu politique et existentiel de la question ainsi que ses implications théoriques et pratiques. Deux grandes perspectives apparaissent dans le développement de la falsafa lorsqu'elle problématise la question du corps. La première porte sur le fondement psychologique du lien existant entre l'âme et le corps et ses conséquences quant à la détermination de leur valeur réciproque. La deuxième est métaphysique et s'inscrit dans une visée eschatologique impliquant une conception de l'au-delà et du jugement dernier. Comment penser le corps d'un point de vue philosophique pour qu'il ne soit pas incompatible avec l'islam? Pour répondre à cette question, nous étudions les textes fondateurs de la falsafa spécialement ceux de Al-F r b, Ibn S n, Al-Ghaz l et Mull Sadr tout en les comparant aux textes coraniques. Georgio Rahal enseigne l'islamologie, l'histoire médiévale de l'islam, l'arabe littéraire et la philosophie arabe à l'Institut Catholique de Toulouse. (shrink)

Those who work with topics related to Modern Greek identity usually start discussing these issues by quoting the famous Georgios Gemistos Pletho (c.1360-1454): we, over whom you rule and hold sway, are Hellenes by genos (γένος), as is witnessed by our language and ancestral education. Although Woodhouse thought of Pletho as the last of the Hellenes, others prefer to denounce him the last of the Byzantines and the first and foremost Modern Greek. During the 14th and 15th centuries, a (...) number of influential intellectuals in the Eastern Roman Empire preferred the term Hellene (Ἓλλην) to identify themselves, instead of the formal Roman (Ρωμαῖος) and the common Greek (Γραικός). According to the prevalent view of modern scholarship, the shift should not be interpreted only as a statement of proto-national identity, but also as the outcome of growing archaism. As Vryonis pointed out, the historian Critoboulos used to call the Balkan nations with their archaic names: Byzantines became “Hellenes,” Albanians became “Illyrians,” etc. Chalkokondyles followed in the same path. Furthermore, in order to lament the decline of their Empire, byzantine intellectuals tended to compare their sad present to the glory of ancient Greece. Besides archaism, proto-nationalism and Hellenism, I suggest that a careful reading of the sources would lead us to reappraise the ways 15th century intellectuals perceived identity. Whilst I do not accept Vakalopoulos’ views on diachronic Hellenic identity, I support that, in the 15th century, Byzantine scholars attempted to create an identity based on cultural and historical continuity and otherness. Moreover, Laiou’s definition of Greek identity as a resultant of language, history, tradition and interests does not cover the case of 15th century Byzantine philosophers, since the latter strived to enrich and enlarge Greek identity with additional elements. It is worth noting that those philosophers who fled to Italy deliberately chose to describe themselves as Greeks (Greci/Γραικοί) or Hellenes (Ἓλληνες) and not as Romans (Ρωμιοί/Ρωμαῖοι), according to the Byzantine official terminology. During the 15th century a major shift occurred in the Byzantine intelligentsia and its prominent members revisited matters of identity. In this paper, I attempt to scrutinize the ways Byzantine philosophers of the 15th century, who lived in the territories of the Byzantine Empire and in Italy, perceived identity and otherness. In my research, I include not only Greek, but also Latin sources, since their works is written in both languages. (shrink)

Georgios Pentzaropoulos continues his investigation undertaken in 'Generating Stable Knowledge via Reduction in Entropy' (Philosophy Pathways Issue 167, 28 November 2011) looking at knowledge not as something we 'possess' -- the knowledge contained in a book, for example -- but rather as an active, or interactive process of increasing understanding through the judicious sifting and processing of raw information. As Macmurray argued in his Gifford Lectures, 'All knowledge is for the sake of action.' Instead of seeking to define some (...) abstract notion of knowledge in a vacuum, what philosophers should be getting to grips with is the notion of actionable knowledge. - Geoffrey Klempner, Editor. (shrink)

The critical concept of commodity fetishism and its developed forms of money and capital fetishism ground the contemporary shape of social life under the rule of capital. This chapter offers a novel interpretation based on Marx’s Capital, elucidating the oft-overlooked interconnection of the fetishism triptych that accounts for domination, as well as the normalisation of exploitation as experienced in capitalist life. In commodity fetishism, a market-based pseudo-social ‘thing-hood’ preponderates over commodity owners and producers, concealing the double inversion that constitutes the (...) ‘world of commodities’. Money’s fetish form makes it appear as the ‘sovereign’ of the commodity world, possessing the exclusive social power to establish the value hierarchy of all persons and objects relativised in regard to it. The universal condition of monetisation of the life process in bourgeois society necessitates the adoption of the competition principle, leading to the generalised formation of a commodity self, shaped by competitive individualism. The social separation of the great mass of commodity producers from the means of production and the consequent need to sell themselves as commodities in the form of wage labour constitutes the social basis of capital fetishism, through which the process of capital ‘valorisation’ is enfolded within the process of use value production, disappearing into its socio-material character and thus naturalised. Capital fetishism dissimulates the production of surplus value by social labour and constructs the harmonised appearance of an equitable contribution of ‘factors of production’ in the sharing of the surplus product, thereby obscuring distributional struggles over it. Such antagonisms over surplus undergird the logic of neoliberal capitalism’s two-pronged strategy, pursuing ‘deregulation of labour relations’ on the one hand and dismantling the welfare state on the other. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The complex web of intellectual exchanges between Britain and Europe remains a peripheral concern for historians interested in the circulation of ideas across national, international and imperial frameworks. This special issue attempts to fill the lacuna by presenting new research on the triangular relationship between Britain, Europe and the idea of liberty during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The articles featured in this issue revisit established narratives, discuss novel case-studies and address the question of Britain's special relationship with liberty (...) in an age marked by impediments to the freedom of movement and the erection of nationalist boundaries across Europe, and the world. (shrink)

This paper inquires into the inability ofsubjects in English to topicalise. Treatingtopicalisation as a specific case of d-linking,it asks: why don’t subjects topicalise inEnglish? And why cannot they be d-linkedthrough further movement? It concludes thatthe property of [aboutness] of subjects is anunderspecified instance of a more compositederivative effect realised as [topic]. Giventhe ability of objects in English to be readilyd-linked through extraction in CP, theanalysis takes a detailed look at the structuraldifferences between subjects and objects. Itconcludes that d-linking of an (...) argument iscontingent upon the derivational memory ofits prior inclusion within vP that has yielded itsdenotational set-membership. Treating EPPas an A’-operation that embeds one instance ofthe subject-chain into discourse, the inabilityof subjects to topicalise is explained as an “online”denotational dependency on discourse,which lacks the systemic memory of thesubject’s embedding. In turn, their immobilityis treated as a modular dependency betweenthe two subject copies, mediated through Texcluding the one instance of the chain. (shrink)