Politics, Monasticism, and Miracles in Sixth Century Upper Egypt. By James E. Goehring. Studien und Texte zu Antike und Christentum, vol. 69. Tübingen: mohR SiEBEck, 2012. Pp. xiv + 116. €49.

The paper considers the recently published British Medical Association Guidance on ethical issues arising in relation to rationing of treatment during the COVID-19 Pandemic. It considers whether it...

This paper examines the early years of the eighteenth-century scientific periodical Observations sur la physique, sur l'histoire naturelle et sur les arts , or ‘Rozier's Journal’, after François Rozier . Rozier's Journal is seen as a transitional and competing genre for scientific publication directed at shortcomings in the learned society press and in contemporary scientific communications. The evolution of this role is traced as the Journal emerged from the independent press between 1771 and 1773. It is argued that Rozier's Journal, (...) limited to the sciences physiques , marked only a step towards the specialized periodical of the nineteenth century. The professional character of Rozier's intended audience is suggested, and Rozier's unexpectedly close ties to the scientific societies are explored. The Journal is seen to be part of both the old and the new, a unique case in the ancien régime press. (shrink)

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its citizens. (...) But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

Let κ denote a regular uncountable cardinal and NS the normal ideal of nonstationary subsets of κ. Our results concern the well-known open question whether NS fails to be κ + -saturated, i.e., are there κ + stationary subsets of κ with pairwise intersections nonstationary? Our first observation is: Theorem. NS is κ + -saturated iff for every normal ideal J on κ there is a stationary set $A \subseteq \kappa$ such that $J = NS \mid A = \{X \subseteq (...) \kappa:X \cap A \in NS\}$ . Turning our attention to large cardinals, we extend the usual (weak) Mahlo hierarchy to define "greatly Mahlo" cardinals and obtain the following: Theorem. If κ is greatly Mahlo then NS is not κ + -saturated. Theorem. If κ is ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable (e.g., weakly compact), ethereal (e.g., subtle), or carries a κ-saturated ideal, then κ is greatly Mahlo. Moreover, there is a stationary set of greatly Mahlo cardinals below any ordinal Π 1 1 -indescribable cardinal. These methods apply to other normal ideals as well; e.g., the subtle ideal on an ineffable cardinal κ is not κ + -saturated. (shrink)

The contribution of this work is a classification of corporate social action underlying the Social Ratings Data compiled by Kinder Lydenburg Domini Analytics, Inc. We compare extant typologies of corporate social action to the results of our exploratory factor analysis. Our findings indicate four distinct latent constructs that bear resemblance to concepts discussed in prior literature. Akey finding of our research is that positive and negative social action are both empirically and conceptually distinct constructs and should not be combined in (...) future research. Additionally, we recommend that some prior research results be reconsidered to determine whether these newly derived measures might clarify some previous findings. (shrink)

In 2012, a U.S. Institute of Medicine report called for a different approach to health care: “Left unchanged, health care will continue to underperform; cause unnecessary harm; and strain national, state, and family budgets.” The answer, they suggested, would be a “continuously learning” health system. Ethicists and researchers urged the creation of “learning health organizations” that would integrate knowledge from patient‐care data to continuously improve the quality of care. Our experience with an ongoing research study on atrial fibrillation—a trial known (...) as IMPACT‐AFib—gave us some insight into one of the challenges that will have to be dealt with in creating these organizations. Although the proposed educational intervention study placed no restrictions on what providers and health plans could do, the oversight team argued that the ethical principle of beneficence did not allow the researchers to be “bystanders” in relation to a control group receiving suboptimal care. In response, the researchers designed a “workaround” that allowed the project to go forward. We believe the experience suggests that what we call “bystander ethics” will create challenges for the kinds of quality improvement research that LHOs are designed to do. (shrink)

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of "relativist" and "positivist" history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of "middle-voicedness" may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after (...) the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's "deep memory" and historical narrative.For finally, it may be the very idea of "deep memory" and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed "deep memory" of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that "What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history." That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, "How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?" Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events?In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call "received history"-a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings-both his telling and mine-on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind-my "vicarious past.". (shrink)

This study attempts to establish the importance of firm-level interactions with sociopolitical stakeholders in explaining firms prospects for survival. Institutional arguments are proposed to explain the effects of internal structures-both organizational and phenomenological-on firms sociopolitical relational strategies, whereas arguments grounded in the stakeholder view of the firm are advanced to explain effects of sociopolitical stakeholder relations on firm performance. Findings indicate that firms tended to adopt cooptative relationships with sociopolitical stakeholders. Furthermore, firms cooperativeness toward sociopolitical stakeholders had little effect on (...) financial performance but, under some conditions, had positive effects on social performance. Implied is that markets may not be an effective governance mechanism to ensure firms alignment with democratic institutions in a plural society and that public policies may be needed to address these failures. (shrink)

Several canonical partition theorems are obtained, including a simultaneous generalization of Neumer's lemma and the Erdos-Rado theorem. The canonical partition relation for infinite cardinals is completely determined, answering a question of Erdos and Rado. Counterexamples are given showing that in several ways these results cannot be improved.

A contribution to ongoing debates in the philosophy of science, aiming to reconceptualize the orientation of the subject. Mobilizing the literature, the authors seek to transform their insights into a new epistemological and ontological basis for studying the enterprise of science.

Much of our work with enriched experience and training in animals supports the Quartz & Sejnowski (Q&S) thesis that environmental information can interact with pre-existing neural structures to produce new synapses and neural structure. However, substantial data as well as an evolutionary perspective indicate that multiple information-capture systems exist: some are constructivist, some are selectionist, and some may be tightly constrained.

This commentary raises a number of questions in connection with Colin Koopman's paper “Conceptual Analysis for Genealogical Philosophy: How to Study the History of Practices after Foucault and Wittgenstein.” Specifically, this commentary asks about the precise relationship between concepts and practices in Koopman's account and the possibility of resisting certain practices of subjectivation.

Women's experiences with sexual harassment were analyzed with three types of variables: occupational and workplace sex ratios, organizational policies and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment problems, and women's cultural status. Regression analyses revealed that extent of contact with men was a key predictor of incidence of harassment, number of different types of harrassment, sexual comments, sexual categorical remarks, and sexual materials. Gender predominance was a significant predictor of physical threats and sexual materials. Informational methods were less successful than proactive (...) methods in reducing incidents of sexual harassment. The analyses support two generalizations. The “contact hypothesis” tested and verified by Gutek and her colleagues provides a substantive understanding of our findings on workplace and occupational numerical predominance. Second, organizations that take a variety of steps to address sexual harassment are more apt to be successful in curtailing the problem than those relying mainly on “get out the word” techniques. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:C. Suetonius Tranquillus: De Grammaticis et RhetoribusJames E. G. ZetzelR. A. Kaster, ed. C. Suetonius Tranquillus: De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus. Edited with a translation, introduction, and commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. lx 1 370 pp. Cloth, $72.00.From a very early stage, the Romans were interested in their own literary history. In the second century B.C.E., Accius composed his didascalica; in the first century, Varro, Cornelius Nepos, and Julius Hyginus (...) all wrote biographies of literary figures; and early in the second century c.e. Suetonius wrote a set of books De uiris illustribus, giving accounts of the lives of Roman poets, historians, orators, philosophers—and teachers of grammar and rhetoric. Our knowledge of the first four categories of writers is exiguous: aside from Cicero’s Brutus, which is of more importance for chronology than for biography proper, we have the versions of some of Suetonius’ lives of the poets that are attached to scholia and the one-sentence notices excerpted from Suetonius by Jerome in his adaptation of Eusebius’ Chronicle; we also have occasional anecdotes in the elder Seneca, Aulus Gellius, and a few other sources. The vagaries of textual transmission, however, have left us much better off with the last of Suetonius’ rubrics: a single manuscript survived to the middle ages containing (along with Tacitus’ minor works) the portion of De uiris illustribus known as De grammaticis et rhetoribus (DGR). The text is badly preserved, and it is also incomplete: of the sixteen professors of rhetoric once included, lives of only five remain. Even so, it is a text of considerable importance for students of Roman education and, indeed, of Roman intellectual life: not only does it describe the origins of grammatical and rhetorical education at Rome, it discusses the origins, character, and students of the men who taught the elite of Rome; it preserves anecdotes involving the leading political and literary figures of the first centuries B.C.E. and c.e.; and along the way it offers quotations, otherwise unknown, from such figures as Valerius Cato, Helvius Cinna, Furius Bibaculus, Cicero, Asinius Pollio, and Asinius Gallus.Until now, DGR has been an extraordinarily difficult text to understand or [End Page 475] to use. Suetonius’ chronology is vague, his biographical reconstructions obscure, and his narratives maddeningly brief and anecdotal—not to mention the fact that the text itself is so corrupt that the words themselves are not always easy to ascertain. No longer: with Robert Kaster’s magnificent edition, DGR is a text that cannot only be read, but understood, used, and even (at times) admired. In some respects, K. is the perfect match for Suetonius: like Suetonius, K.’s principal interest is not in the internal history of ancient education, but in its external history, above all in the social context and significance of teaching at Rome. It should also be said, however, that in other ways K. is far better than Suetonius: where the ancient text is brief, elliptical, and anecdotal, K. is thorough, patient, and extraordinarily learned. K.’s edition includes a long introduction, a new critical text and facing translation, and an exhaustive commentary, followed by four appendices (of which the longest and most important concerns Suetonius’ use of the elder Seneca). A brief review can scarcely do justice to K.’s achievement; a few comments will have to suffice.Introduction: Although DGR is perhaps the portion of De uiris illustribus that modern scholars would most happily have done without, K. turns the very obscurity of the subject matter to good advantage. In writing of poets, historians, and the rest, Suetonius could make full use of earlier biographers such as Nepos and Hyginus; with the teachers, he had no such sources. As a result, DGR provides an excellent laboratory in which to observe Suetonius’ working methods: K. analyzes brilliantly the way in which he collected his information, how it is related to his research for the lives of literary figures, and the strengths and weaknesses of Suetonius’ approach. In both the introduction and the commentary (to singularly good effect in his analysis of DGR1–4 on the origins of grammatical teaching at Rome), K. pays close attention... (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that it is not possible to determine the nature of epistemic justification apart from scientific psychological investigation. I call this view the strong thesis of methodological psychologism. Two sub-theses provide the primary support for this claim. The first sub-thesis is that no account of epistemic justification is correct which requires for the possession of at least one justified belief a psychological capacity which humans do not have. That is, the correct account of epistemic (...) justification must be psychologically realistic. The second sub-thesis is that it is not possible to determine whether an account of epistemic justification is psychologically realistic apart from scientific psychological investigation. After defending these subtheses, I point out some interesting consequences of the overall thesis which present a challenge to traditional epistemology. (shrink)

The recent discovery of microRNAs (miRNAs) in unicellular eukaryotes, including miRNAs known previously only from animals or plants, implies that miRNAs have a deep evolutionary history among eukaryotes. This contrasts with the prevailing view that miRNAs evolved convergently in animals and plants. We re‐evaluate the evidence and find that none of the 73 plant and animal miRNAs described from protists meet the required criteria for miRNA annotation and, by implication, animals and plants did not acquire any of their respective miRNA (...) genes from the crown ancestor of eukaryotes. Furthermore, of the 159 novel miRNAs previously identified among the seven species of unicellular protists examined, only 28 from the algae Ectocarpus and Chlamydomonas, meet the criteria for miRNA annotation. Therefore, at present only five groups of eukaryotes are known to possess miRNAs, indicating that miRNAs have evolved independently within eukaryotes through exaptation of their shared inherited RNAi machinery. (shrink)

Institutional investors are increasingly becoming active owners through voting their shares and engaging in dialogue with investee companies to improve corporate environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance. This article applies a model of stakeholder salience to the shareholder context, analysing the attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency, to determine the factors that are likely to enhance shareholder salience. It is found that a strong business case and the values of the managers of investee companies are likely to be the (...) most important contributors to shareholder salience. (shrink)

For Husserl excess is a part of any phenomenon. For Heidegger the horizon of the phenomenon is also excessive. Levinas and Marion ask us to think about what exceeds the horizon. I focus on Marion’s fifth kind of saturated (transcendent) phenomenon, revelation. How are we to understand it? Marion says he argues only for the possibility of revelation, but only Jesus could be the revelation for which he argues. The excess of the divine cannot remain merely a metaphysical beyond. It (...) must reveal itself in the world as a possible phenomenon, as Flesh, for there is no excess without flesh, and no flesh without being. Excess is either enfleshed or thingly excess. For the Christian this being-together of flesh and word in God means the same being-together in us: Christian life is fully incarnate life, life as enspirited flesh rather than as dead body. Thus the being-together of flesh and word is “in the accusative”. Christian life is, prior to action, a life of submission. That, however, explicitly puts Christian belief and practice at odds with any unrecuperated, merely metaphysical metaphysics which undercuts not only the Christian dogma of Christ’s incarnation and incarnate resurrection, but also the Christian message that the divine life is found only in the life that bends its knee and seeks to bring about justice: dikaiosunae. (shrink)

James E. Bruce explores the relationship between morality and God’s free choices in the thought of Francis Turretin. The first book-length treatment of Turretin’s natural law theory, Rights in the Law provides an important theological backdrop to Early Modern moral and political philosophy. Turretin affirms Thomas Aquinas’s approach to the natural law, calling it the common opinion of the Reformed orthodox, but he develops it, too, by introducing a threefold scheme of right —divine, natural, and positive—to explain how change (...) within the law is possible. For example, God can change the specific day for Sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday—from positive right—without changing the natural law precept that finite creatures ought to rest. Yet even with respect to the natural law God is still free. God can make a world in which there is no such thing as murder: he can choose not to make a world that contains such a thing as man. What God cannot do is make a murderable man. So God’s free choices determine the natural law insofar as the natural law is constituted by the nature of the things that God has chosen to create. (shrink)

The nature of children's early environment has profound long-term consequences. We are beginning to understand the underlying molecular programming of the stress-response system, which may mediate the destructive long-term effects of cruelty to children, explain the evolutionary stability of cruelty, and provide opportunities for its reversal of early trauma.