Part intellectual autobiography and part exposition of complex yet contemporary economic ideas, this lively conversation with renowned scholar and public intellectual Kenneth J. Arrow focuses on economics and politics in light of history, current events, and philosophy as well. Reminding readers that economics is about redistribution and thus about how we treat each other, Arrow shows that the intersection of economics and ethics is of concern not just to economists but for the public more broadly. With a foreword by (...) Amartya Sen, this book highlights the belief that government can be a powerful force for good, and is particularly relevant in the current political climate and to the lay reader as well as the economist. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Only a Wet Dream? Hope and Skepticism in Horace, Satire 1.5Kenneth J. ReckfordLong enjoyed as an entertainment piece, Horace’s “Trip to Brundisium” has continued to baffle its readers by recounting trivialities while ignoring politics. A brief, tactful hint at great affairs is quickly abandoned:huc venturus erat Maecenas optimus atque Cocceius, missi magnis de rebus uterque legati, aversos soliti componere amicos. hic oculis ego nigra meis collyria lippus illinere. interea (...) Maecenas advenit...(S. 1.5.27–31)In his first hic ego (7), Horace missed dinner because of stomach trouble. In the second (30), he misses Maecenas’ arrival—and its meaning—because of eye trouble. Is he unable to see what is going on around him? 1Horace’s persona in Satires 1.5 is well crafted: the naive, good-humored traveling companion, concerned primarily with his own intrusive comforts and discomforts. He likes good food, drink, and sleep, good health and good company, and he especially enjoys his friends: nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico (44). He was taken along, it would appear, rather passively from the first (egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma), on a mission that had something to do with “reconciling [End Page 525] friends” who had fallen out. That is all he knows, and all he needs to know. 2We may well suspect that Horace was keeping a diplomatic silence, that Maecenas confided in him, here and elsewhere, precisely because he did not have a “leaky ear.” 3 He would be teasing, then: teasing prospective readers who would suspect that he was withholding privileged information with intent to annoy, and (rather beyond his intent?) teasing modern scholars who cannot even take the satire’s date for granted, let alone follow the diplomatic maneuvers of Octavian and Antony in 38-37 B.C. 4 If we follow Horace’s lead, all those amusing particulars that render the political picture so opaque convey us insistently into the “little world” of poetry, friendship, and simple human satisfactions. It is tempting to confine our attention to this “little world,” accepting Horace at face value as an amiable entertainer, with brief excursions, perhaps, into comparing the esthetics of his narrative with the reconstructed narrative of the casually autobiographical Lucilius—an attempt that, from insufficient evidence, must also end in frustration. But there is more. I propose here that the poem is both more public and more private than it seems. Reading between the lines, though without abusing allegory, we find Horace deeply implicated in issues of war and peace. Through the distorting lens of the satiric and comic imagination he portrays how a sensitive and thoughtful person might waver between hope for a peaceful, even “friendly” resolution of conflict and skepti-cal awareness of the gap between personal wish-fulfillment (the “wet [End Page 526] dream” of my title) and political reality. Yet this same wavering, and Horace’s consequent, very human vacillation between emotional involvement with Rome and Epicurean disengagement, are the stuff of which genuine poetry—and, consistently over time and through different genres, Horatian poetry—is made.My argument focuses on three aspects of Satire 1.5: the theme of amicitia, private and public; the agon, or insult-match between Sarmentus the scurra and Messius Cicirrus; and the “wet dream” and “failed miracle” sequences toward the end. But first, because Horace’s satires are in part exploratory, like all good poetry, and because meanings notoriously shift as a work progresses in time and is made available to different audiences or circles of readers, I begin with a hypothetical framework consisting of (1) the occasion and first plan, (2) the sketching-out and refining of the satire, (3) its first reading(s) to friends, and (4) its first publication in book form. Further questions of reader reception and the organization of the libellus are deferred until the close of the essay.Hypothetical Stages Of Composition And Reception(1) The poem is conceived. We begin with the happy conjunction of two opportunities (kairoi), Roman and Horatian. The larger kairos involves the diplomatic mission of 37, a renewed attempt to prevent (or postpone) conflict between Octavian and Antony, to settle their differences, and to provide... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 641-644 [Access article in PDF] Erich Segal. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv + 589 pp. Cloth, $35. "In a grand tour of comic theater over the centuries," says the jacket blurb, "Erich Segal traces the evolution of the classical form from its beginnings... to Samuel Beckett. With fitting wit, profound erudition lightly worn, and instructive [End Page (...) 641] examples from the mildly amusing to the uproarious, his book fully illustrates comedy's glorious life cycle from its first breath to its death in the Theater of the Absurd." I agree, in part: It's a grand tour, after the fashion of Segal's Dionysian Ivy-League lectures, mixing pleasure with instruction and reminding the reader of comedy's changing devices, delights, and powers in the different periods and locales in which Segal has made himself comfortably at home. He doesn't, of course, "fully illustrate"—and I don't think he's gotten comedy's "life cycle" quite right, especially that titular death. Rival comedy tour guides like myself will question this or that judgment call, especially in their specialties (and still more when their own supremely valuable writings go unacknowledged). Yet there is much to praise in this highly readable, highly entertaining book, which I shall happily put on the reserve shelf next time I teach Honors 28 ("Comedy and Satire") to my laughter-loving sophomores and juniors at UNC.Segal's first 250 pages, more than half the book, take us from comedy's hypothetical beginnings in holiday fun and revelry to Terence's beleaguered Hecyra. To the usual etymologies of "revel-" and "country-song" (from komos and kome) he adds the less familiar "nightsong" (from koma, "sleep"), anticipating the prominent place of dreamlike disguises, confusions, and misadventures in comedy and in the human unconscious as explored by Freud. In subsequent chapters, Segal sketches the rise and fall of Old Comedy, which reaches new heights in the imaginatively playful erections of Aristophanes' Acharnians, Peace, and Birds, thenceforth declining towards Middle Comedy as sex gives way to money, Phales to Plutus. A chapter on Euripides' Ion entitled "The Comic Catastrophe" (why not "Eucatastrophe"?) provides a helpful bridge to the familial concerns and dramatic conventions of the New Comedy of Menander. From there, pivoting on Plautus and Terence, Segal follows "the evolution and transmutations of the classical literary form" (256), from Machiavelli and Marlowe, through Shakespeare, Molière, Jonson, Wycherley, and Beaumarchais, to what he regards as its foul and unnatural murder by the Surrealists and Absurdists of the last century—even as the beginning of Beckett's Waiting for Godot ironically completes a great circle by recalling the beginning of Aristophanes' Birds.Through all this, Segal keeps up a good, brisk pace. He chooses his plays well, discussing them with a skillful mix of plot summary, paraphrase, quotation (the good, clear translations are his own), and lively running commentary. As classicists, we readers of AJP will have our professional quibbles, our personal bones to pick (some of them juicy) about Aristophanes' Clouds (underrated by Segal), say, or Terence's borrowings from Plautus (which he plays down); but we are amateurs, too, more easily pleased when it comes to Shakespeare or Molière. Here, two of Segal's leitmotifs seem most effective and affecting: First, the dreamlike movement of events in Comedy of Errors (after Menaechmi, but we should add Amphitruo for the twice-doubling) and in Twelfth Night, drifting out of shipwreck, through confusion of identity approaching nightmare and madness, to the komos and gamos of festive comedy—or is it Freudian wish-fulfillment?; second, the sad clown or playwright, poor old cuckolded Molière, pushing to his life's very [End Page 642] end the comic enactments of cuckoldry, sickness, aging, and (near) death. Which reminds me, painfully, of what a difference it would make to our overly naive or sophisticated readings of Aristophanes or Terence if we knew more, even a little more, about their life and work than the usual, all too meager hearsay.Like his beloved Plautus, Segal... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes, and: Horace: Behind the Public PoetryKenneth ReckfordRonnie Ancona. Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes. Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1994. xii + 186Cloth, $39.95.R. O. A. M. Lyne. Horace: Behind the Public Poetry. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. viii + 230 pp. Cloth, $30.Horace’s love poetry has generally been undervalued, if not actively disliked. In (...) the bad old days, as Ancona reminds us, he was simply charged with not being Catullus or Propertius; and although the New Critics appreciated his refined irony and playfulness, they still treated him as somewhat of a kinsman of the fairy queen in Iolanthe, who proclaims,On fire that glows with heat intense I turn the hose of common sense.Ancona doubly disturbs the stereotype. Drawing on feminist and gender theory, she traces the recurrent Horatian figure of the (male) poet-lover whose drive for autonomy and control leads him to resist any form of desire that enforces immersion in temporality; and she argues, too, that (mostly male) scholars have privileged that attitude by identifying with it and taking it for granted. The thesis is challenging, it is well argued, and it serves Horace well.Throughout her careful, often elegant analysis of fourteen odes, Ancona traces the poet-lover’s “desperate refusal to situate his own identity in any real relation to the uncontrollable temporality of the beloved” (13). I summarize, baldly, a few results. (1) His desire as he ages is a private sorrow, or even a bid for power (Odes 4.1); hers is a public embarrassment and disgrace (Odes 1.25). (2) He tries vainly to defeat time through imaginings of permanence in nature, or self-identification with youthful eroticism (Odes 1.4) or fantasies of erotic domination (Odes 1.9, 2.9). Or (3): the beloved woman or boy must not be seen as quite real, if the poet-lover’s integrity is to be maintained (Odes 1.22, 2.5). Only in Odes 1.13 and, more compellingly, in the duet of Odes 3.9 does Horace envisage the (to be sure, very distant) possibility of a genuinely evolving love, with both lovers submitting equally to the challenges of time and change.If her results are challenging—and I shall not read Integer Vitae, or Cum tu Lydia, Telephi, or Donec gratus eram tibi so complacently ever again—Ancona’s argument is built from the ground up in ways that reassure the philologist. Her readings are precise and accurate. She is sensitive to Horace’s poetic strategies, his indirections of technique. Ancona acknowledges her debt to earlier critics. Her analyses of Odes 1.23, 1.25, 2.8, 2.9, 3.7, and 4.13 should be required reading for the next generation.Two minor caveats. Ancona’s reading of Odes 1.13 hinges on the interpretation of irrupta... copula as, not “an unbroken bond,” but “an interrupted bond” that yet holds over time and change: a philologically and humanly daring oxymoron. At Odes 3.9.10 I see a strong sexual challenge inscribed in dulcis [End Page 657] docta modos et citharae sciens. Sex and music go together, and Chloe plays well. All the more reason for Lydia, in the next stanza, to turn up the heat.More generally, I wonder whether behind such controlling Horatian personas as the erotodidaskalos of Odes 3.23—a more sensitive, Roman Anacreon—we may not sense the person of a Horace who is remarkably open to the same mysteries of time and change from which his “Horace” so often, and so vainly, struggles to escape? This Horace of mine (let me, this once, be controlling) recognizes Venus as an irreducible power in life and responds to “time and the erotic” with more self-awareness, more passion, and more poetic excitement than has ordinarily been heard in the Odes. To have revived that sense, which I think we share, of ongoing excitement and challenge in the odes on love—though the aesthetic can itself (as in Odes 2.5) be a refuge from life’s changes—is Ancona’s last, best... (shrink)

After decades of acrimonious debate on the nature of scientific knowledge, researchers in the human or social sciences are reaching a state of relative equanimity, a condition that may be characterized as a reflective pragmatism. Yet, even while the context has favored the development of new forms of research, the longstanding ocular metaphor of inquiry remains pervasive. That is, researchers continue the practice of observing what is the case, with the intent to illuminate, understand, report on, or furnish insight into (...) given states of affairs. And, while selectively useful, such an orientation is not only limited in potential but subject to a receding span of application. As I will propose, when the logics of reflective pragmatism are fully extended, we enter a new territory of understanding, one in which the vision of research is radically altered. We replace the captivating gaze on the world as it is with value based explorations into what it could be. This conception of a future forming orientation to research opens the way to new aims, practices, and reflections. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Horace and the Rhetoric of AuthorityKenneth J. ReckfordEllen Oliensis. Horace and the Rhetoric of Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xii 1 241 pp. Cloth, $64.95.In a gratifying book, crafted with unusual care, Ellen Oliensis investigates Horace’s self-fashioning in his poetry. “Horace is present,” she argues, “in his personae... not because these personae are authentic and accurate impressions of his true self, but because they effectively construct that (...) self—for Horace’s contemporary readers, for us, and also for Horace himself” (2). As she carefully observes the “faces” Horace makes from early satires and epodes to late epistles, she never assumes that they simply screen a “real” Horace, ambitious and/or subservient, from the public gaze. Horace’s strategies are unmasked, and [End Page 313] his tact (together with some rudeness), and what Oliensis characterizes as a fine, shifting blend of authority and deference; but “the final sum of Horace’s calculations is the making of good poetry, by which I mean poetry that is not exhausted in or fundamentally compromised by the social exchanges in which it participates” (14). This is (as I see it) a rescue operation that succeeds most admirably.Chapter 1 is titled “Face-saving and Self-defacement in the Satires.” In book 1, Horace distinguishes himself from his satiric targets as a discriminating poet and person, worthy of his equally discriminating patron. While his defensive maneuvers ward off envious outsiders, they also and more importantly appeal to Maecenas’ judgment as “overreader.” Oliensis often argues negatively, in terms of what Horace does not do. (Cf. Sherlock Holmes and the dog that didn’t bark.) There is, for example, no mention in Satires 1.6 of the part played by Horace’s poetry in winning Maecenas’ approval, no suggestion that Horace’s father was eager to see him advance socially. So too, in 2.6, Horace’s travails are not attributed to Maecenas; his villa is not connected with Maecenas; there is no self-incriminating “thank you”; the city day does not end with dinner at Maecenas’ house. Horace’s tact, his self-effacement here, are remarkable. Yet even as his satires decry the pursuit of wealth and status, they mark and promote “the poet’s own progress from the obscure margins to the shining center of Roman society” (17). Satires 1.10 proclaims Horace’s newfound authority together with his acceptance into an aesthetic and social elite.In book 2, Oliensis argues, Horace retreats from the role of satirist, giving it (ostensibly) to others, displacing upon them (Ofellus in 2.2, Damasippus in 2.3, Ulysses in 2.5, Davus in 2.7, Nasidienus in 2.8) the attempt to “mend misfortune with art” (51–63). Only later, in Epistles 2.2.49–52, will he admit to his early ambitiousness. For now, “by displacing these autobiographical ‘facts’ onto a series of surrogates in Satires 2, he retroactively exposes the satirist of Book 1” (54). The picture is convincing. We see Horace growing in subtlety and assurance as he moves away from satire—or moves satire in a new direction? I would only ask: did the process begin earlier, with the partial rejection of diatribe satire in 1.3 and Lucilian satire in 1.4? How and where should we draw the line between Horace’s half-ironic denials of aggressive intent and his genuine self-education through satire writing?Chapter 2, on the Epodes, is distinguished by Oliensis’ regard for diversity, the ugly and low stuff along with the bright and lofty. To simplify a complex, intuitive argument: Horace associates himself deferentially with the new center of Octavian and Maecenas, and repels outsiders, but his project fails: because he is forced to recognize too much of himself in scapegoated figures like the upstart slave-tribune of Epodes 4; because attack breeds attack in an unending cycle of vengeance; and because Horace is finally impotent before the dark, irrational forces represented by Canidia. He fails signally to achieve closure in the expected ten-poem book, turning instead (mainly) to erotic subjects, [End Page 314] unsubdued passions. Dactyls compete symbolically with iambs. Finally Horace lets Canidia win—and triumphs... (shrink)

I find three major shortcomings in Mele's account. First, verbal ambiguities suggest that the analysis is irrelevant to self-deception and/or that the traditional conception is subtly reinstated. Second, the data offer no means of establishing the superiority of the present account. Finally, as political rhetoric, Mele's proposal not only operates to disqualify others, but establishes science as their judge.

This paper discusses recent neuroscientific research that indicates a solution for what we label the ''causal problem'' of pain qualia, the problem of how the brain generates pain qualia. In particular, the data suggest that pain qualia naturally supervene on activity in a specific brain region: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The first section of this paper discusses several philosophical concerns regarding the nature of pain qualia. The second section overviews the current state of knowledge regarding the neuroanatomy and physiology (...) of pain processing. The third section highlights the recent research by Rainville et al. [(1997) Pain affect encoded in human anterior cingulate but not somatosensory cortex, Science, 277, 968-971], which suggests that pain affect is encoded in the ACC. The final section of the paper spells out exactly how these data affect the causal problem of pain qualia. (shrink)

A fundamental question in the study of human cognition is how people learn to predict the category membership of an example from its properties. Leading approaches account for a wide range of data in terms of comparison to stored examples, abstractions capturing statistical regularities, or logical rules. Across three experiments, participants learned a category structure in a low‐dimension, continuous‐valued space consisting of regularly alternating regions of class membership (A B A B). The dependent measure was generalization performance for novel items (...) outside the range of the training space. Human learners often extended the alternation pattern––a finding of critical interest given that leading theories of categorization based on similarity or dimensional rules fail to predict this behavior. In addition, we provide novel theoretical interpretations of the observed phenomenon. (shrink)

It has become widely accepted that standard connectionist models are unable to show identity‐based relational reasoning that requires universal generalization. The purpose of this brief report is to show how one of the simplest forms of such models, feed‐forward auto‐associative networks, satisfies two of the most well‐known challenges: universal generalization of the identity function and the reduplication rule. Given the simplicity of the modeling account provided, along with the clarity of the evidence, these demonstrations invite a shift in this high‐profile (...) debate over the nature of cognitive architecture and point to a way to bridge some of the presumed gulf between characteristically symbolic forms of reasoning and connectionist mechanisms. (shrink)

Behavior, language, development, identity, and science—all of these phenomena are commonly characterized as 'social' in nature. But what does it mean to be 'social'? Is there any intrinsic 'mark' of the social shared by these phenomena? In the first book to shed light on this foundational question, twelve distinguished philosophers and social scientists from several disciplines debate the mark of the social. Their varied answers will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, and anyone interested in the theoretical foundations (...) of the social sciences. (shrink)