Courts and jurors sometimes refuse to assign liability to defendants on the basis of statistics alone, despite their apparent reliability. I argue that this refusal is best understood as a recognition of defendants’ right to security. Understood as a robust good in Philip Pettit’s sense, security requires that someone risking harm to others’ protected interests adopt a disposition of concern that controls against wrongfully harming them. Since trials risk harm, the state must adopt such a disposition. Statistics leave open the (...) possibility of innocence and so wrongful harm in a way that the state cannot ignore; if it does use such statistics, it makes defendants wrongfully insecure. This explanation of the problem of bare statistical evidence is especially apt because security grounds the right to a fair trial and judicial procedural rights more generally. (shrink)

Did Alcidamas invent the story of the contest of Homer and Hesiod? Martin West has argued that he did , 433 ff.). I believe that there are a number of reasons for thinking this improbable. The stories of the deaths of Homer and Hesiod were traditional before Alcidamas. Heraclitus knew the legend of the riddle of the lice and Homer's death , and the story of Hesiod's death was well known by Thucydides’ time . The first attempt to record information (...) about Homer's life is ascribed to Theagenes of Rhegium, in the late sixth century b.c. . By that time it seems likely that there was already a considerable body of legends about the early poets. The pieces of hexameter verse in the Herodotean Life of Homer, some of which show detailed knowledge of the area around Smyrna in the archaic period, probably date from before 500 b.c. In relating the stories of the poets’ deaths Alcidamas is recording the results of στορα, and this is what he implies in Michigan papyrus 2754 . West's theory requires one to assume that he has incorporated with these traditions his own fiction of the contest. This seems to me to go against what we know in general about the activity of sophists such as Alcidamas. Although they were capable of inventing myths , there is no evidence that they created such stories about earlier historical figures, rather than collecting popular legends about them, and using these for their own purposes. It is true that Critias used the evidence of Archilochus’ own poetry to draw conclusions about his life . But this is not the same as inventing a story virtually from scratch. Hesiod's own testimony about his poetic victory , the original starting-point for the legend of the contest with Homer, did not on its own provide a basis from which such inferences could be drawn. It seems more likely that the legend is the product of earlier popular embroidery, at a time when speculation about these early poets’ lives was becoming common. (shrink)

The problem of the composition of Thucydides' History, first raised by Ullrich in 1846, has evoked a mass of controversial literature. In this article I shall confine myself to the main arguments and conclusions. Thucydides' history is unfinished, not only because it breaks off at 411 b.c., but also because the style is uneven. The history of the Archidamian War to 424 b.c. and of the Sicilian War is fully polished and complete; the remainder is lacking in stylistic finish and (...) particularly in the set speeches which characterize the completed books. This unevenness can be explained by the circumstances of Thucydides' life. For the period 431–424 b.c. he could obtain full information at Athens and, after his exile in 424 b.c., at Sparta and elsewhere; for the Sicilian War he could obtain full information in Sicily from the Siceliotes and from the Athenian prisoners. He was thus in a position to complete his history for these two periods. During his exile from 424 b.c. to 404 or 403 b.c. he lacked the information from the Athenian side, which was necessary for the completion of the remainder of his work. Further light is shed on the unevenness of finish by Thucydides' method of composition. He informs us that he began his work at the beginning of the war, and that he was watching and applying his judgement throughout the Twenty-seven Years War; and the statement that he wrote the history down to the capture of the Peiraeus implies his collection of material down to 404 b.c. The working up of this material must have been conditioned partly by the circumstances of the war; in particular, the conception of the Twenty-seven Years War cannot have been formed until after 415 or 412 b.c. (shrink)

The relation of the special and the general principle of relativity to the principle of covariance, the principle of equivalence and Mach's principle, is discussed. In particular, the connection between Lorentz covariance and the special principle of relativity is illustrated by giving Lorentz covariant formulations of laws that violate the special principle of relativity: Ohm's law and what we call “Aristotle's first and second laws.” An “Aristotelian” universe in which all motion is relative to “absolute space” is considered. The first (...) law: a free particle is at rest. The second law: force is proportional to velocity. Ohm's law: the current density is proportional to the electrical field strength. Neither of these laws fulfills the principle of relativity. The examples illustrate, in the context of Lorentz covariance and special relativity, Kretschmann's critique of founding Einstein's general principle of relativity on the principle of general covariance. A modification of the principle of covariance is suggested, which may serve as a restricted criterium for a physical law to satisfy Einstein's general principle of relativity. Other objections that have been raised to the validity of Einstein's general principle of relativity are based upon the preferred state of inertial frames in the general, as well as in the special theory, the existence of tidal effects in “true” gravitational fields, doubts as to the validity of Mach's principle, whether electromagnetic phenomena obey the principle, and, finally, the anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation. These objections are reviewed and discussed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Problems of Jurisprudence The Enterprise of Legal Theory From Positivism to Natural Law Theory as Interpretation Law as Integrity Unger and the Critical Legal Studies Movement Philosophical Reconstruction of Legal Doctrine.

Aproximación al pensamiento de Rodolfo Kusch -- Canto e identidad en el Martín Fierro según Carlos Astrada y Rodolfo Kusch -- Donde el barro se subleva -- La rehabilitación del saber seminal como camino hacia una mística popular -- Kusch y el impulso social de nuestra época -- La barbarización de la civilización, una grieta de antaño -- ¿De dónde pensarnos?