In 50 B.C. Cicero writes to Atticus as follows : ‘Brundisium uenimus VII Kalend. Decembr. usi tua felicitate nauigandi; ita belle nobis flauit ab Epiro lenissimus Onchesmites. hunc si cui boles pro tuo uendito.’ The antonomasia, the euphonic sibilance, and the mannered rhythm are all prominent in Cicero's hexameter. The line is a humorously concocted example of affected and Grecizing narrative. But it is also a line which, Atticus is to suppose, would value; presumably therefore it is meant to hit (...) off characteristics of their style. Cicero must in fact be parodying what he regards as a typical ‘neoteric’ line, and the significance of this simple fact has perhaps been underestimated. (shrink)

In The Colorful Conservative, R.O.P. Lopez culls important insights into American culture from the works of Phillis Wheatley, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, William Wells Brown, and Walt Whitman. Lopez contends that many of the tensions that emerged prior to the Civil War remain unresolved; thus, the nineteenth century never ended and Americans still live in the literary framework of the 1800s. Beyond political distinctions of the left and the right, there are really four poles: The Left, The Conformist (...) Burkeans, The Anarchist-Nihilist-Libertarians, and The Colorful Conservatives. The Left and the Colorful Conservatives are the two poles most at odds with each other. The Colorful Conservatives, Lopez argues, encompass these five American authors and are the driving force behind many unique paradoxes in the United States' political culture"--Back cover. (shrink)

In this paper I shall be examining the nature and provenance of what many people state or imply to be a traditional, conventional, even trite figure of speech: the Augustan Elegists' figure of the ‘seruitium amoris’’. It is indeed a very frequent image in the Elegists. As. F. O. Copley says: ‘Of all the figures used by the Roman elegists, probably none is quite so familiar as that of the lover as slave.’’ But frequency does not equal triteness nor traditionality.

The Romans had various ways of justifying their imperial aims and methods, some high-minded, some less so. We find in particular that they could give honourable and satisfying explanations of their aims and methods in war. Here for example is Cicero: quare suscipienda quidem bella sunt ob earn causam, ut sine iniuria in pace uiuatur; parta autem uictoria conseruandi ii, qui non crudeles in bello, non immanes fuerunt, ut maiores nostri Tusculanos, Aequos…in ciuitatem etiam acceperunt, at Carthaginem…funditus sustulerunt…mea quidem sententia (...) paci, quae nihil habitura sit insidiarum, semper est consulendum. et cum iis, quos ui deuiceris, consulendum est, tum ii qui armis positis and imperatorum fidem confugient, quamuis murum aries percusserit, recipiendi. (shrink)

With the current resurgence of interest in phenomenology, a second edition of Elveton’s indispensable collection is timely. These essays present appraisals of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, ranging from its earliest reception to the first comprehensive efforts to assess the full scope of Husserl’s writings.

Baron assumes that ethical decision-making can be evaluated without specifying more general features of the cognitive system within which it occurs. It is suggested that ethical principles are heuristics employed during goal-oriented action planning. Heuristics are bound to generate suboptimal decisions in some cases. It is rational to replace a particular heuristic only when the cost of associated error exceeds the cost of constructing and installing a more successful alternative.

The most popular emendation has been Heinsius's somnia sunt. I find the tone of this misplaced. Thepoet has since 66 laboriously catalogued variant aetiologies of Scylla monstrum. It is inappropriate that he should immediately follow this with the statement that all of them were ‘fancy’ or ‘nonsense’. For a start, we may note that the summation quidquid et ut quisque … presumably includes the version of Homer, to whose authority the poet had appealed in the case of the erroneous contamination (...) of the two Scyllas. Next, I suppose that if Scylla monstrum had been the subject of his poem, the poet might have wanted to say that some of the versions were wrong—or at least of less good authority, or less attractive than others for one reason or another. But Scylla monstrum is not the subject of his poem. He confutes, because it is his concern, the contamination; the listing of the rest, variants in a story not his subject, issues largely from an ‘Alexandrian’ delight in such learned display. It calls for no estimation of their lightness or wrongness: neither relative to one another—and certainly not absolutely. (shrink)

In one form or another an elevated, pleasure-transcending view of love is common, we might say natural. For readers of Latin poetry Catullus is perhaps the most impressive spokesman. In many respects, of course, Catullus is special. His particular values and choice of terminology, in his time and situation, mark him out from his crowd; in the Roman world indeed, ‘whole love’, perhaps rather its utterance, is hard to document before him. But a belief that love is powerful and profound, (...) an important if not the most important thing in life, this is not a rarity. Roman tombstones attest to love and devotion, and myths inherited from Greece enshrine love's power, endurance, and transcendence. (shrink)

This paper sets out in section I the most useful evidence we possess for the dating of Propertius Book 1, Tibullus Book 1, and Propertius Books 2a and 2b.2 The evidence squares with a sequence of publication: Prop. 1, Tibull. 1, Prop. 2a, Prop. 2b, which is what, in my view, literary considerations suggest. The most important, or at least most interesting, of these considerations are the signs of response and counterresponse between the two poets. I detect spirited ripostes by (...) the poets, one to the other. Section II examines some Tibullan responses to Propertius Book 1, and section III some Propertian responses, in ‘Book 2’, to Tibullus Book 1. (shrink)

Once we have accepted that theCirisstems from neither Virgil nor Gallus, but was written by a post-Virgilian poetaster, the obvious task for us is to try and formulate some more specific idea of the date of the poem. I think that it has been sufficiently proved that theCirisis not only post-Virgilian, but post-Ovidian in origin, including as it does unquestionable imitations of that author. But this, to date, is really as far as we have got. It is the purpose of (...) this paper to put forward the thesis that the author of theCirislived late enough to know and be influenced by Statius and other poets of the later first century A.D.Now of course any theory that theCirisknew and used Statius and other Silver poets is rendered highly unlikely if it can be maintained that Suetonius considered it, with the otherminora, a genuine Virgilian work. And so we are brought back again to the famous list in the DonatanLife:deinde Catalepton et Priapea et Epigrammata et Diras, item Cirim et Culicem, cum esset annorum XXVI. cuius materia talis est. pastor fatigatur aestu; cum sub arbore condormisset et serpens ad eum proreperet, e palude culex provolavit atque inter duo tempora aculeum fixit pastori. at ille continuo culicem contrivit et serpentem interemit ac sepulchrum culici statuit et distichon fecit. (shrink)

Biography of Sister Alphōnsa, 1910-1946, Catholic nun from Kerala.

Ethics position theory (EPT) maintains that individuals’ personal moral philosophies influence their judgments, actions, and emotions in ethically intense situations. The theory, when describing these moral viewpoints, stresses two dimensions: idealism (concern for benign outcomes) and relativism (skepticism with regards to inviolate moral principles). Variations in idealism and relativism across countries were examined via a meta-analysis of studies that assessed these two aspects of moral thought using the ethics position questionnaire (EPQ; Forsyth, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology39, 175–184, 1980). (...) This review identified 139 samples drawn from 29 different countries, for a total sample of 30,230 respondents, and concluded that (a) levels of idealism and relativism vary across regions of the world in predictable ways; (b) an exceptionist ethic is more common in Western countries, subjectivism and situationism in Eastern countries, and absolutism and situationism in Middle Eastern countries; and (c) a nation’s ethics position predicted that country’s location on previously documented cultural dimensions, such as individualism and avoidance of uncertainty (Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, 1980). Limitations in these methods and concerns about the validity of these cross-cultural conclusions are noted, as are suggestions for further research using the EPQ. (shrink)

This article provides a course of correction in the discourse surrounding human-centric AI by elucidating the philosophical underpinning that serves to create a view that AI is divorced from human-centric values. Next, we espouse the need to explicitly designate stakeholder- or community-centric values which are needed to resolve the issue of alignment. To achieve this, we present two frameworks, Ubuntu and maximum feasible participation. Finally, we demonstrate how employing the aforementioned frameworks in AI can benefit society by flattening the current (...) top-down social hierarchies as AI is currently being utilized. Implications are discussed. (shrink)