How foreign policy embodies human values is an issue worth studying. Such a value not only refers to the interests of social and political elites but to the prevailing welfare of people. In 2016, t...

It is now generally agreed that in Aristotle's Poetics, ch. 13 means ‘mistake of fact’. The moralizing interpretation favoured by our Victorian forebears and their continental counterparts was one of the many misunderstandings fostered by their moralistic society, and in our own enlightened erais revealed as an aberration. In challenging this orthodoxy I am not moved by any particular enthusiasm for Victoriana, nor do I want to revive the view that means simply ‘moral flaw’ or ‘morally wrong action’. I shall (...) try to show that the word has a range of applications, from ‘ignorance of fact’ at one end to ‘moral defect’, ‘moral error’, at the other, and that the modern orthodoxy, though not as clearly wrong as the moralizing interpretation it displaced, restricts Aristotle's meaning in a way he did not intend, and does lessthan justice to his analysis of classical drama. (shrink)

Recent scholarship (Goodwin & Darley, 2008) on the meta-ethical debate between objectivism and relativism has found people to be mixed: they are objectivists about some issues, but relativists about others. The studies discussed here sought to explore this further. Study 1 explored whether giving people the ability to identify moral issues for themselves would reveal them to be more globally objectivist. Study 2 explored people's meta-ethical commitments more deeply, asking them to provide verbal explanations for their judgments. This revealed that (...) while people think they are relativists, this may not always be the case. The explanations people gave were sometimes rated by outside (blind) coders as being objective, even when given a relativist response. Nonetheless, people remained meta-ethical pluralists. Why this might be is discussed. (shrink)

Are experience and stimulus necessarily alike? Wertheimer spoke of this as an “insidious and insistent belief”. By contrast, Watson devotes an entire book to the defense of the thesis that representation necessarily requires resemblance. I argue that this bold and important thesis is ambiguous between a historical and a systematic reading, and that in either one of these readings the thesis, for different reasons, will be found wanting. Second, a proper evaluation of it in either one of its possible interpretations (...) requires a careful analysis of the notion of resemblance. I proceed to supply some necessary distinctions and argue that, given such an analysis, Watson's thesis may be historically applicable only to ancient and medieval philosophy, while its systematic import is untenable. (shrink)

There was once a man in a certain village in the mountains, who made his living by making up stories, which he used to tell to the people of his village to while away their evenings. One day he went on a journey to a strange village far away in the plains, and there he saw a group of men sitting round another story-teller. Being curious to learn whether his rival was as good a story-teller as he was, he joined (...) the group and listened. He was astonished to find that the story being told was one he had made up himself. So when the story-teller had finished, the man took him aside and said, ‘That was a good story, but it is my story, which I made up, and you must pay me money for it.’ ‘You are wrong,’ said his rival. ‘It is my story, for I made it up myself this morning’. (shrink)

This line, composed of only three words, occurs near the beginning of a speech in which Orestes, having revealed himself to his sister, is passing on to her and toa sympathetic chorus consisting of slaves in the royal palace at Argos, the gist of the instructions Apollo, through his oracle at Delphi, has given him about avenging his murdered father. The God, less merciful than the ghost of King Hamlet, has ordered him to kill his mother as well as her (...) paramour. (shrink)

If our theology about the human condition correctly underscores our brokenness, and our understanding of the world as being fallen indeed reflects reality, then our poetry of worship should express that brokenness as well as our longing for healing. However, the Church in North America neglects laments because we have essentially lost the art and practice of grieving in the West, the Church silently condones some bad theology about Christian living, and we lack a robust philosophy of language in Christian (...) practices and disciplines. As this article explores, Job's curse and the lament of Psalm 22 offer healthy correctives to these and other missteps. The article emphasizes the important place of lament in Christian community, particularly as it functions in worship. (shrink)

It has long been accepted as a principle by editors and writers on Greek metre that brevis in longo and hiatus in tragic lyrics often coincide with some kind of sense-pause. The object of this inquiry is to determine the incidence of pause in such places, and show that it is significantly high; to show that there is a comparable incidence in the corresponding places in strophic systems; to show that period-ends determined by criteria other than brevis and hiatus are (...) attended by similar conditions. It might seem that if all this were true it would have been recognized long ago, particularly as the connection between sense and metrical structure, and symmetry of sense in strophe and antistrophe, has often been pointed out. (shrink)

In her masterly article on this passge, Dr. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood goes most of the way towards solving two serious problems: the text of Lys. 645, where the vulgate makes the ‘bears’ more than ten years old, contrary to all other evidence; and the meaning of of A. Ag. 239 . She argues cogently that in Aeschylus means ‘shedding’ the saffron robe, as most editors including Fraenkel have thought, and not ‘letting her robes fall to the ground’ as Lloyd-Jones, followed by (...) Page, has argued. (shrink)

It would be generally accepted that G. E. Moore’s celebrated “Refutation of Idealism,” set forth at the turn of the century, constitutes the classic statement of modern realism. The seeming strengths of this position have been elaborated more recently by a notable realist proponent, Don Locke, who, following Moore, takes for granted what is, in effect, the basic assumption of the “Refutation”—the assumption, namely, that each and every variant of the idealist standpoint is embraced under the central Berkeleian contention that (...) “esse is percipi.” It will be my object to argue that the plausibility of Locke’s realism stems from a basic confusion of terms, and that, in its implications, the position becomes vacuous when set in opposition to idealism. (shrink)

Our ability to attend selectively to our surroundings - noticing things that matter, ignoring those that don't - is crucial if we are to negotiate the world around us. This is the first book in years to explore just how our attention can be influenced by time, and how our own perception of time can be influenced by what we attend to.

In CQ 55 , 22–5, E. Harrison noticed that hiatus between verses in the trimeters of dialogue was much less frequent in tragedy when the sense ran on from one verse to the next, than when there was a pause in sense at verse-end. He observed that Aeschylus' Prometheus differed from the other plays of Aeschylus in this respect, the proportion of run-over hiatus to end-stopped hiatus being much higher, and more like that of comedy; that Sophocles had remarkably few (...) verses with run-over hiatus in the Trachiniae and Antigone , much less than Aeschylus in proportion to the number of non-stop trimeters in the play, though Oedipus Tyrannus had much the largest number in Sophocles , and no continuous chronological development was discernible; that in Euripides there was a general progression from relative strictness to relative freedom in the run-over hiatus allowed, though individual plays did not conform closely to this pattern; that in general comedy was freer than tragedy. (shrink)

Some years ago, Sir Kenneth Dover suggested a new interpretation of καρξαι. Prima facie, the chorus ask the sun to proclaim where Heracles is, and this sense is supported by such passages as Il. 3.277 Ήλιóς θ', ς πντ' ορς, Od. 9.109 Ήελου, ς πντ' ορ , Od. 8.270–1 αρ δ ο γγελος λθεν | Ήλιος, and especially h. Cer. 69ff., where ‘Demeter visits the Sun and implores him, “you who look down on all earth and sea…tell me truly of (...) my dear child, if you have seen her anywhere, who has gone off with her…”.’ This is the way καρξαι in Trach. 97 has always been taken. Dover points out, however, that κηρττειν also has a special, technical sense: to make proclamation inquiring about a missing person's whereabouts, as the town-crier used to do a century ago England and elsewhere, and the media do now. The model is not that of h. Cer. 69ff., but rather S. Aj. 845ff.: ‘Sun, when you see my native land, draw near and tell my aged father…of my fate.’ The examples he cites are enough to demonstrate the ‘interrogative’ use of κηρττω, though his first example, Ar. Ach. 748 γν δ καρυξ Δικαιóπολιν π, will not do: if sound, it means not ‘I will find out by κρυξ where Dicaeopolis is’ , but ‘I will summon Dicaeopolis to where ’. The normal ‘interrogative’ use is to enquire by herald the whereabouts of a Crminal or a runaway slave. (shrink)