In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Life of Roman Republicanism by Joy ConnollyT. P. WisemanJoy Connolly. The Life of Roman Republicanism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. xix + 228 pp. Cloth. $39.95.This book was written for the best of reasons. Joy Connolly explains in her preface that she began to study the republican tradition in 2001, when “the Bush administration’s imprudence, paranoia, and disregard of democratic values stoked in me an anger equalled (...) only by the disgust I felt at my own and my fellow citizens’ inability or unwillingness to stand up to it” (xiv). The failure of the Left caused her “to ask questions that might help us to respond more intelligently and humanly to the situation in which we find ourselves” (xv). In particular, in this book her aim has been to exploit texts from the late Roman republic, to which students of political science have not paid enough attention, and thus recover “the suppressed history of republican political thought” (204). As she says in [End Page 372] conclusion, “I have sought to offer practical tools for civic education by articulating learnable practices of knowing the world that characterize late republican texts” (208, author’s emphasis). How well has this admirable ambition been achieved?According to the introduction, “[t]his book seeks to place Cicero’s Verrines, Caesarian orations, Republic, and Laws; Sallust’s Catiline and Jugurtha; and Horace’s Satires at the center of the republican tradition” (1); however, the Verrines and De legibus get only a couple of paragraphs each, and only one of the “Caesarian” orations is discussed at all. The actual contents are: chapter 1 on De republica (“Where Politics Begins”), which “presents Cicero as a thinker concerned with a collective of antagonists and competing interests, against conventional portrayals of his ideal republic as a homogeneous, unified, harmonious community” (20); chapter 2 on Sallust (“Justice in the World”), which argues that “Sallust’s withholding of judgment at the end of Jugurtha signifies the ways in which agents in the decaying republic withhold justice on a larger scale” (20); chapter 3 on Horace Satires I (“Non-Sovereign Freedom”), in which the obvious question (asked only at the end), “what might political and social progressives find worthy of consideration in Horace today?”, is answered with “Horatian satire undoes the claim to sovereignty that usually partners claims to moral judgment” (154); chapter 4 on Cicero’s view of oratory (“Dividual Advocacy”), which “reflects on the Roman preoccupation with faces, situations, the mutability of selfhood, and the degree to which the divided self mirrors the division of the polity” (21); and chapter 5 on Pro Marcello (“Imagination, Finitude, Responsibility, Irony”), which argues that “[b]y adopting hyperbole as the governing figure of this new style of senatorial speech, Cicero holds out the promise not of a morally legible universe, but of a recognition that every Roman now lives in conditions virtually ‘impossible to believe’, the emergence of one ruler, under whom the chains of traditional obligations do not consistently hold” (183). The short conclusion (“The Republic Remastered”) attacks “the tendency, dominant since the nineteenth-century emergence of sociology and economics, to treat human beings primarily as rational calculators or creatures of practical wisdom” (203) and expresses the hope that “close attention to these texts has the capacity to reshape the way we think about civic wisdom—the way schools teach history, literature, civics, and philosophy—about public discourse, especially public commentary on political oratory, and about the conversations we citizens hold among ourselves” (207).I have deliberately used the author’s own words to indicate what the book attempts to do, because I would find it impossible to summarise its argument any other way. Even with these formulae to help, Connolly’s selective and apparently random approach imposes a heavy burden on the reader to construct a coherent framework for her ideas. I think there are two main reasons for this. The first is a direct result of Connolly’s impressive mastery of the political-sciences literature. It is an excellent thing to be so thoroughly familiar with the works of Hannah Arendt, Simon Critchley, John Dewey, Michel Foucault, Dean Hammer, Bonnie Honig, Andreas Kalyvas, George Kareb... (shrink)

Artist Leonid Filatov. Kakimi raznorodnymi talantami on odaren! YArkij kinorezhisser. Blistatel'nyj parodist. Skazochnik. I vse, chto on delal - pechal'noe i mudroe - na radost' nam. Ego poeziya sozdaet obrazy dushevnoj zhizni lyudej, nepohozhih drug na druga, dazhe protivostoyaschih drug drugu. Eto svojstvo istinnogo iskusstva. Komedijnaya p'esa po motivam bessmertnogo romana Dyuma otkryla nam esche odnu storonu ego darovanij.

Asconius 63 , commenting on the pro Cornelio: Fuerunt enim plures Quinti Metelli, ex quibus duo consulares, Pius et Creticus, de quibus apparet eum non dicere, duo autem adulescentes, Nepos et Celer, ex quibus nunc Nepotem significat. Eius enim patrem Q.Metellum Nepotem, Baliarici filium, Macedonici nepotem qui consul fuit cum T. Didio, Curio is de quo loquitur accusavit … Cicero and his scholiast refer to ‘duo Metelli, Celer et Nepos’ but like Asconius do not specify their relationship. Celer himself, followed (...) by Cicero in correspondence with him, calls Nepos his frater, but since both bore the praenomen Q., this cannot be the whole story. Celer's career shows that he was the elder, yet Nepos senior, according to Asconius, entrusted his feud with Curio not to him but to Nepos iunior. (shrink)

Sed quid ego Graecorum: nescio quo modo me magis nostra delectant. Omnes hoc historici, Fabii Gellii sed proxume Coelius: cum bello Latino ludi votivi maxumi primum fierent, civitas ad arma repente est excitata … Quintus goes on to tell the story of the countryman's dream, with its divine warning about the ominous praesul, which is also related by Livy, Dionysius, Valerius Maximus, and Macrobius.

An introductory ethics course serves many and often disparate ends, so much so that it may be difficult to find a theme or question that can tie these ends together in a coherent course narrative. This paper shares the author’s attempt to do so. In addition to high student interest in the subject, the topic of our obligation to future generations has the advantage of naturally leading a course through several systematic areas of philosophical importance. This topic lends itself not (...) only to moral theory (e.g. the Nonidentity Problem), but also metaphysics (e.g. the metaphysics of personhood underpinning the Nonidentity Problem), political theory (e.g. utilitarian vs. Rawlsian answers to the question), and applied ethics (e.g. population policies). The author speaks to this topic’s adaptability to various levels of study (introductory, advanced, and graduate) and explains how the theme is taught at each level. (shrink)

Exegesis of the philosophy of Madhva, 13th century founder of the Dvaita (dualistic) school of Vedanta.

Description: Professor M. Hiriyanna (1871-1950) is recognized in learned circles both in India and abroad as an outstanding authority on traditional Indian philosophy. This monograph attempts to bring his contribution to Indian philosophy to the notice of a wider circle of readers. Deeply versed in Sanskrit classics and equally proficient in English literature, Hiriyanna worked with single-minded devotion to the cause of Indian philosophy and literary studies. This volume brings together the cream of Hiriyanna's contribution, spread over his numerous articles (...) and books, in one conspectus and evaluates his place among the builders of Indian philosophy. Though Hiriyanna did not claim anything like a philosophy of his own, he had a distinctive perception of both the general spirit and the specific concepts and doctrines of Indian philosophy. This book seeks to highlight Hiriyanna's characteristic approach to Indian philosophy in all its aspects. It starts from the general standpoint of Hiriyanna in regard to Indian philosophy and takes the reader through the details of his interpretation of Indian metaphysics and value investigation. Brief, significant quotations from Hiriyanna are given at appropriate places to bring the reader's attention directly to Hiriyanna. The numerous references given to Hiriyanna's works will also be helpful in the study of Hiriyanna in the original. (shrink)