Can you think of a meme that made you laugh or a political post that made you angry? These examples illustrate how social media use (SMU) impacts how people feel. Similarly, how people feel when they initiate SMU may impact the emotional effects of SMU. Someone feeling happy may feel more positively during SMU, whereas someone feeling sad may feel more negatively. Using an experimental design, we examined whether following SMU, those in a happy mood would experience increases in positive (...) affect (PA) and those in a sad mood would experience increases in negative affect (NA). A large sample of college students (N = 703) were randomly assigned to a happy, sad, or neutral mood induction before SMU. PA and NA were assessed at baseline, post-mood induction, and after SMU. Contrary to hypotheses, after SMU, people in happy moods experienced decreases in PA, and those in sad moods experienced decreases in NA, reflecting SMU having a dampening effect on emotions. PA and NA were significantly lower after SMU compared to baseline and did not vary by condition. How young adults feel when they log onto SMU matters in understanding how SMU impacts PA and NA, but on average, emotional experiences are dampened. (shrink)

Recent debates between modernists and postmodernists have shaken the foundations of modern social science. The epistemological assumptions of long-established procedures for constructing and validating knowledge claims have been called into question. This article discusses how two major contributors to the “new feminist epistemologies”—Dorothy Smith and Patricia Hill Collins—selectively integrate premises of modernist and postmodernist thought into their standpoint approaches. However, the particular premises they select result in significant ontological and epistemological differences between their works. These differences reflect major controversies (...) over materialism versus idealism, as well as essentialism versus diversity. As such, these different standpoints have important implications for feminist scholarship and political practice. (shrink)

In 2009, health authorities from Taiwan formally attended the 62nd World Health Assembly of the World Health Organization as observers, marking the country’s participation for the first time since 1972. The long process of negotiating this breakthrough has been cited as an example of successful global health diplomacy. This paper analyses this negotiation process, drawing on government documents, formal representations from both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and key informant interviews. The actors and their motivations, along with the forums, (...) practices and outcomes of the negotiation process, are detailed. While it is argued that non-traditional diplomatic action was important in establishing the case for Taiwan’s inclusion at the WHA, traditional concerns regarding Taiwanese sovereignty and diplomatic representation ultimately played a decisive role. The persistent influence of these traditional diplomatic questions illustrates the limits of global health diplomacy. (shrink)

Long before Luc Besson shot Fifth Element (1997) in English, and long before the squabble over whether Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement [2004]) was really a French film or a Warner Brothers’ film, the “national” in French national cinema was complicated. And yet a quick glance at the course offerings of most film departments will tell us that the discipline of Film Studies persists in employing a national cinema model when (...) conceptualizing non-Hollywood cinema. In fact, French cinema has been global from its inception, if we think of globalization as the “increasing speed, ease, and extent with which capital, goods, services, technologies, people, cultures, information .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanian Cultural and Political IdentityDonald R. KelleyThe Journal of the History of Ideas, in collaboration with other institutions, including the Universities of Bucharest and Budapest and the Soros Foundation, recently sponsored the second in a series of international conferences being planned on topics in current intellectual history. (The first, “Interrogating Tradition,” was held at Rutgers University, 13–16 November 1997.) The Romanian conference, which was held in the Elisabeta Palace (...) in Bucharest (27–31 May 1998), was devoted to “Culture and the Politics of National Identity in Modern Romania.” Over forty scholars, mainly from Romania but some also from the U.S., France, Germany, and Hungary, gathered to discuss a variety of questions about Romanian society, past, present, and speculative future; and they were joined by at least as many visitors, especially students, from the local area and beyond.Topics discussed included politics, language, economics, historiography, religion, education, philosophy, ideologies, intelligentsia, particular intellectuals, minorities, and women (though not Gypsies or gays). Under this riot of rubrics a wide range of questions were posed in interdisciplinary fashion, with frequent, sometimes impassioned interventions. What is—was, might have been, can be—Romania? Who is a Romanian (and who not)? What is Romania’s relation to the West and the East? (And what are the “West” and the “East”?) To modernity, to modernism, to modernization? What is—has been, should be—the function of intellectuals, of political and cultural elites, in understanding the Romanian past and in setting a course for the future? What, more generally, is the role of history in answering such questions? Or is history perhaps (as Karl Krause remarked of psychoanalysis) the disease for which it claims to be the cure?Keith Hitchens’s keynote address suggested that rehashing old essentialist debates might not be productive at millennium’s end, but the conference itself could not avoid some excursions down the paths of memory and myth. For historians, Western historians anyway, Romania seems to have too many pasts. Located at the juncture of four previous empires, Romania is a mosaic, or perhaps a pandemonium, of ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological groups that can only imagine, or invent, a nationality. Geographically (and in many ways culturally) remote from the West, Romania for a long time (as Sorin Antohi remarked) lacked both a public sphere and a civil society; and suffering “a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation” (Alexandru Dutu’s phrase), it has not enjoyed a tradition of religious or ethnic toleration. Nor have either the Germans or the Jews (as Glass said) found their own unity within the changing borders of the modern Romanian state. Not until the nineteenth century did Romania develop, out of its Boyar background (as Siupiur argued), an intellectual elite that could create a modern national history and help turn “peasants into Romanians” (Antohi’s phrase); and even then this elite seemed more attracted to conservative [End Page 735] (Herder, Savigny, Burke) than to liberal views of autochthonism. Many features of Western modernity, such as Newtonian science, reached Romania late, and indeed there was a retrograde movement against liberalism under the aegis by orthodox religion. In any case this intelligentsia has been as fragmented and multiform as the Romanian past itself. True, some Romanian scholars like to posit a mainstream tradition, “excesses aside,” as one speaker put it—but how, asked another, can historians put “excesses” aside from the devastating perspective of this century?Political and cultural self-examination was the dominant theme of this conference. Nationality, said Pippidi, depends on three factors, viz., name, language, religion, and territory. The Romanian name dates from the tenth century, indicating a separation of the Roman from the Greek tradition in Wallachia; and from the seventeenth century the idea of a mainly Roman provenance was given privilege. As a language, “Romanian” was spoken in the late Middle Ages, but the first written document is dated 1521. The principal religion in Romania was and is Greek orthodox, although there are also Roman Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and German Protestant communities, as well as the Uniate church created in the eighteenth century. As for the territory, this has been a matter of change, conflict, and confusion throughout the tragic course... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Invisible ChildrenMaureen KelleyИсчезаю в весне,в толпе,в лужах,в синеве.И не ищите.Мне так хорошо...I fade into spring,or into a crowd,or into a puddle,sometimes into the blue.There's no sense in looking for me.I feel fine...—¾"Absentee" by Arvo Mets"You have to go through Lesha to get to Danil," Alexandra told me. Lesha was a small but unmoving dog with matted hair and a fierce growl. The dog was pressed against the little (...) boy, who looked no more than three or four years old. Alexandra later told me he was eight. Danil was wearing a Spider Man shirt that was four sizes too big and came down to his feet and mismatched sandals. He was huddled against his dog not only for security but warmth. His tiny arm circled Lesha's neck and he looked at me with a mix of curiosity and caution. I knelt and put my hand out for Lesha to smell me. Apparently I didn't pass the smell test. The dog didn't budge from his post. We stood like that for a long time, at the base of the steps to the shelter. I tried the few Russian words I had learned while visiting as a volunteer. The dog didn't understand my broken Russian, or pretended not to, but I managed to get a shy smile from Danil.Alexandra, a nurse volunteer at the shelter, eventually mediated the standoff by giving Lesha, the dog, a cookie. I introduced myself to the little boy. And just like that, he leaned up against me and put both arms around my legs. It didn't matter that I was a stranger, and a stranger who spoke terrible Russian. "Spidey" was an affectionate little guy. He gripped my hand while Alexandra led us up the steps and Lesha followed close behind. Inside was a small room, warm and full of color. One wall was covered in kids' drawings. Another had public health posters in Russian, some with instructions for condom use, others on literacy. There were about fifteen kids in the shelter that afternoon. The young ones were drawing pictures at a low table. Two teenage boys were hunched over a small TV playing a video game. There was only one teenage girl, Irina. She was cooing at the little kid's drawings, showing one girl how to draw a princess. Alexandra said quietly to me, "Most of the teenage girls are only here in the morning. The rest are back at work right now." I found out later "back at work" meant on the streets as sex workers. This city was frequented by businessmen and itinerant workers heading to the factories or lumber mills in the North. The best money for homeless girls was in prostitution. Danil unwrapped himself from me and ran over to the two older boys playing video games. One put his controller down long enough to pull Danil into his lap. The three boys stared intently as Super Mario hopped from mushroom to magic cloud, golden coins spinning above his cartoon head.To the right of the main room was a closet-sized office for the shelter director, Anya, a pediatrician who donated her time to running the shelter for homeless and orphaned youth living on the streets. Alexandra and I stood in the doorway waiting for Anya to finish a phone conversation. Her desk was covered in papers. Behind her were photos of the kids who had "graduated" from the streets. There were cards and letters pinned to a cork board. When [End Page E4] she finished, Anya greeted us with bear hugs and showed us to the clinic area. Next to her office was a small bathroom with a shower and tub. She explained that bath days were on Wednesdays. Around back, with a separate entrance was the small clinic space. The outside metal door had a sliding window that you see at some nightclubs. They ran a needle exchange program out of that door. It was funded for street youth, but from time to time they would get adult addicts. Anya was adamant that this side of the clinic remain separate from the central space for the children. In reality the distance... (shrink)

Theodor W. Adorno's innovative understanding of nature and the historical constitutes the core of the two contributions that follow. This chapter illuminates the understanding of nature in Adorno by excavating the manifold relations between him and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's concepts of nature. The chapter's argument in this essay concerns Adorno's surprising critique of Negative Dialectics, surprising because for a brief interval Adorno appears to side with nature against Hegel. This is not precisely the move one might have expected of (...) Adorno, for whom nature ought to have been aligned with the material and experimental culture of knowledge that he, like Hegel, opposed to the work of what Hegel called Spirit and the work of dialectic. However, Adorno charges Hegel with a “rage against nature,” and, in the course of a long section of Negative Dialectics, he makes that charge stick. (shrink)

Romantic, po st- Revolutionary French historiography can be described as "ancient verses on new ideas." The "new history" of this period, with its antiquarian nature, shared more with its predecessors than its practitioners acknowledged. Historical and legal scholars of the Restoration belonged to a long intellectual tradition of a shared hermeneutical "community of interpretation," based on common origins, though not necessarily goals. A belief in the historical grounding of knowledge and judgment united Restoration historians and legal scholars to their (...) predecessors. Debate over the origin of private property, the central human right advanced in the Napoleonic Code, united the two sorts of scholars, who examined the origins of the right of private property in the context of the history of laws, both Germanic and Roman. The establishment of private property proves to rest on the logic of feudalism, ironically overthrown in the Revolution while providing continuity in historiography before and after. (shrink)

We examine when and how police officers may avoid costly errors under stress by leveraging theoretical and empirical work on the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat. According to the BPS model, in motivated performance contexts (e.g., test taking, athletics), the evaluation of situational and task demands in relation to one’s perceived resources available to cope with those demands engenders distinct patterns of peripheral physiological responding. Individuals experience more challenge-like states in which blood circulates more efficiently in the periphery (...) when they evaluate their coping resources as meeting or exceeding the task demands. Conversely, individuals experience more threat-like states in which blood circulates less efficiently in the periphery when they view the situation or task demands as exceeding their coping resources. Patterns of response consistent with challenge and threat states have been shown to predict important performance and decision-making outcomes in stressful contexts, and repeated experiences of threat-like patterns of physiological activity are thought to have detrimental effects on long-term cardiovascular health. To date, however, research has not used the biopsychosocial model to understand police decision-making under stress. Here, we review relevant empirical work from the perspective of the BPS model concerning how minority status and power can shape challenge and threat responding and contribute to decision making under stress. We then detail a research agenda aimed at improving the translational value of research being conducted within the BPS model for understanding complex performance and decision making in the real world, including among law enforcement personnel. (shrink)

The paper begins as a response to Tom Rockmore's thesis that contemporary pragmatism is a healthy “confusion” of disparate views. While Rockmore sees the need of some of today's pragmatists to provide a motivation for what he calls “epistemic optimism,” I contend that the crucial question of pragmatism, the problem of pragmatism, is the ontological status of pragmatic meaning. Thus rather than a mere “epistemic optimism,” I call upon pragmatists to assert a fallible yet unabashedly metaphysical optimism. The argument supporting (...) this claim is made in the context of Peirce's “The Architecture of Theories.” In “The Architecture of Theories” Peirce opens the door to a pragmatic metaphysics while at the same time committing the error of subordinating truths and reality to “the long run of inquiry.” Rockmore suggest that the solution may lie in a return to Kant's notion of the “powers of the mind.” However, it is my contention that a solution to this problem cannot be found within Kant at all. I shall argue here that until contemporary pragmatism decisively extracts itself from the Kantian paradigm, the pragmatic philosophic value of pragmatic meaning will always be qualified, conditional and ontologically subordinated, having the same effect upon the standing of pragmatism as a philosophy as well. Moreover, I shall endeavor to show that when the Kantian paradigm is finally abandoned, pragmatism's classic difficulties with realism and what Peircc called “the long run” of scientific inquiry can also be resolved. Kantian “powers of the mind” and constructivist “epistemological optimism” would then be transformed into what I shall call unrestricted pragmatism. On the other hand if the Kantian impediment is not overcome, these difficulties will continue to form the basis of a more sceptical and traditionally restricted pragmatism, one which lacks the confidence desired by both Rockmore and myself. (shrink)

In Fortunes of History Donald R. Kelley offers an authoritative examination of historical writing during the "long nineteenth century"--the years from the French Revolution to those just after the First World War. He provides a comprehensive analysis of the theories and practices of British, French, German, Italian, and American schools of historical thought, their principal figures, and their distinctive methods and self-understandings. Kelley treats the modern traditions of European world and national historiography from the Enlightenment to the (...) "new histories" of the twentieth century, attending not only to major authors and schools but also to methods, scholarship, criticisms, controversies, ideological questions, and relations to other disciplines. (shrink)

Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has only recently begun to receive his due from the English-speaking world, thanks in part to discussions of his thought by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Paul Ricoeur. His international readers have long valued his unique, interdisciplinary approach to philosophy’s greatest questions and his highly readable writing style. Originally published in 1967, _Le Pardon,_ or _Forgiveness,_ is one of Jankélévitch’s most influential works. In it, he characterizes the ultimate ethical act of forgiving as behaving toward the (...) perpetrator as if he or she had never committed the action, rather than merely forgetting or rationalizing it—a controversial notion when considering events as heinous as the Holocaust. Like so many of Jankélévitch’s works, _Forgiveness_ transcends standard treatments of moral problems, not simply generating a treatise on one subject but incorporating discussions of topics such as free will, giving, creativity, and temporality. Translator Andrew Kelley masterfully captures Jankélévitch’s melodic prose and, in a substantive introduction, reviews his life and intellectual contributions. _Forgiveness_ is an essential part of that legacy, and this indispensable English translation provides key tools for understanding one of the great Western philosophers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has only recently begun to receive his due from the English-speaking world, thanks in part to discussions of his thought by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Paul Ricoeur. His international readers have long valued his unique, interdisciplinary approach to philosophy’s greatest questions and his highly readable writing style. Originally published in 1967, _Le Pardon,_ or _Forgiveness,_ is one of Jankélévitch’s most influential works. In it, he characterizes the ultimate ethical act of forgiving as behaving toward the (...) perpetrator as if he or she had never committed the action, rather than merely forgetting or rationalizing it—a controversial notion when considering events as heinous as the Holocaust. Like so many of Jankélévitch’s works, _Forgiveness_ transcends standard treatments of moral problems, not simply generating a treatise on one subject but incorporating discussions of topics such as free will, giving, creativity, and temporality. Translator Andrew Kelley masterfully captures Jankélévitch’s melodic prose and, in a substantive introduction, reviews his life and intellectual contributions. _Forgiveness_ is an essential part of that legacy, and this indispensable English translation provides key tools for understanding one of the great Western philosophers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Harold Brown has written an ambitious work, which traces the formation of concepts in individuals and cultures, examines case studies of concepts in calculus, mathematics, biology and related fields, summarises important philosophical works on the theory of concepts, and seeks to reconcile scientific realism with conceptual change. Brown considers himself a scientific realist but concedes that this very label is one that depends on a long history of concepts that came before, and may indeed be superseded as conceptual change (...) continues. Yet, concepts are not strictly relative to their contexts. ‘‘The usual claim is that truth is relative – period; and this claim assumes a non-relativized truth-concept’’ (p. 309). Crucial to his goal of developing a theory of concepts is how Brown reconciles conceptual change with objectivity. (shrink)

Participants were asked to draw inferences about correlation from single x,y observations. In Experiment 1 statistically sophisticated participants were given the univariate characteristics of distributions of x and y and asked to infer whether a single x, y observation came from a correlated or an uncorrelated population. In Experiment 2, students with a variety of statistical backgrounds assigned posterior probabilities to five possible populations based on single x, y observations, again given knowledge of the univariate statistics. In Experiment 3, statistically (...) naïve participants were given a problem analogous to that given in Experiment 1, framed verbally. Experiment 4 replicated Experiment 3 but added an “impossible to determine” response option. Models that rely on computing sample correlations make no predictions about these investigations. From a Bayesian perspective, participants’ inferences in all four experiments tended to make probabilistically valid inferences as long as the single datum was directional. The results are discussed in light of the Brunswikian notion of vicarious functioning. (shrink)

Leaders in today's world face the challenge of earning the trust and commitment of organizational members if they expect to guide their companies to success in a highly competitive global context. In this article, we present empirical results indicating that when leadership behaviors are perceived as trustworthy through the observer's mediating lens, trust increases and leaders are more likely to be viewed as ethical stewards who honor a higher level of duties. This article contributes to the growing body of literature (...) about the importance of ethical stewardship in the trust relationship. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to trace the main developments in Greek philosophy during the period which runs from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.c. to the end of the Roman Republic. These three centuries, known to us as the Hellenistic Age, witnessed a vast expansion of Greek civilization eastwards, following Alexander's conquests; and later, Greek civilization penetrated deeply into the western Mediterranean world assisted by the political conquerors of Greece, the Romans. But philosophy throughout this (...) time remained a predominantly Greek activity. The most influential thinkers in the Hellenistic world were Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics. This book gives a concise critical analysis of their ideas and their methods of thought. The last book in English to cover this ground was written sixty years ago. In the interval the subject has moved on, quite rapidly since the last war, but most of the best work is highly specialized. There is a clear need for a general appraisal of Hellenistic philosophy which can provide those who are not specialists with an up-to-date account of the subject. Hellenistic philosophy is often regarded as a dull product of second-rate thinkers who are unable to stand comparison with Plato and Aristotle. This book will help to remove such misconceptions and arouse wider interest in a field which is fascinating both historically and conceptually. (shrink)

Beneficence and integrity comprise two of the five principles of the American Psychological Association (American Psychological Association [APA], 2017) code of ethics. The connection between ethic...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 121-122 [Access article in PDF] Harold Tarrant. Plato's First Interpreters. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 263. Cloth, $55.00. This is Tarrant's third book on the ancient Platonist tradition, following his Scepticism or Platonism? (1985) and Thrasyllan Platonism (1993). In those earlier volumes his focus was on the first centuries bc and ad. Here his scope is much (...) wider. Stating that "Platonic interpretation is today at a crossroads," he has written a book that explores "ancient attempts to wrestle with this corpus," with the ultimate objective "to encourage a fresh, almost primitive reading of Plato himself" (vii).He begins engagingly by confronting the ancients with questions any modern reader of Plato must ask: What kind of text is this? Are there doctrines here? Where do I look for Plato's doctrines? The second part of his book is a historical survey, taking us from Plato, the early Academy and Aristotle, through the Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial period, and concluding with the principal Neoplatonist interpreters. In the third and longest part, he focuses on the interpretation of specific dialogues, giving most space to the Gorgias and Theaetetus, but also dealing in particular detail with the Meno, Parmenides, and Philebus. Something is said about every dialogue, but Tarrant writes only briefly about such major works as the Republic and Timaeus. He explains his selectivity (not very convincingly) as due to his wish to "discuss issues of meta-interpretation, with emphasis on the period before Plotinus" (198).Taking his book as a whole, one realizes that few strands of modern interpretation were not prefigured to quite a large extent in antiquity. The two most obvious exceptions are the chronological and developmental approach (Early, Middle, and Late), at present under strong attack from some quarters, and the theological, numerological, and allegorical readings practiced by Neoplatonists. Plato's ancient interpreters were doctrinal unitarians, but they implicitly anticipated our tendency to distinguish "Socratic dialogues," which some of them called "gymnastic" and "inquisitive," from such "canonical" works as the Phaedo,Republic, Symposium, and Timaeus, to which they applied the labels "dogmatic" and "expository." And they recognized that both types of characteristics could be found in the same dialogue, as in the Meno and Theaetetus. Plato himself, they proposed, spoke primarily through the voices of Socrates, Timaeus, and the Eleatic and Athenian strangers; but other characters, such as Pausanias in the Symposium, or Protagoras in the dialogue of that name, utter thoughts with some philosophical value. In explaining difficult passages of one dialogue, they would typically refer to passages from other parts of the corpus. An especially intriguing instance is the strategy of the Anonymous Commentator on the Theaetetus, who reads the Meno into the dialogue on which he is officially commenting.Ancient scholars, just like ourselves, asked questions about the unifying themes of complex dialogues. Hence the sub-titles given to certain works: "On the soul" for the Phaedo, and "On justice" for the Republic, etc. For Olympiodorus (whose commentary on the Gorgias Tarrant has recently co-edited [Leiden, 1998]), earlier interpreters have seriously erred by giving too limited an account of that dialogue's scope. It is not, he says, simply about rhetoric, nor about justice and injustice; nor is its theme the divine demiurge (as some Neoplatonists had strangely proposed, on the basis of the concluding myth). Rather, the subject of the Gorgias is "the ethical principles that lead to constitutional well-being" (125). [End Page 121] However, Olympiodorus's eminently "sensible" reading (as Tarrant calls it) is deeply embedded in the Neoplatonic contrast between the "purificatory virtues" of the Phaedo and the "constitutional virtues" of Republic4.Strong or weak scepticism, esotericism, unwritten doctrines, spurious versus genuine, a canon of central dialogues, dramatic considerations, and the philosophical importance or non-importance of the dialogues' prologues—all of these are interpretive approaches that Tarrant surveys in this immensely learned book, and all of them continue to resonate for us. Modern scholars, who emphasize the literary and philosophical unity of each dialogue, are walking... (shrink)

The philosophy of Epictetus, a freed slave in the Roman Empire, has been profoundly influential on Western thought: it offers not only stimulating ideas but practical guidance in living one's life. A. A. Long, a leading scholar of later ancient philosophy, gives the definitive presentation of the thought of Epictetus for a broad readership. Long's fresh and vivid translations of a selection of the best of Epictetus' discourses show that his ideas are as valuable and striking today as (...) they were amost two thousand years ago. This is a book for anyone interested in what we can learn from ancient philosophy about how to live our lives. (shrink)

Volume 1 presents the texts in new translations by the authors, and these are accompanied by a philosophical and historical commentary designed for use by all readers, including those with no background in the classical world. With its glossary and indexes, this volume can stand alone as an independent tool of study.

A. A. Long, one of the world's leading writers on ancient philosophy, presents eighteen essays on the philosophers and schools of the Hellenistic and Roman periods--Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics. The discussion ranges over four centuries of innovative and challenging thought in ethics and politics, psychology, epistemology, and cosmology.

This comprehensive sourcebook makes available in the original Latin and Greek the principal extant texts required for the study of the Stoic, Epicurean and sceptical schools of philosophy. The material is organized by schools, and within each school topics are treated thematically. The volume presents the same texts (with some additional passages) as are translated in The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume 1. The authors provide their own critical apparatus, and also supply detailed notes on the more difficult texts. This volume is (...) equipped with a large annotated bibliography. (shrink)

For the past three decades A. A. Long has been at the forefront of research in Hellenistic philosophy. In this book he assembles a dozen articles on Stoicism previously published in journals and conference proceedings. The collection is biased in favour of Professor Long's more recent studies of Stoicism and is focused on three themes: the Stoics' interpretation of their intellectual tradition, their ethics and their psychology. The contents of the book reflect the peculiarly holistic and systematic features (...) of Stoicism. The papers are printed here in their original form for the most part, but the author has made some minor corrections and stylistic or bibliographical changes. He has also added a postscript to three papers whose topics have been the subject of much discussion during the years since they first appeared. (shrink)

This study examines the logical coherence of the theological claim that Jesus was "truly man and truly God." The primary question dealt with is whether or not it is possible for one person to have all of the properties necessary for being fully divine and all of the properties necessary for being fully human. The philosophical approach is analytic, focusing upon alleged coherence problems generated by applying the Indiscernibility of Identicals to statements about Jesus. Two extended arguments against the coherence (...) of the doctrine of the incarnation are examined and rebutted. The bulk of the study is a presentation and evaluation of five modern philosophical approaches to solving the coherence problems generated by the Indiscernibility of Identicals. These are Relative Trinitarianism, the One-Nature view, the Reduplicative maneuver, kenoticism, and the Two-Minds view. Relative Trinitarianism is rejected because it denies the Indiscernibility of Identicals as a logical principle. The One-Nature view unnecessarily alters the concept of divinity and it, too, is rejected. Traditional kenoticism is judged an inadequate response to the incoherence challenge, but a revised kenoticism does show that many statements about Jesus can be coherently stated. This revised kenoticism eliminates coherence problems concerning many properties of Jesus, but not all. Some statements about Jesus, particularly modal statements, can be coherently stated as reduplicative statements. The problem is that some Steven A. Long incarnational property adjectives do not appear to be logically attributive, hence they cannot be predicated reduplicatively. Though the Two-Minds view is rejected, some features of it are used to show how incarnational property adjectives can be logically attributive and predicated reduplicatively. The conclusion is that there are no convincing arguments against the coherence of the incarnation and that a revised kenoticism and the Reduplicative maneuver together can be used to formulate a coherent interpretation of the doctrine of the incarnation that is possibly true. (shrink)

A. A. Long’s study of Greek notions of mind and human selfhood is anchored in questions of universal interest. What happens to us when we die? How is the mind or soul related to the body? Are we responsible for our own happiness? Can we achieve autonomy? Long shows that Greek thinkers’ modeling of the mind gave us metaphors that we still live by.

The Western tradition of philosophy began in Greece with a cluster of thinkers often called the Presocratics, whose influence has been incalculable. They include the early Ionian cosmologists, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, the Eleatics (Parmenides, Melissus, and Zeno), Empedocles, Anaxagoras, the atomists and the sophists. All these thinkers are discussed in this 1999 volume both as individuals and collectively in chapters on rational theology, epistemology, psychology, rhetoric and relativism, justice, and poetics. A chapter on causality extends the focus to include historians and (...) medical writers. (shrink)