Dionysos.--Akhenaton.--Confucius.--Aristippus.--Ecclesiastes.--Lucretius.--Lucian.--Julian the Apostate.--Omar Khayyám.--Machiavelli.--Rabelais.--Deloney.--Burton.--Hobbes.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This is an investigation of an aspect of Virgil'sAeneid—ultimately, of the ways in which the poet guides his reader's response to Aeneas’ stay in Carthage—and, while it touches on Roman religious practice, clothing codes, late antique Virgilian commentary and Augustan ideology, it hinges on a single word inAeneidBook 4 and its implications for Virgil's depiction of his hero in this book. That word islaena, and it features in one of the most celebrated scenes of the poem, when Mercury descends to (...) earth to find Aeneas busily engaged in founding Carthage (Aen.4.259–64):ut primum alatis tetigit magalia plantis,Aenean fundantem arces ac tecta nouantemconspicit. atque illi stellatus iaspide fuluaensis erat Tyrioque ardebat murice laenademissa ex umeris, diues quae munera Didofecerat, et tenui telas discreuerat auro.As soon as Mercury with winged feet touched the Carthaginian huts, he caught sight of Aeneas founding the citadel and raising new buildings: his sword was studded with stars of yellow jasper, and alaena, hanging from/let down from his shoulders, blazed with Tyrian purple, a gift that Dido with her wealth had made, interweaving in the web a subtle cross-thread of gold.Line 4.262 is the only place in theAeneidwhere this word is used, and I shall be suggesting thatlaenarepresents an unusually evocative piece of clothing to put on Aeneas, even aside from the particular character, its decoration and origin, that Virgil attributes to the example Aeneas is wearing at lines 4.262–4. What I offer is a cumulative argument, as a whole (I believe) persuasive but also necessarily speculative given the limited state of our knowledge in various areas from religion to clothing. My essential claim is that Virgil is encouraging his reader at this point in the poem to associate Aeneas with, and judge his behaviour in comparison to, one of the most important members of the Roman priesthood. (shrink)

Based on Merleau-Ponty's description of nature as that on which we ultimately rely, this essay cultivates the thought that this description also fits an idea of God and therefore of _Deus sive Natura_. Guided by an outline for a phenomenology of climbing, it is argued that what Heidegger calls readiness to hand presupposes readiness-to-foot. The latter gives ground for gratitude not only because it gives ground for enjoyment as gratification, but because it also gives ground for joy understood as a (...) grace, grace understood as having its ground in _Natura_. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

InFam.13.1 Cicero, visiting Athens en route to Cilicia in the summer of 51b.c., writes to C. Memmius L.f., praetor in 58 but by the time of Cicero's communication an exile in Athens after the shambolic consular elections for 53; Memmius was absent from Athens in Mytilene, hence the need for Cicero to write to him. This letter, along withAtt.5.11.6 and 19.3, is our focus in the argument that follows, but, to summarize the situation in the very broadest terms, Cicero's concern (...) in it is with Memmius’ intentions regarding a plot of land in Athens occupied by a house of Epicurus, and with the objections to Memmius’ plans that had been raised with Cicero by the scholarch of the Epicurean community in Athens, Patro. (shrink)

This essay compares two philosophical proposals concerning the relation between values and science, both of which reject the value-free ideal but nevertheless place restrictions on how values and science should interact. The first of these proposals relies on a distinction between the direct and indirect roles of values, while the second emphasizes instead a distinction between epistemic and nonepistemic values. We consider these two proposals in connection with a case study of disputed research on the topic of environmental justice and (...) argue that the second proposal has several advantages over the first. (shrink)

eliciunt caelo te, Iuppiter; unde minoresnunc quoque te celebrant Eliciumque uocant.constat Auentinae tremuisse cacumina siluae,terraque subsedit pondere pressa Iouis. (Ov.Fasti3.327–30)They draw you down from the sky, Jupiter, and that is why more recent generations still worship you today, and call you Elicius. It is certain that the summit of the Aventine wood trembled, and the earth sank beneath the weight of Jupiter.Dismayed by an unprecedented flurry of thunderbolts, the pious King Numa sets out to expiate the omen. His divine consort (...) Egeria advises him to learn theritus piandi(291) from Picus and Faunus, who will, however, only reveal the necessary information under compulsion. Numa makes plans to ambush the gods, taking up position in a cave within a grove ‘under the Aventine, black with the shade of the holm oak, at sight of which you would say, “A spirit is here”’ (lucus Auentino suberat niger ilicis umbra, | quo posses uiso dicere ‘numen inest’, 295–6). The description of this numinous location continues (297–9):in medio gramen, muscoque adoperta uirentimanabat saxo uena perennis aquae;inde fere soli Faunus Picusque bibebant.In the middle was a meadow, and an unceasing stream of water, covered with green moss, flowed from the rock. From it Faunus and Picus, unaccompanied, were in the habit of drinking.Once captured by the king, Faunus and Picus tell Numa that only Jupiter himself can be consulted about Jupiter's own domain (if we readtectaat 316; Jupiter's weapons, if we readtela, and there's little to choose between those readings), but that with their help Numa may be able to draw Jupiter down from the sky to answer his enquiry. (shrink)

‘The last stanza of Horace's poem’, writes Denis Feeney of Hor. Carm. 3.3, ‘declares virtually outright that he has just been “quoting” epic matter: “desine peruicax | referre sermones deorum et | magna modis tenuare paruis” ’. A poem that recounts the doings of gods automatically demands comparison with epic, but if the speeches of gods are presented, all the more so. Horace's poem in fact evokes an episode within a specific epic poem, the Council of the Gods that occurred (...) during the first book of Ennius’ Annales. But such divine councils are a ‘stock epic scene’, and rather more than that: they are moments when epic is at its most quintessentially epic. In simple terms, an epic poet ‘may underline the significance and increase the dramatic effect’ of a critical point in the narrative ‘by showing us that it exercised the gods’, and that analysis applies to any divine presence in a poem: if a key impulse of epic is to amplify the significance of human activity, those occasions when higher forces overtly assert their control of human destiny satisfy a number of fundamental preoccupations of the genre. But in the Council of the Gods we have the most developed and impressive realization of this divine concern for mortal existence, as well as a topos that in Rome at least achieved special status within the broader field of divine machinery in epic. That status is perhaps reflected in a tendency discernible in the Roman section of the tradition for such councils to fall early in the epic narrative, as if initiating the epic plot. If so, however, Virgil's Council at Aen. 10.1–117 defies expectation by failing to be convened until the plot of the epic is very far advanced indeed, and even then, as this article will consider, achieving strikingly less than one might expect of a plenary gathering of supernatural powers at an advanced stage in an epic narrative. (shrink)

From the relative obscurity in which Levinas's work languished until very recently, Emmanuel Levinas must now be judged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Continental philosophy. There is no better guide than John Lewelyn to lead one through the thickets of Levinas's prose. Bursting with questions, multiple references, cascading citations and multilingual puns and nuances, this book is the compelling record of intellectual obsession. Taking as its guiding thre the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly (...) chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of the Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, feminity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hestitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics. The book concludes with a sensitive reading of the autobiographical epigraphs to Levinas's Otherwise than Being... and a consideration of the Holocaust. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples often embrace different versions of the concept of food sovereignty. Yet some of these concepts are seemingly based on impossible ideals of food self-sufficiency. I will suggest in this essay that for at least some North American Indigenous peoples, food sovereignty movements are not based on such ideals, even though they invoke concepts of cultural revitalization and political sovereignty. Instead, food sovereignty is a strategy of Indigenous resurgence that negotiates structures of settler colonialism that erase the ecological value (...) of certain foods for Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

For a homicidal tyrant Domitian was disconcertingly droll. A number of examples of is ‘sardonic wit’ survive. One of them was so good that Marcus Aurelius supposedly repeated it, and attributed it to Hadrian rather than Domitian on the grounds that good sayings had no moral force if they came from tyrants.3 Domitian also possessed a talent for writing. Suetonius and Tacitus claim that his interest in literature was merely a pretence, but Domitian′s contemporaries claim for him genuine ability, and (...) here for once they seem much closer to the mark, as Coleman argues. (shrink)

For a homicidal tyrant Domitian was disconcertingly droll. A number of examples of is ‘sardonic wit’ survive. One of them was so good that Marcus Aurelius supposedly repeated it, and attributed it to Hadrian rather than Domitian on the grounds that good sayings had no moral force if they came from tyrants.3 Domitian also possessed a talent for writing. Suetonius and Tacitus claim that his interest in literature was merely a pretence, but Domitian′s contemporaries claim for him genuine ability, and (...) here for once they seem much closer to the mark, as Coleman argues. (shrink)

Abstract As Paul B. Thompson suggests in his recent seminal paper, “‘There’s an App for That’: Technical Standards and Commodification by Technological Means,” technical standards restructure property (and other social) relations. He concludes with the claim that the development of technical standards of commodification can serve purposes with bad effects such as “the rise of the factory system and the deskilling of work” or progressive effects such as how “technical standards for animal welfare… discipline the unwanted consequences of market forces.” (...) In this reply, we want to append several points to his argument and suggest that he rightly points out that standards can promote various goods; however, there are peculiar powers wielded by standardization processes that might profitably be unpacked more systematically than Thompson's article seems to suggest. First, the concealment of the technopolitics around standards is largely due to their peculiar ontological status as recipes for reality. Second, technical standards can and do commit violence against persons, but such violence is often suffered not in the formation of class consciousness, as Marx might have put it, but as a failure to conform to the laws of nature . Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0048-1 Authors Lawrence Busch, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 429A Berkey Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge advances a theory of how designers can improve decision-making in various situations where people have to make choices. We claim that the moral acceptability of nudges hinges in part on whether they can provide an account of the competence required to offer nudges, an account that would serve to warrant our general trust in choice architects. What needs to be considered, on a methodological level, is whether they have clarified the competence required for choice (...) architects to prompt subtly our behaviour toward making choices that are in our best interest from our own perspectives. We argue that, among other features, an account of the competence required to offer nudges would have to clarify why it is reasonable to expect that choice architects can understand the constraints imposed by semantic variance. Semantic variance refers to the diverse perceptions of meaning, tied to differences in identity and context, that influence how users interpret nudges. We conclude by suggesting that choice architects can grasp semantic variance if Thaler and Sunstein’s approach to design is compatible with insights about meaning expressed in science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

"An indispensable book for those who would relate Dreiser's philosophy to his fiction." --Antioch Review.

Recent scholarship has argued that Simon Peter is not the author of 1 Peter, whilst maintaining that the addressees in 1:1 are the real recipients of the letter. We contend that both the stated author and the stated audience are part of the author’s deception. We propose instead that the author may have simply argued that this text was an older letter from Peter. This proposal is consistent with the widely‐held view that pseudepigraphical letters were not knowingly accepted in early (...) Christian circles, as well as the ancient tradition that Peter was believed to be the real author of the text and offers a simple solution as to how the letter escaped the scrutiny that came with pseudepigraphical works. If this thesis is followed, scholarship concerned with uncovering the socio‐economic status of the Christians in Asia Minor based on this text is therefore misguided. (shrink)

Participatory approaches to environmental decision making and assessment continue to grow in academic and policy circles. Improving how we understand the structure of deliberative activities is especially important for addressing problems in natural resources, climate change, and food systems that have wicked dimensions, such as deep value disagreements, high degrees of uncertainty, catastrophic risks, and high costs associated with errors. Yet getting the structure right is not the only important task at hand. Indeed, participatory activities can break down and fail (...) to achieve their specific goals when some of the deliberators lack what we will call participatory virtues. We will argue for the importance of future research on how environmental education can incorporate participatory virtues to equip future citizens with the virtues they will need to deliberate about wicked, environmental problems. What is the role of education for deliberative skills and virtues relative to other aspects of environmental education, such as facts and values education? How important is it relative to careful design of the deliberative process? What virtues really matter? (shrink)

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge advances a theory of how designers can improve decision-making in various situations where people have to make choices. We claim that the moral acceptability of nudges hinges in part on whether they can provide an account of the competence required to offer nudges, an account that would serve to warrant our general trust in choice architects. What needs to be considered, on a methodological level, is whether they have clarified the competence required for choice (...) architects to prompt subtly our behaviour toward making choices that are in our best interest from our own perspectives. We argue that, among other features, an account of the competence required to offer nudges would have to clarify why it is reasonable to expect that choice architects can understand the constraints imposed by semantic variance. Semantic variance refers to the diverse perceptions of meaning, tied to differences in identity and context, that influence how users interpret nudges. We conclude by suggesting that choice architects can grasp semantic variance if Thaler and Sunstein’s approach to design is compatible with insights about meaning expressed in science and technology studies and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

For philosophers such as Kant, the imagination is the starting point for all thought. For others, such as Wittgenstein, what is important is only how the word 'imagination' is used. In spite of the attention the imagination has received from major philosophers, remarkably little has been written about the radically different interpretations they have made of it. _The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas_ is an outstanding contribution to this vaccuum. Focusing on Kant and Levinas, John Llewelyn takes us (...) on a dazzling tour of the philosophical imagination. He shows us that despite the different treatments they accord to the imagination, there is much to be gained from comparing these two key thinkers. From Kant, Llewelyn shows how the imagination is the common root of all understanding. He contrasts this with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the imagination plays an ambivalent role both as necessary for and a threat to recognition of the other. John Llewelyn also introduces the importance of the work of Heidegger Schelling, Hegel, Arendt and Derrida on the imagination and what this work can tell us about the relationship between the imagination and ethics, aesthetics and literature. _The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas_ is a brilliant reading of a neglected but important philosophical theme and is essential reading for those in contemporary philosophy, art theory and literature. (shrink)

"This is a book of scintillating intelligence, a book whose range of references, whose extraordinary ethical sensibility and linguistic creativity, set a standard for philosophy that few if any contemporary thinkers other than Derrida and ...