Ii is a well-known fact that the men of the Macedonian phalanx under Philip and Alexander were known collectively asor ‘foot companions’. Our first reference to the name comes from Demosthenes, who in his second Olynthiac tries unconvincingly to disparage the fighting qualities of Philip's mercenaries andDemosthenes adds no explanation, and it was left to commentators and lexicographers to unearth a relevant fragment from thePhilippicaof Anaximenes of Lampsacus.

One of the more intriguing figures of the first period of the Successors is Nicanor, the lieutenant and admiral of Cassander. He came into prominence when he assumed command of the Macedonian garrison at Athens, late in 319 B.c. After distinguishing himself there he took a fleet to the Bosporus, where with Antigonus' collaboration he won a decisive victory over Polyperchon's royal navy. Subsequently his aspirations became sufficiently lofty to threaten his patron's security, and Cassander took elaborate precautions to ensure (...) his arrest and condemnation. Nicanor was clearly a figure of considerable importance; yet no source even hints at his origins and family background. Can conjecture go any way to filling the gaps? (shrink)

In a recent article Professor Brunt has made an eloquent plea for greater rigour in handling the remains of non-extant authors. When the original is lost and we depend I upon quotation, paraphrase or mere citation by later authorities, we must first establish the reliability of the source which supplies the fragment. There is obviously a world of difference between the long verbal quotations in Athenaeus and the disjointed epitomes provided by the periochae of Livy. As a general rule, the (...) fuller and more explicit the reproduction in the secondary source, the more confident we can be that it approximates to the original. Our doubts should increase as the references become less precise and resort to paraphrase rather than direct quotation. The wider context is also important. One always needs to know why the secondary author is making his citation and what interest he has in a strictly literal reproduction. These principles are unexceptionable, but they are difficult to maintain in practice. One rarely has the opportunity to make a sustained experiment, checking an author's techniques' of quotation and digest against sources which are now extant. As a result the historian all too often feels constrained to squeeze the last drop of meaning out of testimonia which are by their very nature imprecise. The standard work, Jacoby's Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, is a pitfall for the unwary. It presents all citations, whether full quotations or the vaguest of references, on the same status as ‘fragments’; and the context is necessarily reduced to the barest minimum, so that the reader's attention is focussed directly upon the lost original and diverted from the machinery of transmission. (shrink)

New evidence often complicates as much as it clarifies. That truth is well illustrated by Stephen Tracy's recent and brilliant discovery that a tiny unpublished fragment of an Attic inscription belongs to a known decree . The decree has hitherto been recognised as an enactment of the oligarchy imposed by Antipater in 322. Its proposer, Archedicus of Lamptrae, was a leading member of the new regime and held the most influential office of state, that of anagrapheus, in 320/19.2 Appropriately enough (...) the decree confers honours upon members of the Macedonian court, but as the stone now reveals, it is phrased in a remarkable and anomalous manner: ‘in order that as many as possible of the friends of the king and of Antipater may be honoured by the Athenian people and confer benefactions upon the city’. There is no question about the meaning. The decree refers to friends of an unknown king, who are also friends of Antipater. But after Alexander's death there was a dual kingship. Philip III Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV reigned jointly and are generally termed ‘the kings’. How can the singular singular be explained? (shrink)

Propaganda and history are often inseparable. Most governments are in a position to control the dissemination of evidence, and if an event is embarrassing or damaging, the relevant evidence is certain to be distorted or withheld. Moreover the writers of history, however innocent their motives, cannot disregard the official apologia of their rulers. One notes with interest that the learned authors of the official Soviet history of the world portray the invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 as a (...) crusade of liberation. Of course it might be true that the people liberated by the Red Army were glad to be rid of ‘the arbitrary despotism of the Polish Pans’ and that in the subsequent elections there was absolute freedom of choice and overwhelming support for union with the Ukraine, but the fact remains that it was impossible for membersof the Moscow Academy to contradict their government's justification of the invasion. (shrink)

Arrian is regarded as the most authoritative of the extant sources for the reign of Alexander the Great. It is his work that is usually chosen to provide the narrative core of modern histories, and very often a mere reference to ‘the reliable Arrian’ is considered sufficient to guarantee the veracity of the information derived from him. What gives Arrian his prestige is his reliance on contemporary sources, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. It is recognized that Arrian's narrative is based primarily upon (...) Ptolemy, and, as long as Ptolemy is regarded as an impeccable mine of facts for Alexander's reign and Arrian's work is accepted as a faithful reproduction of Ptolemy, the Anabasis Alexandri stands out as a uniquely authoritative record of Alexander's reign. (shrink)

Alexander's satrapal appointments in Syria have long been a focal point of scholarly dissension, for the relevant passages in the ancient sources are uniformly inconsistent and sometimes disconcertingly corrupt. A running debate continued until 1935, when Oscar Leuze presented a monumental survey of the ancient evidence together with exhaustive refutation of the hypotheses advanced by earlier scholars. Since then the problems of Syria under Alexander have been left virtually undisturbed, which is a pity. In the first place, Leuze's treatment is (...) not impregnable. His massive discussion tends to convince through sheer accumulation of argument rather than by the cogency of its logic, which can often be faulted. (shrink)

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals to (...) moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’. (shrink)

There is relative agreement among modern scholars that the bulk of Arrian's literary activity came late in his life. What has become the standard theory was evolved by Eduard Schwartz, who maintained that it was only after the end of his public career that Arrian turned to writing. According to this hypothesis the Пєρίπλους of 131/ A.D. was a tentative preliminary monograph, which was followed in 136/7 by a work of similar genre, the.

This article addresses the problem of veracity in ancient historiography. It contests some recent views that the criteria of truth in historical writing were comparable to the standards of forensic rhetoric. Against this I contend that the historians of antiquity did follow their sources with commendable fi delity, superimposing a layer of comment but not adding independent material. To illustrate the point I examine the techniques of the Alexander historian, Q. Curtius Rufus, comparing his treatment of events with a range (...) of other sources that reflect the same tradition. The results can be paralleled in early modern historiography, in the dispute between J. G. Droysen and K. W. Krüger on the character of Callisthenes of Olynthus. Both operate with the same material, but give it different “spins” according to their political perspectives. There is error and hyperbole, but no deliberate fiction. (shrink)

One of the most enigmatic figures in Macedonian history is Alexander of Lyncestis, son of Aeropus and son-in-law of the great Antipater. During the reign of his royal namesake he achieved sensational prominence, deposed from his command of the élite Thessalian cavalry under suspicion of treasonable correspondence with the Persian court. Still more sensational, however, is his involvement in the murder of Philip II. Our sources are unanimous that together with his brothers, Heromenes and Arrhabaeus, he was party to the (...) murder, but secured pardon by his immediate recognition of Alexander as king.The immediate recognition is certain, the participation in the murder much less so. (shrink)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms (long noted by theorists like William Connolly and Quentin Skinner), as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

A recent article in Philosophy of Science by Andrew Lugg (1985), revives interest once again in Johannes Kepler’s so-called “discovery” of the laws of planetary motion. Typically, as if by some recurring philosophical instinct, it focuses on Kepler’s finally settling on the ellipse for planetary orbits--the first of his three laws. There is a fascination with the limiting shape of what is still taken to be the scope of the Sun’s sovereign domain, rather than with the second, or, even more (...) rarely, the third law. Ever since the famous debate between John Stuart Mill and William Whewell, philosophers and historians have been drawn to this notable advance in early modern science--in what Kepler himself calls his “war on Mars” (the planet itself named after the “god” of war). (shrink)

This study analyses the sensitivity of public goods contributions through the lens of psychological motives. We report the results of a public goods experiment in which subjects were induced with the motives of care and anger through autobiographical recall. Subjects’ preferences, beliefs, and perceptions under each motive are compared with those of subjects experiencing a neutral autobiographical recall control condition. We find, but only for those subjects with the highest comprehension of the game, that care elicits significantly higher contributions than (...) anger, with the control treatment in between. This positive influence of the care motive on unconditional giving is accounted for partly by preferences for giving and partly by beliefs concerning greater contributions by others. Anger also affects attention to own and other’s payoffs and perceptions of the game’s incentive structure. (shrink)

This paper identifies that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a negative effect on software piracy rates in addition to consolidating prior research that economic development and the cultural dimension of individualism also negatively affect piracy rates. Using data for 59 countries from 2000 to 2005, the findings show that economic well-being, individualism and technology development as measured by ICT expenditures explain between 70% and 82% of the variation in software piracy rates during this period. The research results provide important (...) implications for policy makers and business practitioners to help reduce software piracy. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen a welcome erosion of traditional dogmas of Alexander scholarship, and a number of hallowed theories, raised on a cushion of metaphysical speculation above the mundane historical evidence, have succumbed to attacks based on rigorous logic and source analysis. The brotherhood of man as a vision of Alexander is dead, as is the idea that all Alexander sources can be divided into sheep and goats, the one based on extracts from the archives and the other (...) mere rhetorical fantasy. One notable theory, however, still flourishes and has indeed been described as one of the few certainties among Alexander's aims. This is the so-called policy of fusion. As so often, the idea and terminology go back to J. G. Droysen, who hailed Alexander's marriage to Rhoxane as a symbol of the fusion of Europe and Asia, which the king recognised as the consequence of his victory. At Susa the fusion of east and west was complete and Alexander, as interpreted by Droysen, saw in that fusion the guarantee of the strength and stability of his empire. Once enunciated, Droysen's formulation passed down the mainstream of German historiography, to Kaerst, Wilcken, Berve and Schachermeyr, and has penetrated to almost all arteries of Alexander scholarship. Like the figure of Alexander himself the theory is flexible and capable of strange metamorphoses. In the hands of Tarn it developed into the idea of all subjects, Greek and barbarian, living together in unity and concord in a universal empire of peace. The polar opposite is an essay of Helmut Berve, written in the heady days before the Second World War, in which he claimed that Alexander, with commendable respect for Aryan supremacy, planned a blending of the Macedonian and Persian peoples, so that the two racially related Herrenvölkerwould lord it over the rest of the world empire. On Berve's interpretation the policy had two stages. Alexander first recognised the merits of the Iranian peoples and placed them alongside the Macedonians in his court and army hierarchy. Next came the ‘Blutvermischung’, the integration of the two peoples by marriage. (shrink)

For all its celebrity, Thucydides' Funeral Speech remains an enigma. ‘Unquantifiably authentic’ is how one scholar describes it, and the description betrays a measure of despair. We feel that the speech is authentic in some sense of the word. To some degree it corresponds to what Pericles actually said in the winter of 431/30 BC, but the degree of correspondence is a mystery. All agree that Thucydides framed the speech in his own words and integrated it with his historical narrative, (...) so as to recall and answer Archidamus' encomium of Sparta in Book I. It also anticipates the forthcoming description of the plague with mordant, subtle allusions. (shrink)

Research from psychology, neurobiology and behavioral economics indicates that a binary view of motivation, based on approach and avoidance, may be too reductive. Instead, a literature review suggests that at least seven distinct motives are likely to affect human decisions: “consumption/resource seeking,” “care,” “affiliation,” “achievement,” “status-power,” “threat approach” (or anger), and “threat avoidance” (or fear). To explore the conceptual distinctness and relatedness of these motives, we conducted a semantic categorization task. Here, participants were to assign provided words to one of (...) the motives. By applying principal component analysis to the categorization assignments we represent the semantic inter-relations of these motives on a two-dimensional space, a “semantic atlas.” This atlas suggests that, while care and affiliation are conceptually close, affiliation is closer to threat avoidance (or fear); opposite to these motives we find achievement, consumption and power, with the latter lying closer to threat approach (or anger). In a second study, we asked participants to rate how well the motive-specific words obtained in the first study described their currently experienced feelings. We find that semantically close motives are also more likely to be experienced together, that is, we replicate most of the semantic relations in the “subjective atlas.” We discuss our findings in comparison to other multi-dimensional models of motivation, which show clear similarities. In addition to these motivational atlases, we provide a database of motive-specific words, together with the valence and arousal scores. These can be used for future research on the influence of motives on decision making. (shrink)

Hauntingly beautiful photographs of 70 "champion" trees—each the biggest of its species—in a book that offers a dignified portrait of the American landscape and its true environmental heroes.

The first Athenian intervention in Sicily is one of the most opaque episodes in Thucydides. The historian for once dispenses with a full record and confines himself explicitly to the major events of the campaign. What then emerges is a disconnected narrative of geographically separate actions, most of them trivial. There is no attempt to give a synoptic picture or explain the problems of strategy, and the lack of coordination has impressed many critics. The episode is remarkable for another reason. (...) For once we have that rarest of rare birds, an independent control source for Thucydides. Since 1930 there has been available a brief fragment of papyrus, usually ascribed to Philistus, which provides an extraordinarily detailed, if fragmentary, report of a portion of the campaign. The fragment has become a standard reference, and it is reported, not always accurately, in the more recent scholarship on the Peloponnesian War. But there has been little attempt to come to terms with the historiographical problem it poses. Not only does the fragment give a large amount of detail which has no counterpart in Thucydides, but its narrative, as it is usually interpreted, is formally inconsistent with Thucydides' chronology. The new fragment is most probably the work of a Sicilian historian, well acquainted with the events of 427/6, and it is – to put it mildly – disturbing to find a contradiction in what should have been an easily verifiable sequence of events. (shrink)

The figure of Alexander inevitably dominates the history of his reign. Our extant sources are centrally focussed upon the king himself. Accordingly it is his own military actions which receive the fullest documentation. Appointments to satrapies and satrapal armies are carefully noted because he made them, but the achievements of the appointees are passed over in silence. The great victories of Antigonus which secured Asia Minor in 323 BC are only known from two casual references in Curtius Rufus, and in (...) general all the multifarious activities in the empire disappear from recorded history except in so far as they impinge upon court life in the shape of reports to Alexander and administrative decisions made by him. Moreover, the sources we possess originate either from high officers of Alexander's court, such as Ptolemy and Nearchus, or from Greek historians like Callisthenes and Cleitarchus, whose aims were literary or propagandist and whose interests were firmly anchored in court life. Inevitably Alexander bestrides that narrow world like a colossus and monopolises the historical picture. But even the figure of Alexander is far from fully fleshed. No contemporary history survives, and for continuous narratives of the reign we are dependent upon late derivative writers who saw Alexander through the filter of centuries of rhetoric and philosophy. The king had long been a stock example of many contradictory traits; he was at once the conqueror and the civiliser, the tyrant and the enlightened king. Cicero and Seneca saw him as the type of unbridled license, Arrian as the paradigm of moderation. The result is that the sources present a series of irreconcilable caricatures of Alexander but no uniform or coherent picture. (shrink)

Everywhere the 1990s have been characterized by an odd mixture of ideological triumphalism-Fukuyama's "end of history" being only the crassest example-and of ideological uncertainty-can there be, should there be, a "third way"? For all its pretensions to universality, the "New World Order" has never lost a fragility in appearance. Students of historiography can scarcely be surprised to learn that an uneasiness over the present and future has in turn frequently entailed uncertainty about the past and particularly about those parts of (...) the past which had seemed most able to give clear and significant "lessons."One evident example is the history of what in my Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima I called the "long" Second World War, that is, that crisis in confidence in the relationship between political and economic liberalism and the nation-state which, by the end of 1938, had left only Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia as in any sense preserving those "liberal" freedoms which had spread across Europe since 1789. In this article, I briefly review the most recent difficulties World War II combatant societies have had in locating a usable past in the history of those times. However, my major focus is on the specific case of Italy, very much a border state in the Cold War system, and today the political home of an "Olive Tree" and a "Liberty Pole" whose historical antecedents and whose philosophical base for the future are less than limpid. 1990s Italian historians thus give very mixed messages about the Fascist past; these are the messages I describe and decode. (shrink)

: The written renderings of Turkish names, so frequently encountered in the history of the pre-modern ruling dynasties of the Central and Eastern Islamic lands, suffered badly in the past from the deformations of authors and copyists, mainly Arabs and Persians, who did not themselves know Turkish. Moreover, these renderings have often been perpetuated by modern historians of Islam, few of whom have bothered to elucidate these names and to set forth their correct forms and meanings. The present study discusses (...) some of the very diverse principles behind medieval Turkish onomastic and uses these specifically for a consideration of the names of some prominent military commanders of the Great Seljuq sultans, ruling essentially in Persia and Iraq during the 11th and 12th centuries. (shrink)

Evidence from adult studies of deaf signers supports the dissociation between neural systems involved in processing visual linguistic and non-linguistic body actions. The question of how and when this specialization arises is poorly understood. Visual attention to these forms is likely to change with age and be affected by prior language experience. The present study used eye-tracking methodology with infants and children as they freely viewed alternating video sequences of lexical American sign language (ASL) signs and non-linguistic body actions (self-directed (...) grooming action and object-directed pantomime). In Experiment 1, we quantified fixation patterns using an area of interest (AOI) approach and calculated face preference index (FPI) values to assess the developmental differences between 6 and 11-month-old hearing infants. Both groups were from monolingual English-speaking homes with no prior exposure to sign language. Six-month-olds attended the signer’s face for grooming; but for mimes and signs, they were drawn to attend to the “articulatory space” where the hands and arms primarily fall. Eleven-month-olds, on the other hand, showed a similar attention to the face for all body action types. We interpret this to reflect an early visual language sensitivity that diminishes with age, just before the child’s first birthday. In Experiment 2, we contrasted 18 hearing monolingual English-speaking children (mean age of 4.8 years) vs. 13 hearing children of deaf adults (CODAs; mean age of 5.7 years) whose primary language at home was ASL. Native signing children had a significantly greater face attentional bias than non-signing children for ASL signs, but not for grooming and mimes. The differences in the visual attention patterns that are contingent on age (in infants) and language experience (in children) may be related to both linguistic specialization over time and the emerging awareness of communicative gestural acts. (shrink)

3. The third proposition seems to imply that outside metaphysical analogy there are only different degrees of "univocity." This would mean that things expressed according to the Aristotelian πρὸς ἕν relations, or in Scholastic terminology "analogy of attribution," should be classed as basically "univocal." This seems to be against the traditional usage [[sic-corrected duplicate line/portion of sentence missing]] organism are healthy in a way that is basically univocal, just because the reference in all cases is to one and the same (...) nature, would be to miss the import of this type of metaphysical procedure, as well as to cause confusion in the traditional terminology. Would not the interests of clarity be better served by retaining the basic opposition between the Aristotelian μοναχῶς and πολλαχῶς λεγόμενα? For the latter type I would suggest retaining "equivocal," which goes back to Boethius, who has given the fixed and definite meanings to so much of the traditional terminology. Basically opposed to the "univocal" will be the "equivocal," and under this latter class will come its three main divisions: equivocal by chance, equivocal by proportion, and equivocal by reference. Analogy, then, will be equivocity by proportion, and will be opposed immediately to the other types of equivocity, all of which as a class are opposed to the univocal. (shrink)

Anaximander wrote a book which was catalogued by the librarians of Alexandria under the title Πέρι Φύσεως--the first of many books so called. It is the first known philosophical work, in fact the first known prose work, in Greek. Of this book only one sentence is extant: "Into that from which beings have their origin they also have their passing away, by necessity; for they render to each other retribution and atonement for their injustice in the order of time." But (...) numerous references from reliable ancient sources enable us to recon- struct, with reasonable certainty, some of the principles of his doctrine. (shrink)

Tertium Organum, published in Russian in 1912, is the most interesting and important of these works. The title is explained as meaning that the book is about "the third canon of thought," namely the mystical, which has always existed, although for us moderns it appears as a third method after the deductive and inductive methods described by Aristotle and Bacon. The English translation by Nicholas Bessaraboff and Claude Bragdon was published by Manas Press in 1920, and again, revised, by Knopf (...) in 1922. The simplicity of the literary style, the short sentences and paragraphs, and the clarity with which subtle arguments are developed show the influence of the author's training as a journalist. In content Tertium Organum is a systematic treatise on epistemology. The first seven chapters are an objective survey of the physical world. The author considers that the most basic problem of physics is why space has just three dimensions, and he concludes that it is impossible to find any answer to this question in an objective study of the world of space and time. Consequently, taking as a clue Kant's thesis that space and time are forms of intuition, and inferring from this that "we bear within ourselves the conditions of our space," he approaches the problem subjectively. In the following chapters he endeavors to show how our mode of consciousness makes space three-dimensional, how other modes of consciousness would, and for other beings do, make it of fewer or more dimensions, and how these different spaces are related to each other. The next to last chapter is a collection of selections from mystical literature, with comments, and the concluding chapter considers the "cosmic consciousness" with has for its object a world of four dimensions. An appendix gives a table showing the space and time sense, psychology, logic, mathematics, forms of action, morals, forms of consciousness, forms of knowledge, and forms of science characteristic of, as well as the different beings characterized by, four "forms of the manifestation of consciousness.". (shrink)

"Religions", Mahatma Gandhi once said, "are different roads converging to the same point". But in this stimulating assessment of Christianity, Buddhism, and Vedanta, Professor Burch develops the revolutionary theory that religions, starting from the same point, take divergent roads to different goals incompatible one with the other. Whereas Gandhi asks, "What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal?" Dr. Burch asks, "What does it matter that in taking different roads we reach (...) different goals?" Religions, he maintains, do not have to fight each other because of their differences, or abolish their differences to avoid fighting. He is a firm believer in coexistence for religions. Ecumenicity is good "in so far as it means, on the one hand, cooperation with other faiths in their common concerns of social activities and resistance to irreligion, and on the other hand mutual respect for the other faiths themselves". Dr. Burch argues for the coexistence of three alternative Absolutes: Truth which corresponds to the religion of Hindu Advaita Vedanta, Absolute Freedom which corresponds to Buddhism, and love which corresponds to Christianity. The religious quest requires absolute commitment to one or other of these irreducible alternatives; not to truth and freedom and love, but to truth or freedom or love. In his Foreword, Professor W. Norris Clarke, S.J., of Fordham University, subjects Dr. Burch's theory to the most rigorous critical analysis, but in the end invites each reader to make the effort himself of coming to grips with the author's profound and original challenge. (shrink)

Even inanimate bodies, to be sure, have a certain amount of freedom. Insofar as they are definite things they maintain their integrity against the tendency to be reabsorbed into the Indefinite. Even a gas preserves its mass, a liquid preserves also its volume, and a solid preserves even its shape, in the face of a hostile environment. But the motion of an inanimate body is determined by the outer forces acting on it. This fact is formulated by the classical laws (...) of motion. The law of inertia states that a body left to its own devices will not change its motion. The law of force states that a body not left to its own devices will change its motion in a direction and to an extent determined by the imposed force. The law of reaction states that a body will not kick back any harder than it is kicked. (shrink)

Some Christian philosophers, notably Tertullian, have gloried in this absurdity, finding in its very irrationality a sign of the dogma's truth. But most Christian philosophers, following Augustine, have tried to find some reconciliation between reason and revelation. The history of medieval philosophy is the history of the attempt to make the revealed truths rationally intelligible. The attempt was a failure. As we proceed chronologically from Anselm of Canterbury to Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam, we find the (...) domain of intelligibility relentlessly contracting as standards of logical rigor were raised. Anselm could prove all the dogmas of the Church. Abelard could prove the Trinity but not the Incarnation. Aquinas could prove that God is our beatitude but not that he is a Trinity. Scotus could prove that God exists, but not that he is our beatitude. William of Occam could not prove even that God exists, for without revelation we know only the immediately obvious and what can be inferred from it, the empirical world. As the rational defense of Christian doctrine collapsed, the domain of rational philosophy grew smaller and smaller, leaving dogmatic theology the sole defender of metaphysical truth. The alternatives seem to be to refute William of Occam's positivistic analysis, to accept revelation blindly, or to get along without metaphysics. None of these is easy. (shrink)

The second volume of Father Copleston's History of Philosophy covers the period from Augustine through Duns Scotus. Of its 51 chapters Aquinas has eleven, Augustine and Duns Scotus six each, Bonaventura five, Erigena two, and Dionysius, Anselm, William of Auvergne, and Albertus one each, while other philosophers are treated more briefly. The author's point of view is strictly and explicitly Thomist, and the book is intended primarily as a textbook for use in Catholic seminaries. But it is written with such (...) scholarship, integrity, and clarity that it should interest a much wider circle of readers. Apparently the book is based on a thorough study of the original sources. The documentation, while not detailed, is as complete as one expects in a general work of this sort. Since the Thomist concept of philosophy is accepted, little is said about mysticism or dogmatic theology. But the various rationalistic philosophies are analyzed with a critical sympathy which endeavors to appreciate their various insights into the nature of reality. (shrink)