The modern debate around scientific structuralism has revealed the need to reassess the standing and role of both structure and objects in the metaphysics of physics. Ontic structural realism recommends that metaphysics be purged of objects. Nonetheless, its proponents have failed to specify what it means for properties to be relational and structural, and, consequently, to show how the elementary objects postulated by our best theories can be re-conceptualized in structural terms or altogether eliminated. In this paper, I draw from (...) modern physics in order to untangle various types of relational properties and propose a definition for structural properties. (shrink)

I argue that the Holonomy Interpretation, at least as it has been presented in Richard Healey’s Gauging What’s Real, faces serious problems. These problems are revealed when certain approximations and idealizations that are innate in the original formulation of the Aharonov-Bohm effect are thrust aside; in particular, when the temporal dimension is taken into account. There are two ways in which time re-appears in the picture: by considering complete solutions to the original problem, where the magnetic flux is static, and (...) by examining the effects of time dependent magnetic fluxes. Both cases expose explanatory gaps in the Interpretation, as well as conflicts between it and customary ideas about relativistic locality and local action on which the Interpretation depends. (shrink)

To single one out of the infinitely many, empirically indistinguishable gauge potentials of classical electrodynamics, and to deem it `more real' than the rest is not trivial. Only two routes are open to one who might attempt to do so. The first leads to a slippery slope: if one singles out a potential solely by requiring it to admit well behaved propagations, and on the strength of this behavior one subscribes to its reality, one inevitably subscribes to the reality of (...) infinitely many. As for the second, it seems to be barred from the beginning. But if, for reasons of metaphysical economy, one insisted on taking it, it would lead to a `truncated theory' that is physically and empirically inferior to the complete. (shrink)

Στις κβαντικές θεωρίες πεδίου, οι οποίες στην πιο ολοκληρωμένη τους μορφή εκφράζονται μέσω του μαθηματικού φορμαλισμού που ονομάζεται δεσμίδες ινών (fibre bundles), χρησιμοποιούνται εκτενώς η έννοια της συμμετρίας και η αλληλένδετη με αυτήν έννοια της διατήρησης. Ο στόχος του παρόντος άρθρου είναι η αποσαφήνιση του όρου συμμετρία, όπως αυτός εμφανίζεται στο εν λόγω πλαίσιο, καθώς και η εξέταση του ρόλου κάποιων συγκεκριμένων μαθηματικών δομών , οι οποίες εμφανίζονται ως αποτέλεσμα της χρήσης των συμμετριών, στην επιστημονική εξήγηση των φαινομένων που περιγράφονται (...) από τις κβαντικές θεωρίες πεδίου. (shrink)

Scientific understanding comes in different kinds, and each kind comes in degrees. Two of these kinds are revealed by the examination of a recent episode from the history of physics: the making of the theory of strong interactions. The first of these kinds of understanding is associated with the realization that some mathematical formalism or theory may have a fruitful application to physical phenomena. This is what I call prior understanding. Yet another kind is associated with the development of the (...) mathematical formalism into a physical theory that purports to be mathematically consistent and empirically complete –at least in the domain of its applicability. This second kind I call internal understanding. None of these two kinds is conferred by explanations; both are associated with what some authors have called genuine or scientific understanding; and both are epistemically relevant in that they are required for the achievement of some of science’s epistemic aims. (shrink)

For time-independent fields the Aharonov-Bohm effect has been obtained by idealizing the coordinate space as multiply-connected and using representations of its fundamental homotopy group to provide information on what is physically identified as the magnetic flux. With a time-dependent field, multiple-connectedness introduces the same degree of ambiguity; by taking into account electromagnetic fields induced by the time dependence, full physical behavior is again recovered once a representation is selected. The selection depends on a single arbitrary time (hence the so-called holonomies (...) are not unique), although no physical effects depend on the value of that particular time. These features can also be phrased in terms of the selection of self-adjoint extensions, thereby involving yet another question that has come up in this context, namely, boundary conditions for the wave function. (shrink)

This document records the discussion between participants at the workshop "Philosophy of Gauge Theory," Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 18-19 April 2009.

Entre 2010 et 2011, une fouille d’urgence a été menée sur la pente Sud de la colline de Viklèsà l’Est de l’acropole d’Amathonte, et a révélé un type de réservoir d’eau alimenté depuis la surface ; découverte à ce jour unique à Chypre. Ce dispositif est constitué d’une citerne creusée dans le rocher et partiellement construite, reliée, par un passage voûté, à un puits d’accès servant également pour puiser. Ce réservoir, d’une capacité de 30 m 3environ, devait desservir les besoins (...) en eau non pas d’un habitat, comme c’est souvent le cas, mais des espaces funéraire, cultuel ou économique implantés sur la colline de Viklèsdans l’Antiquité. Dans cette étude est présenté le mobilier archéologique mis au jour — céramique, lithique, figurines de terre cuite et ossements — qui atteste une occupation continue du lieu, allant de la fin de l’époque archaïque à la fin de l’époque protobyzantine, date d’abandon définitif de l’utilisation de la citerne. (shrink)

This paper reads Antigone from the perspective of the Chorus. Whereas most interpreters read Antigone from the perspective of Creon and Antigone’s respective laws, I maintain that the protagonists represent laws that are distinctly apolitical. Alternatively, I argue that the Chorus make the polis—past, present, and future—the center of their thought and action and are therefore uniquely political. Through close attention to the Chorus’s composition as a body that is both one and many at the same time, (...) and by tracing their evolving position throughout the action of the drama and in their choral odes, I argue that they model a reflective and political orientation to judgment rooted in plurality, tradition, and innovation. (shrink)

‘Unhappy boy, what a deed you have done! What came into your mind? What disaster destroyed your reason?’ This version of 1228–9, by Andrew Brown in his recent commentary, represents the majority opinion. But what ‘deed’ has Haemon done that justifies such an outburst? Jebb, followed by Kamerbeek and Brown, claims that the deed which causes Creon to wail aloud with charges of insanity is Haemon's entry into Antigone's tomb. Kamerbeek and Brown justify the extremity of Creon's reaction by (...) claiming that Creon knows that Haemon intends to kill himself. But is it reasonable to suppose that Creon's first reaction to the shocking scene of Antigone's hanging corpse and Haemon helplessly wailing would be that Haemon is on the verge of killing himself? Creon has not had time to predict his son's actions and his screams of dismay are most naturally read as a reaction to something he sees before his eyes. It would also be strange if Creon had absolutely no reaction to Antigone's death; he expected to find her alive. (shrink)

It is now some years since Professor D. Daiches Raphael published his interesting book, The Paradox of Tragedy , which represented one of the first serious attempts made by a British philosopher to assess the significance of tragic drama for ethical, and indeed metaphysical theory. Since then we have had a variety of books touching on related topics: for instance, Dr George Steiner's Death of Tragedy and Mr Raymond Williams’ most recent, elusive and interesting essay, Modern Tragedy. To entitle an (...) essay Theology and Tragedy might be thought to invite needless trouble for oneself; to indulge to a dangerous degree the human intellectual obsession of supposing that ‘the meaning of a word is an object’. After all, if one confines one's regard to the Greeks, one has to recognise that between the treatments of their common theme of Electra , Sophocles and Euripides are in fact doing very different things. There is no gainsaying the significance for Euripides of the postponement of the murder of Clytemnestra till after that of Aegisthus, still less of his introduction into the play of the morally upright peasant, who has had the banished Electra in his keeping, and whose simple integrity contrasts both with the corruption of the court and the obsessive preoccupation with a dreadful, supposed duty of brother and sister. The element of propaganda is unmistakable; while in Sophocles’ Electra it is altogether absent, although Dr Victor Ehrenberg in his very interesting monograph on Sophocles and Pericles has argued strongly for an element of subtle political commentary in the treatment of Oedipus in the Oedipus Tyrannus , and of Pocreon in the Antigone. These remarks may serve to show that the title does not express a blind indifference to the multiple complexity of those works which we class together as tragedies. They are inherently complex, and various in emphasis; at best we can discern a family resemblance between them, and, in an essay like this, the author runs the risk not only of selecting examples tailor-made to his thesis, but also of imposing an appearance of similarity of conception where it is at least equally important to stress differences. (shrink)

In this slim volume of three lectures, Judith Butler reads Sophocles’ Antigone with a care often reserved for Oedipus himself. She takes on Hegel’s interpretation of the play, found primarily in the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right. While Butler intends to challenge Hegel’s reading, she begins the book with an epigraph from the Aesthetics: “They are gripped and shattered by something intrinsic to their own being.” It is this engagement with the texts, the sense that Antigone’s fate (...) is our fate, which gives Antigone’s Claim its vitality. (shrink)

Tracing the sign -- Signing the trace -- The messianic without messianism -- Mourning terminable and interminable : law and (commmodity) fetishism -- Justice, law, and Antigone's singular act -- Generalizing the economy of fetishism.

This paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. (...) This way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediacy of an ‘in-itself’. My reading, by contrast, finds under the tragic conflict of this text of Hegel's nothing but the ‘no’ of death that negates itself, or a principle that has the form of an original and irreducible conflict. Under this interpretation of Hegelian spirit, it becomes clear that it can neither fail to posit some form of ‘in-itself’ nor sublate its own tragic nature. This way it is shown that Hegel's reflection on the past does not reassure the superiority of the identity of the present, but rather illuminates its ‘broken’ nature. I thus offer an alternative view on Hegel's comprehension of the relation between present and past and between philosophy and time. (shrink)

This paper interrogates Hölderlin's effort to deconstruct the speculative matrix of tragedy, with a particular focus on his "Remarks on Antigone," which are appended to his translation of the Sophoclean tragedy. In focus are, firstly, the separative force of the caesura, which stems tragic transport and is here analyzed, in terms of Hölderlin's understanding of Greece in relation to "Hesperia," as an incipiently Hesperian poetic gesture. Secondly, Hölderlin's key thought of the mutual "unfaithfulness" of God and man is at (...) issue: the god here is revealed as sheer time, while man is thrown back upon the bare moment. This "unfaithfulness" must be tempered by a striving that turns back from the quest for transcendence to the measures of fmitude and to this world. By attentiveness to the singular (which is not the particular), the tragic poet, unlike the speculative philosopher, reveals time's agonal spacing. (shrink)

This paper interrogates Hölderlin's effort to deconstruct the speculative matrix of tragedy, with a particular focus on his "Remarks on Antigone," which are appended to his translation of the Sophoclean tragedy. In focus are, firstly, the separative force of the caesura, which stems tragic transport and is here analyzed, in terms of Hölderlin's understanding of Greece in relation to "Hesperia," as an incipiently Hesperian poetic gesture. Secondly, Hölderlin's key thought of the mutual "unfaithfulness" of God and man is at (...) issue: the god here is revealed as sheer time, while man is thrown back upon the bare moment. This "unfaithfulness" must be tempered by a striving that turns back from the quest for transcendence to the measures of fmitude and to this world. By attentiveness to the singular (which is not the particular), the tragic poet, unlike the speculative philosopher, reveals time's agonal spacing. (shrink)

This book presents selections from the political and social thought of the ancient West from the early sixth century BCE up to the early years of the Roman Empire and includes not only the classic philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, but a number of dramatists and historians as well. The range of topics these writings treat run from class conflict, through the perils of democracy and the horrors of tyranny, to the place of women in politics, while the styles range (...) from the deeply dramatic of Sophocles' Antigone and the bawdy satire of Aristophanes' Assemblywomen to Plato's Socratic dialogue Republic and Aristotle's scientific treatise Politics. The translations have been chosen, and sometimes modified, for clarity and readability, and are accompanied by introductions which set forth the historical context and trace the general lines of thought the readings develop. Frequent notes explain references to ancient lore unfamiliar to many readers. Questions for discussion accompany each reading. (shrink)

This paper uses E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End to help articulate what I describe as a moral pluralist approach to moral conflict. Moral pluralism, I argue here, represents a way of responding to the moral conflicts we encounter in our lives, rather than the mere acknowledgment of their inevitability, as suggested by value pluralists like Isaiah Berlin. The tragic view of moral conflict epitomized by Sophocles’ Antigone and endorsed by most theories of value pluralism, tells us that we (...) must choose between moral commitments and reconcile ourselves to the moral regrets that inevitably follow from moral choice. The moral pluralist view, in contrast, suggests that we should seek means, however imperfect, of satisfying conflicting moral commitments and minimizing causes for moral regret. That view, I argue, drives the words and actions of Forster’s heroine in Howards End, Margaret Schlegel. Confronted with a battle between a willful patriarch and a self-righteous sister, a conflict that maps neatly onto the central conflict in Sophocles’ tragedy, Margaret refuses to take sides without refusing to make moral choices. And in doing so, she comes to exemplify an unexpected kind of moral heroism. (shrink)

I have little to say on this passage, where it seems necessary to maintain the vulgate notwith standing its obvious defects. My only reason for discussing it is to call attention to the strangeness of Jebb's proceeding when seeking to support Hermann's conjecture παλλλοιν which he admits into the text. The objection to Hermann's view is that, as he himself admits, there is no evidence that πáλληλος could be used in the sense of λληλιφóνος. For that, I suppose, is the (...) meaning of ‘mutual hands,’ which both Jebb and Campbell suggest as a translation, although ‘mutual violence’ would be better. But the chief purpose of this note is to protest against the mode of interpretation applied to Philo de Mose 3. 36. II. p. 175 M. διà τàς ν δασι καí πνρì γνιμéνας συνχς καì παλλλονς φθορáς Turnebu s rightl yrenders ‘alternas interneciones,’ and why Jebb supposes him to have meant ‘mutual’ I do not know. Anyhow he admits that Philo used the word in its ordinary sense of successive, and proceeds to paraphrase ‘owing to the continuous and rapid succession of calamities by flood and fire’ . All this is quite beside the mark, for the reference is to the alternate destruction of the world at the κπρωσις by fire and at the ξγρωσιςby water. I must take leave to refer to the evidence collected in my book on Zeno and Cleanthes, p. 253, to which should be added a most instructive passage of Origen : περì τν κακν λóγος ο μνóντων ì ν τατᾦ διà τν τοι τηροσαν τà πì γ$$$ς πρóνοιαν κατακλνσμο καì κπνρ03CE;σσι καθαíρονσαν.Add the passages from Lucan quoted by Mr. Heitland in his Introduction, p. xliii. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sophocles’s Enemy Sisters: Antigone and IsmeneWm. Blake Tyrrell (bio) and Larry J. BennettAt the core of the Oedipus myth, as Sophocles presents it, is the proposition that all masculine relationships are based on reciprocal acts of violence. Laius, taking his cue from the oracle, violently rejects Oedipus out of fear that his son will seize his throne and invade his conjugal bed. Oedipus, taking his cue from the (...) oracle, does away with Laius, violently rebuffs the sphinx, then takes their places—as king and “scourge of the city,” respectively. Again, Oedipus, taking his cue from the oracle, plots the death of that unknown figure who may be seeking to usurp his own position. Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias, each taking his cue from the oracle, seek one another’s downfall.All these acts of violence gradually wear away the differences that exist not only in the same family but throughout the community.—René Girard, Violence and the SacredRené Girard does not include feminine relationships in his assessment of the Oedipus myth, yet the same redundancy that characterizes the males marks the females.1 Jocasta conjoins in one person multiple and redundant social roles: she is the mother and wife of the same person, for which she [End Page 1] hangs herself, leaving for Oedipus “many pains that a mother’s furies fulfilled” (Homer Odyssey 11.279–80). Her daughters, their father’s sisters, manifest kinship redundancy in two persons. Incest produces circularly, reverting to a sibling of the parent rather than moving forward with a descendant. The absence of linear progression from one generation to the next creates a sameness and equilibrium that thwart separation and individuality. Oedipus’s brothers/sons fail in their adult roles, because neither can overcome the other’s right to the throne of Thebes and the mastery of its royal household. They are enemy brothers locked in reciprocal violence.2 Antigone and Ismene have escaped notice not only as enemy sisters but even as products of the same incest. Audiences for Sophocles’s Antigone have viewed them as “normal” women and cooperated with his characters in emphasizing the differences between them. They have assumed from Antigone’s betrothal to Haemon and resistance to Creon that she is the elder, more mature sister.3 They tend to accept without question that Antigone engages in burial rituals with Polyneices’s corpse (241–58) and returns to it (442–35).4 Bernard M. W. Knox’s critically powerful concept of the “Sophoclean hero” has bolstered this view of Antigone while reducing Ismene to a foil, and abetted the tendency of modern producers of the play to cast an older or more famous actress in the role of Antigone.5 Naturalistic readings like that of C. M. Bowra—“seeing that Ismene is her only close relative in the world, Antigone is remarkably cold to her”6—have masked the source and hence the vehemence of Antigone’s fury.That the reciprocity of the violence between Ismene and Antigone has gone unnoticed is understandable in view of the familiarity of the conflict between their brothers. Males in Greek society pursued difference by striving to excel as aristoi (best) in competition for prestige, wealth, and power.7 Whenever Eteocles and Polyneices came together, each asserted a right to Oedipus’s household and throne that was equally matched, and violence ensued from the equilibrium. On the other hand, Greek women were not supposed to compete with one another for distinction. They wove wool for clothes, maintained the household, and cared for the children, the sick, and the dead, activities that required cooperation away from public view.8 Proximity to other women was the norm and desideratum. Moreover, lawgivers like Solon based their funeral legislation on the premise that every woman wanted to participate in mourning.9 For the sake of public tranquillity, legislators tried to limit the numbers of women participants by imposing restrictions according to degrees of kinship, for instance, to children of fifth cousins. In this context, women were interchangeable, and the places they held during birth, coming of age in wedding ceremonies, and death, [End Page 2] were open to more than one woman. Closeness and... (shrink)

In three articles published in Blackwood's Magazine , one Wilson, under the nom de guerre of Christopher North, propounded the view that Shakespeare's Othello operates on a double time scheme. The represented time in Cyprus is some thirty-three hours, lasting from about 4 p.m. on Saturday till the early hours of Monday morning. If we take this time scheme at face value, there has been no opportunity for Desdemona and Cassio to commit adultery: Iago's insinuations and Othello's suspicions are manifestly (...) absurd. However, another time scheme is in operation as well. By its clock, the protagonists have been in Cyprus for more than a week. For example, we find Bianca, a local courtesan, complaining that it has been ‘seven days and nights, / Eight score eight hours’ since she last saw Cassio, who by the first time scheme had arrived in Cyprus only the day before. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 134-178.

Writing from a scientifically and philosophically informed perspective, the authors provide a critical overview of the conceptual difficulties encountered in many current neuroscientific and psychological theories.