By convention epinician poetry claims to be both obligatory and truthful, yet in the intersection of obligation and truth lies a seeming paradox: the poet presents his poetry as commissioned by a patron but also claims to be unbiased enough to convey the truth. In Slater's interpretation Pindar reconciles this paradox by casting his relationship to the patron as one of guest-friendship: when he declares himself a guest-friend of the victor, he agrees to the obligation ‘a) not to be envious (...) of hisxenosand b) to speak well of him. The argumentation is:Xeniaexcludes envy, I am axenos, therefore I am not envious and consequently praise honestly’. Slater observes that envy may foster bias against the patron, but the problem of pro-patron bias remains: does the poet's friendship with and obligation to his patron produce praise at the expense of truth? (shrink)

One may purport that ones awareness of space for scientific purposes comes about from a potential awareness of its'absence that is derived from times when ones attention is not focused on it. Yet simply one might extract the notion that space and entailed properties of it are elemental - i.e. conceptually non reducible and that from which all emanates. The words non-ethical induction, entailing the existence of ethical induction, if compared in a corresponding manner (to indivisible space and the attentive (...) awareness of it), also entail that the ethics of induction in science are dependant on attentive focus. In the following description I will attempt to draw some logical conclusions employing this analogy regardless of its' potential validity or invalidity and then relate these conclusions to actual circumstances in order to lend them substance. (shrink)