This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: chronological snobbery (CS). First described by the Christian academic Owen Barfield in the 1920s and later popularized by his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, the fallacy of CS presupposes that cultural, philosophical, or scientific ideas from later time periods are necessarily superior to those from earlier ages. Grounded on the Enlightenment's concept of “progress”, this informal fallacy stems from the assumption that the ever‐increasing amount of knowledge (...) in society naturally and perpetually replaces all outdated, disproven ideas with updated, better‐justified beliefs, therefore making old ideas incorrect or irrelevant simply because they are old. Essentially the opposite of the appeal to ancient authority, CS relates to guilt by association, hasty generalization, and poisoning the well fallacies whenever it references unrelated false beliefs held by individuals from the originating time period. (shrink)

This article presents a catalogue of some of the ways in which Proust's novel fails to make sense. The major categories of non-sense examined here are: minor inconsistencies due to the unfinished quality of the work; chronological incoherences; and inconsistent distinctions between narrator and author, with particular attention to textual entailments of the differences between the author and his semi-autobiographical narrator in terms of homosexuality, Jewishness and snobbery.

This is a paper about the nature of snobbery and the undermining import of a charge of snobbery. On my account, snobs sincerely attempt to identify and correctly evaluate the aesthetically relevant features of an object, but they get things wrong, and their getting things wrong is explained by the fact that they under-value that which they associate with being lower-class. We can see the need for this account by reflecting on examples, and can distinguish it from existing (...) accounts of snobbery by thinking about when and why evidence of snobbery constitutes higher-order evidence against one’s aesthetic judgements. Existing accounts either are consistent with snobs’ aesthetic judgements being flawless, and thus not undermined by evidence of snobbery, or they imply that the canonical reasoning-process for arriving at aesthetic judgements has been bypassed altogether. On my account, by contrast, snobbery does not bypass the canonical aesthetic reasoning-process but distorts it in systematic and predictable ways. (shrink)

Matthew Kieran has recently argued that those he calls ‘appreciative snobs’ go wrong by valuing appreciative objects primarily because of their ability to raise the snob’s social status, what I call social contagion snobbery. In this paper, I argue that there are at least two other ways that snobbery commonly manifests itself in appreciative contexts, what I call attitudinal snobbery and contextual snobbery. As it turns out, all three snobs—Kieran’s social-contagion snob, the attitudinal snob, and the (...) contextual snob—represent distinct ways that appreciative judgments can go wrong because of how socio-hierarchical elements figure into the snob’s appreciative judgments. (shrink)

Apparently snobbery undermines justification for and legitimacy of aesthetic claims. It is also pervasive in the aesthetic realm, much more so than we tend to presume. If these two claims are combined, a fundamental problem arises: we do not know whether or not we are justified in believing or making aesthetic claims. Addressing this new challenge requires an epistemological story which underpins when, where and why snobbish judgement is problematic, and how appreciative claims can survive. This leads towards a (...) virtue-theoretic account of art appreciation and aesthetic justification, as contrasted with a purely reliabilist one – a new direction for contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

This essay briefly introduces and contextualizes the extant work on aesthetic snobbery, and identifies some areas for further inquiry. Currently four kinds of snobbery have been identified—social contagion snobbery, attitudinal snobbery, contextual snobbery, and straight-up classist snobbery. Interestingly, each kind of snobbery is thought to manifest itself as a distinct epistemic failing, and for this reason they are advanced as distinct, non-competing kinds of snobbery. Some snob’s aesthetic judgments will be false or (...) unjustified (social-contagion and straight-up classist), some will be unfitting (contextual), and some will fail to have an apt attitude toward their aesthetic judgment (attitudinal). Because the debate has been framed so narrowly, on how the vice of aesthetic snobbery undermines aesthetic judgment, several fruitful areas of philosophical investigation remain unexplored. (shrink)

The chapter describes a detailed chronology of Michel Foucault's life and work. This substantial and detailed intellectual biography avoids the worst excesses of some of Foucault's earlier biographers, providing an austere yet personal insight into the intertwining of Foucault's personal, political, and scholarly trajectory.

Dr Brandwood's book presents a factual and critical account of the more important of the various attempts that have been made to establish the order of composition of Plato's dialogues by analysing his diction and prose style. Plato's literary activity covered fifty years and there is almost no direct evidence, either external or internal, to help in establishing the relative order of his writings. Until the middle of the nineteenth century people were dependent on personal interpretation of the probable line (...) of development of Plato's thought and doctrines, but then a less subjective method was discovered, which relied instead on the observation of changes in Plato's prose style. Dr Brandwood examines the investigations of each scholar individually, checking the correctness of the methodology and the accuracy of the statistics, before arriving at fairly definite conclusions of his own, at least as far as the works of Plato's middle and old age are concerned. (shrink)

Abstract:This article examines the use of astronomical chronology in Jesuit and secular works of history between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. It suggests that the highly visible adoption of astronomical records in historical scholarship in Enlightenment Europe by Nicolas Fréret and Voltaire was entangled with debates about Chinese chronology, translated by Jesuit missionaries. The article argues that the missionary Martino Martini's experience of the Manchu conquest of China was crucial in shaping his conception of history as a discipline. Political events (...) that unfolded in seventeenth-century China had a marked effect on discussions about emergent world history in eighteenth-century Europe. (shrink)

Two firm points in the chronology of Antiphon's speeches are VI περ το χορευτο in 419/81 and the Defence in 411/02. Speech V περ τσ 'Hρδου is now generally dated between these two; only the vaguest attempts have been made to date I κατ τσ μητρυασ; there is no general agreement on either the date or the authorship of the Tetralogies. The main purpose of this paper is to adduce linguistic as well as external evidence for the dating of V (...) in the neighbourhood of 414 and to show grounds for dating I between VI and V. Its secondary purpose is to apply some of the results gained in this inquiry to the fragments and the Tetralogies. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 9-13.

Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the mathematical principles on which the calculation of periods rests, the (...) philologians understood nothing. The astronomers, on their side, had not yet undertaken to apply their data to the records of ancient times. Scaliger was the first of the philologians who made use of the improved astronomy of the sixteenth century to get a scientific basis for historical chronology. So Mark Pattison. This verdict can be challenged on a number of grounds. The one relevant at present is simple: Scaliger himself claimed far less. He certainly said that technical chronology had been untouched in modern times — not an entirely fair judgement — but in antiquity it had been practised in exactly the manner he considered proper, or so he believed. In particular he singles out Censorinus, whose De die natali drew extensively on Varro's lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum, books 14–19, for information on chronology. Students of Varro have long appreciated the importance of Censorinus. His dry and compact treatise offers Varronian views on etymology, the human life-span, and the course of history itself, all couched in language so jejune as to suggest that he added little or nothing to what he read. (shrink)

Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the mathematical principles on which the calculation of periods rests, the (...) philologians understood nothing. The astronomers, on their side, had not yet undertaken to apply their data to the records of ancient times. Scaliger was the first of the philologians who made use of the improved astronomy of the sixteenth century to get a scientific basis for historical chronology. So Mark Pattison. This verdict can be challenged on a number of grounds. The one relevant at present is simple: Scaliger himself claimed far less. He certainly said that technical chronology had been untouched in modern times — not an entirely fair judgement — but in antiquity it had been practised in exactly the manner he considered proper, or so he believed. In particular he singles out Censorinus, whose De die natali drew extensively on Varro's lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum, books 14–19, for information on chronology. Students of Varro have long appreciated the importance of Censorinus. His dry and compact treatise offers Varronian views on etymology, the human life-span, and the course of history itself, all couched in language so jejune as to suggest that he added little or nothing to what he read. (shrink)

Mr. Norman H. Baynes thinks that the conclusions which I reached in my essay on the ‘Chronology of the Ninth Book of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius’ are ‘difficult to believe.’ That is due, he says, to the fact that I based my reconstruction ‘on one of the most doubtful sections of that book’—that in which Eusebius states that the Emperor Maximin wrote his letter to Sabinus after he received the ‘Edict of Milan.’ From it I inferred that the letter (...) was dispatched early in 313. No doubt Eusebius' assertion raises difficulties. But when a contemporary witness of high authority speaks it may be wise not to reject his evidence before the difficulties which seem to overthrow it are scrutinized. In the present instance the difficulties seem to me to vanish on examination. But Mr. Baynes appears to have overlooked my attempt to deal with them. His own view of the date of the letter is expressed in a single sentence ‘In November of 312 Maximin would receive news of Constantine's victory [at the Milvian Bridge], and as a result he issues the letter to Sabinus permitting Christian worship late in 312.’ But where is his evidence? All I can find is that in his edict of toleration Maximin affirms that ‘last year’ he wrote the letter. ‘This passage proves that that letter dates from the year 312.’ Yes, if Maximin's year began in January. But is that certain? In the East, New Year's Day was not uncommonly in September. (shrink)

Introduction Numerous guidelines and policies for ethical research practice have evolved over time, how this translates to global health practice in resource-constrained settings is unclear. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the concept of ancillary care has evolved over time and how it is included in the ethics guidelines and policy documents that guide the conduct of research in the global south with both an international focus and providing a specific example of Malawi, where the first author (...) lives and works, as a case study. Methods Discourse analysis was conducted on 34 international ethics guidelines and policy documents. Documents were purposively selected if they contained a set of key terms that reflect the concept of ancillary care. Following a process of inductive discourse analysis, five key interrelated text phrases relating to ancillary care were extracted from the documents. The evolution of these phrases over time was explored as they represented the development of the concept of ancillary care as a component of ethical health research guidance and practice. Results We found key interrelated phrases that represent discourses regarding the evolution of ancillary care including participant protection; provide care as appropriate; supererogation; patient needs prevail over science; and ancillary care as an obligation. Arguments for the provision of ancillary care were characterised by safeguarding the safety, health rights and well-being of study participants. However, despite the evolution of discourse around ethical obligations to provide ancillary care, this is rarely made explicit within guidance documents, leaving interpretive space for differential application in practice. Conclusion While there have been major changes to the ethics guidance that reflect significant evolution in the ethical conduct of research, the specific vocabulary or language used to explain the ethics of researchers' ancillary care obligations to the health needs of their research participants, lacks clarity and consistency. As a result, the concept of ancillary care continues to be under-represented in local ethical guidelines and regulations, with no clear directives for country-level research ethics committees to apply in regulating ancillary care responsibilities. (shrink)

The relative and absolute chronology of Middle Platonic philosophy is often uncertain, causing problems in connecting a philosopher either to other philosophers or to the surrounding culture.

In the first part of this paper, I shall argue that Apollodorus of Athens, in his Chronica, dated Anaxagoras' arrival at Athens to 456/5, following Demetrius of Phalerum. Rejecting the divergent opinion of others, he also followed Demetrius' estimation of the Athenian period as having lasted 20 years, which makes 437/6 Anaxagoras' last year at Athens 1). In the second part I shall argue that the trial of Anaxagoras, about which no information survives in the remains of Apollodorus but which (...) is reported by several other sources, should probably be dated to 437/6. This second argument is independent of the first; both run counter to the view, still rather popular among historians of ancient philosophy, which favours a date for the trial either immediately preceding or even following upon the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, as well as to the communis opinio according to which the Athenian period lasted 30 years. What is common to both parts of this inquiry is a refusal to study the chronology of Anaxagoras' career in isolation. In part I, which is chiefly concerned with an analysis of the relevant passage in Diogenes Laertius qua specimen of Apollodorean reasoning, the problem is discussed against the background of Apollodorus' synchronistic matrices. In part II, the trial and the decree of Diopeithes which made it possible are studied in connection with the plot against Pericles and certain members of his circle.-A suggestion regarding the date of 'publication' of Anaxagoras' treatise will be appended to part II. (shrink)

For the most part, this is a fairly literal translation, but I have opted for a few English idioms for the sake of readability. In that spirit, I have kept the original punctuation, which results in very long sentences, but I have inserted paragraph breaks for readability. I mark these inserted breaks with this sign [¶]; unmarked breaks are in the original. In addition to providing the French for difficult translations, I also interpolate a few English words for readability. Simondon’s (...) notes appear as footnotes; translator’s notes as endnotes. (shrink)

The archaeological record is very limited and its analysis has been contentious. Hence, molecular biologists have shifted their attention to molecular dating techniques. Recently on April 2013, the prestigious Cell Press Journal Current Biology published an article (Fu et al. 2013) entitled “A Revised Timescale for Human Evolution Based on Ancient Mitochondrial Genomes”. This paper has twenty authors and they are researchers from the world’s top institutes like Max Planck Institute, Harvard, etc. Respected authors of this paper have emphatically accepted (...) that the fossil record is inadequate and unreliable. These statements clearly substantiate that now biologists are agreeing that fossil records do not provide any significant evidence at all for conventional evolution theory. Despite the well-recorded fact of the continual grand propaganda of Darwinism based on fossil evidence for more than 150 years, in recent times biologists are surprisingly coming up with such statements, based on their confidence that evolution can be explained purely by the genealogical/genomic record provided by modern molecular biology. Still many respected journals (for example the article in Nature, Retallack, 2013) continue to publish articles on fossil evidence to support Darwinian evolution. These incoherently diverse claims prove that Darwinists are struggling with unscientific ideological approaches to explain biodiversity. Darwinian evolutionary theory is not only the basis of modern biology, but also acts as the guiding principle of science and intellectual reasoning for modern civilization. Hence, a scientific understanding of the breakdown of the Darwinian theory of objective evolution is very important for overcoming the traditional scientific temper of mechanistic intellectualism that characterizes this ideology. In my article “21st Century Biology Refutes Darwinian Abiology” (published in two parts in November and December 2012 issues of The Harmonizer: www.mahaprabhu.net/satsanga/harmonizer) it was noted that several recent findings challenge the credibility that random mutations and natural selection can provide a valid basis for justifying the naturalistic evolution of species. The present article summarizes the problems associated with the fossil record and dating techniques, and its implication on the neo-Darwinian mechanistic misconception of biological life as mere molecular chemistry or abiology. An alternative approach based on the Vedāntic view for explaining biodiversity in the light of 21st century biology is also discussed in the end of the article. (shrink)

The true chronology of the Pentekontaetia is difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish conclusively. The events between 477 and 432 were of the greatest possible importance: these years saw the creation of the Athenian empire and a precipitous decline in Spartiate manpower, drastic political realignments involving nearly every state in Hellas, and military activity often rising to a crescendo scarcely matched at the peak of the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, one might strongly argue that the fifty-odd years prior to 432 had a (...) substantially greater historical significance than the three decades of war which followed, as well as a greater degree of political and military drama. But the Pentekontaetia lacks the unifying historical narrative of a Herodotus, let alone a Thucydides, and this one deficiency has caused events of the utmost significance to fade into near obscurity. There is scarcely a single political or military occurrence during the Fifty Years which can be dated to closer than a year or two, and in some cases, proposed dates have ranged over the better part of a decade. With no firm chronological framework, historical analysis degenerates into guesswork and speculation, especially if even the relative order of events is in dispute. In cognizance of this need, this paper seeks to present portions of a new chronology of the Pentekontaetia, one differing in several very significant features from those previously suggested. The severely limited nature of the available evidence precludes any hope of firmly establishing the validity of any one dating scheme over its rivals; the best we can hope for is plausibility. (shrink)

In the discussions concerning the date of Dharmakīrti, Jaina sources have never been seriously taken into account. They may, however, provide a valuable insight because Dharmakīrti both criticised and was criticised by Jaina thinkers. Two Jaina authors, Samantabhadra and Pūjyapāda Devanandin, may prove crucial in determining the actual dates of Dharmakīrti. The paper argues that Dharmakīrti directly influenced Samantabhadra in a number of ways, which sets the terminus ante quem for Dharmakīrti, and his traditional chronology has to be reconsidered in (...) the light of new findings. The paper suggests new dates for all the three authors. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that the use of astronomy as a chronological problem-solving tool has deep roots in the scholarly practices of the Latin Middle Ages, as is manifest from the writings of Marianus Scotus, Gerland, and other “critical computists” of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This essay enlarges the existing picture by introducing a hitherto unknown epistolary treatise of the mid-twelfth century. Written in Lotharingia in 1144, this poorly preserved work documents an attempt to reconstruct the timeline of (...) world history via techniques that had emerged within the Latin computus tradition prior to the advent of Greco-Arabic astronomy. Drawing on the so-called computus naturalis, the author performed lunar computations on the basis of observed eclipses and used them to propose new dates for the Creation and the Last Supper. He also relied on a revised estimate of the time and date of the vernal equinox, placing it on 16 March, and gave a detailed account of how this result can be derived from solar observations with a meridian line. By virtue of these methodological features, the Chronology of 1144 represents an important transitional stage between the “critical computists” and the use of eclipse-based dating methods by later scholars such as Giles of Lessines (fl. 1260). (shrink)

Although Grosseteste's scientific writings have been more adequately studied, particularly of recent years, than any other part of his vast literary legacy, scholars have reached little agreement on even the essentials of their chronology. The reasons for this are not far to seek. The course of Grosseteste's life up until 1225 is almost completely unknown and hence there exists no firm, ready-made structure into which the sequence of his surviving writings can be inserted. In addition to this, few of his (...) works have been adequately edited, with the result that promising chronological indications may upon occasion turn out to be merely corruptions of the text; one reference to Averroës, which would of itself have sufficed to date a work after 1230, proved to have several variants, including “Augustinus” and “Avicenna”! (shrink)

The last decade has witnessed a widespread resurgence of interest in Galen of Pergamum that is without parallel since the early seventeenth century. New studies of Galen's concepts of psychology and medicine have examined afresh his position in the development of scientific thought, and historians have begun to realize the wealth of material for the social history of the Antonine Age that he provides. But, despite the earlier labours of Ilberg and Bardong to restore a chronological order to the (...) many tracts that flowed readily from his pen, many of the events of his life still lack the precise dates that would enable even more valuable information to be extracted, especially upon the careers of his friends. (shrink)

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is a 79 days political protest and occupy campaigns in major areas in the city. This chronology lists the key events prior to and during the movement.

The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is a 79 days political protest and occupy campaigns in major areas in the city. This chronology lists the key events prior to and during the movement.