Belief in the afterlife is still very much alive in Western civilisation, even though the truth of its existence is no longer universally accepted. Surprisingly, however, heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all ideas which arrived relatively late in the ancient world. Originally Greece and Israel - the cultures that gave us Christianity - had only the vaguest ideas of an afterlife. So where did these concepts come from and why did they develop? In this fascinating, learned, but highly (...) readable book, Jan N. Bremmer - one of the foremost authorities on ancient religion - takes a fresh look at the major developments in the Western imagination of the afterlife, from the ancient Greeks to the modern near-death experience. (shrink)

Recently, Jenny Strauss Clay has put forward the suggestion that the ‘goat island’ on which Odysseus lands before crossing over to the Cyclopes is ‘none other than Hyperia, the former home of the Phaeacians from which they emigrated to Scheria under the leadership of Nausithoos on account of the depredations of the Cyclopes.’ She arrives at this suggestion by combining the former proximity of the Phaeacians and Cyclopes with the fact that the island νδρν χηρεύει , ‘is bereft of men’ (...) . The argument seems debatable. First, the word χηρεύει is a hapax, which Homer may or may not have used in a metaphorical way; our words ‘desert’ and ‘deserted’ are also used of places which have not been inhabited before. Second, nothing in the description of the island suggests previous habitation. Third, the Phaeacians are said to have left Hyperia to escape the plundering of the Cyclopes , but the Cyclopes are also explicitly described as lacking ships and shipbuilders . Consequently, Hyperia will hardly have been an island, nor the ‘goat island’ Hyperia. Modern studies of Odysseus' visit to the Cyclopes often focus on the nature/culture aspects of the episode. The wild goats of ‘goat island’ in line 124 — βóσκει δέ τε μηκδας αγας — have regularly been included in these analyses. For example, C. Calame has well pointed out that ‘ce dernier trait distingue le complexe sémantique que définit l'Île Petite de celui que représente Polyphème et son monde: alors que Polyphème avait avec le monde des hommes le trait commun de l'élevage du petit bétail, la figure sémantique de l'Île Petite inverse exactement les traits caractérisant le monde des hommes.’. (shrink)

More than a century after the first appearance of Norden’s classic commentary on Aeneid VI in 1903 the time has come to see to what extent the new discoveries of Orphic materials and new insights in the ways Virgil worked enrich and/or correct our understanding of that text. We will therefore take a fresh look at Virgil’s underworld, but limit our comments to those passages where perhaps something new can be contributed. This means that we will especially concentrate on the (...) Orphic, the Eleusinian, and the, if usually neglected, Hellenistic-Jewish backgrounds of Aeneas’s descent. Yet a Roman poet hardly could totally avoid his own Roman tradition or the contemporary world, and, in a few instances, we will comment on these aspects as well. As Norden observed, Virgil had divided his picture of the underworld into six parts, and we will follow these in our argument.Plus d’un siècle après la publication, en 1903, du commentaire classique de Norden sur le livre six de l’Énéide, il est temps de considérer à quel point les nouvelles découvertes de matériel orphique et les nouvelles idées sur la manière de travailler de Virgile enrichissent et/ou corrigent la compréhension de ce texte. Il s’agit dès lors de porter un regard neuf sur l’au-delà de Virgile, mais en limitant nos commentaires aux passages sur lesquels il est possible d’apporter quelque chose de nouveau. Ce sont les éléments orphiques et éleusiniens, tout autant que l’arrière-plan hellénistique juif – souvent négligé – sur lesquels l’analyse se concentre. En outre, un poète romain pouvait difficilement négliger totalement sa propre tradition romaine ou le monde contemporain, et, à quelques reprises, ces aspects seront également commentés. Comme Norden l’a observé, Virgile a réparti l’image de l’au-delà en six parties, et c’est son parcours que notre analyse épouse. (shrink)

Promythion.--Antipodes.--Le fanatisme des formules.--La morale au service de l'état.--De l'asynaptisme.--Une société super-étatiste il y a trente siècles.--Le monde périodique.--L'état et le problème social.--Epimythion.

Ces dernières décennies, il est devenu habituel de considérer que la polis de la période classique contrôlait la religion sous tous ces aspects. Ce n’est que récemment que ce point de vue a été mis en question. Même si les aspects plus marginaux de la religion de la polis ont déjà reçu l’attention nécessaire, leur étude reste marquée, dans une certaine mesure, par les préjugés des savants des générations antérieures, eux-mêmes nourris des préjugés et des représentations des auteurs anciens. Cet (...) article se concentre sur les lieux de la vie reli­gieuse grecque, et plus particulièrement athénienne, où des livres et de l’écrit étaient particu­lièrement importants, dans la mesure où l’écrit permet aux gens de prendre une position plus indépendante en regard de la religion de la polis. Mes observations concerneront les manteis , la magie , les mystères et l’Orphisme , la mythographie , en terminant par quelques considérations sur la nature de la religion de la polis .In recent decades it has become customary to assume that in the classical period the polis controlled religion in all its aspects. It is only recently that this view is being questioned. Although the more marginal aspects of polis religion have already received the necessary attention, the study of these marginal aspects remains dominated, to a certain extent, by old prejudices of previous generations of scholars, which in turn were sometimes fed by the prejudices or representations of ancient authors. I will concentrate on those areas of Greek, especially Athenian, religious life in which books and writing were particularly important, as the written word enabled people to take a more independent stance in polis religion. Subsequently, I will make observations on manteis , magic , mysteries and Orphism and mythography , and end with some remarks on the nature of polis religion. (shrink)

Bowers et al. focus their criticisms on research that compares behavioral and brain data from the ventral stream with a class of deep neural networks for object recognition. While they are right to identify issues with current benchmarking research programs, they overlook a much more fundamental limitation of this literature: Disregarding the importance of action and interaction for perception.

The contributions of this volume discuss the legacy of Emmanuel Levinas philosophy. Examining critically the limits of his thinking, they also bear witness to its influence, thus demonstrating the significance of his groundbreaking project of establishing ethics as first philosophy".

Over the past decades, great strides have been made to professionalize and increase access to transgender medicine. As the evidence base grows and conceptualizations regarding gender dysphoria/gender incongruence evolve, so too do ideas regarding what constitutes good treatment and decision-making in transgender healthcare. Against this background, differing care models arose, including the ‘Standards of Care’ and the so-called ‘Informed Consent Model’. In these care models, ethical notions and principles such as ‘decision-making’ and ‘autonomy’ are often referred to, but left unsubstantiated. (...) This not only transpires into the consultation room where stakeholders are confronted with many different ethical challenges in decision-making, but also hampers a more explicit discussion of what good decision-making in transgender medicine should be comprised of. The aim of this paper is to make explicit the conceptual and normative assumptions regarding decision-making and client autonomy underpinning the ‘Standards of Care’ and ‘Informed Consent Model’ currently used in transgender care. Furthermore, we illustrate how this elucidation aids in better understanding stakeholders’ ethical challenges related to decision-making. Our ethical analysis lays bare how distinct normative ambiguities in both care models influence decision-making in practice and how foregrounding one normative model for decision-making is no moral panacea. We suggest that the first steps towards good decision-making in gender-affirming medical care are the acknowledgement of its inherent normative and moral dimensions and a shared, dialogical approach towards the decision-making process. (shrink)

Postural instability marks a prevalent symptom of Parkinson’s disease. It often manifests in increased body sway, which is commonly assessed by tracking the Center of Pressure. Yet, in terms of postural control, the body’s Center of Mass, and not CoP is what is regulated in a gravitational field. The aim of this study was to explore the effect of early- to mid-stage PD on these measures of postural control in response to unpredictable visual perturbations. We investigated three cohorts: 18 patients (...) with early to mid-stage PD [Hoehn & Yahr stage ; 1.94 ± 0.70]; a group of 15 age-matched controls ; and a group of 12 young healthy adults. Participants stood on a force plate to track their CoP, while the movement of their entire body was recorded with a video-based motion tracking system to monitor their CoM. A moving room paradigm was applied through a head-mounted virtual reality headset. The stimulus consisted of a virtual tunnel that stretched in the anterior-posterior direction which either remained static or moved back and forth in an unpredictable fashion.We found differences in mean sway amplitude and mean velocities of CoP and CoM between the groups under both conditions, with higher MSA of CoP and CoM for PD and higher mean velocities of both variables for PD and ECT when compared with YCT. Visual perturbation increased mean CoP velocity in all groups but did not have effects on mean CoM velocity or MSA. While being significantly lower for the young adults, the net effect of visual perturbation on mean CoP velocity was similar between patients with PD and age-matched controls. There was no effect of the visual perturbation on mean CoM velocity for any of the groups.Our simultaneous assessment of CoP and CoM revealed that postural control is reflected differently in CoM and CoP. As the motion of CoM remained mostly unaffected, all groups successfully counteracted the perturbation and maintained their balance. Higher CoP velocity for PD and ECT revealed increased corrective motion needed to achieve this, which however was similar in both groups. Thus, our results suggest increased effort, expressed in CoP velocity, to be an effect of age rather than disease in earlier stages of PD. (shrink)

BackgroundIn gender-affirming medical care (GAMC), ethical challenges in decision-making are ubiquitous. These challenges are becoming more pressing due to exponentially increasing referrals, politico-legal contestation, and divergent normative views regarding decisional roles and models. Little is known, however, about what ethical challenges related to decision-making healthcare professionals (HCPs) themselves face in their daily work in GAMC and how these relate to, for example, the subjective nature of Gender Incongruence (GI), the multidisciplinary character of GAMC and the role HCPs play in assessing (...) GI and eligibility for interventions. Given the relevance and urgency of these questions, we conducted a qualitative study among HCPs providing GAMC to transgender adults in the Netherlands.MethodsIn this qualitative research, we conducted 11 semi-structured interviews between May 2020 and February 2021 with HCPs (six mental health professionals, two HCPs in endocrinology, two in plastic surgery, and one in nursing) working in two distinct GAMC settings. We purposively sampled for professional background and years of experience in GAMC. We analyzed our interview data using thematic analysis. As some respondents were more inclined to speak about what should or ought to be done to arrive at good or right decision-making, we identified both ethical challenges and norms. Furthermore, in our analysis, we differentiated between respondents’ explicit and implicit ethical challenges and norms and ascertained the specific context in which these challenges emerged.ResultsRespondents’ ethical challenges and norms centered on (1) dividing and defining decisional roles and bounds, (2) negotiating decision-making in a (multidisciplinary) team, and (3) navigating various decision-making temporalities. These themes arose in the context of uncertainties regarding (1) GAMC’s guidelines, evidence, and outcomes, as well as (2) the boundaries and assessment of GI.ConclusionsThis interview study provides detailed empirical insight into both the explicit and implicit ethical challenges that HCPs experience and their ethical norms regarding decision-making. It also describes how uncertainties and (implicit) normativities concerning GAMC and GI pre-structure the moral environment in which these challenges and norms manifest. We provide normative reflections and recommendations on handling these ethical challenges in a way that is sensitive to the context in which they arise. (shrink)

Jan N. Bremmer (J.N.B.) est incontestablement un historien des religions antiques parmi les plus productifs de ces quarante dernières années, qu’il s’agisse de l’étude du monde gréco-romain ou du christianisme antique, qu’il arpente avec une remarquable maîtrise des outils nécessaires à cette fin. Aux débuts du christianisme était consacré le premier recueil de ses travaux publié chez Mohr Siebeck, tandis que ce deuxième volume (qui n’est pas le second) rassemble, en trente chapitres, 35 arti...

On a longtemps pensé que l’athéisme était une invention moderne, qui n’était possible qu’avec les Lumières, en réaction contre la religion catholique, préparée par la Réforme et favorisée par l’avènement de la science moderne. Longtemps ignoré, l’athéisme antique a connu un regain d’intérêt avec les travaux pionniers de Marek Winiarczyk dans les années 1970-1990, puis avec ceux plus récents de Jan Bremmer, David Sedley ou Tim Whitmarsh. Dans son livre récent, T. Whitmarsh soutient que l’athéi...

Was ist der Mensch? Das ist eine der "großen" philosophischen Fragen, und immer wieder werden bei der Beantwortung dieser Frage antike Denker zitiert. Das vorliegende Buch ist die erste Gesamtdarstellung des anthropologischen Denkens in der Antike. In fünfzehn Beiträgen behandelt der Band alle wichtigen antiken Philosophen und Philosophenschulen, von den Vorsokratikern bis zu Augustinus. Bewusst schaut der Band dabei über die Grenzen dessen hinaus, was wir heute "Philosophie" nennen, und wendet sich auch Denkern aus den Gebieten der antiken Literatur, Theologie (...) und Medizin zu. Der Band richtet sich an Philosophen und Altphilologen ebenso wie Historiker und Theologen. Die Beiträge eignen sich auch als Einführung in die jeweiligen Autoren und Schulen für Studierende und interessierte Leser aus anderen Disziplinen. Speziell für diesen Leserkreis liefern die Beiträge Hinweise für die weitere Lektüre. (publisher) -/- Mit Beiträgen von Ursula Bittrich, Yves Bossart, Jan N. Bremmer, Thomas Buchheim, Christoph Horn, Ludger Jansen, Christoph Jedan, Geurt Henk van Kooten, Zbigniew Nerczuk, Matthias Perkams, Joachim Söder, Niko Strobach, Hartmut Westermann und Jula Wildberger. (shrink)

Il s’agit du troisième volume des Collected Essays de Jan N. Bremmer (J.N.B.) et il s’inscrit dans la même perspective que le deuxième volume (The World of Greek Religion and Mythology) dont j’ai rendu compte entre les pages de Kernos en 2021. Mythes et rituels sont à nouveau convoqués, et l’intention de l’A. était d’ailleurs de ne publier qu’un volume sur ce thème. Mais l’ampleur de cet ensemble l’a dissuadé d’aller en ce sens (p. xix) et c’est un ouvrage séparé, (...) davantage thématique, qu’il... (shrink)