Editors of Pliny's Naturalis Historia have not had to deplore the paucity of the MS. tradition, but rather its value; while MSS. belonging to the ordo recentiorum are numerous and fairly complete, those of the ordo uetustiorum are very few, and never contain more than a few books, often with considerable gaps. They are A ii 196–vi 51, M xi–xv, P and H parts of xviii, I xxiii, xxv, B xxxii–xxxvii . There are also some scattered fragments. Detlefsen indeed (...) claimed that the restoration of the original text of the N.H. is more difficult than that of any other Latin author owing to the mutilated and defective transmission of considerable parts. (shrink)

Editors of Pliny's Naturalis Historia have not had to deplore the paucity of the MS. tradition, but rather its value; while MSS. belonging to the ordo recentiorum are numerous and fairly complete, those of the ordo uetustiorum are very few, and never contain more than a few books, often with considerable gaps. They are A ii 196–vi 51, M xi–xv, P and H parts of xviii, I xxiii, xxv, B xxxii–xxxvii. There are also some scattered fragments. Detlefsen indeed claimed (...) that the restoration of the original text of the N.H. is more difficult than that of any other Latin author owing to the mutilated and defective transmission of considerable parts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche. His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His PhilosophyAlan D. SchriftWolfgang Müller-Lauter. Nietzsche. His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy. Translated from the German by David J. Parent. Foreword by Richard Schacht. Ghicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pp. xviii + 246. Paper, $21.95.Since this work first appeared in 1971, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter has been at the forefront of German Nietzsche scholarship. The (...) long overdue appearance in English translation of this important work is a welcome addition to the Nietzsche literature and, although dated in some respects, it remains an important work that warrants careful attention. As Richard Schacht notes in his foreword, the original publication of this work was a significant event in the history of Nietzsche studies in Germany. Coming ten years after the publication of Heidegger's massive two-volume Nietzsche, Müller-Lauter's book "provided a much-needed counterweight" to Heidegger's idiosyncratic treatment (ix). Aside from proferring a significant rejoinder to the Heideggerian interpretation, Müller-Lauter also responds to a vast array of German Nietzsche scholars, some well-known (K. Löwith, K. Jaspers, E. Fink, K. Schlechta), but many much less familiar. As such, this book is an important piece of historical scholarship, offering the contemporary English-speaking reader an interesting picture of German scholarship on Nietzsche before Heidegger's work took center stage as the dominant (unfortunately, some would say only) German work worth engaging.But Müller-Lauter's book is not just of historical interest; it offers a powerful and profound reading of Nietzsche's corpus focused on the question of contradiction, both the contradictions readers find amidst Nietzsche's various works and Nietzsche's own philosophy of contradiction, namely, that contradictoriness is in some sense constitutive of the world. For Müller-Lauter, contradiction, the unresolvable conflict between essentially antithetical perspectives, grounds Nietzsche's philosophizing in wills to power. Emphasizing the plurality of conflicting wills to power, Müller-Lauter offers in successive chapters interpretations of Nietzsche's views on history as the "concrete occurrences" of these conflicting wills to power; nihilism as the process by which an organized system of forces (physical, social, intellectual, cultural) disintegrates into an antagonistic multiplicity of competing wills; morality as demanding truths that, once discovered, it can neither face nor accept, fleeing instead into a fictitious world of its own creation; Christian truthfulness as a destruction of truth that presents a "multiplicity of mutually opposing untruths" (72). All of these interpretations are shown to rest upon a contradiction at the heart of Nietzsche's own account of will to power, namely, that the strong will to power both affirms the multiplicity of perspectives and yet imposes its perspective as absolute.This is the paradox of the overman, a paradox Müller-Lauter addresses in his final chapter on "the doctrine of eternal recurrence." Not surprisingly, the eternal recurrence reveals itself to be essentially contradictory. But this contradiction is not self-refuting; rather "since the eternal recurrence is only as a thought and a doctrine, its meaning remains insurmountably split into a duality" (121) reflected in two ultimately incompatible types of overman. There is, on the one hand, the "powerful overman" who sees the entirety of what is as necessary for his own existence; to affirm eternal [End Page 453] recurrence is to understand everything that has been as a necessary series of events that ends with himself at its apex. But there is also the "wise overman," who understands the totality of what has been and is as necessary for his having arrived at the present moment in which he transcends himself and becomes other. Where the meaning of the powerful overman's affirmation of eternal recurrence resides in his appearance as the being who is dominant, the meaning of the wise overman's affirmation lies in understanding and accepting what has been as the precondition for both what he presently is and what he can become. Although both types of overman want recurrence, Müller-Lauter concludes they want something different in it and by it: the wise overman "is concerned with dissolving in the stream of... (shrink)

George P. Fletcher, Rethinking Criminal Law Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1978, xviii + 898 pp.

Volume XVIII of the distinguished "Religious Perspectives" series, this translation of Jaspers' 1962 publication Der philosophische Glaube ansichts [[sic]] der Offenbarung is an important addition to the library of English translations of Jaspers' works. It is a lengthy work and, as is typical of Jaspers, is heavily punctuated with textual divisions and subdivisions--a procedure so exaggerated in Jaspers that it is quite distracting. The translation of E. B. Ashton, who has since translated Jaspers' three-volume major work Philosophie, is extremely (...) good, just as one would expect. Jaspers holds that there is an underlying metaphysical structure in being--the Encompassing--which eludes any final conceptual formulation. It can only be approached through "ciphers," symbols which obliquely intimate the nature of the ultimate, and which it belongs to the philosopher to read. While on the one hand Jaspers quarrels with the various religious faiths because of their tendency to take their own ciphers as final and definitive, he is on the other hand profoundly interested in the historical faiths inasmuch as they represent important and deep expressions of faith in the transcendent. In this book Jaspers seeks a rapprochement between "philosophical faith"--an idea which he has ultimately borrowed from Kant's notion of rational faith in the speculatively unknowable thing-in-itself--and the faith that is based on revelation.--J. D. C. (shrink)

Aramaic and Hebrew Inscriptions from Mt. Gerizim and Samaria between Antiochus III and Antiochus IV Epiphanes. By Jan Dušek. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 54. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xviii + 200, illus. $135.

May, John D'Arcy Review(s) of: Hyphenated Christians: Towards a better understanding of dual religious belonging, by Gideon Goosen, (Oxford/Bern/New York: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. xviii + 172.

Este artículo pretende mostrar las aportaciones del pensador francés Michel de Certeau, sobre el proceso de surgimiento de las instituciones sociales. Para ello he analizado, en el marco de la antropología certeauniana del creer, su texto Une politique de la langue, en el que Certeau aborda el proyecto del Abbé Gregoire para imponer el francés sobre los patois a finales del siglo XVIII. Puede concluirse, tras este análisis, que las instituciones se fundan siguiendo un proceso en tres fases: la (...) definición clara de las creencias básicas o principios rectores de la institución ; el desplazamiento de los principios alternativos con los que compite ; y la lucha contra la resistencias que ofrecen las antiguas creencias. (shrink)