Descriptions of battles in ancient authors are not mirrors of reality, however dim and badly cracked, but are a form of literary production in which the real events depicted are filtered through the literary, intellectual, and cultural assumptions of the author. By comparing the battle descriptions of Julius Caesar to those of Xenophon and Polybius this paper attempts to place those battle descriptions in their intellectual and cultural context. Here Caesar appears as a military intellectual engaged in controversies with experts (...) in the Greek tradition of military theory-rejecting materialist strains of Greek thinking-and also as a Roman soldier whose military experience and cultural conceptions about how battles work could not be fully accommodated by Greek models. Caesar adapts from the Greeks an intellectual model of tactics based on physical metaphors, but adjusts Greek theory to Roman experience: Caesar's tactical physics ramifies from the crash-impetus-of the legionary charge rather than the push of the phalanx. Caesar also adapts from the Greeks a simplifying model of military psychology, adjusting a Greek binary scheme of morale into a three-level model to accommodate a Roman military ethos of steadiness in combat. Greek military thinking downplayed the role in battle of innate differences in courage between armies or nations, concentrating instead on tactics and stratagems; Roman culture encouraged Caesar to reject this dismissive view and elaborate a detailed understanding of the role of courage-virtus-in the mechanics of battle. The prominence of virtus in Caesar's battle descriptions illustrates its survival as an important Roman cultural norm and tempts speculation as to its historical consequences. Attempts to reconstruct ancient battles must take into account the cultural and intellectual traditions which guide ancient battle descriptions. (shrink)

Limits to Action: The Allocation of Individual Behavior presents the ideas and methods in the study of how individual organisms allocate their limited time and energy and the consequences of such allocation. The book is a survey of individual resource allocation, emphasizing the relationships of the concepts of utility, reinforcement, and Darwinian fitness. The chapters are arranged beginning with plants and general evolutionary considerations, through animal behavior in nature and laboratory, and ending with human behavior in suburb and institution. Topics (...) discussed include operant conditioning; the principle of diminishing returns; and issues in relation to mating strategies. Biologists, sociologists, economists, and psychologists will find the book interesting. (shrink)

What are physical quantities, and in particular, what makes them quantitative? This book presents an original answer to this question through the novel position of substantival structuralism, arguing that quantitativeness is an irreducible feature of attributes, and quantitative attributes are best understood as substantival structured spaces.

It may seem strange, in view of the spate of recent literature on the subject, that yet another article should be forthcoming on what is certainly the most familiar, as well as the most vexed, of all Platonic passages. But it is precisely this spate of literature that has impelled me to write. The time seems to have come for an article which, rather than seeking desperately for something new, sets out instead to reaffirm those facts and conclusions that even (...) the most resolutely original of scholars could hardly venture to dispute. This article will therefore be based, not on any of the numerous modern interpretations, but on what Plato himself actually wrote. It will contain a number of tentative suggestions which, to the best of my knowledge, have not been made before. They can, and probably will, be rejected. But its primary purpose remains to restate, whenever possible in Plato's own words, a number of important facts that are at once so simple and so obvious that they seem repeatedly, and especially in recent years, to have been quite forgotten. (shrink)

This book is an anthology of Plato's writings, connected with sections of commentary.

It is standardly assumed that there are three — and only three — ways to solve problem of temporary intrinsics: (a) embrace presentism, (b) relativize property possession to times, or (c) accept the doctrine of temporal parts. The first two solutions are favoured by endurantists, whereas the third is the perdurantist solution of choice. In this paper, I argue that there is a further type of solution available to endurantists, one that not only avoids the usual costs, but is structurally (...) identical to the temporal-parts solution preferred by perdurantists. In addition to providing a general characterization of this new type of solution, I discuss certain of its anticipations in the literature on bundle theory, as well as provide a detailed development of it in terms of my own preferred metaphysics of ordinary objects — namely, a distinctive form of substratum theory tracing to Aristotle. (shrink)

In a well-known quotation from Speusippus in the Theologumena Arithmeticae , said to have been derived from Pythagorean sources, especially Philolaus, occur the following sentences: And again a little later: Similarly Sextus Empiricus , drawing evidently on a relatively early Pythagorean source, writes as follows: And Aristotle himself writes of the Pythagoreans : There were, in fact, certain Pythagoreans who equated the number 2 with the line because they regarded the line as ‘length without breadth extended between two points’; and (...) likewise the number 3 was equated with the plane and 4 with the solid. (shrink)