Commentators do not take Socrates’ theses in the Hippias Minor seriously. They believe it is an aporetic dialogue and even that Socrates does not mean what he says. Hence they are unable to understand the presuppositions behind Socrates’ two interconnected theses: that those who do wrong and lie voluntarily are better than those who do wrong unintentionally, and that no one does wrong and lies voluntarily. Arguing that liars are better than the unenlightened, Socrates concludes that there are no liars. (...) Instead, there are only those who know and those who don’t. The unenlightened cannot lie, and alien volitions, desires, or emotions are unlikely to mislead and deceive those who know, i. e., the wise. Why, then, is a thinker like Socrates ready to defy the experience and moral convictions of his contemporaries and even our own to such an extent? (shrink)

A quick mental survey of one's friends or acquaintances reveals an important difference between them. On the one hand, there are seemingly stoic people for whom emotional events (e.g., having a pap...

Since the poem of Sappho, which was first published as No. 7 of the Oxyrhynchus series, has been the object of a good deal of attention and ingenuity , it is perhaps not too early to publish a number of new readings, the result of repeated examinations of the papyrus , that may provide a surer foundation for future attempts at reconstruction. I have submitted my suggestions to Professor Hunt, who does not reject them , and I have to thank (...) him and Mr. H. I. Bell, of the Department of MSS., for the readiness of their help whenever and under whatever form I made appeal to it. But, of course, neither of them is in any way committed to any of my readings or deductions. (shrink)

The ancient scholia and various modern editors interpret these lines as a description of the prodigies which followed the death of Caesar. It is bold to criticize a view so widely held, but its acceptance, to me, involves considerable difficulties. The first is the long interval between Caesar's death and the date of the Ode. About this date editors vary, but the general view is that it belongs either to the year 29 or 28 B.C.

Hieron of Syracuse was the most powerful Greek of his day. He was also, and the two facts are not unrelated, the most frequent of Pindar's patrons. A singular feature of the four poems for this Sicilian prince is their obsession with sin and punishment: Tantalus in the First Olympian, Typhoeus, Ixion, and Coronis in the first three Pythians – all offend divinity and suffer terribly. But even in this company, where glory comes trailing clouds of pain, the Third Pythian (...) stands out. The other three odes are manifestly epinician and celebrate success, both athletic and military. The Second Pythian, for instance, is a sombre canvas, and a motif of ingratitude dominates the myth. Yet it rings at the outset with praise of Syracuse and of Hieron's victory. The Third Pythian, by comparison, is not obviously a victory ode. (shrink)

In the Eighth Olympian, for Alcimedon of Aegina, Pindar recounts a story that, according to a notice in the scholia, is not found in earlier Greek literature. Aeacus was summoned from Aegina to Troy by Apollo and Poseidon to help in the construction of the city's fortifications. Smoke, says the poet, would one day rise from the very battlements Aeacus built. The wall newly completed, a portent appeared: three snakes tried to scale the ramparts but two fell to earth while (...) one succeeded in entering the city. Apollo immediately interpreted this sign: Troy would be taken ‘owing to the work of Aeacus’ hand' and would, moreover, be taken ‘by the first and the fourth generations’. If there is literary invention here, it would seem that Pindar has drawn inspiration from three passages of our Iliad: 7.452–3, Apollo and Poseidon toiled to build a wall for Laomedon; 6.433–4, there was one spot in the wall of Troy that was especially vulnerable; 2.308–29, the seer Calchas declares an omen involving a snake to signify the eventual destruction of Ilium. The general import of the passage is clear enough — descendants of Aeacus play a prominent part in the Trojan war and in the capture of the city. But the details of the portent and of the prophecy have caused much perplexity, for they cannot easily be made to correspond to the history they prefigure. It is the numbers in Pindar's account that are the chief source of confusion. On the model of the omen interpreted by Calchas the three snakes in the Pindaric story might reasonably be expected to represent the lapse of three generations before Aeacus' great-grandson Neoptolemus played his conspicuous part in the final agony of Troy. But this interpretation of the portent forces us to explain away the fact that Troy was also destroyed by Aeacus' son, Telamon, as Pindar repeatedly insists in his Aeginetan odes : if the snakes are taken to represent generations, one of the unsuccessful snakes in fact represents a successful conqueror. This is a disturbing inconcinnity. (shrink)

In these lines Ovid introduces Althaea's debate whether or not to kill her son Meleager by burning the brand which was his life, because he had killed her two brothers during the Calydonian boar hunt. A. S. Hollis says of line 476 that it contains ‘a forced and almost pointless word-play’. If sanguis is taken in its primary meaning, ‘blood’, this condemnation is quite justified. However, if one takes into account a secondary sense, the word-play acquires more strength. This sense (...) is that of ‘offspring’ or ‘descendant’. Examples of this usage include Virgil, Aeneid 6.835 ‘sanguis meus’ , Horace, Carmen Saeculare 50 ‘clarus Anchisae Venerisque sanguis’ , Odes 3.27.65 ‘regius sanguis’ , and, in the Metamorphoses itself ‘pro…meo veni supplex tibi, Iuppiter, …sanguine’. It may well be that Ovid was intending implications of both meanings in his choice of the word. (shrink)

‘The tale of the Argonauts was among the most popular myths in Greek and Roman literature of all periods.’ There was, however, not inconsiderable variation in certain aspects of the narrative: in the inclusion or exclusion of entire episodes; in (un)expected divergences from more authoritative versions of the story; and in the details of minutiae. In the Argonautic choral odes of Seneca'sMedea(301–79 and 579–669), and in Valerius Flaccus’ incomplete epic, there is a conspicuous, learned engagement with much of the earlier (...) tradition that hints at versions of the myth which are divergent from those that the two poets privilege in their respective narratives. Such moments serve to assert the playwright's and the epicist's status asdocti poetae, and to engage the learned reader in a (re)negotiation of the tradition; at times, an awareness of a literary past seems to be given to particular characters too so as to heighten the reader's experience of the narrative—by a sort of prolepsis—as it unfolds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:In Search of the ClassicEdward E. FosterIn Search of the Classic, by Steven Shankman; xvi & 331 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, $55.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.“In search of” in the title of a book is often a code warning of lukewarm conviction or academic disingenuousness. In Shankman’s title, however, the phrase is literally appropriate because he forthrightly argues that the classic is, of its nature, (...) something that always exists in quest and tension. The classic is not to be located merely in classical antiquity or in the tastes of a privileged class. Though Shankman grants that these often are associated with the literary classic, he finds the nature of the classic rather in the nature of literature as a state of metaxis or “in-betweenness.” His examinations of classical, neo-classical, and modern works define various aspects of this “in-betweenness,” the state of tension that exists in the truly classic at any point in the history of literature.Although Shankman dismisses Derrida, Foucault, de Man, and others for having mistaken their own destruction of Enlightenment rationalism for a demonstration that rationality is impossible, he is not wildly original. He uses Habermas’s notion of classic literature as enduring and independent of time and Vogelin’s concept of metaxis as foundational for his sprawling, yet lucid, inquiry into the idea of the classic in Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Pindar, Virgil, Dryden, Defoe, Swift, Valery, and others, and in the traditions of the epic, ode, pastoral, and lyric.Fundamental is the view that classic literature has the greatest power to represent human experience. To avoid the hermeneutical conundrum of the subject-object dilemma, Shankman asserts literature to be in “a middle place” from Plato and Aristotle on. He sees a basic agreement between them on how literature stands between the One and the Many. Put negatively, literature is not sparks from the One or compilations of the Many. Rather it is a mediator between these polarities: classic literature accommodates the propositional purity of philosophy to the indeterminacy of thing-reality. Literature is neither an abstract kernelization of truth nor an anthology of the things of experience [End Page 256] but an analogical conjunction of the two extremes—therefore tension, therefore continual quest.Using Plato, especially the Cratylus and the Symposium, and Aristotle, especially the Metaphysics and the Poetics, Shankman describes a rationality that exists in literature that is clearly identified in his chapter on Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels by emphasizing the idea of man as an animal capax rationis. This in itself places man’s literary enterprise in a middle place and Shankman explores its various implications in a variety of works. From this perspective, it is argued that literature must be about something that matters; that pure poetry or reflexive poetry cannot achieve the ambiguity of analogy as the central core that the classic requires. Thus, Plato never rejected poetry—only the debasement of poetry into either the fantastical or literal (or the confusion of the two.)The true classic walks a line between ignorance and knowledge, rhetoric and philosophy, literalism and fantasy, “thing-reality” and “the ideal.” The Aeneid makes a good test case. It is at once a piece of propaganda and a statement of an ideal that is complicated by the duplicity of Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido, the brutality of his killing of Turnus, and his emergence in Book VI from the underworld by the Gate of Ivory (false dreams). Such tension is exemplary of what Shankman sinuously argues is at the heart of “the classic” in a variety of other works.The argument is persuasive and attractive, even if not compelling, in a world where many critics would have us believe that all of literature, canonical or not, is disappearing into nontext. That about half of the chapters are adaptations of previously published articles risks a discontinuity that is largely avoided by recapitulations of where we are in the exposition of our struggle in a continuing and intrinsic state of rational metaxis. I like the idea, but I must reserve judgment on a thesis that attends to the poetry of Yvor Winters and E. V. Cunningham... (shrink)

The authority of great scholars such as Fraenkel and Wilamowitz means that any mistakes they make tend to be accepted even when the evidence adduced is weak. Fraenkel’s interpretation of ego, quem vocas in Odes 2. 20. 6 as “I, whom you invite to dinner” has apparently silenced all debate. Yet Bentley construed non ego, pauperum sanguis parentum, non ego, quem vocas as a single idea, “I, the man you call the offspring of penniless parents.” For various reasons this seems (...) preferable to Fraenkel’s rendering. Likewise, Fraenkel has silenced doubts about 3. 30. 10–14, where he takes qua violens obstrepit Aufidus et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnavit populorum with dicar although this implies the boast that Horace will be famous in Apulia, a spatial restriction hard to square with the limitless temporal vistas of 1–9. Unless we alter the text, the words cited above have no anchoring point in what follows, but potens in 12 seems for various reasons dubious and should be replaced by, e.g. editus. (shrink)

The paper aims at reconstructing the influence of Simonides on a contiguous series of Horatian poems . The starting point is provided by the discovery of new Simonidean fragments published by Peter Parsons and by Martin West in 1992. But the research casts a wider net, including the influence of Theocritus on Horace-and of Simonides on Theoocritus-and the simultaneous and competing presence of Pindar and Simonides in late Horatian lyric. The influence of Simonides is seen in specific textual pointers-e.g., a (...) simile on the death of Achilles in 4.6, the idea of caducity in 4.7-as well as in the composite role-model of Simonides, the immortalizing poet, the flexible praise-singer. Some wider questions are put in perspective: As for Horace's approach to the poetic tradition, the Roman poet is able to glance across whole genealogies of models, without necessarily making a choice, but making the invocation of several predecessors, already linked in a tradition, relevant to his new text. "Odes" 4.7, for instance, features a dialogue of Horace, Homer, Mimnermus and Simonides. The oscillation in modern criticism between an "Alexandrian" and a "classicizing" Horace could be better explained by constructing a complex model of intertextuality: "Pindar" plus "the Pindar in Callimachus"; "Simonides" plus "the Simonides in Theocritus." The dominating influence of Pindar in Book IV could be a part of a richer picture of influence, now difficult to reconstruct since all we have is the four Pindaric books of epinicia, not necessarily the only widely read choral lyric in antiquity. The reuse of early-classical praise poetry includes references to social constructs and cultural models of patronage, gift exchange, and poetic addressee: they are important in Augustan lyric precisely because they are felt as distant and impossible to recreate, and become a part of Horace's deft and often ironical negotiations with the problem of being a lyric poet in Augustan Rome. (shrink)

Resumo O artigo descreve o poema “An die Melancholie” como um momento crucial e essencial da evolução da filosofia de Nietzsche, aquele de uma primeira intuição da noção de “vontade de potência”. O filósofo se afasta da longa tradição alemã dos hinos à melancolia, ao mesmo tempo em que subverteu os poemas filosóficos - os darwinistas em particular - de sua época, para superar seu pessimismo schopenhaueriano.The article aims at describing the poem “An die Melancholie” as an essential and crucial (...) moment within the development of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which refers to the first intuition of the notion of “Will to Power”. The philosopher deviates from the long German tradition of odes to melancholy, whilst subverting the philosophical poems of his own time - specially the Darwinian ones -, in order to overcome his Schopenhauerian pessimism. (shrink)

Augusto foi um governante admirável que, durante o longo tempo de seu império, fez com que a paz reinasse em Roma e com ela o mundo prosperasse. Pode-se considerar que durante seu império ocorreu o período mais produtivo da literatura latina. Apesar de o imperador ter se esforçado em garantir o triunfo da tradição romana, os modelos preferíveis sempre foram as produções gregas. A influência do helenismo revelava-se nas obras de escritores como, por exemplo, Horácio, considerado o mais autobiográfico de (...) todos os poetas latinos. Através de suas obras, o poeta deixa pistas valiosas a respeito dos diferentes momentos de sua vida. Com perfeição, nitidez e precisão, Horácio compôs as Sátiras, os Epodos, as Odes, as Epístolas e o Canto Secular. Legou às letras latinas uma poesia ao mesmo tempo familiar, nacional e religiosa, que fizeram com que fosse considerado como modelo de virtudes clássicas de equilíbrio e medida. A presente pesquisa tem como objeto a análise do Epodo XI, uma poesia confidencial dirigida a um amigo, a quem confessa sofrer por amor. O sentimento amor tem o sinônimo de sofrimento, tema que fazia parte do helenismo. Neste trabalho, serão feitos comentários literários, estilísticos e sintáticos sobre o Epodo horaciano selecionado. (shrink)

Em suas reflexões sobre a filosofia do direito, Alysson Leandro Mascaro destacou que atualmente G.W.F. Hegel é uma estação fundamental para qualquer estudioso dessa ciência. De fato, o autor alemão mostra-se de fundamental importância por pensarmos a sociedade civil burguesa e o Estado como aspectos inseparáveis para a necessária determinação do direito na era moderna (e contemporânea). Ao contrário da proposta jusnaturalista, Hegel coloca a questão do direito no interior da querela sobre o Estado moderno, esvaziando de sentido a ode (...) ao individualismo, de fundo romântico. Assim, a máquina pública surge como expressão concreta de um momento histórico muito particular, leia-se, como fruto da era das profundas revoluções sociais na Europa. Destarte, nossa hipótese é que a filosofia do direito hegeliana não se limita à uma consciência tardia, que sempre se apresenta como post festum, mas, sim, desenvolve-se como uma reflexão capaz de antever aspectos importantes de toda uma formação histórica em emergência, através dos seus primeiros sinais. Essa perspectiva nos permite argumentar que esse autor buscou se apresentar como síntese dialética da realidade e dos conceitos que conheceu, fitando não se dobrar às complexidades e/ou à vulgata do momento que tinha sob os olhos. (shrink)

L’Olimpica 13 di Pindaro, dedicata a Senofonte di Corinto, presenta due caratteristiche macroscopiche: lunghi elenchi di vittorie ottenute dalla famiglia di Senofonte e un accumulo di miti strettamente legati alla città di Corinto (Sisifo, Medea, Glauco e Bellerofonte). Questa connessione con Corinto è stata fortemente rimarcata, con particolare attenzione alla famiglia degli Oligetidi e ai miti di Medea e Sisifo presenti nei perduti Korinthiaká di Eumelo. Nondimeno, l’ode sembra mostrare i tipici meccanismi atti a interessare pubblici secondari. Ritengo che le (...) narrazioni di Pindaro siano consapevolmente generiche, allo scopo di permettere riesecuzioni in festival e simposi. Dall’altro lato, anche la precisione dei cataloghi di vittorie può avere la funzione, in scenari di riesecuzione, di dare ai futuri ascoltatori la sensazione di trovarsi nel luogo della prima esecuzione (l’espediente della cosiddetta “pseudo-intimacy”). (shrink)

Assumindo que o “tornar-se cristão” é o eixo que sustenta toda a produção literária de Søren Kierkegaard, o escopo deste ensaio é tentar delinear o conceito de paixão apresentado em Temor e Tremor como uma condição necessária para a efetivação dos movimentos dialéticos que possibilitam o desenvolvimento da fé. Efetivamente, é através do pseudônimo Johannes de Silentio que Kierkegaard apresenta sua ode à fé. Neste sentido, é sobre o esteio da narrativa apresentada em Temor e Tremor acerca da fé demonstrada (...) por Abraão (quando Deus solicitou-lhe a vida de Isaac em sacrifício) que destacaremos a importância que o mencionado pseudônimo atribui à paixão como fundamento que precede e, substancialmente, compõe a fé última: aquela que só emerge ante ao absurdo, mas que, uma vez conquistada, assoma como possibilidade para a fuga do desespero da existência e para a construção de sentido para a vida humana. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alcaics In Exile: W. H. Auden’s “In Memory Of Sigmund Freud”Rosanna WarrenOn September 23, 1939, Sigmund Freud died in exile in London, a refugee from Nazi Austria. Within a month, Auden, who had been living in the United States since January of that year, wrote a friend in England that he was working on an elegy for Freud. 1 The poem appeared in The Kenyon Review early in 1940. (...) A stately public ode, the poem mourns not only the death of a publicly significant individual, but the collapse of a world. Hitler had overrun Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland; assaults on Jews had intensified; England and France had just declared war on Germany. There would be, indeed, many who would have to be mourned:When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish,of whom shall we speak?...Someone encountering this poem for the first time, on the page or in the ear, might be pardoned for puzzling over its form. It sounds prosy. It seems to have some recognizable English cadences, pentameters (“[inline-graphic 01]”), tetrameters (“ ”), and even trimeters (“ ”). But the pattern seems unruly, with some [End Page 111] lines stretching out beyond five traditional beats, and ignoring any iambic order: “turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he.” Groping for a more satisfactory principle of organization, a reader with some knowledge of versification may be moved to count syllables. Such a reader will discover that the poem is indeed organized syllabically in lines of 11, 11, 9, and 10 syllables. “Aha,” says the reader, alert to Auden’s intimacy with Classical civilization: “A Horatian ode. Not inappropriate for a formal elegy.” Reflecting further, and leafing through the pages of Horace, that reader will find, or remember, that two thirds of Horace’s odes are in these quatrains, the alcaic stanza. Auden, it appears, has composed his elegy in some version of the meter of Alcaeus, the 7th century b.c.e. Greek poet whose stanza became second nature to Horace. And we cannot enter the world of Auden’s poem without asking, why alcaics? And how do they work here?“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” is sometimes said to be Auden’s first syllabic poem. 2 Others demur, proposing both earlier and later examples. 3 Whatever the spats about dating Auden’s early syllabic practice, scholars conventionally agree that his turn toward syllabic composition reflects his evolving interest in a discursive poetry; in the poet as a private intelligence with a public voice; and in the work, respectively, of Horace and Marianne Moore. Having identified the poem as syllabic, many critics move on to heftier topics like psychoanalysis versus Marxism, Auden more than most poets having laid himself open to an overridingly thematic criticism of Big Ideas. But if, having acknowledged the influence of Horace and Moore in Auden’s refusal of English iambic lyricism here, we stay with the question of meter, we are led back to the older progenitor, Alcaeus, a great poet of exile, whose stanza Auden adopts and adapts. I shall ask how it affects our reading to observe that the stanza itself has a genealogy, and brings its expressive burden to bear on Auden’s poem.“In Memory of Sigmund Freud” relies on a counterpoint of two metrical systems, the largely iambic accentual/syllabic system, traditional in English since Wyatt, and a flattened version of Greek quantitative meter, which was a musical notation of syllable length. For Auden, whose great prosodic facility was almost a handicap, the problem was, “not how to write in iambics but how not to write in them from automatic habit.” 4 Throughout his poetic life, he reached for cadences to interrupt the “natural” iambics, sometimes recalling the Old English alliterative beat, and often turning to ballads and popular tunes for rhythmical variation. By the late thirties, he was not only disillusioned [End Page 112] with the Spanish Civil War and his role as quasi-Socialist bard, but was seeking new compositional principles as well. Free verse was not an alternative: his ear required an evident... (shrink)

In its narrative, dramatic, and representational genres, art regularly depicts contexts for human emotions and their expressions. It is not surprising, then, that these artforms are often about emotional experiences and displays, and that they are also concerned with the expression of emotion. What is more interesting is that abstract art genres may also include examples that are highly expressive of human emotion. Pure music – that is, stand-alone music played on musical instruments excluding the human voice, and without words, (...) literary titles, or associated texts connected to it by its composer – is often characterized as the expressive art par excellence. Yet how could that be possible, given that such music lacks semantic or representational content? Pure music presents the hardest and most vivid philosophical challenge to any account of expressiveness in the arts, which is why it is crucial to consider the musical case for the light it sheds on the underlying principles and issues. In this chapter I consider two accounts of expressiveness in pure music. Both regard expressiveness as an objective property of such music. I argue for the position I call appearance emotionalism and against the alternative, which I label hypothetical emo- tionalism. But before I get to that, there is a different mode of musical expression to be acknowledged. Even instrumental music comes charged with associations. Some of these are private to the listener, but many are widely shared. The latter may be included in a piece by accident but are, more often, deliberately placed for their effects. For instance, when a song is quoted in an instrumental work, its title or words may be brought to mind. Certain melodies (e.g., “Ode to Joy”), styles (e.g., tarantella), idioms (e.g., fanfares), forms (e.g., minuet), modalities (e.g., church modes), and instruments (e.g., fifes and snare drums) recall particular social events, geocultural regions, historical periods, ideas, and sensibilities, and in this way can hook up with affective life-experiences. Though it is music’s associative ties that are likely to be referred to when most people are asked about music’s significance, philosophers say little about them.. (shrink)

The ordinary differential equations are used as a mathematical method for the sake of modeling a complicated nonlinear system. This approach is well-known to be useful for the practical application, e.g., bioinformatics, chemical reaction models, controlling theory etc. In this paper, we propose a new evolutionary method by which to make inference of a system of ODEs. To explore the search space more effectively in the course of evolution, the right-hand sides of ODEs are inferred by Genetic Programming and the (...) least mean square method is used along with the ordinary GP. We apply our method to several target tasks and empirically show how successfully GP infers the systems of ODEs. We also describe how our approach is extended to solve the inference of a differential equation system including transdential functions. (shrink)

Compiled by scholars at the court of Liu An, king of Huainan, in the second century B.C.E, _The Huainanzi_ is a tightly organized, sophisticated articulation of Western Han philosophy and statecraft. Outlining "all that a modern monarch needs to know," the text emphasizes rigorous self-cultivation and mental discipline, brilliantly synthesizing for readers past and present the full spectrum of early Chinese thought. _The Huainanzi_ locates the key to successful rule in a balance of broad knowledge, diligent application, and the penetrating (...) wisdom of a sage. It is a unique and creative synthesis of Daoist classics, such as the _Laozi_ and the _Zhuangzi_; works associated with the Confucian tradition, such as the _Changes_, the _Odes_, and the _Documents_; and a wide range of other foundational philosophical and literary texts from the _Mozi_ to the _Hanfeizi_. The product of twelve years of scholarship, this remarkable translation preserves _The Huainanzi_'s special rhetorical features, such as parallel prose and verse, and showcases a compositional technique that conveys the work's powerful philosophical appeal. This path-breaking volume will have a transformative impact on the field of early Chinese intellectual history and will be of great interest to scholars and students alike. (shrink)

Apart from his critique of Kant, Maimon’s significance for the history of philosophy lies in his crucial role in the rediscovery of Spinoza by the German Idealists. Specifically, Maimon initiated a change from the common eighteenth-century view of Spinoza as the great ‘atheist’ to the view of Spinoza as an ‘acosmist’, i.e., a thinker who propounded a deep, though unorthodox, religious view denying the reality of the world and taking God to be the only real being. I have discussed this (...) aspect of Maimon’s philosophy in other places, and though the topic of the current paper has an interesting relation to certain doctrines of Spinoza, I will not develop this issue here. Neither of these two issues -- Maimon’s criticism of Kant or his original interpretation of Spinoza -- was considered by Maimon as his main contribution to philosophy. There is little doubt that if Maimon were asked to point out his single most important innovation he would have picked his doctrine of the Principle of Determinability [Satz der Bestimmbarkeit]. Regarding this doctrine Maimon writes: ... [T]he principle of determinability laid down in this work is a principle of all objectively real thought, and consequently of philosophy as a whole too. All the propositions of philosophy can be derived from, and be determined by it [woraus sich alle Sätze herleiten und wodurch sie sich bestimmen lassen]. … I have made available a supreme principle of all objectively real thought, viz., the principle of determinability... and have established as the ground of the whole of pure philosophy -- a principle which, if it is ever grasped, will, I hope, withstand every scrutiny. These claims may strike the reader as somewhat presumptuous, to say the least. But, if we pay attention to the last sentence of the passage, we can see that Maimon doubts whether his great finding will ever be understood. It is not unlikely that in this phrase (“wenn er nur einmal eingesehen werden wird”) Maimon was reacting to his own repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to explain the principle. The fate of Maimon’s principle has not been much better in the few works written on Maimon’s philosophy, and though almost all commentators agree that the principle of determinability is the linchpin of the positive philosophy Maimon was trying to develop, we do not yet have a clear explanation of this principle, or of the reason why Maimon assigns such importance to it. Recently, Oded Schechter developed an excellent reading of this principle, and in most aspects my view agrees with his (primarily, in its rejecting the attempt to explain the principle as a version of Leibniz’s predicate-in-subject [Praedicatum inest subjecto] containment thesis). My paper consists of two parts. The first is expository in nature. In this part, I spell out briefly the main aspects of Maimon’s principle of determinability and its aims. In the second part, I examine Maimon’s surprising claim that once we accept the principle of determinability, we have to deny the possibility of two subjects sharing the same predicate. Maimon provides several proofs for this highly counterintuitive claim, and I will try to clarify and evaluate these proofs. (shrink)