No sooner had Pompey and the Senate fled in terror from Rome before Caesar's approach than the fears of those who remained in the city were heightened by new portents. The Etruscan soothsayer, Arruns, who was called in by the frightened townspeople to discover the will of the gods, proceeded to give such instructions as might be expected from one of his profession, and then, on sacrificing a bull, found that the omens were unfavourable. As if this were not enough, (...) at v. 639 the famous Neopythagorean scholar and friend of Cicero, P. Nigidius Figulus, appeared in order to consult the skies, for, as Lucan observes, he was in advance of even the Egyptians in his knowledge of astrology. He began by remarking that, if this science meant anything at all, considerable trouble was in store for the Romans; and then went on in vv. 651–65 to reveal what he saw when he looked at the heavens, expressing his meaning in words which, apart from a couple of technical expressions, may be immediately translated with some incidental interpretations as follows: ‘If the cold baneful planet Saturn were kindling his black fires summo caelo’, ‘a flood like that of Deucalion would have been pouring from Aquarius’ ‘and the entire land would have been hidden in the spreading expanse of water. (shrink)

Since late antiquity, a connection was made between Jews and the psychological state of despondency based, in part, on the link between melancholy and Saturn, and the further association of the Hebrew name of that planet, Shabbetai, and the Sabbath. The melancholic predisposition has had important anthropological, cosmological, and theological repercussions. In this essay, I focus on various perspectives on melancholia in thinkers as diverse as Kafka, Levinas, Blanchot, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Bloch, Scholem, and Derrida. A common thread that links (...) these thinkers is the hopelessness of hope imparted by the messianic belief in a future that must be perpetually deferred. (shrink)

In this paper I undermine the Entailment Principle according to which if an entity is a truthmaker for a certain proposition and this proposition entails another, then the entity in question is a truthmaker for the latter proposition. I argue that the two most promising versions of the principle entail the popular but false Conjunction Thesis, namely that a truthmaker for a conjunction is a truthmaker for its conjuncts. One promising version of the principle understands entailment as strict implication but (...) restricts the field of application of the principle to purely contingent truths (i.e. those that contain no necessary proposition at any level of analysis). But a conjunction of purely contingent truths strictly implies its conjuncts. So this version of the principle is committed to the Conjunction Thesis. The same is true of the version of the principle where entailment is understood in the sense of systems T, R, and E of relevant logic, since in these systems conjunctions entail their conjuncts. I argue that the Conjunction Thesis is false because a truthmaker is that in virtue of what a certain proposition is true and it is false that, for example, what the proposition that Peter is a man is true in virtue of is the conjunctive fact that Peter is man and Saturn is a planet (or the facts that Peter is a man and that Saturn is a planet taken together). I also argue against other versions of the principle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. SebaldMark R. McCullohIFor all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald's application of Walter Benjamin's view of historical process (an attitude toward history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author's sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible. 1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are capable (...) of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to document and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley's "Ozymandias" remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin's cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald's primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our [End Page 395] planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque.Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art:Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incredible care and precision as if they were permanent? 2The care and precision of the painter's craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald's fiction, the artist's depiction "courts and admits" its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald's first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3 :At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.(p. 176)The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly "slow-motion quality" of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, "screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair..." (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to... (shrink)

R. J. Hankinson traces the history of ancient Greek thinking about causation and explanation, from its earliest beginnings through more than a thousand years to the middle of the first millennium of the Christian era. He examines ways in which the Ancient Greeks dealt with questions about how and why things happen as and when they do, about the basic constitution and structure of things, about function and purpose, laws of nature, chance, coincidence, and responsibility.

This book is divided into three parts: in Part I, R. M. Hare offers a justification for the use of philosophy of language in the treatment of moral questions, together with an overview of his moral philosophy of ‘universal prescriptivism’. The second part, and the core of the book, consists of five chapters originally presented as a lecture series under the title ‘A Taxonomy of Ethical Theories’. Hare identifies descriptivism and non‐descriptivism as the two main positions in modern moral philosophy. (...) The former he divides into Naturalism and Intuitionism, and the latter into Emotivism and Rationalism. Hare argues that all forms of descriptivism tend to lead to Relativism because the truth conditions of moral statements are culturally variant. Of the positions discussed, only Hare's own position, a form of Rationalism, which he calls Universal Prescriptivism, meets all of the requirements that an adequate ethical theory should meet. Part III consists of Hare's previously published essay ‘Could Kant have been a Utilitarian?’ (Utilitas 5, 1993). Here, Hare puts forward the controversial thesis that Kant's moral philosophy is, in its basic principles, compatible with utilitarianism. (shrink)

The literature fails to reflect general agreement over the nature of the services and procedures provided by bioethicists, and the training and core competencies this work requires. If bioethicists are to define their activities in a consistent way, it makes sense to look for common ground in shared communities of practice. We report results of a survey of the services and procedures among bioethicists affiliated with the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics (JCB). This is the largest group of (...) bioethicists working in healthcare organizations in Canada. The results suggest there are many common services and procedures of JCB bioethicists. This survey can serve as a baseline for further exploration of the work of JCB bioethicists. Common practices exist with respect to the domains of practice, individual reporting relationships, service availability within business hours and the education and training of the bioethicist. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders certain questions about Ausonius’ two incomplete works on historical themes, Fasti and Caesares, with particular attention to points raised in a recent article by R. W. Burgess. Of the Fasti we have only a few tantalizing snippets, the packaging and not the core: what did the work look like when it left Ausonius? What was its coverage? was it in verse or prose? The Caesares as we have it breaks off in mid-quatrain, at line 139: did it (...) go beyond Elagabalus? What of the evidence in Giovanni Mansionario that Ausonius treated certain imperatores from Decius to Diocletian? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:684 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 "Private I.anguage" and the pivotal paper in the Stoic section, "The Conjunctive Model," bring out a third feature of Brunschwig's method. Many of his essays take their start from a small text or a relatively local problem, one which does not primafacie bear significantly on large philosophical issues. Yet in a rigorously conceived philosophical system, the whole is often (...) reflected in the details; where possible Brunschwig elicits the larger significance. He shows how Epicurean physics provides a normative model for Epicurean psychology without falling into the reductionist error; the Epicurean does extrapolate from physical theory to human experience, but in so doing he does not forget that human beings are not just atomic; they are atomic compounds. Reductionism does not follow from materialism, for Epicurus or for us. Similarly in "The Conjunctive Model" Brunschwig connects, in a manner which is speculative but nevertheless compelling, a important Stoic thesis in logic (that a conjunction is false if even one of its conjuncts is false) with a comprehensive understanding of Stoic ethics and physics, thereby giving definite content to the Stoic claims about the coherence of their system. The other Stoic papers focus on ontology and logic, showing how central these are to Stoicism. The titles speak for themselves: "Remarks on the Stoic Theory of the Proper Noun," "Remarks on the Classification of Simple Propositions in Hellenistic Logics," "The Stoic Theory of the Supreme Genus and Platonic Ontology," and "Did Diogenes of Babylon Invent the Ontological Argument?" (the answer is 'no'). One essay ("On a Stoic Way of Not Being") disguises by its title a crucial contribution to the philosophy of mind. The papers on Scepticism include "The 6oov ~t~ x~ ~.6"f.t 9 Formula in Sextus Empiricus," a definitive treatment of a verbal formula crucial to understanding the precise character of his sceptical stance, and "Sextus Empiricus on the xptxfl0tov," the only paper in the volume which has previously appeared in English. The papers "Once Again on Eusebius on Aristocles on Timon on Pyrrho" and "The Title of Timon's lndalmoi: From Odysseus to Pyrrho" deal with early Pyrrhonism, for which the evidence is so thin that no firm conclusions can be drawn. Yet even here Brunschwig's care and skill are exemplary, and his argument that we should look to Timon rather than Pyrrho as the creator of Pyrrhonism is as convincing as anything could be in this area. This is a collection which specialists must read and even nonspecialists will value for its elegant combination of rigor, intellectual honesty, and philosophical insight. BRAD INWOOD University of Toronto Michael J. B. Allen. Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato's Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. PP. x + 291. Cloth, $5o.oo. Marsilio Ficino was born in 1433 and died in 1499 at the age of 66. He would have been pleased if he could have known that. For three years before in 1496 (or slightly earlier) he declared in his Commentary on the Fatal Number that 6 was the perfect number and BOOK R~VIEWS 685 that contemplations of the sextile relations of the planets might lead to the return of the golden age of Saturn "some day," This is the fifth volume of Michael Allen's seminal studies of Ficino's Platonic commentaries; if his notable additional articles on further Ficino commentaries were assembled, as they sometime must be, it would be his sixth--not that he takes the same pleasure in numbers as his subject Ficino did. But 6 is the key to Ficino's unraveling of Plato's "fatal number" in Republic 546. To end the suspense, Ficino's solution, aided by Aristotle, Politics V. 1316, is (4 + 3 + 5)3or (6 x 2)3 or 1728. But 1728 what? There is no clue. The book is itself a valuable contribution to the history of philosophy. Allen reviews the history of this topos up to Brumbaugh and Rees. Although Ficino's entry was known and discussed in the sixteenth century, it has been lost from sight since, and Alien restores it importantly to... (shrink)

No one is excused from doing what he ought to do merely because he is unwilling to do it. But what if others are unwilling to play their necessary role in some joint venture that you all ought to undertake: might that excuse you from doing what you yourself ought to do as part of that? It would, if you were genuinely willing to play your necessary part if they were. But the unwillingness of everyone involved cannot reciprocally serve to (...) excuse one another from doing what they ought to do. (shrink)

The disappearance of the imperial biographies written by Marius Maximus is one of the more frustrating losses of Latin literature, for various reasons: the well-known testimony of Ammianus, the interest of Marius Maximus' attested contribution to the Historia Augusta, his importance, much in dispute, to the writer of that work, the lack of information on much of the period he covered, and, not least, the fascinating role assigned to him by modern scholars, remodelling a previous duality of sources, of bad (...) biographer in contrast to the good Ignotus. It has recently become common practice for the evidence of Ausonius' Caesares to be used in the search for this biographer. The suggestion goes back to a dissertation of F. della Corte in 1956/7, and was taken up in his edition of Ausonius' works by Pastorino, and discussed in the following year by Cazzaniga who, though uncertain about the dependence of Ausonius on Marius Maximus, does misleadingly assert ‘e certo che l'ultima epigramma tocca Elagabalo, che chiude la silloge’. More recently, della Corte has returned to the question and sketched a possible model for the growth of the whole extant collection of Ausonius' Caesares, on the basis of the manuscript tradition. The same volume contains a contribution to the question by S. d'Elia and includes, by a felicitous piece of editing, an extended footnote in which d'Elia is able to comment on the relevant part of della Corte's paper. Meanwhile, outside Italy, there have been parallel and independent developments. (shrink)

Elliott Sober''s selection for/selection of distinction has been widely used to clarify the idea that some properties of organisms are side-effects of selection processes. It has also been used, however, to choose between different descriptions of an evolutionary product when assigning biological functions to that product. We suggest that there is a characteristic error in these uses of the distinction. Complementary descriptions of function are misrepresented as mutually excluding one another. This error arises from a failure to appreciate that selection (...) processes can be described at several different theoretical levels. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Protecting The Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. By Robert E. Goodin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The proposition that a decreasing sequence of ordinals necessarily terminates has been given a new, and perhaps unexpected, importance by the rôle which it plays in Gentzen's proof of the freedom from contradiction of the “reine Zahlentheorie.” Gödel's construction of non-demonstrable propositions and the establishment of the impossibility of a proof of freedom from contradiction, within the framework of a certain type of formal system, showed that a proof of freedom from contradiction could be found only by transcending the axioms (...) and proof processes of that formal system. Gentzen's proof succeeds by utilisingtransfinite inductionto prove that certain sequences of reduction processes, enumerated by ordinals less than ε (the first ordinal to satisfy ε = ὡ) are finite. Were it possible to provethe restricted ordinal theorem, that a descending sequence of ordinals, less thanε, is finite, in Gentzen's “reine Zahlentheorie,” then it would be possible to determine a contradiction in that number system. In his paper, Gentzen proves the theorem of transfinite induction, which he requires, by an intuitive argument. There is also a method of reducing transfinite induction, for ordinals less than ε, to a number-theoretic principle given by Hilbert and Bernays, and a similar method by Ackermann. None of these proofs of transfinite induction isfinitist. (shrink)

The primary aim of this article is to reveal a number of previously unrecorded appearances of classical Latin poetry in the poems of Ausonius, with a brief assessment of their value in understanding his text, and an incorporation of them into the general picture of his acquaintance with his predecessors; a final section will outline some ways in which his adoptions and adaptations are used. Latin poets now fragmented or lost are not included in this study; for the survival of (...) a Lucilius or an Ennius has generally enjoyed more attention and study than the after-life of better-known authors. It is moreover doubtful if such early writers had a context to offer the borrower in Late Antiquity; while poets of the second and third centuries A.D. , who did, are poorly known today. (shrink)

Our human embryonic stem cell debates are not simply about good or bad ethical arguments. The fetus and the embryo have instead become symbols for a larger set of value conflicts occasioned by social and cultural changes. Beneath our stem cell debates lie conflicts between those who would privilege scientific progress and individual choice and others who favour the sanctity of family life and traditional family roles. Also at work, on both the national and international levels, is the use of (...) the embryo by newly emergent social groups to express resentment against cultural elites. The organisational needs of religious groups have also played a role, with the issue of protection of the embryo and fetus serving as a useful means of rallying organisational allegiance in the Roman Catholic and evangelical communities. Because the epiphenomenal moral positions on the status and use of the embryo are driven by the powerful social, cultural or economic forces beneath them, they will most likely change only with shifts in the underlying forces that sustain them. (shrink)