In reviewing Ellis' OCT of Catullus, Housman scorned the ‘diction and metre’ of Carm. 64.37, ‘Pharsaliam coeunt, Pharsalia tecta frequentant’. Yet several subsequent editors have agreed with Ellis and have also refrained from emending Pharsaliam. Even if there has not been enough discomfort with the MS reading to put some editors off retaining it, they might yet welcome a piece of positive evidence to support this decision. I will make the case that a passage in Statius' Achilleid may indicate that (...) the later poet was familiar with the line as the MSS have it. (shrink)

The US food regime maintained some degree of stability in terms of prices and production levels for commodities in the world economy. This food regime, resting on supply management policy, began to falter in the early 1970s. In the late-1980s and 1990s, notable changes occurred in the world economy regarding agriculture as the food regime became more market-oriented. The end of the twentieth century saw the breakdown of many institutions, organizations, and international agreements that had tried to stabilize prices and (...) production from 1945 to 1975. This paper examines this period of change and explores the effects on five commodities: cocoa, coffee, corn, soybeans, and wheat. These commodities offer important points of comparison. First, while cocoa, coffee, and wheat were regulated by international organizations and agreements, corn and soybeans were not. Second, the US dominated the international corn and soybean markets, but the cocoa, coffee, and wheat markets were much more competitive. And third, corn, soybeans, and wheat were commodities largely produced in the core of the world economy, while cocoa and coffee were produced in the periphery. Thus, comparing the effect of the fall of the US food regime on these commodities reveals the importance of previous regulation, the level of market competition, and geographic origin in the world economy. (shrink)

Seeing, Doing, and Knowing is an original and comprehensive philosophical treatment of sense perception as it is currently investigated by cognitive neuroscientists. Its central theme is the task-oriented specialization of sensory systems across the biological domain. Sensory systems are automatic sorting machines; they engage in a process of classification. Human vision sorts and orders external objects in terms of a specialized, proprietary scheme of categories - colours, shapes, speeds and directions of movement, etc. This 'Sensory Classification Thesis' implies that sensation (...) is not a naturally caused image from which an organism must infer the state of the world beyond; it is more like an internal communication, a signal concerning the state of the world issued by a sensory system, in accordance with internal conventions, for the use of an organism's other systems. This is why sensory states are both easily understood and persuasive.Sensory classification schemes are purpose-built to serve the knowledge-gathering and pragmatic needs of particular types of organisms. They are specialized: a bee or a bird does not see exactly what a human does. The Sensory Classification Thesis helps clarify this specialization in perceptual content and supports a new form of realism about the deliverances of sensation: 'Pluralistic Realism' is based on the idea that sensory systems coevolve with an organism's other systems; they are not simply moulded to the external world. The last part of the book deals with reference in vision. Cognitive scientists now believe that vision guides the limbs by means of a subsystem that links up with the objects of physical manipulation in ways that bypass sensory categories. In a novel extension of this theory, Matthen argues that 'motion-guiding vision' is integrated with sensory classification in conscious vision. This accounts for the quasi-demonstrative form of visual states: 'This particular object is red', and so on. He uses this idea to cast new light on the nature of perceptual objects, pictorial representation, and the visual representation of space. (shrink)

The eclipse riddle -- Seeing surfaces -- The disappearing act -- Spinning shadows -- Berkeley's shadow -- Para-reflections -- Para-refractions : shadowgrams and the black drop -- Goethe's colored shadows -- Filtows -- Holes in the light -- Black and blue -- Seeing in black and white -- We see in the dark -- Hearing silence.