In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Unmasking the Maxim: An Ancient Genre And Why It Matters Now W. ROBERT CONNOR We live surrounded by maxims, often without even noticing them. They are easily dismissed as platitudes, banalities or harmless clichés, but even in an age of big data and number crunching we put them to work almost every day. A Silicon Valley whiz kid says, Move Fast and Break Things. Investors try to (...) Buy Low and Sell High. Investigative reporters Follow the Money. Others Follow their Bliss. The lavish host thinks, The More the Merrier, while the Modernist architect is sure that Less is More. Captains of Industry whisper to themselves, Me First; captains of sinking ships shout, Women and Children First. Be Prepared was the Boy Scouts’ marching song, while the Proud Boys Stand Down and Stand By, awaiting their marching orders. Maxims are perhaps the smallest members in a large family of speech acts, which among the Greeks included proverbs, oracles, riddles, blessings, curses and lamentations. Not all of these continue in use, but maxims have found companions—mottos, mantras, advertising tag lines and jingles, slogans, political rallying cries, hashtags, three- or four-letter acronyms and 280 character tweets from the goddess Twitter. Familiarity, however, can breed contempt, or at least inattentiveness to the full range of their influence. Sometimes what sounds at first like empty verbiage turns into action. Bruce Lee adapted an old Taoist saying when he said, Be Water, and thereby provided what was for a while a surprisingly effective strategy for protesters in Hong Kong. arion 28.3 winter 2021 6 unmasking the maxim Maxims empower, for good or ill. In the hands of bigots or ideologues, they can turn deadly. Sic Semper Tyrannis shouted John Wilkes Booth after shooting Abraham Lincoln. A manufacturer of assault rifles urged potential customers to Earn Your Man Card. How better to earn it than to obey 8chan, a web site favored by white nationalists, with its own maxim, Embrace Infamy. A devotee of the site did just that, perpetrating a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. Maxims, then, should not be lightly dismissed. Since the ancient Greeks so relished maxims, they should surely be interrogated to help us better understand the power of these often underestimated speech acts. Before turning to the Greeks, however, the English word maxim needs a closer look. english “maxim” english borrowed maxim from a Latin phrase and boiled it down for everyday use. In Latin writings about logic, the expression maxima propositio, biggest proposition, denoted a statement that did not need to be proved, but could provide the basis for proof of other, lesser propositions. This phraseology goes back at least to Boethius in the sixth century of our era. It’s the equivalent of the generalizations that serve as the major premises in syllogistic logic. If this makes maxims sound like the axioms of geometry, that is historically right. The starting points of plane geometry are propositions that deserve to be accepted; even without proof that they are worthy of belief. That’s the meaning of the term axiōma. No one needs to prove that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Think about it; after a while it seems self-evident. It is worthy of assent. We might equally well call such an axiom a maxim; indeed, the earliest (1426) attested use of maxim in English is described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “an axiom; a self-evident proposition assumed as a premise in mathematical, or dialectical reasoning.” W. Robert Connor 7 This usage is now obsolete, but Thomas Jefferson understood the idea behind it, since he believed that there were such truths, waiting to be put to work in building a society where all people were equal and possess certain inalienable rights. He did not feel he had to prove these propositions; they were in his view self-evident. In using these ideas in his draft of the Declaration of Independence, he was, in effect, transferring to politics what Euclid had done in geometry. It was a swift, strategic stroke on his part, for, since self-evident truths require no argument or explanation, they focus discussion not on... (shrink)

We introduce the concept of fraud tolerance, validate the conceptualization using prior studies in economics and criminology as well as our own independent tests, and explore the relationship of fraud tolerance with numerous cultural attributes using data from the World Values Survey. Applying partial least squares path modeling, we find that people with stronger self-enhancing values exhibit higher fraud tolerance. Further, respondents who believe in the importance of hard work exhibit lower fraud tolerance, and such beliefs mediate the relationship between (...) locus of control and fraud tolerance. Finally, we find that people prone to traditional gender stereotypes demonstrate higher fraud tolerance and document subtle differences in the influence of these cultural attributes across age, religiosity, and gender groups. Our study contributes to research on corporate governance, ethics, and the antecedents of work-place dishonesty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Hyperbole Enters Politics: What Can Be Learned From Antiquity and Our Hyperbolist-In-Chief W. ROBERT CONNOR introduction: an age of hyperbole Everywhere we turn these days we encounter hyperbole—in the colloquialisms of every day speech, advertising, salesmanship, letters of recommendation, sports-casting, and not least in political discourse. This may be a good moment, then, to open a conversation between ancient and modern understandings of verbal “over-shoot,” as the (...) Greek term for exaggeration might be rendered in English. The evidence gathered in H. Lausberg’s Handbook of Literary Rhetoric1 shows that while ancient rhetoricians agreed that hyperbole should be counted among the “figures of speech,” they found much to argue about: was hyperbole a violation of the Aristotelian middle course, hence an extreme to be avoided, or was it a legitimate form of augmentation (auxēsis in Greek, amplificatio in Latin)? Could diminution (meiōsis ) also be regarded as a form of hyperbole? In the interpretation of texts hyperbole poses a further difficulty —unlike simile, alliteration or some other figures of speech, it is “unmarked,” that is, it has no linguistic sign to alert the reader to its presence. Hyperbole likes to disguise itself as if it were going to a masquerade ball, presenting itself as simile or wearing metaphorical dress, or appearing not infrequently as litotes. It can sneak up on you and take you by surprise. The critic Longinus in On the Sublime, ch. 38, and some rhetoricians noted that hyperbole could be most arion 26.3 winter 2019 powerful when least recognized. Many ancient rhetoricians and some modern critics, however, have followed Quintilian, who asserted that “expressions (often hyperbolic), such as “storms of public assemblies, thunderbolts of eloquence, are used merely for ornament” (Institutes 8.6.7). In this view hyperbole is a conspicuous ornament used to embellish speech and make it more elegant and attractive, but today it is more often treated either as an excuse for an outrageous statement (as when the CEO of Cambridge Analytica characterized as “a certain amount of hyperbole” his suggestion of using prostitutes to discredit a political opponent), or as a euphemism for a falsehood (as when a politician promises he will eliminate the national debt—$20 trillion—and his budget director shrugs the claim off as “hyperbole.”) The term seems to extinguish any feeling of embarrassment. None of these understandings of hyperbole is simply wrong, but together they eclipse an alternative view, grounded in one ancient understanding of language, and corroborated by modern experience. In this approach language in general and hyperbole in particular are not simply a set of signs whose meaning is arbitrarily determined by social convention. Instead, they have their own nature (physis, as Isocrates says in Panegyricus 8) and hence their own power to arouse and motivate listeners. Hyperbole, viewed in this light, is a force in its own right, with the ability to give voice to otherwise unarticulated emotions, to intensify them, to push aside doubts and hesitations, and then to turn feelings into action. Language is power, and hyperbole, as an extreme form of language, provides great power to those who use it skillfully. These need not be the docile students of the rhetoricians ; politicians sometimes seem to have an innate understanding of it. The extreme breed among them, the demagogues, are often the ones who know best how to put this extreme of language to use. True, you don’t have to be a politician to put hyperbole to work. It is a favorite mode of speech among lovers, poets, travellers. Holy Men use it, too: Jesus of Nazareth, for exam16 when hyperbole enters politics ple, proclaimed that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19.24). Almost everyone uses it at some point, except policy wonks whose soulless prose withers before its onslaughts. When people use hyperbole they may be neither lying nor embroidering the truth to make it more ornamental. They exalt and intensify what they see as truth, make it come alive, and thereby rouse their listeners from apathy and distraction. Ordinary people, too, use... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women Poets and the Origin of the Greek Hexameter W. ROBERT CONNOR A very considerable question has arisen, as to what was the origin of poetry. —Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.57 i. a road trip with pausanias Tennyson called the dactylic hexameter “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but he did not say whose lips first did the moulding. Despite much arguing (...) we do not know for sure where it came from, or who developed it. But some ancient Greeks did, or thought they did. For them, the hexameter came with a personal history, a legendary one to be sure, but no less powerful for that. The legend, moreover, started with a woman poet. The trail that leads to this is a long and devious one, but a good guide presents himself, Pausanias, author of A Greek Guidebook (Hellados Periegesis). Although he is now valued primarily as a quarry cordoned off for topographers and archaeologists, he had a strong interest in poets, especially women ones. These include Sappho, of course, the valiant Telesilla of Argos of whom he tells two stories (2.20.8, and 2.35.2), and Praxilla of Sicyon (3.13.5). In his account of Boeotia he mentions another woman poet of the fifth century before our era, Corinna of Tanagra. She, he says (9.22.3f.), once defeated Pindar in a poetry contest, and was, he thinks, the most beautiful woman of her time, judging by a statue of her he had seen. He also speaks of Myro of Byzantium (9.5.8). Pausanias was confident that she had written epic and elegiac verse. arion 27.2 fall 2019 Pausanias chooses, moreover, to end his work with an enigmatic story about another woman poet, Anyte of Tegea. He had not mentioned her in his lengthy account of her home town in the mountains of Arcadia, but now her story seems to speak to him. It is set at a ruined shrine of Asclepius near the port town of Naupactus. The reason that Anyte had come there was a strange one: She had had, he says, a vision—not a dream, but a real vision—at the end of which she found herself holding a sealed tablet addressed to one Phalysius of Naupactus. He was, it turns out, a prosperous citizen of the town, but was going blind. Anyte made the journey, surely not an easy one, and delivered the tablet. As soon as Phalysius broke its seal, he found he could make out the letters—a wondrous improvement in his vision, which he attributed to the healing god Asclepius. That is why he built the shrine that Pausanias saw many years later. And the content of the message? Give Anyte two thousand gold staters. Phalysius did so. End of story. End of the Guidebook. So, indeed, Pausanias paid attention to women poets, and there were plenty of them to pay attention to. There is good evidence of a vibrant tradition of women’s poetry among the ancient Greeks. Pausanias is not the only writer of his time to note this. In fact, if on his journeys Pausanias had encountered the well-travelled rhetorician Tatian, the two near-contemporaries could have challenged one another to see who could name the largest number of women poets and identify the sculptors of statues honoring them. Tatian might have won, to judge from his Address to the Greeks, ch 33. But then, Tatian had an agenda. As a convert to a “barbarian” cult he wanted to show that his co-religionists had precedents for respecting women’s intellects: “My object in referring to these women is, that you may not regard as something strange what you find among us, and that, comparing the statues which are before your eyes, you may not treat the women with scorn who among us pursue philosophy.” So much for the Christian Tatian. Did Pausanias have an agenda, too? His stories of two women from Delphi, Boio 86 women poets and the origin of the greek hexameter and Phemonoe, help answer that question. ii. boio’s disruptive poetry when pausanias’s work describes Delphi, the plot thickens. In... (shrink)

If we are flexible, hybrid and unfinished creatures that tend to incorporate or at least employ technological artefacts in our cognitive lives, then the sort of technological regime we live under should shape the kinds of minds we possess and the sorts of beings we are. E-Memory consists in digital systems and services we use to record, store and access digital memory traces to augment, re-use or replace organismic systems of memory. I consider the various advantages of extended and embedded (...) approaches to cognition in making sense of E-Memory and some of the problems that debate can engender. I also explore how the different approaches imply different answers to questions such as: does our use of internet technology imply the diminishment of ourselves and our cognitive abilities? Whether or not our technologies can become actual parts of our minds, they may still influence our cognitive profile. I suggest E-Memory systems have four factors: totality, practical cognitive incorporability, autonomy and entanglement which conjointly have a novel incorporation profile and hence afford some novel cognitive possibilities. I find that thanks to the properties of totality and incorporability we can expect an increasing reliance on E-Memory. Yet the potentially highly entangled and autonomous nature of these technologie pose questions about whether they should really be counted as proper parts of our minds. (shrink)

Several issues are raised concerning the notion that a single strategy explains Fitts' law and the linear speed/accuracy trade-off. Two additional concerns are discussed: (1) distance is programmed, (2) the fact that movements produced without the aid of vision obey Fitts' law does not mean that sighted movements must be explained without regard to vision.

Among discrete emotions, basic emotions are the most elemental; most distinct; most continuous across species, time, and place; and most intimately related to survival-critical functions. For an emotion to be afforded basic emotion status it must meet criteria of: (a) distinctness (primarily in behavioral and physiological characteristics), (b) hard-wiredness (circuitry built into the nervous system), and (c) functionality (provides a generalized solution to a particular survival-relevant challenge or opportunity). A set of six emotions that most clearly meet these criteria (enjoyment, (...) anger, disgust, fear, surprise, sadness) and three additional emotions (relief/contentment, interest, love) for which the evidence is not yet quite as strong is described. Empirical approaches that are most and least useful for establishing basic-emotion status are discussed. Basic emotions are thought to have a central organizing mechanism and to have the capacity to influence behavior, thoughts, and other fundamental processes. (shrink)

1 The Zero-Force Evolutionary Law 2 Randomness, Hierarchy, and Constraint 3 Diversity 4 Complexity 5 Evidence, Predictions, and Tests 6 Philosophical Foundations 7 Implications.

Lines of identity in Peirce's existential graphs are logically complex structures that comprise both identity and existential quantification. Yet geometrically they are simple: linear continua that cannot have “furcations” or cross “cuts.” By contrast Peirce's “ligatures” are geometrically complex: they can both have furcations and cross cuts. Logically they involve not only identity and existential quantification but also negation. Moreover, Peirce makes clear that ligatures are composed of lines of identity by virtue of the fact that such lines can be (...) “connected” with one another and can “abut upon” one another at a cut. This paper shows in logical detail how ligatures are composed and how they relate to identity, existential quantification, and negation. In so doing, it makes use of Peirce's non-standard account of the linear continuum, according to which, when a linear continuum is separated into two parts, the parts are symmetric rather than asymmetric, and the one point at which separation occurs actually becomes two points, each of which is a Doppelgänger of the other. (shrink)

This Handbook provides an overview of many of the topics that currently engage philosophers of physics. It surveys new issues and the problems that have become a focus of attention in recent years. It also provides up-to-date discussions of the still very important problems that dominated the field in the past.

The fundamental question for the interpreter who addresses himself to the Jesus-tradition today is this: Is it possible any longer to recover the parable as parable?

The Kingdom as Jesus sees it breaking in will arrive in disenchanting and disarming form : not as a mighty cedar astride the lofty mountain height but as a lowly garden herb.... It will erupt out of the power of weakness and refuse to perpetuate itself by the weakness of power.

In this essay, I set forth a view of humans as creatures living at once in two worlds: the world of nature and the world of culture. I explore some of the tensions and paradoxes entailed by this position, as weIl as the implications for ethics, both interhuman and environmental. I also critique the distortions entailed by ethical stances which draw too heavily on one polarity or the other without taking sufficient account of the discontinuities between them.

A persistent methodological problem in primate social cognition research has been how to determine experimentally whether primates represent the internal goals of other agents or just the external goals of their actions. This is an instance of Daniel Povinelli’s more general challenge that no experimental protocol currently used in the field is capable of distinguishing genuine mindreading animals from their complementary behavior-reading counterparts. We argue that current methods used to test for internal-goal attribution in primates do not solve Povinelli’s problem. (...) To overcome the problem, a new type of experimental approach is needed, one which is supported by an alternative theoretical account of animal mindreading, called the appearance-reality mindreading (ARM) theory. We provide an outline of the ARM theory and show how it can be used to design a novel way to test for internal-goal attribution in chimpanzees. Unlike protocols currently in use, the experimental design presented here has the power, in principle and in practice, to distinguish genuine mindreading chimpanzees from those who predict others’ behavior solely on the basis of behavioral/environmental cues. Our solution to Povinelli’s problem has important consequences for a similar debate in developmental psychology over when preverbal infants should be credited with the ability to attribute internal goals. If what we argue for here in the case of nonhuman primates is sound, then the clearest tests for internal-goal attribution in infants will be those that test for attributions of discrepant or ‘false’ perceptions. (shrink)

From three simple Peircean semeiotic principles, the general formula is derived for the number of definable sign-types from the number of semeiotic trichotomies to be used in defining the sign-types. If k is the number of such trichotomies, then [ ]/2 is the number of sign-types definable by appealing to them. The significance of the derivation lies in its setting constraints on particular detailed theories of sign-types.

In recent years a growing number of democratic theorists have proposed ways to increase citizen engagement, while channeling those democratic energies in positive directions and away from systematic marginalization, exclusion and intolerance. One novel answer is provided by a strain of democratic theory known as agonistic pluralism, which valorizes adversarial engagement and recognizes the marginalizing tendencies implicit in drives to consensus and stability. However, the divergences between competing variants of agonistic pluralism remain largely underdeveloped or unrecognized. In this article, I (...) address this shortcoming, examining these strains of agonism around the constraints placed upon democratic discourse. I argue that the ‘associative agonism’ of theorists such as Bonnie Honig and William Connolly offers the best means for cultivating virtues necessary to revitalize a contentious democratic politics which also fosters receptivity to pluralism and difference. (shrink)

Kaum einer hat die offene Gesellschaft in der politischen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts so leidenschaftlich verteidigt wie Karl Popper. Sein Demokratieverstandnis ist eng gekoppelt an seine Wissenschaftstheorie und die Kritik an Platon, Hegel, Marx. Als Liberaler und sozialer Reformist wird er parteiubergreifend zum Stichwortgeber bundesdeutscher Politik seit den 70er Jahren. Popper-Rezeptionen finden sich bis in die Staatsrechtslehre (namentlich Peter Haberle) und das Bundesverfassungsgericht hinein. Noch heute lasst sich mit Popper gegen Diktaturen wie uberhaupt gegen Konzepte von "Gemeinschaft" Position beziehen - (...) aber auch gegen einen pseudo-liberalen, gnadenlosen Kapitalismus der "Ich-AGs". Mit Beitragen von Dorothea Frede, Peter Haberle, Herbert Keuth, Hubert Kiesewetter, Martin H. W. Mollers, Jurgen Nordmann, Harald Stelzer, Robert Chr. van Ooyen, Robert Zimmer. (shrink)

The relationship between individuals’ creativity and their ethical ideologies appears to be complex. Applying Forsyth’s (1980, 1992) personal moral philosophy model which consists of two independent ethical ideology dimensions, idealism and relativism, we hypothesized and found support for a positive relationship between creativity and relativism. It appears that creative people are less likely than non-creative people to follow universal rules in their moral decision making. However, contrary to our hypothesis and the general stereotype that creative people are less caring about (...) others, we found a positive relationship between creativity and idealism. These findings indicate that highly creative people are likely to be what Forsyth called “situationists,” individuals with both an ethic of caring and a pragmatic moral decision-making style. The finding that creative individuals tend to be situationists, and particularly that they tend to be high in idealism, appears to refute the line of reasoning that argues for a “creative personality” characterized in part by social insensitivity. Understanding the relationship between creativity and ethical ideologies has important implications for researchers, managers and teachers. (shrink)

We propose a vision of the structure of knowledge and processes of learning based upon the particularity of experience. Highly specific cognitive structures are constructed through activities in limited domains of experience. For new domains, new cognitive structures develop from and can call upon the knowledge of prior structures. Applying this vision of disparate cognitive structures to a detailed case study, we present an interpretation of addition‐related matter from the corpus and trace the interplay of specific experiences with the interactions (...) of ascribed, disparate structures. The interpretive focus is on learning processes through which a broadly applicable skill emerges from the interaction and integration of knowledge based on specific, particular experiences. (shrink)