Weather Omens of Enūma Anu Enlil: Thunderstorms, Wind and Rain. By Erlend Gehlken. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 43. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. x + 286, 47 plts. $144.

This paper recounts the experience of a community of inquiry in a Philosophy with Children´s workshop directed at teacher training students. The workshop experience is documented in the form of pedagogical narrative, a practice-training-research strategy that seeks to make school practice visible from the teacher´s point of view. Our narrative documents the experience of the workshop in the students’ voices. Between August and October 2018, each session was audio-recorded and transcribed. The critical issue of the narrative analyzed here is the (...) question of names; the discussion shows how the name not only constitutes a fundamental issue for identity definition, but also problematizes identity. The students’ experience of naming and being named opens questions about the teacher’s role in the classroom context, and problematizes the concept of the human subject in current pedagogical discourse, particularly in its opposition to the concept of community of inquiry in current philosophy of education discourse. (shrink)

This article starts from the non-juridical meaning of subjectivity that counter-conducts entail and from the asymmetrical forms of refusal they generate. Foucault’s understanding of counter-conducts as productive practices, internal to the regime of norms that they oppose, enables analysing struggles and modes of life that were not defined by Foucault in these terms, or those counter-conducts that are more recent. In the first section, the article engages with the meaning of “counter-conduct,” situating it within the omnes et singulatim nexus, interrogating (...) how the level of multiplicities is at stake in contemporary forms of counter-conduct. Then, it focuses on The Punitive Society, showing that the modes of life and strategies of flight against the capitalist system described by Foucault allow us to grasp the excess of discordant conducts with respect to technologies of power that try to discipline them. In the final section, the article explores the entanglement between singularities and multiplicities at play in the government of refugees, focusing on the spatial disobedience enacted by rejected refugees at Choucha refugee camp in Tunisia. Refugees’ strategic embracement of the condition ofsubjects eminently governed by the humanitarian rationale illuminates a form of biopolitics of the governed. (shrink)

We summarize the ethnographic literature illustrating that “abnormal birth” circumstances and “ill omens” operate as cues to terminate parental investment. A review of the medical literature provides evidence to support our assertion that ill omens serve as markers of biological conditions that will threaten the survival of infants. Daly and Wilson (1984) tested the prediction that children of demonstrably poor phenotypic quality will be common victims of infanticide. We take this hypothesis one stage further and argue that some (...) children will be poor vehicles for parental investment yet are not of demonstrably poor quality at birth. We conclude that when people dispose of infants due to “superstitious beliefs” they are pursuing an adaptive strategy in eliminating infants who are poor vehicles for parental investment. (shrink)

The names of dishes grow in some situations to the level of small works of art. This is especially true in situations where their function is persuasive, they are meant to persuade to buy, order or prepare. For this very reason they are often ambiguous, in many cases not culinarily definitive and possibly misleading to the recipient. We are dealing with this type of names in the culinary programmes “Ugotowani” and “Das perfekte Dinner / Das perfekte Promi-Dinner”. Invented for the (...) sake of the programme, the occasional names of the dishes served are both manifestations of creativity and a kind of a riddle for the recipient, as they permit many interpretations. The aim of our analysis is to identify strategies used to create these terms. (shrink)

Severe illnesses and sudden deaths are all too common occurrences in the lives of the Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula, so it is perhaps no surprise that, as a people, they tend to be rather fatalistic. Maya fatalism finds one of its most prominent expressions in the tamax chi'—a type of omen that speaks of impending suffering, usually of a terminal nature, for a member of one's close family. In terms of components and mechanics, however, a tamax chi' is actually (...) something more than a mere kin-doom sign; it forms part of a hybrid, if somewhat limited, cultural self, one of whose key functions seems to be helping people cope. Through recourse to Goffman () speaker roles and Danziger's hearer roles and through analysis of data derived from years of research in the region, I also demonstrate its relevance to more general understandings of self and intentionality. (shrink)

A passage in Eunapius (476–7, pp. 440–2 Loeb) draws an interesting contrast between the attitudes to divination of the two sophists Maximus and Chrysanthius: Maximus, who manipulates the omens until they say what he wants, and Chrysanthius, who scrupulously obeys their apparent meaning. But a passage a little later (500–1, pp. 542–4 Loeb) apparently ascribes to Chrysanthius the opposite attitude. This article suggests a transposition to restore coherence to the text. Even if the transposition is wrong, the contrast drawn (...) in the first passage between two attitudes to divination, one rigorous and literalist, one manipulative, is important. (shrink)

The omen of the door and the eagle at Iliad 24.314–21 appears to have sparked scant scholarly interest, but deserves careful attention. The omen itself forms part of an analogy, for the eagle is likened in the size of its wingspan to a large, barred door. This simile might seem unremarkable, merely a convenient means of depicting great size, a casual juxtaposition of two ordinary nouns. The omen, on the whole, might be dismissed as nothing more than a conventional expression (...) of divine favor. But closer scrutiny will reveal that there is, in fact, nothing arbitrary or haphazard in the selection of the terms of the analogy. Appreciation of the elegance and subtlety of the simile in turn reveals the full import of the omen. (shrink)

ExcerptThe Omens In November 1961, the Einaudi publishing house published Renzo De Felice's Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo.1 The Wiener Library in London and both the Yad Vashem Martyrs' and Heroes' Memorial Authority in Jerusalem and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research of New York City had just published (respectively, at the beginning and the end of 1960) two bibliographies concerning the persecution of Jews in Europe, one authored by Ilse R. Wolff and the other by Philip (...) Friedman and Jacob Robinson.2 According to their works (in particular, according to the latter, more extensive one),…. (shrink)

Dia·mytho·log·õmen: the first person plural present subjunctive active form of the verb διαμυθολογέω, ‘to converse,’ or, more literally, ‘to tell stories,’ and more literally still, ‘to speak about by way of myth.’ Adapted from Plato’s Phaedo (70b6), the word functions in the title as a hortatory subjunctive: ‘Let us converse, tell stories, mythologize.’ The book depicts through narrative the various activities of a philosopher, as a thinker, a teacher, a scholar, and a creative-intellectual writer. With reference to various philosophers, to (...) Plato and Nietzsche in particular, it develops accounts of philosophy as ‘Creative Pyrrhonism’ and of the philosopher as superior to the sage. (shrink)

Significant dreams, like omens and oracles, play a conspicuous part in Herodotus′ narrative; the prominence which he affords to them well illustrates the difference between his approach to historiography and that of Thucydides, in whose work we shall look in vain for nocturnal visions. From the point of view of the scientific historian reports of dreams are inadmissible evidence, resting as they must on the unverifiable testimony of a single witness whose recollection is very likely to have been influenced (...) by subsequent events. Herodotus′ more hospitable attitude in part reflects his incalculable debt to the traditions of Levantine storytelling; but it is also connected with the central position occupied by kings and other powerful individuals in his narrative. Homer bears witness to the belief that the dreams of kings are more likely to be divinely inspired than those of others , and throughout the Near East rulers recorded the achievements which resulted from monitions received in sleep; if royal dreams assumed a more lucid and orderly form than most people could well parallel from their own experience, this might be regarded as a natural corollary of the peculiar link between king and gods. (shrink)

"Divination and Human Nature" casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination--the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. In this book, Peter Struck reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact--that humans (...) could sometimes have uncanny insights--and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, Struck demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, Struck notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, "Divination and Human Nature" illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic. (shrink)