bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Resurrection of Jesus
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: November 2023

I argued in the previous chapter that our evidence about the life and teaching of Jesus is such as it is probable we would find if his life were the sort of life and teaching that God Incarnate would live and teach, and very improbable we would find otherwise. But that is not enough to show that Jesus was God Incarnate. For it is not very improbable that in the course of human history given the large number of different kinds of humans there might have appeared by chance just once a prophet who lived the requisite sort of life and gave the requisite sort of teaching, but who was nevertheless just an ordinary human. As I argued in Chapter 6, to establish that a prophet was God Incarnate we need also God’s signature on the prophet’s work. Someone’s signature on a work is an event which can (with high probability) only be brought about by that person, and occurs in connection with the work in a way which the culture in which it occurs would recognize as an endorsement of that work.
Fundamental Physics for Probing and Imaging
Authors: Allison Wade
Published: November 2023

Physics has reduced fear and increased safety for society, largely by extending the power to see. The methods used are magnetic resonance, ionising radiation and sound, with their extensions. This textbook expounds the fundamental physics of these. It follows how they are applied by modern technology to #x201C;seeing#x201D; in clinical medicine including therapy and in other spheres of human activity such as archaeology, geophysics, security and navigation. By taking a broad view over the whole field, the book encourages comparisons, underlines the importance of public education and reaches fresh conclusions of some political importance concerning safety. This textbook has developed from a course given to third year students at Oxford and is written so that it can be used coherently as a basis for shorter courses by omitting certain chapters.
Rediscovering Ancient Magic
Authors: Davies Owen
Published: November 2023

In the nineteenth century archaeological revelations about the world of ancient Egypt reinvigorated old conceptions of the country’s place in the history of the occult and inspired new magical traditions. But it is important to acknowledge that ancient Egyptian culture was not as remote to the people of early modern Europe as one might think. In learned medical practice pieces of Egyptian mummies were prized for their potent blend of resins, gums, oils, and decayed bodily Xuids. The Medici popes and prosperous merchants of early sixteenth- century Italy generated an enthusiasm for Egyptian monumental architecture and antiquities as part of a renewed respect for the military achievements of their pagan ancestors, giving pride of place to the obelisks that had been brought back in the heyday of the Empire. In intellectual circles hieroglyphs fascinated the Renaissance occult philosophers and alchemists. As with the Jewish Kabbalah, hieroglyphs represented both the key to and substance of ancient wisdom, and their meaning could only be revealed through divine communication or by intuitive inspiration.
Early and present Earth and its circumnavigation of the Sun
Authors: Gale Joseph
Published: November 2023

The Solar System came into being from the remnants of a supernova event around 4.55 billion years ago. As discussed in Chapter 2, this supernova origin was important for life as it ensured the presence of the essential heavier than helium elements, such as carbon, iron, and phosphorus. The first period of Earth’s formation, from 4.55 to ∼4.0 Gy BP is called, appropriately enough, the Hadean aeon (from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld). Life probably first appeared at the end of this aeon in a period called the Archaean (see Table 8.1 for the dating and characteristics of the different geological periods). It is conceptually of the greatest importance to remember that, however exceptional, Earth is just one of eight planets in the Solar System. Earth began to form from the swirling maelstrom of the rocks and dust surrounding the Sun (the solar nebula) only a short time after the Sun itself coalesced into a mass with a density sufficient to drive fission activity, thus becoming a star. In relation to potentially life-supporting conditions, Earth’s first 0.5-1 Gy are well expressed in the words from the Hebrew bible’s story of the creation ‘Tohu V’Vohu’-complete chaos. This was a time during which there were frequent collisions with bodies varying in size from rocks to planetisimals measured in kilometres; the ‘bombardment phase’. These impactors originated from the same solar nebula and accreted to form planet Earth. As it formed, Earth acquired the physical characteristics described in Chapter 4. This period probably looked much like the artist’s impression shown in Fig. 5.1. The final form of Earth included oceans, an early land mass, and a swirling atmosphere.
Beyond Moralism: God is Love
Authors: Rowland Tracey
Published: November 2023

In a series of sermons preached at the Cathedral of Münster to members of the student chaplaincy in 1964 Ratzinger posed the question: ‘What actually is the real substance of Christianity that goes beyond mere moralism?’ The term moralism generally refers to the Kantian rationalist tendency to reduce Christianity to the dimensions of an ethical framework, or to equate faith with obeying a law. Lorenzo Albacete has described it as a modern form of Pelagianism, a belief in salvation through good works and obedience which he suggests can only be overcome by a ‘proper theology of grace in which grace is not presented as something added to and external to the natural law itself [as some Neo-Scholastics would have it], but rather as the possibility of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ’. In such a theology of grace ‘it is not life according to the natural law or to ethics that saves and fulfils us: more radically, it involves a relationship of Communion with the Person of Jesus Christ’. This is essentially the response which the young Ratzinger gave to his own question in the third of his Münster sermons. Ratzinger proposed that the antidote to moralism is the theology of the First Letter of St John: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.
‘Country-States’ versus City-State Cultures
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

In the perspective of world history we can see that the mutual interreaction between the creation of cities and the creation of states brought to the fore two different types of state: macro-states, which each had a great number of cities spread out over the territory, and regions whose population had, indeed, the same culture, language, religion and traditions but were nevertheless divided into a large number of little states, each consisting of a city and its hinterland, often of under 100 and, at most, 1,000 or so km2. It is usual to call the macro-states ‘territorial states’ and to treat territorial states and city-states as antonyms.1 But that is misleading, because every city-state had a territory, even if of modest size.
The Polis as City and State
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

I have argued above that the polis was both a nucleated settlement and a self-governing polity, and from page 1 I have cast this view in modern terms and spoken of the polis as both ‘city’ and ‘state’. Are these two terms and the concepts behind them well chosen in a description of the Greek polis? Even if we accept that the polis ideally was both a city and a state, i.e. a city-state, what happens if, combining the two aspects, we apply them to individual poleis? Athens was both a city and a state, and that goes for many other poleis too: Corinth, Megara, Syracuse.
Polis as City
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

All our written sources show that socially and economically a polis was a city plus its hinterland, and that politically it was a kind of state. Each of these aspects must be treated now in greater detail. We begin with polis as city. An important difference between polis as city and polis as state can be clearly seen if we attempt to answer the questions: Who lived in a polis? And who were members of a polis? Although the Greeks had a tendency to settle in cities, it is a fact that in ancient Greek there is no word that means the people living in a city as against the people living in the countryside. The word polites meant a ‘citizen’ in the political sense of the word, and signified the adult male citizen irrespective of where he lived.1 The word asty (city) was used as a synonym of polis in the sense of a place,2 but its derivation astos (man from the asty) is never used to mean ‘city-dweller’. Like polites, astos is used of a citizen only in the political meaning. The adjective agroikos often means someone who lives in the country, and then can have the derivative meaning of ‘simple, uneducated person’.
The Size and Population of the Cities
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

The areas of cities are not a thing in which historians show much interest. They prefer to estimate the size of cities by the number of inhabitants. There can, indeed, be no doubt that knowledge of population size is much more important than knowledge of how large an area the city covered: the problem is only that in the case of ancient cities we have next to no knowledge of their population size and are consequently reduced to making guesses about a city’s population size from what we know about its area. In the Classical period almost all poleis had walls, and of many of the walls enough survives for us to be able to calculate with complete or fair certainty the area enclosed by them. For 232 of the 1,035 poleis in the Polis Centre’s Inventory we can calculate the city’s area, and the figures work out as shown in table 2.1 These figures must, of course, be read with caution, for the area of the city walls is not always an adequate criterion of the size of the city. Many cities had a large open area within the walls, where the population from the countryside could take refuge in case of war.
Polis as City in the Archaic Period
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

In describing the polis in its ‘city’ meaning I have so far focused on the Classical period. I want now to return to the question how far back polis as ‘city’ can be traced, to set beside what we know of the origin of polis as ‘state’. I begin with the written sources and consider the earliest evidence we have for the concept of polis as city. In the Homeric poems all cities are provided with high walls and impressive towers, and inside the walls they have broad streets.1 That picture may be a reminiscence of the cities of the Bronze Age, or be based on a vague knowledge of the big cities of the Near East; but it may reflect the cities of Greece proper that Homer’s hearers lived in, say, in the seventh century bc; and that possibility is confirmed by other sources. In a lost—though much-cited—poem Alkaios of Lesbos says that a polis is not just a walled city but rather a community of men ready to defend their society: the antithetical way of putting it implies that other people did describe the polis as a walled city; and polis in that sense turns up in Archilochos of Paros.
Religion
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

Ever since the ground-breaking book of Fustel de Coulanges, La Cite‹ antique, of 1864, many ancient historians have declared that religion was the most important aspect of the society of the ancient Greek polis: (1) the institutions of the polis were the framework of Greek religion; (2) in the polis there was no distinction between the sacred and the profane; and (3) religion was at the centre of everything with which the polis concerned itself. I believe that this holistic conception of the polis is skewed, and it is the second and third points with which I disagree. With one small addition I can accept the first point: the polis came to be the framework of Greek religion. The Greek pantheon and the temples and worship of the gods were not invented by the polis; they were much older and were adopted by the polis, but not at one go. It is often alleged that the polis arose in the early Archaic Age as a result of the communal co-operation that was required to build the monumental temples and organise the great religious festivals.
The Polis Compared with Other City-State Cultures
Authors: Hansen Mogens Herman
Published: November 2023

What remains is to put the Greek city-state culture into perspective by comparing some essential aspects of the polis with what we know about similar characteristics in other city-state cultures. Emergence Unlike many other city-state cultures, the Greek poleis did not come into existence by the disintegration of a macro-state.1 The polis belonged in the other category: it was a demographic and economic upsurge in the Geometric period that resulted in the simultaneous rise of cities and states and led to the formation of the polis as the specific Greek form of city-state and city-state culture.2 In Greece the interval between the demise of the Mycenean civilisation and the emergence of the polis in the late Geometric period spans more than three centuries. Accordingly, it is unlikely that the polis should be seen as a direct continuation of Mycenean civilisation.
Translation and Commentary
Authors: Macrides Ruth
Published: November 2023

The usefulness of history has already been defined by our predecessors and we must repeat much of what they had to say. For how could we find a newer insight than those many historians who have revealed the general value of history in their own works? But perhaps we should present in the preface to our composition that which is worth saying on the task that lies before us that is supplementary to them; that is, we have new subject matter which no one has yet committed to writing; novelty also has some usefulness when people gain knowledge of the things which the indiscriminate flow of vulgar speech does not reveal truthfully.
Simone Weil and the Classics
Authors: Meaney Marie Cabaud
Published: November 2023

Simone Weil (1909–43) is mainly identified as a political thinker and a religious author. Her interpretations of ancient Greek texts are less well known except for her article on the Iliad which has elicited some recognition among classicists. Her readings of the Sophoclean Antigone and Electra, of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, of Plato and of the Pythagoreans are not usually included in the bibliographies of secondary works on the Greek classics. The reason is obvious: her anachronistic and Christological readings are shocking to those who wish to analyse texts with a critical-historical approach. Antigone, in her eyes, is a Christ-figure, giving her life out of a folly of love, adopting a supernatural perspective while Creon has embraced worldly reasoning. The recognition scene between Electra and her brother Orestes symbolizes for her a mystical encounter between the soul and God. Prometheus, on the other hand, is not really punished by Zeus, she believes, but simply experiences the same abandonment as Christ on the Cross.
Tableau de l’absence de Dieu—AModern Interpretation of the Iliad
Authors: Meaney Marie Cabaud
Published: November 2023

To answer one of the most pertinent questions of her time, namely the reasons for war, Weil turns again to the classics, this time to the Iliad.² In the face of destruction and battle, Weil looks at their ancient poetic depiction. Though many know the epic, ‘une sorte de fatalité nous fait lire sans comprendre’ (OC ii/3. 50). This may be the time when its true meaning can be understood anew, since the French are about to experience a fate similar to that of the Trojans. In spite of Weil’s fear of the suffering that awaits her countrymen, she also sees the possibilities of awakening and conversion that war offers. War reveals certain truths concerning evil that need to be grasped, as she writes in La Connaissance surnaturelle: ‘Dans la guerre, il faut lire les vérités surnaturelles qui concernent le mal’ (CS 126). These truths concern the nature of force, destiny, the perception of one’s enemy, the dynamic of war and its causes. These themes will be examined in detail in this chapter, as well as the reason why Weil calls them supernatural.
Prometheus Bound — An Apologetics of the Cross
Authors: Meaney Marie Cabaud
Published: November 2023

How a good and omnipotent God can allow evil and suffering is a question which has haunted humanity at all times. But during World War II it was a particularly pertinent problem. It led some to atheism and others— such as Weil— to develop a theodicy which usually belongs to every apologetic endeavour. The malheur of her contemporaries obsessed Weil. She was tempted ‘de pleurer des larmes de sang’, when thinking of those who are unable bear their suffering (PSO 130).
Wittgenstein ‘s Knight Move: Hacker on Wittgenstein ‘s Influence on Analytic Philosophy
Authors: Margalit Avishai
Published: November 2023

My title is based on the knight ‘s move in chess, a metaphor that Victor Shklovsky, the illustrious literary scholar, made famous. Philosophical influence moves the way the knight moves in chess, partly forward and partly sideways. Wittgenstein ‘s influence in philosophy is rarely straight-forward— hence my title. In my essay, I would like to reflect on the notion of philosophical influence by viewing and reviewing Peter Hacker ‘s account of Wittgenstein ‘s influence on twentieth-century analytic philosophy. My suspicion is that Wittgenstein had more presence in philosophy than influence on philosophy. There are those who put Wittgenstein in the Pantheon, and those who put him in the Pandemonium. But he leaves no one indifferent: all find him impressive. Yet being impressive is not the same as having influence. Peter Hacker served successfully as apprentice to the master-craftsman Wittgenstein, as attested by his book Insight and Illusion. He then spent many years as a journeyman, at the end of which he submitted to the guild a masterpiece in four volumes dedicated to the work of the master. For Hacker, Wittgenstein is the Hans Sachs of the philosophical guild who discovered, when he was about to join the great masters, that not much of the guild was left from the golden days at Oxford. To commemorate the guild and its great master from Cambridge, Hacker wrote a book that sings the praises of the great guild and highlights the great role his master played in shaping it.
‘Moses ‘: Wittgenstein on Names
Authors: Schulte Joachim
Published: November 2023

In the first volume of their commentary on Wittgenstein ‘s Philosophical Investigations Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker give ample space to discussions of Wittgenstein ‘s views on names. In various parts of their commentary they review a number of manuscript passages foreshadowing, or contrasting with, Wittgenstein ‘s later remarks on this topic as printed in the Investigations. Clearly, the most important and, perhaps, most controversial of these remarks is PI, 79, which centres on the biblical name ‘Moses ‘. In this essay I shall rely on the same sort of manuscript material to tell part of the story of Wittgenstein ‘s ‘Moses ‘ remark in my own way — often in agreement with Baker ‘s and Hacker ‘s findings, but sometimes emphasizing different aspects of Wittgenstein ‘s thought. There is one point, however, regarding which Baker and Hacker take issue with Wittgenstein ‘s account of the matter where I for my part feel that Wittgenstein ‘s approach can be seen in a more favourable light. Baker and Hacker write as follows: Wittgenstein seems to be committed to a similarly implausible view [as Frege], since on his account each John Smith will have a name with a different fluctuating and indeterminate meaning. [...] It is not necessary to assume that names have meanings that determine their reference. Traditional accounts of their meaning have unwelcome consequences. So we can now jettison the three dogmas that names have meaning (in the preferred sense), that explaining who N is, is explaining the meaning of ‘N ‘, and therefore that names are typically polysemic. If we jettison the assumption that names have meanings that identify their bearer, then there can be no such thing as explaining their meaning.
Cognitive Scientism
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: November 2023

Once upon a time it was easy to classify propositions. There were analytic propositions, true in virtue of their meaning, and there were synthetic propositions that contained information about the world. All analytic propositions were known a priori; empirical propositions, known a posteriori, were all synthetic. Out of respect for Kant philosophers would inquire whether any propositions were synthetic a priori, but commonly the question was raised only to be answered in the negative. In the latter part of the twentieth century the tidy dichotomy — analytic a priori vs synthetic a posteriori— came under attack from two opposite directions. In 1951 Quine ‘s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism ‘ sought to undermine the analytic/synthetic distinction, replacing it with a continuum of propositions of varying degrees of entrenchment in the web of our beliefs. In 1969 there appeared Wittgenstein ‘s On Certainty, which drew attention to an important class of propositions which appeared to be neither analytic nor empirical. Instead of two packages of propositions, we were offered either a single package or three packages. Quine denied that analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy or necessity, and he rejected the idea that a sentence was synthetic if it could be verified or falsified by experience. It is not single sentences, he argued, but whole systems— which include mathematics and logic as well as geography and history — that are verified or falsified. ‘Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.
Knowing How To and Knowing That
Authors: Wiggins David
Published: November 2023

Gilbert Ryle maintained that knowing how [to V] and knowing that [p] were distinct, not the same thing. The first was not reducible to the second. They represented different aspects or powers of mind. It was a long-standing, deep-seated, intellectualist mistake to assimilate them, he said. In the last decade, relatively few philosophers have taken Ryle ‘s part, but I shall. Some who doubt Ryle ‘s contention are impressed by the point that there are cases where knowing some ordinary fact appears to be all that is needed in order to put one into a position to do something. (I shall say something about that towards the end.) Others argue that knowing how to V is always a matter of knowing the way to V, where knowing the way to V is knowing propositionally that such and such is that way. Against both kinds of critic, I shall argue that the Rylean contention is simply correct.
Fusing the Images: Nachruf for Wilfrid Sellars
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

With the death of Wilfrid Sellars at age 77 in July 1989, we have lost one of the great creative, synthetic, and systematic philosophical talents of our century. His published scholarly work, a corpus including three independent books but dominated by well over one hundred substantial essays, has helped to set and shape the Anglo-American philosophical agenda over a period of forty years and has earned him worldwide recognition and justified acclaim as one of the most consequential and, indeed, definitive figures of postwar Western philosophy.
Linguistic Roles and Proper Names
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

Sellars’ philosophy forms an extraordinarily complex and thoroughly interconnected systematic unity. If only tangentially, it touches every major concern of the philosophical community. On some of these concerns, Sellars has both thought long and written extensively; on others, while he has thought no less long, much of what he has to say he has so far said largely by implication. In this essay, I want to address a theme from the second group. Specifically, I want to try to develop an appropriately Sellarsian understanding of proper names, to locate and assess their place in the broader context of his semantic theories.
Ryleans and Outlookers: Wilfrid Sellars on “Mental States”
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

Wilfrid Sellars’ well-known “Myth of Jones”, in his classic essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”,¹ is almost universally cited as the original source of the proposal that such “mental states” as beliefs, desires, intentions, and other “propositional attitudes” should be conceived of on the model of posited theoretical entities. That proposal, in turn, is the key- stone of something often called the “theory” theory (henceforth, for simplicity, “the T-theory”), although it is frequently not terribly clear just what the commitments of that theory are supposed to be.³
The Place of Color in the Scheme of Things: A Roadmap to Sellars’ Carus Lectures
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

Sellars’ views on the Myth of the Given and the ontological status of secondary qualities, one would have thought, are well-known, even if not always well- understood. One would not have expected his Carus Lectures, then, to offer anything radically new and exciting. The ground that they cover is, after all, familiar— from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956), from “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962), from “The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem” (1965), and from the ensuing debates with Cornman (“Science, Sense Impressions, and Sensa: A Reply to Cornman”, 1971) and with Firth (“Givenness and Explanatory Coherence”, 1973). One would not really have anticipated many surprises. But one would have been wrong.
Sellarsian Seeing: In Search of Perceptual Authority
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

In this essay, I propose to insert myself into an ongoing dispute between John McDowell and Robert Brandom regarding the relationship between perceptual experience and epistemic justification.¹ Each is reacting in his own way to a well- known account offered by Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” [EPM], and each offers a critical alternative to it. I want to suggest that neither Brandom’s nor McDowell’s alternative is ultimately satisfactory— Brandom’s for some of the reasons that likely motivated Sellars to reject a reliabilist externalism, and McDowell’s for some of the same reasons that Sellars brings critically to bear on classical foundationalist givenness.
Divergent Intuitions: McDowell’s Kant and Sellars’ Kant
Authors: Rosenberg Jay F
Published: November 2023

John McDowell’s Woodbridge Lectures constitute one of those remarkable documents that illustrate how serious philosophy draws on its own history. McDowell’s primary aim is to contrast his own account of intentionality— of “how thought and language are directed toward the world” (HWV, 471)— with one that he finds more or less explicitly framed and defended by Wilfrid Sellars, originally and influentially in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”. This is not the first time that McDowell has attempted to articulate his differences with Sellars.
Diagram (tu) and Text (wen) Mapping the Chinese World
Authors: Schmidt-Glintzer Helwig
Published: November 2023

Human beings have always imagined their environment, thereby creating ‘mental maps.’ Even before knowing how to write, they drew maps in order to come to terms with, and to take control over, the spatial dimension of their livelihood. An important aspect of this spatial dimension constituted communication with deities and ancestors of the netherworld. In ancient China religious experts took charge of this particular aspect. Moreover, as in many other cultures, conceptualizations of the cosmos were part and parcel of cosmogonic myths. In the course of a long-term rationalization process we find that pacing the cosmos became the king’s prerequisite and, in later times, even that of members of the elite.
Image and Empire The Shaping of Augustan Rome
Authors: Schneider Rolf Michael
Published: November 2023

Imperial Rome is an archetype of empire—and this for many reasons. The shaping of imperial Rome owes a considerable debt to cultures which achieved exceptional standards in political and intellectual life as well as in the visual, written, and technical domain. This is particularly manifest in the Roman reception of non-Italian cultures, such as Classical Greece, the kingdoms of the Hellenistic East, and the realm of Carthage in the West. Equally, Rome’s multi-ethnic empire was based on a variety of ‘Roman’ factors such as a dominant military, a worldwide economy, and a flexible religious, cultural, and social policy combined with efficient infrastructure and global imagery. I focus on the imagery, which I regard as one of Rome’s most influential instruments for consolidating her empire. Concentrating on the relation of image and empire I am interested in the making, function, and perception of Rome’s imperial imagery—and its role in social communication. The best documented starting point for such an analysis is the reign of Augustus, Rome’s Wrst emperor (27 bc–ad 14). During his regime Rome and her empire were fundamentally remodeled. In and for the process of this remodeling images of all kinds and in all contexts played a crucial part. I start with the new images of Rome’s Augustan landscape, continue with the new images of Augustus, and finish with the new images of the oriental as Rome’s most important cultural Other.
Imperial Aura and the Image of the Other in Han Art
Authors: Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens Michele
Published: November 2023

Before trying to explore how notions such as the imperial aura and the image of the Other are expressed in Han art, I would like to recall the limits of our documentation, which explain the difficulty I often have had in illustrating my subject. The cities and palaces of the Qin and the Han, built mostly of earth (mainly rammed earth), sometimes faced with decorated bricks, and of wood, have left few evocative vestiges. We possess fragments of city walls and gates, foundations and floors, of decorated partition walls, eaves tile ends, drainage elements, models of houses destined to accompany the dead, representations on the walls of tombs, and finally, descriptions, sometimes extravagant but often imprecise, found in the texts of this period. The situation is therefore totally different from that of the urbanism of the Roman Empire.
The Impact of the Empire’s Crises on Historiography and Historical Thinking in Late Antiquity
Authors: Gärtner Hans Armin , Min Ye
Published: November 2023

Originally the Greek word is to be understood in the terms of the Greek medical writers as the span of time, the critical days, in which serious diseases combined with high fever take a turn for the better or worse. One speaks of crises of the Imperium Romanum—with a reduction of the meaning—as of periods, in which the decline, if not the downfall of the empire was to be feared. Our interest is directed to the interpretations of feared crises, real or not, in literature. These interpretations inform us about the thoughts of the authors, which values of the Roman Empire they saw endangered, which corrections they recommended, and which prognoses they made. It is a postulation of consequence to relate also the testimonies of political thoughts in times of the empire’s consolidation. There are correlations and alterations
Before and below ‘theory of mind’: embodied simulation and the neural correlates of social cognition
Authors: Gallese Vittorio
Published: November 2023

The automatic translation of folk psychology into newly formed brain modules specifically dedicated to mind-reading and other social cognitive abilities should be carefully scrutinized. Searching for the brain location of intentions, beliefs and desires—as such—might not be the best epistemic strategy to disclose what social cognition really is. The results of neurocognitive research suggest that in the brain of primates, mirror neurons, and more generally the premotor system, play a major role in several aspects of social cognition, from action and intention understanding to language processing. This evidence is presented and discussed within the theoretical frame of an embodied simulation account of social cognition.
Troubles in Babylon and Retribution in Susa
Authors: Dalley Stephanie
Published: November 2023

During the eighth to sixth centuries bc the scribes who composed historical records for their royal patrons shaped certain current events into a formulaic sequence, beginning with catastrophe and ending with restoration, or beginning with outrage and ending with retribution. In such sequences particular gods played a leading role by coming to earth in order to act on the king’s behalf. The time-span might cover more than one generation, allowing interpretations to change. Such shifts are especially well documented in Assyrian records relating to the sack of Babylon. These events led to the sack of Susa and its portrayal as Ishtar’s revenge.
Dissemination in Palestine and Egypt
Authors: Dalley Stephanie
Published: November 2023

Sennacherib, his forceful and long-lived queen Naqia, their son, and their grandson, all played a part in the invasion and occupation of Egypt. The impact on Palestine was enormous, for the campaigns involved Judaeans, Israelites, Philistines, and Arabs, among others, in co-operation with Assyria. Some Aramaic stories based on these events have survived from Egypt, none of them anti-Assyrian. Although it is often assumed that Assyrian domination was universally detested, a new look at the evidence modifies that assumption. It points to a particular line of transmission through which a story based on Assyrian deeds may have evolved into the Hebrew tale of Esther, because it was of great interest to those Hebrews already living in Assyria, to those living in Palestine, and to those who served as soldiers in Egypt.
Shakespeare and Text
Authors: Jowett John
Published: November 2023

OXFORD SHAKESPEARE TOPICS General Editors: Peter Holland and Stanley Wells Oxford Shakespeare Topics provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespeare criticism and scholarship. Each book is written by an authority in its field, and combines accessible style with original discussion of its subject. Shakespeare and Text is an indispensable and unique guide to its topic. It takes Shakespeare readers to the very foundation of his work, explaining how his plays first took shape in the theatre where writing was part of a larger collective enterprise. As the resulting manuscripts are virtually all lost, the account then turns to the early modern printing industry that produced the earliest surviving texts of Shakespeare's plays. It describes the roles of publisher and printer, the controls exerted through the Stationers' Company, and the technology of printing. A chapter is devoted to the book that gathered Shakespeare's plays together for the first time, the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare and Text goes on to survey the major developments in textual studies over the past century. It builds on the recent upsurge of interest in textual theory, and deals with issues such as collaboration, the instability of the text, the relationship between theatre culture and print culture, and the book as a material object. Later chapters examine the current critical edition, explaining the procedures that transform early texts in to a very different cultural artefact, the edition in which we regularly encounter Shakespeare.
Author and Collaborator
Authors: Jowett John
Published: November 2023

If today one speaks of a literary author, Shakespeare will seem to offer a good instance of such a figure, perhaps the pre-eminent one. The engraved portrait first published in the First Folio of 1623 has iconic status and is widely recognized. Shakespeare is taught in schools; he has been widely read. The term ‘complete works’ will be more readily associated with Shakespeare than any other writer. He is the prime example of the literary genius, and of the writer who combines literary longevity with worldwide recognition. The study of Shakespeare demands a historical adjustment to take into account four centuries of change, yet he is often thought to transcend the passage of time. He is deeply established in literary culture. At the same time, he retains a reputation for speaking to us, here and now, movingly, deeply, and sometimes challengingly about matters that concern us.
Trust
Authors: Kohn Marek
Published: November 2023

Trust - our belief in the truth or reliability of someone or something - lies at the very heart of our relationships, our society and our everyday lives. Much of the time we take it for granted. And yet trust, or the lack of it, is becoming an increasingly prominent issue in public life: politicians say they want to rebuild trust in politics; people look for new ways to trust each other in a world where relationships are easier to start and harder than ever to sustain; and we are no longer sure how much we trust experts on issues like the safety of food or medicine. This short but thought-provoking book reveals why scientists, social scientists, and philosophers no longer take trust for granted. Beginning with some fascinating biological puzzles about the origins of trust -- how cooperation can evolve from ‘selfish genes’, and how language could have evolved when ‘words are cheap’ and we have such a capacity to deceive each other - Marek Kohn explores many different perspectives from the fields of science, sociology, economics, and politics, to draw out the wider implications for trust in human society today. The book ends on a personal note, concluding that our material prosperity is not matched by the quality of our lives and relationships, but that, if we understand what makes trust possible, and why it matters, then we will live better lives in a fast-moving, fast-changing, globalized society.
History of Universities
Authors: Young Spencer E
Published: November 2023

Volume XXII/1 of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, conference reports, and bibliographical information, which makes this publication such an indispensable tool for the historian of higher education. Its contributions range widely geographically, chronologically, and in subject-matter. The volume is, as always, a lively combination of original research and invaluable reference material.
Paratus sum sententiam mutare: The Influence of Cartesian Philosophy at Basle
Authors: Rother Wolfgang
Published: November 2023

Renaissance critique of the scholastic curriculum led, in the sphere of philosophy, to a rediscovery of its sources and relieved the Princeps Philosophorum of the scholastic ballast gathered throughout the Middle Ages. Subsequently, there was a multiplication of Aristotle studies and Aristotle editions – with the consequence of a new Aristotelian scholastic to be noticed particularly at Protestant universities. A first wave of turning away from Aristotle was marked by Petrus Ramus, who was very influential at the universities in the Calvinistic territories far into the seventeenth century. Finally, this turning away from Aristotle was completed by a turning towards Cartesian philosophy, which fell on fertile ground especially where Ramism was already introduced as an alternative to Aristotelianism and was thus easily introduced into courses of philosophy. But those processes of detachment did not run linearly; alternatives did not exclude themselves a priori. Thus at many seventeenthcentury Protestant universities, there were eclectic hybrids such as Aristoteleo-Ramism, Aristoteleo-Cartesianism as well as RameoCartesianism – and these hybrids not only succeeded one another but also existed sometimes simultaneously.
Hoffmann and Stahl. Documents and Reflections on the Dispute
Authors: De Ceglia Francesco Paolo
Published: November 2023

Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742) and Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734), both physicians and experts in experimental sciences, were amongst other things, authors of two of the most famous and controversial medical systems of the first half of the eighteenth century. After a youthful flirtation with iatrochemistry, Hoffmann embraced an articulate doctrine of iatromechanics. In this he was influenced by Robert Boyle (1627–91), whom he knew personally. Stahl, on the other hand, remained a staunch upholder of animism all his life, the doctrine of which he had already clearly expounded while still a student at Jena. Both professors at the Alma Regia et Electorali Academia Fridericiana in Halle – the former primarius, the latter secundarius – they were divided by intellectual divergences. Yet there is something paradoxical about the dispute in which they were involved. Though recorded in important works on the history of medicine, it has nevertheless taken on something of the guise of a historiographical mystery: a belief that most scholars cherish but are unable to detail or substantiate with documentary evidence.
Can (modern) poets do classical drama? The case of Ted Hughes
Authors: Hardwick Lorna
Published: November 2023

This is one of the most contentious questions that have been raised in recent discussion of modern adaptations of classical plays and it has been intensified in the critical reception of the work of poet/ dramatists such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Ted Hughes. Analysis of this type of critical comment reveals some crucial issues about the basic requirements of translating and adapting ancient drama for and to the modern stage. These include the creation of a text that can not only be spoken aloud but also physically communicated in a modern acting space which is likely to be indoors, artiffcially lit, and accommodating anything from thirty to several hundred spectators.
Hughes’s myth: the classics in Gaudete and Cave Birds
Authors: Roberts Neil
Published: November 2023

I have often had the fancy that there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought. W. B. Yeats, ‘At Stratford-on-Avon: Ideas of Good and Evil’, epigraph to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being By this beguilingly capacious phrase ‘Hughes’s myth’, I do not mean a coherent narrative that is detectable on the surface or even underlying his published works.
Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy
Authors: Liveley Genevieve
Published: November 2023

More to reach you Than to reproach you, more to spark A contact through the see-saw bustling Atmospherics of higher learning And lower socializing, than to correct you With our archaic principles, we concocted An attack, a dismemberment, laughing. We had our own broadsheet to publish it. Our Welshman composed it— still deaf To the white noise of the elegy That would fill his mouth and his ear Worlds later, on Cader Idris, In the wind and snow of your final climb.
Virgil: A Paradoxical Poet?
Authors: Hardie Philip
Published: November 2023

The present inquiry arose out of a wider question about the adequacy of conventional distinctions between the classicism of Virgil (and other Augustan poets) and the style of post-Augustan poets, to which the anachronistic labels ‘mannerist’ (following Ernst Curtius) and ‘baroque’ are often attached.1 From the features taken to characterize the ‘post-classical’ manner I point to three, connected in their effects: an excessive emotionalism, hyperbole, and paradox, all supposedly at variance with the balance and moderation of a classical Augustan style. Yet in the case of the first two of these features there appears to be more of a continuum than a gap between Virgil (at least in the Aeneid) and writers such as Lucan, Seneca, and Statius.
Thaumatographia, or ‘What is a Theme?’
Authors: Schwindt Jürgen Paul
Published: November 2023

The following remarks are based on the hypothesis that the theme ‘paradox and the marvellous in Augustan literature and culture’ cannot easily be treated thematically, whether historically or systematically. To say ‘my theme is the paradoxical and the marvellous’ is problematic because if it is true that the paradoxical cannot, ‘as a rule’, be exactly philologically defined, this is even truer of the marvellous.1 The theme: positing, anchoring a thought that is, in itself, based on a momentum of unquiet, implies, to put it mildly, an awkward logical operation.
Constructing a Narrative of mira deum: The Story of Philemon and Baucis (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8)
Authors: Fabre-Serris Jacqueline
Published: November 2023

Roman tradition is founded upon exempla. What is the mos maiorum, if not a repertoire of rules for living, in the form of anecdotes, which illustrate model behaviour?1 Following the economic, social, and political upheavals caused by the military conquests and Rome’s confrontation with Greek culture, these ‘customs received from the ancestors’, which had been handed down through the centuries orally, were called into question. With the mos maiorum, it was not only a set of rules, convictions, and values that was shaken, but also an entire way of thinking and of conceiving the relationship with the past.
Audience and Emotion in the Reception of Greek Drama
Authors: Ruffell Ian
Published: November 2023

One of Oliver Taplin’s most important contributions to the study of Greek comedy has been his 1986 paper, ‘Fifth-Century Tragedy and Comedy: A Synkrisis’. It was here that he introduced the concept of metatheatre to classical critics but also situated the concept within some bold and challenging hypotheses about the nature of the audience’s experience. Developing his earlier explorations of tragic dramaturgy and rejecting moves towards a highly self-conscious tragedy, Taplin argued for a radical difference in the reception of tragic and comic performances. Subsequent comparative work on comedy and tragedy has tended to confirm Taplin’s picture of two genres separated by a common context, with broad (if not absolute) distinctions being maintained in terms of form and performance but historicist critics stressing the common cultural context. In this paper, I look again at this generic comparison and suggest that while formal distinctions can be upheld, the model of audience response requires, at the least, substantial qualification.
Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Chronotopes, and the ‘Aetiological Mode’
Authors: Revermann Martin
Published: November 2023

There is no question that Oliver Taplin’s work on Aeschylus contains some of the best thinking done in the twentieth century on this eminent artist. Moreover, the methodology he developed in his seminal 1977 monograph for meeting some of the exegetical challenges this dramatist presents (or imposes?) on every generation of readers and spectators is foundational in the true sense of the word: subsequent residents of the house may, for better or worse, redesign the floor-plan, add an extension, update the kitchen or redecorate the bathroom (tasks which, in my domestic as well as my scholarly life, I myself have recently embarked on). But it is the soundness of the foundations and the sheer raw potential of the building as a whole that really matter. It is Oliver’s lasting achievement that the house he built is any real estate agent’s dream: a rock-solid structure, beautifully appointed, and in the right neighbourhood.