While positive appraisals of testimonial knowledge by Enlightenment thinkers have recently begun to receive more attention, such discussions often operate at a very general level, leaving out much of the context and dynamics of specific types of testimonial interactions. Drawing on extended passages from Georg Friedrich Meier and Immanuel Kant, the present paper looks at the specific case of scholarly testimony and the various epistemic dangers that can befall the interaction between scholars (or, in modern parlance, ‘experts’) and lay audiences. (...) While Kant recognises the imperfections of many expert testifiers (and pays special attention to the figure of the ‘pedant’), he is keenly aware of the – greater – risk of what may be called ‘epistemic populism’, which seeks ‘to make imperceptible the blatantly obvious inequality between loquacious ignorance and thorough science’ (AA, XI, 141). Furthermore, Kant suggests, those with superior epistemic authority can justifiably disengage from interactions with those who, as laypersons, arrogate to themselves equal epistemic standing and are unwilling to appreciate the rational force of evidence and argumentation. Prolonging interaction in such a scenario would be futile and may well be ‘contrary to the dignity of reason’ (AA, XI, 143). (shrink)

Après une agrégation de philosophie (1983), Marie-Dominique Couzinet s'est formée à la recherche en Italie, à l'Institut Universitaire Européen de Florence, et en France, au CNRS. Maître de conférences (1996) habilitée à diriger les recherches (2009), elle enseigne l'histoire de la philosophie de la Renaissance à l'Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (UFR de philosophie ; Centre d'Histoire des Systèmes de Pensée Moderne : EA 1451). Ses travaux portent sur la philosophie de la Renaissance au XVIe siècle en France et en Italie, (...) l'histoire et la transmission des savoirs dans la culture humaniste européenne et l'historiographie consacrée à la Renaissance. Elle est l'auteur de Méthode et histoire à la Renaissance. Une lecture de la Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem de Jean Bodin (Paris, Vrin, 1996) ; Bibliographie des écrivains français : Jean Bodin, Paris- Rome (Éditions Memini, 2001), et Sub specie hominis. Études sur le savoir humain au XVIe siècle (Paris, Vrin, 2007). / This study analyzes the links between philosophy, humanism and scholarly culture according to Ramus, the great 16th-century pedagogue – a prime target of the so-called "critique of pedantry", which asserted that one had to choose between teaching and thinking. It offers new critical tools to approach his oeuvre. (shrink)

The transformational pace of modern education, healthcare, business management systems, etc., requires new approaches for prompt and reliable personality assessment. Phenotypology is one of such theories and it claims of the discovered interconnections of a person’s psychological and psychophysical characteristics on the basis of individual features of his/her phenotype. The article aim is to present some validation results for the Phenotypology hypotheses as a possible tool for personality assessment. In order to verify connections between phenotypic treats and individual behavior, we (...) conducted the study when respondents were differentiated according to some anthropometric (facial) peculiarities and characterological features. The results were quantified and analyzed using the mathematical-statistical linear regression. The research output contains the rationale for the conclusion that there are no statistically significant correlations between some phenotypic body features and such individual psychological characteristics as aggressiveness, impetuosity, pedantry, passivity, etc. In particular, the validity of using of appropriate phenotypologic representations to predict the examined character traits was studied. The obtained results disproved the possibility to use directly the phenotypic approach for reliable characterological profiling. Though, the study outcome is tentative due to some limitations on generality. It is necessary to continue verification of the Phenotypology hypotheses with a broader experimental sample with the inclusion of various ethnic and racial groups’ representatives. However, until then, based on actual findings, the practical application of the Phenotypology statements is doubtful, at least for the purposes of character diagnosis and personality assessment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant’s Just War TheoryBrian OrendKant is often cited as one of the first truly international political philosophers. Unlike the vast majority of his predecessors, Kant views a purely domestic or national conception of justice as radically incomplete; we must, he insists, also turn our faculties of critical judgment towards the international plane. When he does so, what results is one of the most powerful and principled conceptions of international (...) justice ever constructed. Kant’s central concept, that it is a demand of our own practical reason that we forge a cosmopolitan federation of free republics, based on the rule of law, human rights, and cultural and commercial development, still resonates today as a plausible and hopeful prescription for humanity’s future.Much of Kant’s international theory has recently received searching analysis and evaluation. But the bulk of this consideration has focused on Kant’s descriptive, as opposed to prescriptive, claims. Lavish attention, for example, has been showered on his assertion that perpetual peace is inevitable—that our natural antagonism will irresistibly incline us, after many failures, to establish an international juridical condition. Comparatively little has been done on thoroughly evaluating Kant’s normative claims of international justice, particularly with regard to his ideal corpus of international law and his concrete recommendations for moving from a global state of nature to a cosmopolitan civil society.1In this paper, I would like to contribute to the latter task by focusing on the moral problem that war poses as, arguably, the most frequent and severe cause [End Page 323] of ruptures in the functioning of the international system.2 In particular, I would like to argue in favour of the controversial, and original, thesis that Kant has a just war theory.3 I would then like to develop that theory in some detail and to explain its strength and suggestiveness. The focus on war seems both helpful and timely. It is helpful in that it provides a specific, graphic example with which one can apprehend more clearly the abstract architecture of Kant’s international vision. It is timely in that, in the wake of the very recent conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda, and in light of the subsequent formation of the International War Crimes Tribunals at The Hague, renewed attention has been paid to considering what, if anything, constitutes a just war and what is permitted, and what punishable, in terms of conduct in war. A rigorous consideration of what one of the true giants of moral philosophy thought about these issues can only serve to illuminate our understanding of these current events.1. THE TRADITIONAL READING OF KANT: NO JUST WARNearly every commentator on Kant’s international theory of justice who discusses the problem of war in any detail believes that Kant not only has no just war theory, but that he is, moreover, a vicious critic of the core propositions of classical just war theorists, such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Grotius. Howard Williams, for example, says that “Kant has no theory of just war … (j)ustice and war are in conflict with one another and it is our duty as human beings to try to overcome war.” Fernando Teson contends that “Kant dismisses the idea that there could be a just war” and Georg Geismann asserts that, for Kant, “there is no such thing as a just war.” Similarly, W. B. Gallie asserts that “Kant agreed … that nothing but confusion and harm resulted from regarding any wars as just … ” There is a bevy of quotes in the Kantian corpus to support this reading.4One prominent anti-just war quote occurs in Perpetual Peace, when Kant [End Page 324] reflects on the contributions of traditional just war theorists and arrives at the following judgment:It is therefore to be wondered at that the word right has not been completely banished from military politics as superfluous pedantry, and that no state has been bold enough to declare itself publicly in favour of doing so. For Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel and the rest (sorry comforters as they are) are still dutifully quoted in justification of military aggression, although their philosophically or diplomatically formulated codes do not and... (shrink)

This essay reviews the domain of the literary contrasting it with other intellectual discourses; especially philosophy. It establishes the superiority of literature over philosophy. And mentions the philosophies informing literature. The essay is written consciously with copious endnotes, contrary to current ways of writing. The essay proper is simple; the endnotes often mock jargon and mimic pedantry.

Rene Descartes (1596 – 1650) is considered the founder of modern philosophy. Profoundly influenced by the new physics and astronomy of Kepler and Galileo, Descartes was a scientist and mathematician whose most long-lasting contributions in science were the invention of Cartesian coordinates, the application of algebra to geometry, and the discovery of the law of refraction, what we now call Snell’s law.His most important books on philosophy were The discourse on method(1637) and The meditations(1642). Descartes’ writings display an exemplary degree (...) of clarity and an aversion to pedantry. I explore Descartes' break with Aristotle, but also shine a light on the intellectual continuity Descartes had with Aristotle's thought. I also draw attention to some overlooked but interesting possibilities for an experimental test of a dualistic theory of mind. (shrink)

Dissertation without tears By Joseph Agassi Tel-Aviv University 1. Perfectionism is the loss of the sense of proportion. 2. Perfectionism in education is pedantry and obstruction. 3. Pedantry expels traditional writing techniques. 4. There are many ways to write a scientific study. 5. The best and easiest writing formula is the dialectic. 1. Perfectionism is the loss of the sense of proportion.

Philology is a term of wide application, designating at its most narrow the study of specific linguistic and textual features, at its most extensive what Gustav Gröber, in the Grundriβ der romanischen Philologie , called “the human spirit in language.” The distance between these definitions measures the literary medievalist's task: on the one hand to engage in the disinterested and often highly technical practices of medieval studies, on the other to produce results of general interest. These imperatives converge with a (...) slightly different but analogous dilemma, the relation of medieval studies to the human sciences as a whole. On the one hand, as the custodian of the formative history of the cultures of the European nation states, and as the agency by which the study of the national literatures first entered the academy in the nineteenth century, medieval studies has provided a model for cultural study. Yet in the current academic milieu, at least in the Anglo-American world, medieval studies is a marginalized institution. Most literary scholars and critics consider medieval texts to be utterly extraneous to their own interests, as at best irrelevant, at worst inconsequential; and they perceive the field itself as a site of pedantry and antiquarianism, a place to escape from the demands of modern intellectual life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Arguing about PsychiatryNatural Selection, Austinian Conservatism, and Finding Our Way to the BestJoseph Gough (bio)Professors Murphy and Lieberman have offered two generous and interesting commentaries on my article, each very insightful and helpful in its own way, and each offering an interesting alternative characterization of the subject matter of psychiatry. I found each extremely thought-provoking, hence this rather bloated response. I strongly disagree with each. In brief, I disagree (...) with the 'preliminaries' of each commentary, struggle to see the tension between Hull's view of science and my view of psychiatry, reject Lieberman's appeal to the history of mind-like and mental-illness-like concepts, and finally, believe my position neither suffers from the instability of psychiatry, nor blocks the route to best practice, nor counsels despair.Metaphysical Precision and Conceptual Evolution: Response to MurphyMurphy begins by offering some helpful context for the debate, and for our disagreement within that debate. Partly it is helpful because it raises a cluster of questions, which I agree with him, are related to the topic at hand. Partly it is helpful because it lays out Murphy's background metaphysics, with which I broadly agree, but where I think it is important to be more pedantic than Murphy himself is. Murphy and I agree that there are animate objects, importantly different from inanimate objects; we also agree that there is no object in nature that is a mind. However, in that [End Page 45] opening paragraph, there are a few things that look to me a little like conflations—and while I am happy to grant this as pedantry, I am not happy to deny its importance.First, not everything animate is intelligent and unpredictable—a presumably accidental implication of Murphy's use of 'these' throughout the paragraph. Second, intelligence and unpredictability do not in my view cluster in the way that Murphy suggests in the passage—a highly intelligent system may be exceptionally predictable at least so long as its goals and knowledge are fixed, and a highly unpredictable system may, of course, be entirely unintelligent. Of course, when some systems behave other than we expect, we count this as a failing of the system; but this is a feature of artifacts as well as animate systems, and perhaps also of objects that are neither artifacts nor animate (think of a farmer whose crops fail to go—might they not think there is something wrong with the soil?). The class of 'predictions' Murphy identifies is what I would describe as a class of normative expectations, that, of course, must be somewhat in line with the way things actually are, but are not 'predictions' in the paradigmatic sense of guesses about what will happen.This pedantry matters because this implied (or perhaps less charitably, enforced) alignment between non-coextensive categories in this picture of Murphy's is leveraged, I think, to gesture towards an objection. First, Murphy claims that this class of systems has required a special vocabulary, 'mental' vocabulary. Second, it is, I think, suggested in Murphy's set-up (and perhaps in Murphy's work; Murphy & Stich, 1999) that at some level this vocabulary anchors what we are talking about when we are talking about 'mental illness.'But here, of course, I disagree—or at least, I might disagree if I were clear what is being claimed. Which class of systems is that gives rise to this 'special vocabulary? Several have been mentioned. It should also come as no surprise that I think it is deeply unclear what counts as 'mental' vocabulary. Is it the vocabulary of animacy? Of normative expectation and function-ascription? Perhaps of intentionality? Or of consciousness? Maybe it is defined 'ostensively' with respect to terms like belief and desire?After these preliminaries, Murphy offers an objection to my position, and a brief defense of his own. I would like to begin with his defense of his own position:the best way to think about the claim that mental illnesses are brain diseases … is to see them as committing us to a form of explanation that treats psychiatry as continuous with other sciences of mind, in... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Has Metaphysics to Do with Wisdom?John HaldaneThere are two loci of ambiguity in the title of the symposium from which this essay derives—"Is Belief in God Reasonable? Aquinas's Summa contra gentiles in a Contemporary Context."1 The first concerns the opening question, "is belief in God reasonable?" and the second the closing clause "in a contemporary context." I observe this not in the spirit of pedantry, but because (...) I want to consider certain interpretations of what is at issue, ones which may be different from those of other contributors but which are relevant to Aquinas's circumstances and interests and to ours. So far as the Summa contra gentiles [SCG] is concerned, I will touch mainly on issues discussed by Thomas at the outset of book I, in chapters 1–15, which deal with philosophical knowledge of first principles and arguments to the existence of God. First, however, the general issue of reasonable belief.IConcerning the first locus of ambiguity, the question of the reasonability of belief in God is multiply interpretable. It may be treated as relative to a subject's other beliefs and attitudes, where that subject e may be an individual or a group. Given that S believes p and q (and these can each be conjunctions of any number of propositions), is it reasonable for S to believe r? This aspect of relative credibility is itself ambiguous because it [End Page 1249] can be viewed narrowly, without regard to the status of those antecedent beliefs and attitudes, or broadly, as also asking whether those are themselves reasonable. In a court setting, for example, it may be asked whether it was reasonable for someone to have believed (or done) something given their antecedent beliefs, but it may well be countered that this is an insufficient standard of reasonability, since the prior attitudes may be incredible, or credible but irresponsibly held. The issue of reasonable belief, foresight and foreseeability are common courtroom examples.In these respects, then, it may be granted by someone A, who holds that believing in God is not reasonable, that it was nevertheless reasonable for S to do so given S's antecedent beliefs. This need not be a matter of condescension, however, since A may grant that the prior beliefs were themselves reasonable for S to hold, and would also have been reasonable by some more objective standard prevailing at the time or in the circumstances.A "rationalist" objector may counter, however, that this is all beside the point, since the question to consider is not the relative, but the absolute one: is belief in God reasonable? Full stop. I agree that there is nothing to be gained by unconstrained relativizing, but if "absolutism" is the implied contrast, it is over-stated. First, if reasonability is related to having (or having access to) reasons, and to the "quality" of those reasons, then some degree of relativity is entailed, and the only standard of reasonability that can be applied is a contextual one. To ask simpliciter whether it is reasonable to believe p carries an unacknowledged implicit reference either to something such as prevailing commonly held beliefs and associated normal cognitive processes or to an idealized thinker with access to relevant proofs or evidence. On further consideration, however, the latter, somewhat like Adam Smith's "impartial spectator" in ethics,2 tends just to be a more abstract version of the contextually reasonable thinker. There is perhaps a step beyond this, namely to the Omniscient Reasoner (OR) but it is a sophistical move, since it amounts to saying that a belief is reasonable if and only if it would be held by someone who knows everything relevant to its justification. which given that we cannot know antecedently the range of relevant considerations, is for us an inapplicably high standard. There is also some irony in asking if OR would judge belief in God Reasonable since OR would be God or at least God-like in respect of being all-knowing. [End Page 1250]IIThe other respect in which the question "is belief in God reasonable?" is ambiguous (in this first of the two areas ambiguity noted at the... (shrink)

In what senses can the academy be said to be a site of culture? Does that very idea bear much weight today? Perhaps the negative proposition has more substance, namely that the academy is no longer (if indeed it ever was) a place of culture. After all, we live in dark times-of unbridled power, tyranny, domination and manipulation. Some say that we have entered an age of the posthuman or even the inhuman. It just may be, however, that in such (...) a world, the academic community is needed more than ever for it offers a culture of justified revelation. It is a culture that reveals the world to us in new ways, but in ways that are attested and contested; its judgements emerge out of a critical and unworldly pedantry. With some hesitancy, we can legitimately therefore speak of not just a culture of the academic community but, indeed, the culture of the academic community. (shrink)

The main idea of this study is to disclose the content of the theological and political ideas of modern Salafism of the ideology of the “Muslim Brotherhood” on the example of the work of Anwar al-Jundi. The fundamental question that Anwar al-Jundi has in all of his writings is to show how Muslims can preserve their Islamic identity. Hence the al-Jundi’s idea of the paramount importance of “optimizing Islamic rebirth and awakening”. An important place in understanding and maintaining Islamic identity (...) is occupied by the theory of the “political conspiracy” of the West in relation to the Muslim world. This predetermines the political vision of Anwar al-Jundi, for whom the whole history of the relationship of the West with the Islamic world and Islam is links in a chain of overt and covert conspiracy. In the combined approach of Anwar al-Jundi, the theological vision and mentality prevail, reducing reality to a sample that substantiates the dogmas of religion and faith. As a result, a political vision of the theological type inevitably arises. It takes by Anwar al-Jundi the form of a methodology for criticizing the cultural and civilizational parameters of a political idea. His method in some of its aspects is not devoid of a scientific approach and contains deep criticisms, but remains within the framework of the same traditions of theological pedantry, which turns science, history and reflection into tools for serving religious dogmas. (shrink)

In general terms, the preference for dialogue and mutual understanding was present in all my intercultural studies—starting with the German-French encounter in my youth. My forays into different cultures and religions were never prompted by idle touristic curiosity nor by scholastic pedantry, but by a practical impulse: to find out how—coming from very diverse backgrounds—people can yet live peacefully and justly in this world. In this short essay, I reflect about my journey through philosophy in a global setting.

The authors of this study deplore the present gulf that lies between the creative writer and the scholar. In five stimulating essays on letters, language, literary history, criticism, and imaginative writing, they challenge our prevailing pedantries and offer a program for revitalizing literary scholarship in the universities. Authoritative and brilliantly written, this book anticipates a fuller place for humane learning in American life. Originally published in 1941. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in (...) digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

Ian Hacking's [6] is a spirited romp though a broad field of metaphysics, touching on a variety of important questions, and appealing to deep results in mathematical logic while remaining free of logical pedantry. Philosophical journals might be more fun to read if others could write in his style. It is an essay in applying the theory of logic expounded in more detail in his very interesting [7]. Unfortunately, despite my sympathy for his project, I have a number of (...) criticisms to make of his argument. Some of them are picky logical points, but the major conclusions of [6] are affected. (shrink)

Can our present-day anxieties be stated in terms of the ancient world? Can this be done without risking the accusation of self-deception or pedantry? That is the question.Hellenism in en vogue; there is satisfaction in defining in ever more exact terms a new aspect, long underestimated, of Greek grandeur. A certain ‘modernism’ cannot be denied to Greek thought: a tendency that existed then as it does now. Two millennia and more have trimmed down what was pretensions: tricks and scandals (...) of innovation become less important ; the essence of contributions becomes apparent, distilled by the labour of preceding centuries. It remains sure that the Greeks faced new human circumstances with the vigour of youth and with intelligence, and launched themselves freely upon the path of world discovery. This is truly modem: modern for us as it was for the Greeks of the third century B.C. A comparison between such experiences may be worth while. (shrink)

The following topics are discussed, from psychoanalytic, philosophical, and empirical perspectives: -/- *Sociopathy *Pedantry *The nature of bureaucrats *The nature of bureaucratic institutions *Rationalization and Repression *The relationship between ignorance and mental health *The relationship sapience and mental illness *The relationship between ignorance and the ability to act *The relationship between hyper-sapience and the inability to act. *The psychological underpinnings of addiction; and finally *The differences between men and women.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.1 (2000) 94-96 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition Rhetoric Reclaimed: Aristotle and the Liberal Arts Tradition. Janet M. Atwill. London: Cornell University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi + 235. $35.00 hard cover. Much like Weimar, Germany, American civil society has been buffeted for a half-century by both the lunatic right, hiding behind the mask of religious freedom, and (...) the lunatic left, sporting "pomo" (postmodern) tribal colors in the garb of academic freedom. In an earlier age, both might be burned at the stake; today, they are granted tax-exempt status. Readers seeking contributions to the life of the mind find their harangues both unpleasant and unrewarding. This book is unfortunately no exception.Atwill's title is deceptive. Her work is only marginally about either Aristotle or his rhetoric. She is more concerned to "reclaim" the liberal arts held hostage by the received tradition of Athenian democratic ideals. Vide: At issue are the character of the social identities of gender, race, and class and the nature of the social ties by which we are bound.... (3) Challenges to the... humanist paradigm... became the subject of... debates over cultural diversity, political correctness, and revisionist literary canons and historical accounts. Just what is at stake... is the type of subjectivity produced by the paideia of a multicultural curriculum (that subjects values, views of reality, and relationships to cultural and political authority. (12-13) So we are in for another salvo of pomo evangelism, with the usual suspects trotted out (Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Edward Said) all with a view to rectifying the hegemonic white male biases of E. M. Cope, and rhetoric's four B's (Baldwin, Burnet, Burkhardt, and Hans Baron).Were Atwill offering a New Age update of Cope's commentary, her project might hold promise. Embers of such potential glow throughout the [End Page 94] book. Thus, her passing remarks on the relation of techne and theoria to Greek medicine (74-79) and to the cultural demands of what amounts to a plantation society (107-8) bear consideration. And her deconstruction of Cope's work as a managerial art grounded in associationist psychology (192-200) is especially insightful.Where the book disappoints is its clumsiness: it is simultaneously pedantic and superficial. On the first count, the author shows wide acquaintance with the standard commentaries on classical culture, but she seems often to be adrift in an ocean of secondary sources. For example, she is more likely to discuss Kennedy's treatment of Aristotle than Aristotle himself (58). And so it goes: Wright on Empedocles (90), Crane on Cicero (31), Woods on Cope (200). Indeed, it is difficult to tell from the book if the author's command of classical Greek extends much beyond Liddell and Scott.In addition to her overdependency on secondary sources, Atwill disregards historical contexts in pushing her quirky pomo readings to the fore. To cite only a few of these: For Plato, expertise is equivalent to function, and function determines one's place in the hierarchical order of the state. (30)... Physis (nature) or faculty equals function equals place in the social order. (141) [For Aristotle,] private property is the means of both self-expression and self-knowledge; knowledge of the self would be impossible without the procurement of private property. The subject and object distinction, usually made in the context of epistemology, is relocated at the center of the notion of private property. (184-85) If Protagoras, Isocrates, and Cicero were appointed deans... today, I doubt that they would institute a curriculum based on principles of radical democracy. (209) Perhaps Atwill would prefer to pick her dean from among Che, Mao, Pol Pot, or Lenin. While such eccentric inferences may fit the bill for cultural studies, they flunk the test of impartiality. This is a commodification of pedantry--recycling fragments of academic publications to advocate a partisan position. But advocacy resting on innuendo, resentment, and polite sneering can never meet the standards of serious scholarship... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Comic Business: Theatricality, Technique, and Performance Contexts in Aristophanic ComedyC. W. MarshallMartin Revermann. Comic Business: Theatricality, Technique, and Performance Contexts in Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xiv + 396 pp. 15 black-and-white plates. 3 black-and-white figs. 5 tables. Cloth, $115.The cover illustration of Martin Revermann's book on Aristophanic performance betrays the author's personal and intellectual debts: caricatures of five scholars thanked in the preface, drawn as (...) if they were characters in Clouds, including Oliver Taplin in a swing looking down from above like Socrates. It is a shame many libraries will not keep the cover, since the lighthearted image is quite revealing about the nature of this study, though without any intended association with the academic pedantry of the Thinkery. Following chapter 1, entitled "Comic Business" (3–7), really a short whirlwind of an introduction that raises many of the sorts of questions the book addresses, the structure of the book falls neatly into two parts: three chapters examine the nature of performance criticism of ancient comedy and address a wide range of specifics; three chapters address individual plays, Clouds, Lysistrata, and Wealth. Each chapter falls into well-labeled sections, which will facilitate ongoing reference to the book. Revermann's study aims at a theoretical sophistication that is needed if the study of ancient performance is to proceed meaningfully. While he does not engage with every issue he raises in sufficient depth, Revermann provides a crucial advance on previous discussions (the book comes thirty years after C. W. Dearden's Stage of Aristophanes and twenty-six years after Kenneth McLeish's Theatre of Aristophanes).Chapter 2, "Performance Criticism: Point and Methods" (8–65), addresses some important and underexplored methodological questions that often go unmentioned in such studies. After arguing that "no ancient statement known to [End Page 431] me... claims a necessary link between meaning and dramatic performance" (15), Revermann identifies a "nexus of competitive agendas and social performances" (22), building on those Wilson has described for the choregos. Many of the issues raised (non-competitive performances, pay for poets, the relative importance of dramatic festivals) are equally important for the study of tragedy, and the book generally raises issues that students of tragic performance will need to consider. A general vocabulary of theatre semiotics is introduced, helpfully, with specific examples examining how performance generally is framed.Revermann embarks on an ambitious project of replacing the "significant action" hypothesis (which assumes that every significant action within a Greek play is indicated by the words a character says) that has dominated discussions of ancient stagecraft. This is a very helpful discussion, and it is surely correct, culminating in a good articulation of Revermann's methodology (63–64). Again, the principal examples come from tragedy. However, when Revermann invokes the question of on-stage frogs (agreeing with my 1996 discussion, which in its way sought also to challenge the "significant action" hypothesis), I think he needlessly muddles the matter by imagining the possibility of subsequent, frogless performances, when, I would say, a great deal is lost as a result. Revermann's interest is more with the possibilities offered by performance generally (65: "'Why frogs?,' irrespective of their visibility"), and sometimes the nitty-gritty of specific staging choices is not pressed (comparison is made with the offstage songs of the cloud chorus on 200).Chapter 3 (66–106) addresses "Two Fundamental Problems." The first relates the performance script (as attested in our manuscripts) to a concept of authenticity, considering that many plays were reperformed in the fourth century and after. Given that issues of reperformance were barely acknowledged until the last decade (Easterling's 1994 discussion is subtitled "A Speculative Note"), Revermann provides a solid discussion, arguing that the scripts of both tragedy and comedy closely match what was performed in Athens. Inconsistencies exist, but they are mentioned; context-specific references in Aristophanes point to the primary script surviving. An appendix on the time allocated to a performance during a festival is relevant (333–37). Revermann argues that the scripts as we have them may not have been performed in their entirety during their initial performance, suggesting, for example, that one... (shrink)

The word τερθρεία, which L. and S.8 derived from τερατεία and translated ‘the use of claptraps’, is perhaps best known from its occurrence in Isocrates , but the new edition has spread the net more widely, citing Philo, Philodemus, Proclus, Galen, Dion. Hal., and giving its meaning as ‘the use of extreme subtlety, hair-splitting, formal pedantry’. This agrees better with the gloss / κενοσπονδία attributed to Orus of Miletus in Et. Mag. 753. 4. Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Plutarch each use (...) τερθρεύομαι once. In the Helen Isocrates, condemning the futile ingenuity of the Sophists in writing encomia on such unworthy objects as salt and humble-bees, holds that such tours de force are immoral, as tending to deceive, representing a literary form of the vice περιεργία. Τερθρεία, then, should take its place, as a recognized term for the idle over-elaboration of a banausic theme, in the vocabulary of Greek literary criticism. It does not, however, appear in Rhys Roberts's ‘Glossary of Greek Rhetoric’ appended to his edition of D.H.'s On Literary Composition. No doubt this is because τερθρεία does not occur in this or any other of D.H.'s Scripta Rhetorica. But D.H. himself uses the word in Antiq. Rom. . Similarly J. F. Lockwood does not discuss the term in his lists in C.Q. xxxi and xxxii, where he collects words which are used metaphorically by D.H. in literary criticism. The metaphor in τερθρεία is certainly not obvious; but the literary sense must have involved some transference of meaning, for it is not to be expected that the word τερθρεία sprang, in full panoply of critical significance, from the brain of the Muse of Rhetoric; and it is part of the purpose of this paper to point the way to an explanation, or at least to set forth some known facts about the word and its possible congeners. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion and Science: Nishitani’s View of Nihility and Emptiness–A Pure Land Buddhist CritiqueRyusei TakedaIn general, philosophical critique of Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, the so-called Kyoto school, has been mainly conducted from a Zen Buddhist perspective. One should not, however, overlook the fact that a profound regard for the philosophical aspects of Pure Land Buddhist thought, another major stream of Mahayana Buddhism, is deeply intertwined in the foundation of their (...) philosophies. But the ways in which they interpret it and the position they give it within their philosophical systems are not the same: they have taken different forms, often giving rise to original terminology, in accord with each thinker’s metaphysical speculation.As Alfred N. Whitehead critically argues in his Religion in the Making, the fundamental reason for the decay of both Buddhism and Christianity is that “each religion has unduly sheltered itself from the other. The self-sufficient pedantry of learning and the confidence of ignorant zealots have combined to shut up each religion in its own forms of thought. Instead of looking to each other for deeper meanings, they have remained self-satisfied and unfertilized.” Further, “both have suffered from the rise of the third tradition, which is science, because neither of them had retained the requisite flexibility of adaptation.” 1In this contemporary situation, the philosophies of Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani, in which the issue of religion and science has been brought into fundamental question and examined on the dimension of origin of their development, have extremely important implications for the critical interpretation of Pure Land Buddhist doctrines, particularly in the postmodern world. 2There are two points I want to make in this paper. First, the fundamental structure of Pure Land Buddhism, in a way an antipode to Zen, will be examined in light of Nishitani’s metaphysical analysis of the relationship between human experience and the laws of nature, particularly bringing into focus his existential realization of ‘nihility.’And second, I want to challenge Nishitani’s understanding of ‘emptiness’ from my perspective as a Pure Land Buddhist, and also to uncover some fundamental [End Page 155] problems underlying his view of ‘emptiness’ by attempting to relate it to Nagarjuna’s negation of ‘substance’ in his concept of ‘non-self being,’ or ‘nih-svabhava.’ 3What is Religion for Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani?Before getting into those two topics, I want to make a rough sketch indicating about where Nishida, Tanabe, and Nishitani see that religious experience is to be truly realized.The starting point of Nishida’s understanding of religion is found in his argument that “it is on the ground of fact that religion ought to be considered.” The fact of religious experience is in his view none other than self-awareness of ‘absolute nothingness,’ which is also the foundation of what we consider as objective knowledge. The self-awareness manifests itself in the midst of such fact and serves to reveal that fact. He argues that the ultimate goal of Mahayana Buddhism is to penetrate into the depth of this fact.In Tanabe’s philosophy, one’s resurrection and return to the world (genso) and self-renunciation through ‘metanoetics’ (zangedo), a philosophy of absolute Other-power, are required and witnessed to in order for one to establish a genuine religious standpoint. Neither/nor, instead of both/and, is the only relationship in which the self negates itself by means of contradiction, so that at the same time as the self is extinguished in the negation, the contradiction of that which opposes the self is also extinguished. Converted into the neither/nor relationship, both self and contradiction cease to be contradictory opposites. 4 This is Tanabe’s criticism directed at Nishida’s notion of the self-identity of absolute contradiction. Nothingness can never be intuited as such self-identity. The self-consciousness of nothingness is only in resurrection and return to the world, which is witnessed to through practice based upon faith and performed in obedience to Other-power. 5For Nishitani the question of the essence of religion must be answered through tracing the process of the genuine pursuit of true reality. He attempts to interpret the religious quest... (shrink)

Like everyone else, I was brought up to repeat that regnauit populorum is a ‘Greek genitive = S0009838800023934_inline1’ If one shrinks from depriving examinationpapers of this interesting idiom, he may be consoled by remembering that abstineto irarum and desine querelarum are still left. Why should not populorum depend in a normal manner upon potens ? Surely the sense is improved by the antithesis pauper aquae, potens agrestium populorum. ‘Where Daunus, scant of water, ruled rustic peoples’ contains a somewhat cold (...) class='Hi'>pedantry, which is at least partially relieved by the fuller description. I find it difficult to understand why so many scholars prefer to make ex humili potens refer to Horace himself. (shrink)

In preparing for a lecture on the ethics of surgical complications, it became apparent that confusion exists about the definition of a ‘‘surgical complication.’’ Is it, as one medical website states, ‘‘any undesirable result of surgery?’’ [1]. In the European Journal of Surgery, Veen et al. [2] provide a more elaborate definition: ‘‘every unwanted development in the illness of the patient or in the treatment of the patient’s illness that occurs in the clinic’’ [2]. An esteemed historian of science suggests (...) yet another definition in a recent volume on surgical complications: ‘‘a complication, in any sphere of endeavour, is something out of the norm, and the product of extraneous and unexpected factors’’ [3]. Such is the discrepancy in definitions that Rampersaud et al. [4] declared in 2006 that ‘‘presently, there is no clear or consistent definition of a complication in the surgical literature.’’ Much research in surgery aims to reduce the risk of surgical complications. However, until we have a stable and agreed definition of what counts as a surgical complication, we cannot reliably compare different studies to discover what best reduces the chance of surgical complications [5]. Therefore, the topic is more than mere pedantry; defining surgical complications will help us with the broader question of how to improve surgical practice. A basic PubMed search returned nearly 800 articles with the phrases ‘‘surgical complications’’ or ‘‘surgical complication’’ in the title. But unlike the sources above. (shrink)

Leśniewski is known for his pedantry and idiosyncratic notation, which make it extremely difficult to read and follow. As reading comes before understanding, this paper therefore attempts only one...

Hesiod is among the most difficult Greek poets for problems of text. This is especially true in the case of the Theogony. Today we consider an over-scrupulous analysis of the logical consistency of a text a characteristic of nineteenth-century pedantry. Yet such latitude is not always allowed the Theogony. It was only twenty-five years ago that there appeared the most ruthless survey of its contents. This was Jacoby's edition of 1930, when only a mutilated remnant of the surviving text (...) was left the original poet; the rest was added by a whole series of subsequent rhapsodes. Hesiod received very much the same treatment four years later from Schwenn. Recently, however, two developments have gone a long way towards the defence of passages excluded by scholars from what they think the authentic text of Hesiod's Theogony. Many single lines or groups of verses have been bracketed by the editors of Hesiod, since they reproduce some other part of the poem in a similar or even identical form. The researches of the Dutch scholar Otterlo have now revealed that the fault is rather that of these editors. When they stigmatize the passages with the description of aimless repetition, they fail to appreciate what Otterlo claims as an inherent principle of oral recitation, or literature derived from an oral prototype. Otterlo's term for what would be an essential feature of this literature is ring-composition. A rhapsode provides a loose unity for his poem by repeating at the conclusion to the sections of the poem the verses which also introduced them. These repetitive verses announce the beginning and then the end of each section. We are wrong if we think that they have only been transferred from their original place in the poem to some later passage because there has been a lack of proper care in the process of transmission. Certainly this repetition is no adequate reason for us to suppose their occurence a second time in our text spurious. (shrink)

By virtue of his Essays Montaigne is rightly regarded not only as a radically modern philosopher but also as a transformative educational innovator. He confronted the extent to which pedantry and acculturation can justify cruelty by developing a conception of liberal arts education as the arts of liberation, and at the core of this education he placed the practice of essaying. This article argues that in easing us into essaying practices Montaigne qua educator makes reflexive use of three specific (...) modes of didactic humor: incongruous comparison, subversive superiority, and leveling embodiment. Humor thus emerges as a cognitive disposition and communicative mode especially appropriate to the pedagogical engagement with difference today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Paradox of Kandinsky's Abstract RepresentationKenneth BerryThere is a paradox in the relationship between Kandinsky's use of the terms, "abstract" and "concrete," which is presented in the expression, "Kandinsky's abstract representation." Thisexpression, while being apparently contradictory, may point to a feature underpinning Kandinsky's art, which is pivotal to a proper experience of his work, just as, in Christopher Middleton's view, a poetic language may be pivotal to the formation (...) of cultures.1 Art and cultural artifacts are vital to aesthetic experience and aesthetic education, and both the language of art and other languages are instrumental to this end. However, how may Kandinsky's mature abstraction, being in essence objectless, have any claim to representation, and consequently the higher cultural goals of aesthetic expression and the aesthetic enrichment of society?According to Thomas M. Messer, the position of centrality that Kandinsky has assumed in our understanding of modern art is largely due to his having brought to bear on his art, an instinctive awareness of what constituted the central aesthetic issues of his era.2 Kandinsky's writings in Concerning the Spiritual in Art elaborate on his aesthetic theories, and, in particular, [End Page 99] present the view that paintings should be looked at as a graphic representation of a mood rather than as a representation of objects. Messer observes that, for Kandinsky, abstraction, defined as a mode of painting extending beyond the depiction of recognizable objects, having gradually stripped itself of mimetic vestiges, thus becomes paramount. Michael Carter has similarly pointed out that with the pure forms of absolute abstraction, the non-objective colors and shapes of Kandinsky's paintings were regarded as distillations of the aesthetic properties of the artistic sign3 — separable from any referential aspect of art.4 This aesthetic aspect of Kandinsky's work, which became known as nonfigurative, nonobjective, or nonrepresentational,goes along with the cultural — and, as sculptor Anish Kapoor has remarked, "in the deepest, deepest depths of human history the cultural has always been a motivator of people," and has the power to transform society through finding visual equivalents for an emotional language.5Much has been written about Kandinsky's use of color, but perhaps the primary innovation that he made, as in the case of Barnett Newman, was in the field of drawing. Kandinsky was influenced by Gauguin's idea that drawing was an abstraction from memory after nature, just as Gauguin had been affected by the simplified contours and flattened forms of Puvis de Chavannes. Drawing did not come so easily to Kandinsky as color — he had to work harder at drawing, but in his early improvisations, forms and their outlines as graphic symbols came welling up from the unconscious, and eidetic motifs only had to be copied — almost as the art of calligraphy. Kandinsky's "organic" drawing developed as an urge to nonnaturalistic impulses, and during the period of Point and Line to Plane became almost a grammar of form, saved from mere pedantry by the living forces or visual tensions that made various kinds of line operate not just as contours but as dynamic or restful elements within themselves. In 1913, Kandinsky wrote in his "Reminiscences" that, "painting is a thundering collision of different worlds, intended to create a new world in, and from, their struggles with one another, a new world which is the work of art."6 It is clear from this that the Modernist work of art was intended to be a "new world" operating according to its own universal aesthetic laws.Kandinsky is not just a painter; he is also a visual poet. Poetry, according to Tony Curtis, involves the expression of the intensification of experience — the elevation of banal facts of life into something beyond the merely prosaic — something unique and perceptively heightened.7 It involves both imagination and poetic license to explore both ambiguity and paradox. As Scottish poet Norman MacCaig observed, poetry renders the ordinary extraordinary, seeing the unfamiliar in the familiar.8 Creative analogical thinking such as evinced in Kandinsky's art, often involves breaking free of a clichéd representation.Malcolm Budd has remarked that, in its most exclusive sense, a work... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:154 BOOK REVIEWS Woznicki highlights his own interpretation of St. Thomas's view of being and order by comparing and contrasting it with the views of other thinkers, such as Duns Scotus and Ockham. Woznicki points out that Duns Scotus's insistance on the primacy of essence over exist· ence led to a metaphysics quite different from that of Saint Thomas, in which existence had priority over essence, Woznicki emphasizes that (...) Ockham's denial of the validity of analogy has bequeathed to us an instrumentalistic understanding of being as being; the real unity of being is replaced by a unity that is the product of our minds. What actually happens in Ockham is that metaphysics is subordinated to the demands of logic. Ockham's metaphysics also resembles the Heraclitean philosophy of becoming, and Woznicki points to Nietzsche as evidence that such a philosophy of becoming necessarily leads to nihilism. In his criticism of Ockham as well as in his criticism of Descartes, Kant, and Whitehead, Woznicki not only makes Thomas seem more attrac· tive but also, at least implicitly, reveals the deleterious effect that influential false philosophies can have on the human adventure. Woznicki 's explanation of Thomas's doctrine of esse does involve abstract thinking, but the result, the rooting of order in esse, is anything but irrelevant. Metaphysics does bury its undertakers; bad metaphysics creates victims. Father Woznicki has produced a fine work as the author of this first volume in the series Catholic Thought from Lublin. I hope that in his role as editor he will be able to present in the near future other volumes as good as Being and Order. Saint John's University Jamaica, New York ROBERT E. LAUDER An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge. By YVES R. SIMON. Translated by Vukan Kuic and Richard J. Thompson. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. Pp. xii + 180. Almost sixty years have passed between the first appearance of Jn. troduction al'ontologie du connaitre and its English translation. But even though we have had to wait so long, we now have this treasure in hand. An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge leaves no doubt that here is a thinker of the first water. Simon's writings never fail to exemplify the medieval fusion of the concepts " teacher " and " master " in the Latin " magister." As I observed when reviewing one of his posthumously published books, Work, Society, and Culture, BOOK REVIEWS 155 Simon had the knack for using concrete words and vivid imagery drawn from everyday life to carry the reader to the very heart of pro· found thoughts. That testifies to more than just a good prose style; the freedom from reliance on jargon and formalized academic language shows that Simon was neither a " scholastic" (in the pejorative sense of the word) nor a pedant or mere academician. His ready access to everyday language is simply one more indication that he was an independent philosophical thinker for whom reflective personal experience, not the text, was the ultimate court of appeal for arriving at the truth. A case in point is the book's structure. Flipping through its pages, one notices the frequent extended discussions in the footnotes and the abundant citation of classical texts, often leaving room for no more than three or four lines of Simon's own prose on a given page. This may well remind the reader of the musty pedantry of so many doctoral dissertations. But although Simon frequently cites the texts of Aristotle, St. Thomas, Cajetan, and John of St. Thomas, the arguments he advances clearly do not depend on any appeal to the authority of these authors. Although a Thomist, he assumes complete responsibility for his critique of knowledge; he is a thinker whose arguments stand on their own merit. All the references to the aforementioned authorities are truly footnotes; they are never an essential part of Simon's own text. (This bears mention for the benefit of the august members of "The Guardianship of the Undefiled Text of St. Thomas Aquinas," who can be counted upon to insist that commentators, such as John of St. Thomas, are unreliable interpreters of the master's texts.) The book sparkles as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.3 (2000) 497-499 [Access article in PDF] Thomas Schmitz. Bildung und Macht: zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit. Munich: Beck, 1997. 270 pp. Paper, DM 98. (Zetemata, 97) This book, which originated as a Habilitationsschrift, offers an intelligent and energetic analysis of the Second Sophistic from a sociological perspective informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu. This (...) is not Bourdieu the Algerian sociologist of the 1960s, nor even Bourdieu the polemical critic of social anthropology of the 1970s, but the Bourdieu of the 1970s and 1980s who applied his theories of practice and symbolic capital to the analysis of language and education in such works as Homo Academicus (Paris 1984) and Ce que parler veut dire: l'économie des échanges linguistiques (Paris 1982).Schmitz is interested in the way the elites of Greek cities used education to legitimate their ruling position (chapter 2.2, "Bildung als Legitimation zur Herrschaft"). The social domination of an elite, where not based on brute force, may be presented by that elite, both to those they dominate and to themselves, as the "natural" result of certain forms of superiority. The hallmark of elite superiority in the Greek cities of the Empire was paideia. This situation may explain the general prevalence of rhetorical training among elite families, but not why some people from these families would become sophists. Schmitz demonstrates [End Page 497] correctly that performing as a sophist did not in itself procure social advancement (chapter 2.3). Instead he sees the ruling class as delegating the legitimation of its collective power to certain of its members, so that the sophists in effect performed publicly as pars pro toto (64-66). How exactly the invisible hand of class delegation made itself felt in individual life choices would require some psychological speculation, which Schmitz does not attempt here. Possibly sophists evolved from child prodigies whose early success in outperforming their peers instilled a lifelong appetite for victorious competition.Mastery of the arbitrary complexities of atticizing paideia set one apart from the underclass (chapter 3) but could also be used to set oneself apart from one's peers. Schmitz sees striving for distinction as a constant in imperial society (chapter 4) and makes good use of the posthumous vaunts of funerary inscriptions to show that for these aristocrats paideia was the medium of competition par excellence (chapter 5.1). He stresses the parallel between paideia and euergetism (65-66, 95-96, 100ff., 219-20), a form of competitive political communication that validated the ascendancy not only of the individual liturgist but also the class to which he belonged. He describes the cornucopia of opportunities for public competition that characterized imperial society (from children's encomium contests at the Pythian Games to learned symposia) but concludes that because it structured competitive impulses and enhanced participants' sense of belonging, paideia, like euergetistic competition, operated in imperial society as a centripetal as well as centrifugal force (chapter 4.5).Schmitz sees the opsimathes as a sort of bogeyman whose pedantry, laboriously acquired and gauchely displayed, educated aristocrats imagined to contrast with their own paideia, the product of an inborn superiority. Indeed in chapter 5 he uses Bourdieu to pinpoint one of the reasons that participants and educated observers put such stress on extemporaneous performance: "il leur suffit d'être ce qu'ils sont pour être ce qu'il faut être, c'est-à-dire naturellement distingués de ceux qui ne peuvent pas faire l'économie de la recherche de la distinction" (158). As Schmitz himself puts it, in an extemporaneous performance, an aristocratic sophist "zeigte er nicht, was er erlernt hatte und was er wusste, sondern was er war." Improvisation functioned as synecdoche for aristocratic supremacy.What sophists have to say about the size of the crowds they enthralled should be taken with a grain of salt. In chapter 6 Schmitz is perhaps a bit too credulous in this regard, but he rightly stresses the artful way in which... (shrink)

The balance between creative thinking and creative scholarship is a hard one to achieve, partly because the lure to be original is in conflict with the desire to be fair to the insights of past thinkers and partly because one can never be quite sure whether his scholarship is mere pedantry or actually constitutes significant discovery. In his essay, “On Books and Reading,” Schopenhauer distinguishes those who have “read themselves stupid” from those who take time to ruminate and set (...) their own thoughts to work. “A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity,” he writes, “and so does the mind if other people’s thoughts are constantly forced upon it.” Thomas Hobbes once observed that if he had read as much as other persons of his acquaintance he would have known no more than they. But the trouble is that if one does not read enough of what others have thought, he may repeat mistakes they made or turn down some cul-de-sac which is not worth exploring or is profoundly trivial. More common in philosophy is the arrogant upstart who has fastened onto some formula which he treats as a talisman enabling him to decide what to ignore and what to study. For a time, there were some philosophers who thought that anyone before Hume was not worth reading, and there are still a few who think anyone following in the footsteps of Descartes must surely be wrongheaded. (shrink)

Wittgenstein and Heidegger were not merely pioneering leaders of different philosophical schools. They both disavowed a Judeo-Christian God and influenced trends opposed to traditional metaphysical arguments. Therefore, we may suppose that they had a major role in relegating medieval arguments for God to archaic syllogistic pedantries. But I will argue that a conditional premise in Thomas’ Second-Way argument not only finds expression in modal logic, since it specifies necessarily if there is no God, there is no world, but involves a (...) natural sort of reasoning. Its ordinariness bears on Wittgenstein and Heidegger because they had extraordinary moods induced by considering the world’s possible nonexistence. Taken with their expressed disbelief in God when they consider the nonexistence, these things suggest a surreptitious embracement of Thomas’ reasoning. This fact both strengthens and makes it relevant to a pervasive twentieth-century “angst.”. (shrink)

How should philosophy be pursued? I want to defend a conception of philosophy in mediis rebus—philosophy in the middle of things. The more familiar Latin phrase is ‘in medias res,’ but Latin distinguishes two readings of ‘in the middle of things.’ There’s the middle of things from which one starts, and there’s the middle of things into which one jumps. ‘In medias res’ is the middle of things into which one jumps; I, however, mean to invoke the middle of things (...) from which one starts. Thus, risking an accusation of pedantry, I use ‘in mediis rebus.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.3 (2001) 459-460 [Access article in PDF] Reinhard Brandt. Philosophie in Bildern: Von Giorgione bis Magritte. Hamburg: Dumont, 2000. Pp. 470. Paper, NP. Reinhard Brandt, professor for Philosophiegeschichte, offers in his latest book a multi-faceted history of philosophy and art through his detailed interpretations of major paintings in the European tradition, beginning with Giorgione's "The Three Philosophers" and a young Raphael's "The Dream (...) of the Knight,"and stretching to René Magritte's "La condition humaine." In these paintings, as Brandt claims, different philosophical positions are expounded, which he then, in the role of interpreter, attempts to elucidate.In the introduction Brandt explains how this paradoxical phenomenon of philosophizing paintings can even exist. That one can find not only philosophical themes but well-wrought positions in such paintings, and, most importantly, not read these positions into them, is shown in more than thirty short essays, spanning from ancient Greek philosophy and literature, through the Renaissance and on to present-day Italian, French, Spanish, and German literature/philosophy. In almost every interpretation, Brandt critically reviews previous research, exposing and correcting some deeply rooted mistakes and constantly providing new impulses; in light of his philosophical-philological method, some major paintings in the European tradition are interpreted anew.His detailed analysis of Raphael's "The School of Athens" forces a persuasive revision of previous interpretations; the sitting figure in the foreground is not, as previously assumed, Heraclitus, but Democritus. On account of this carefully proven and convincing allotment, an unnoticed field of vision is discovered between the materialist and solid-state physicist Democritus, who with the gestus melancholicus is concentrating on a problem, and Plato, standing perpendicularly over him. Could this problem be the stone cube, on which the philosopher is leaning? From this conjecture we now have a bridge leading to Albrecht Dürer's engraving "Melancholia."Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas" is interpreted anew on account of the surprising solution to the painting's puzzling construction. Brandt shows that the whole picture is viewed from the vantage point of the princess inside the painting, not of an observer outside it. The princess stands before a mirror and Velazquez paints everything exactly as the princess sees it. So the painting, which hangs in the Prado Museum, is the mirror image of a complete reflection of the Self; perhaps it is no coincidence that the painting belongs to the same historical period as Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum dictum. Or Jacques Louis David's "The Death of Socrates": although the painting has been correctly referred back to Plato's Phaidon, until now a Platonic ground position was falsely attributed to the painting. Brandt shows that the painting was conceived with Stoic philosophical positions in mind: death is portrayed as immanently present, coupled with the un-Socratic maxim mortem spernere. The virtuous stance that Socrates still shows on the threshold of death is decisive. And as an added bonus he includes his influential, previously published essay on the title-page emblem of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is Brandt's technical know-how. He combines an encyclopedic knowledge of the European intellectual tradition with a [End Page 459] fluid, easy-to-read style, which not only instructs the reader, but entertains as well. At no time does this book approach mere philosophical pedantry; his treatment of some of the lesser known, albeit important, figures in the history of philosophy, e.g., Justus Lipsius and Diogenes of Sinope, is not a lesson in obscurity. The reader feels himself taken on a journey through a history of Western philosophy, always being provided with thought-provoking material. His style, however, is in no way used to mask the often shaky scholarship that has a tendency to go hand-in-hand with such interdisciplinary studies. In every essay Brandt exhausts all the sources; he works with razor-sharp exactness, proceeding with the meticulousness of an outstanding and seasoned scholar.A problem which always accompanies such books is the question: Cui bono? Are either the philosophers... (shrink)

We use the term “justice” in many different ways. In this essay, I consider justice only as it used in Anglo-American political and legal theory. In this realm of discourse, all forms of justice consist of non-utilitarian allocative principles, i.e., principles governing, to put it as broadly as possible, who gets how much of what. Some may wish to treat utilitarian principles as principles of justice. As a matter of nomenclatural pedantry, this is surely reasonable. But, perhaps as a (...) consequence of John Rawls’ arguments in Theory of Justice,2 or perhaps as a result of Aristotle’s classifications of two forms of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics,3 or perhaps as a result of John Stuart Mill’s appreciation of the need for reconciling utilitarianism with justice,4 we generally think of justice as consisting of principles that are sensitive to factors shielded from any stable form of utilitarianism. Furthermore, thanks to Rawls, we generally think of distributive justice as being primarily applicable to political and social institutions and not to individual actors (this, though, has been challenged by those who would still recognize a sharp distinction between utilitarianism and justice5). Regardless of whether this distinction between justice and utilitarian principles is sustainable in the long term, I shall presume it, if only to make clear what is at stake if we are to treat utilitarianism as just one form of justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.3 (2003) 265-266 [Access article in PDF] Definition Is Limited and Values Inescapable Richard Mullen THIS IS A welcome paper that lays bare some of the presumptions of those who seek to determine the status of psychiatric disorder. At different times debate on the subject reflects stigma, prejudice, needs for coherent categorization, and occasionally just antipsychiatric resentment. As Pickering hints, much philosophical argument may be (...) selected to support a position already chosen.The article illustrates that the likeness argument is insufficient to demonstrate that mental disorders are or are not disorders in any other more profound sense. Similarly perhaps, if a debate were conducted about whether or not a bony fracture, hypertension, obesity, or bacterial infection were real illnesses, the likeness argument might be unfruitful. This is perhaps unsurprising; notions of health and illness, mental or physical, are largely abstractions. In psychiatry, so-called symptoms are themselves abstract classifications of incompletely articulated mental phenomena far more diverse than the definitions and criteria to be found in a diagnostic manual.Argument by analogy is always limited. If my car has a flat tire, the car will be dysfunctional or disordered. Its loss of performance will be the symptoms of the flat tire, which is the lesion. It is a problem quickly diagnosed and treated. If convenient, I suppose my car could have been said to be ill, but this would not lead to any particular insights into the nature of cars, mechanics, health, or anything else.A variety of concepts can be contained within terms such as illness,disease, and disorder. They include the clinicopathological approach (the disease is the organic lesion), the disease is deviance approach, disease as distress, and approaches that consider disease—particularly mental disorder—as largely socially constructed. None may resolve the questions that Pickering raises, but recognizing that our terms are not always precise or used consistently is part of formulating the problem more clearly. For the most part clinical psychiatry (and the rest of medicine) has no difficulty in properly identifying most of our patients as disordered or ill. The fact that there are some borderline instances, difficult to classify either way, does not invalidate the classification.Consideration of whether or not the features of a disorder can in themselves determine whether or not a person is disordered is timely for two reasons. As stigma about (some) psychiatric disorder lessens, and opportunities for complaint and compensation expand, an era of self-definition as mentally disordered has arrived. How are mental health practitioners to respond to someone whose mental distress appears not to be clinically significant, but who demands access to the sick role? Also of current concern for clinical psychiatry is widespread pressure to define as disordered those persons whose antisocial behavior brings them into conflict with society. Professional recognition that definitions of mental disorder are inadequate, or rather incomplete, [End Page 265] may be valid. Worryingly, there are others who are willing to define it for us.Both major international systems of classification of mental disorder offer definitions of mental disorder that turn on what is to be meant by clinical significance or clinically recognizable. In the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, mental disorder implies "clinically significant impairment or distress," and criteria for specific disorders mostly including a comment about "clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" (APA 2000, 8). In the International Classification of Disease, disorder is used to imply "existence of a clinically recognizable set of symptoms or behavior associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal function" (WHO 1992, 5). It seems that no definition of mental disorder is adequate for all purposes. Seeking to improve existing definitions by further defining the terms used quickly becomes an exercise in pedantry, far removed from practical utility.Pickering mentions as an example the "symptom" of delusions. Available definitions are widely recognized as incomplete or otherwise unsatisfactory (David 1999). This leads to debate about what the individual elements within the definition precisely mean. However in practice delusions are identified with remarkably high reliability (WHO 1973... (shrink)

Philosopher Daniel C. Fouke sheds the light of rhetorical analysis on a subversive thinker whose challenges to institutional authority have awakened recent scholarly interest. John Toland was a controversial Irish-born British freethinker, satirist, and critic of traditional Christianity. His work Christianity Not Mysterious, now considered a classic exposition of deism, provoked outrage in its time, but eventually led to a healthy skepticism regarding the historical reliability of the biblical canon. Though little known today, Toland was an acquaintance of Gottfried Wilhelm (...) Leibniz, John Locke, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, among others. Fouke argues that Toland's use of language in theology and philosophy represents a neglected current of early modern thought, in significant contrast to Locke, to whom Toland is often compared. Toland's practice of philosophy recognizes a social dimension to knowledge, which cannot be found in many of his contemporaries. Fouke analyzes Toland's "exoteric strategy" of speaking as others speak, but with a different meaning. He argues that Toland's philosophy and theology had little to do with positive expression of beliefs, and that his philosophical aim was not to develop an epistemology, a true metaphysical system, an ideal form of governance, or the basis of ethical obligation, but to find ways to participate in the discourses of others while undermining those discourses from within. Fouke traces Toland's practices to Shaftesbury's conception of a comic or "derisory" mode of philosophizing aimed at exposing pedantry, imposture, dogmatism, and folly. This important study adds new depth to our understanding of a neglected though influential British writer. (shrink)

A riddle or a joke? I regret having made light of both myself and the reader. However, the concept of complexity has been explored with such intensity and pedantry, has been analyzed from so many points of view – the mathematical, linguistic, physical, chemical, political, psychological, sociological, physiological, algorithmic, logical, religious, and metaphysical – that nothing, not even the title of this piece, can escape it. Indeed the situation has reached the point where we grow misty-eyed over the very (...) thought of the discrete charms of yesterday's simplicity. Sometimes we dream that complexity itself, after having given us so much, muses – now that its task is fulfilled – of flying up miraculously into the sky, like the Virgin Mother (the Assumption); or ourselves wish to experience – for those spirits who prefer to keep their feet on the ground(!) – the “dissolution” with which entropy begins. Isn't it true that certain words, marked by the spirit of their age, are themselves in fact carried away by the spirit of the age? (shrink)

In recent years historians of science have come to an increasing appreciation of the role played by such moral and affective categories as “trust,” “wonder,” “pedantry,” and “self‐discipline” in the knowledge‐making enterprises of the early modern period. Barbara Benedict's book on curiosity is a most welcome contribution to the literature devoted to such topics. In a lively and entertaining work, Benedict sets out to “analyse literary representations of the way curious people, including scientists, authors, performers, and readers, were engaged (...) in practicing and producing curiosity itself” . The author modestly states at the outset that the work is not, and does not claim to be, a history of science, and indeed as a whole the essay perhaps falls short of the more ambitious promise of the subtitle—“a cultural history of early modern inquiry.” Yet it deals with a subject that is nonetheless of profound importance for historians of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century science.Of particular significance is the way in which the book demonstrates how curiosity and its representations served to demarcate the boundaries of legitimate topics of knowledge and modes of enquiry. The discourse about curiosity thus served to inform central epistemological questions of the period: Is it appropriate to seek all knowledge on all topics, and is it to be sought by all people? If there are areas of knowledge that are illicit, what are they and why are they proscribed? What are the proper methods for the various spheres of knowledge? Benedict carefully articulates the role played by the discourse of curiosity in the sanctioning of some projects and the censuring of others. To take one of the many telling examples found in the book, the protagonist of Thomas Shadwell's Virtuoso is presented as epitomizing the curious impulse, here manifested as a puzzlingly earnest quest for useless knowledge and a strange fascination with base and undignified natural objects. The odd proclivities of this character demonstrate in a forceful way how the new natural philosophy could be regarded as merely an outlet for the intellectual vice of curiosity—and how far the new knowledge‐making enterprises fell short of social approval amongst those whose approbation mattered most. The familiar seventeenth‐century rhetoric of the “usefulness of natural philosophy” was thus in part a response to accusations of curiosity leveled against experimental philosophers. Benedict observes that “early modern literary culture struggled to mold curiosity into forms that would preserve public values” . Apologists for the scientific activities of the Royal Society, in keeping with this goal, sought to depict the quest for natural knowledge as a legitimate expression of a curiosity that had been appropriately disciplined and directed in ways that would contribute to the common good.The book also traces the varying fortunes of curiosity, nicely delineating the reciprocal relations between subjective and objective, between the curious sensibility and curiosities, between wonder and wonders. At times it might have been helpful for the author to have transgressed the self‐imposed limitation of examining literary representations and to have considered some formal accounts of curiosity as they occur in contemporary works of moral psychology in which this human propensity is carefully described and precisely located among the other affections. Without more direct information about the contemporary taxonomy of the affections curiosity too easily shades into wonder, credulity, greed, avarice, and acquisitiveness. In short, the relations of curiosity with its neighboring affections—the subtle transformations of which constituted an integral part of the changing status of curiosity—could perhaps have been more finely drawn. This, however, is a minor issue. Benedict has written a good book on an important topic, not least for historians of science because it clearly shows how the eventual establishment of the social respectability of curious individuals and objects was an essential phase in the legitimation of natural history and natural philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Literature as Sheltering the HumanJohn Durham PetersLiterature as Sheltering the Human, by Frederic Will; 203 pp. Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993, $69.95.This volume contains thirteen essays by Frederic Will, poet, critic, ex-professor of literature, autobiographer, translator, man of letters. All concern the peculiar powers of literature to offer spiritual comfort and protection against the storms of life.A cluster of four theoretical essays begins the collection. The first (...) surveys Husserl’s intellectual offspring, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Heidegger, and seeks in their philosophies of language a grounding for literature’s uniqueness. The second essay argues that everyday language is always on the verge of entropy, but at its best, can be sublimated into literature. The third essay is a fiction of a crazed lit professor trying to master “the whole of literature” (p. 41). The eternally elusive object of “literature” turns out to evoke erotic-aggressive energies. The fourth essay on “Influencing the Past” rehearses some Benjaminian and Borgesian themes about literary influence being not causality, but intertextual resonance.The next set of five essays—which Will calls a “testimony” (p. 133) or “hit and run theology” (p. 138)—forms the core of the book. They treat “sheltering the human” in Homer, the Bible, Sappho, the Bhagavad Gita, and the epistles of St. Paul. Each ponders an enclosure—a retreat from battle, a womb, an act of translation, an inward wrestle of conscience, the blood of Christ—made of words. To my mind, this is the best part of the book: a steady meditation, graced with poetic lines and steeped in wide learning, on the proposition that “poetically man dwells.” Here Will performs the humane survey of world-literature he elsewhere extolls.The concluding section explores the relation of literature to the other arts. There is an essay on the gradual discovery of the oral core of Greek literature, largely through German scholarship, and one on literature’s relation to the other arts, which argues for its unique centrality among human expressive forms, thanks to its alleged continuity with the essential human possession, language. The penultimate essay meditates on Adorno’s aesthetics of music (concluding on an affirmative note not quite in tune with Adorno’s gloomy musings on capitalism), and the grand finale muses on the relation of art to life, via the dubious conceit of “art” as a great resort hotel.The book is remarkable for an intense and bald aestheticism that is exceedingly rare today. Will calls literature “the ripest offspring of language” (p. 1) and is happy to speak of masterpieces, genius, revelation, the autonomy of art, classics, humanism, values lodged in the structure of the universe (p. 125), universal validity (p. 131), “texts high in redemptive claim” (p. 147), the continuing necessity of the classical tradition (p. 190), and the artist as all but a different species (p. 200). The faith in a totality called “literature” is, to put it lightly, out of season in the academy today. As Will, a confirmed foe of [End Page 387] academic politics and pedantry, might well suggest, this may speak in its favor. Though Will’s aestheticism may refresh, I cannot help but wonder with Adorno whether some forms of expression and faith are objectively impossible in certain eras. Can “literature” sustain credulity today as anything more than one among many remarkable human practices?There is something, if I may say it, sheltered about these essays. If, as J. S. Mill said, eloquence is heard but poetry is overheard, this work is more poetry than eloquence. It features repeated and unannounced autobiographical intrusions. The self-reflexive quality supplies ready phrases to the reviewer: Will calls himself a “fallen contemporary classicist,” praises “high-minded eclecticism” and favors those thinkers who “sensualize knowing.” These traits make for a rare voice singing in the cornfields of Iowa.John Durham PetersUniversity of IowaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

This book, originally published in Germany in 1951 under the title Menschlichkeit, is a religious reading of human nature culminating in the assertion that, "The ultimate meaning of man can belong only to his relationship to the absolute, the relation which he has to God." Inspired by Fichte, and emphasizing the unity of Kant’s three critiques which together address the "lived" human experience, the author attempts to address the "whole" man, not only his intellect, his objectivity or his historicity. This (...) concern with the "whole" man leads him, within the context of a critique of Husserl, to assert the limitations of science, "Scientific knowledge seeks objectivity;... [But] objectivity offers no ultimately valid truth." When we have moved beyond science and objectivity Medicus "invites" us to seek the "unconditionally true" by pursuing the good, the beautiful, and the just. These eternal values rise from the depths of man’s being, "bringing him the awareness that he must make decisions by means of which he will be enabled to escape the contingency of changing circumstances and the power of time." Medicus devotes considerable effort to rejecting Nietzsche on the grounds that his glorification of man actually cuts us off from these inner roots and finally sets us in opposition to our own "creatureliness." The book is characterized by an eclectic pedantry that proceeds not so much by argument and analysis as by quotation cliche and assertion.—S.L.W. (shrink)

Ce texte a pour objet de comparer différentes lectures phénoménologiques de la théorie cartésienne de la connaissance, en montrant comment celle-ci est mobilisée pour répondre à certaines inquiétudes contemporaines. En premier lieu, nous pouvons constater une tension intéressante entre le modèle d’un « monde crépusculaire » de la science cartésienne développé par Jean-Luc Marion et celui d’un « monde de lumière » décrit par Emmanuel Levinas dans De l’existence à l’existant. Alors que le premier traduit l’emprise métaphysique d’une volonté de (...) puissance égologique, le second rend possible dans une certaine mesure la liberté d’un arrachement à l’être. Toutefois, ces deux modèles se rejoignent sur un point fondamental, à savoir le caractère à la fois égologique et carcéral du monde de l’objectivité. En outre, ces deux interprétations ne permettent pas de rendre justice à l’idée cartésienne que Dieu nous a donné une « bonne nature », du point de vue de la lumière naturelle, mais aussi des passions. C’est pourquoi nous proposons dans ce travail une lecture phénoménologique de Descartes qui prenne davantage en considération cette idée de « bonne nature ». Cette lecture devra prendre en compte la sensibilité humaniste de Descartes tout en respectant les enjeux contemporains liés à la phénoménologie. Cet autre modèle propose de repenser la métaphysique de l’objectivité à partir de notions et de perspectives qui ne renvoient pas à la solitude de l’ego, mais plutôt au cadre humaniste de la civilité, tout en respectant la valeur humaine du savoir. (shrink)