Music is a deeply entrenched human phenomenon. In this article, I argue that its evolutionary origins are intrinsically intertwined with the incremental anatomical, cognitive, social, and technological evolution of the hominin lineage. I propose an account of the evolution of Plio-Pleistocene hominins, focusing on traits that would be later implicated in music making. Such traits can be conceived as comprising the musicality mosaic or the multifaceted foundations of musicality. I then articulate and defend an account of protomusical behaviour, drawing theoretical (...) licence from the social brain framework of Robin Dunbar and colleagues, as well as the evolutionary framework for human culture and cooperation developed by Kim Sterelny. The role of gene-culture co-evolution and niche construction is brought to the fore in articulating the evolutionary account. Finally, I defend the view that music subsequently developed via processes of social learning and cumulative culture. (shrink)

This article maps existing research from 5,874 scholarly publications on social entrepreneurship (SE) utilizing scientometrics. The mapping indicates a taxonomy of five clusters: (a) the nature of SE, (b) policy implications and employment in relation to SE, (c) SE in communities and health, (d) SE personality traits, and (e) SE education. We complement the scientometric analysis with a systematic literature review of publications on SE in the Financial Times 50 list (FT50) and Business & Society and propose a multistage, multilevel (...) framework that highlights the clusters of existing research on SE based on their stage and level of analysis. This review study also helps outline a set of future research directions, including studies examining (a) the process stage at the micro-level and macro-level, (b) linkages across levels and stages, (c) linkages across stages over time or longitudinal studies, (d) SE in resource-constrained environments, (e) technological advancement and its impact on SE, (f) the types of social enterprises and their outcomes, and (g) various emerging topics in SE. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to reconstruct Schelling’s theory of organism, primarily as it is elaborated in the First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and the Introduction to the Outline. First, I discuss the challenge that the properties of organisms presented to the dominant scientific viewpoint by the end of the eighteenth century. I present different responses to this challenge, including reductive materialism, metaphysical and heuristic vitalism, and the Kantian response, and I situate Schelling’s account of (...) organism with respect to these responses. I argue that while Schelling agrees with vitalism in that he wants to preserve the specificity of organic phenomena, he rejects principles such as vital forces or the formative drive postulated by vitalism, even for purely heuristic purposes. I argue that Schelling understands organisms fundamentally in terms of the coordinated functioning of their organs. I further clarify Schelling’s account of problematic organic phenomena by focusing on his treatment of the relation between organic activity and organic receptivity. For Schelling, organic activity and organic receptivity mutually condition each other. I provide a detailed account of how this is supposed to work. (shrink)

Recently theorists have developed competing accounts of the origins and nature of protolanguage and the subsequent evolution of language. Debate over these accounts is lively. Participants ask: Is music a direct precursor of language? Were the first languages gestural? Or is language continuous with primate vocalizations, such as the alarm calls of vervets? In this article I survey the leading hypotheses and lines of evidence, favouring a largely gestural conception of protolanguage. However, the “sticking point” of gestural accounts, to use (...) Robbins Burling’s phrase, is the need to explain how language shifted to a largely vocal medium. So with a critical eye I consider Michael Corballis’s most recent expression of his ideas about this transition. Corballis’s view is an excellent foil to mine and I present it as such. Contrary to Corballis’s account, and developing Burling’s conjecture that musicality played some role, I argue that the foundations of an evolving musicality provided the means and medium for the shift from gestural to vocal dominance in language. In other words, I suggest that an independently evolving musicality prepared ancient hominins, morphologically and cognitively, for intentional articulate vocal production, enabling the evolution of speech. (shrink)

The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...) individual members can belong to the same or to different species. Examples of communities include biofilms, ant colonies, symbiotic associations resulting in holobiont formation, and human societies. The proposed model of evolution at the level of communities revises classic theorizing on the major transitions in evolution by analyzing the interplay between community/social traits and individual traits, and how this brings forth ideas of top-down regulations of bottom-up evolutionary processes (collaboration of downward and upward causation). The work demonstrates that such interplay also includes reticulate interactions and reticulate causation. In this regard, we exemplify how community systems provide various non-genetic ‘scaffoldings’, ‘constraints’, and ‘affordances’ for individual and sociocultural evolutionary development. Such research complements prevailing models that focus on the vertical transmission of heritable information, from parent to offspring, with research that instead focusses on horizontal, oblique and even reverse information transmission, going from offspring to parent. We call this reversed information transfer the ‘offspring effect’ to contrast it from the ‘parental effect’. We argue that the proposed approach to inheritance is effective for modelling cumulative and distributed developmental process and for explaining the biological origins and evolution of language. (shrink)

In A Million Years of Music, Gary Tomlinson develops an extensive evolutionary narrative that emphasises several important components of human musicality and proposes a theory of the coalescence of these components. In this essay I tie some of Tomlinson’s ideas to five constraints on theories of music’s evolution. This provides the framework for organising my reconstruction of his model. Thereafter I focus on Tomlinson’s description of ‘entraining’ Acheulean toolmakers and offer several criticisms. I close with some tentative proposals for further (...) theorising. (shrink)

This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster (...) of philosophers, archaeologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, from a variety of career stages, of whom many are leading experts in their fields. Chapter 3 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

Watsuji Tetsurô is famous for having constructed a systematic socio-political ethics on the basis of the idea of emptiness. This essay examines his 1938 essay “The Concept of ‘Dharma’ and the Dialectics of Emptiness in Buddhist Philosophy” and the posthumously published The History of Buddhist Ethical Thought, in order to clarify the Buddhist roots of his ethics. It aims to answer two main questions which are fundamentally linked: “Which way does Watsuji's legacy turn: toward totalitarianism or toward a balanced theory (...) of selflessness?” and “Is Watsuji's systematic ethics Buddhist?” In order to answer these questions, this essay discusses Watsuji's view of dharma, dependent arising, and morality in Hīnayāna Buddhism. It then proceeds to Watsuji's fine-tuning of the concept of emptiness in Mādhyamika and Yogācāra Buddhism. Finally, this essay shows how Watsuji's modernist Buddhist theory connects to his own systematic ethical theory. These two theories share a focus on non-duality, negation, and emptiness. But they differ in their accounts of the relations between the individual and the community, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between hermeneutics and transcendence. These findings give us hints as to Watsuji's origins, pitfalls, and possibilities. (shrink)

Irad Kimhi considers the conundrum, first addressed by Parmenides, of how negative facts can be the case and be thought, to be the puzzle that philosophy has been working to solve since Plato and Aristotle and wants to do his part by criticizing Frege's dissociation of sense and force and developing a more Aristotelian account of judgment. Michael Della Rocca considers the conundrum a hopeless aporia that we must avoid by embracing Parmenides' radical monism of being and in a recent (...) article (“Parmenides' insight and the possibility of logic”) aims to show that Kimhi is confronted with exactly the kind of insoluble difficulties that he that finds in Frege. The present article agrees with Kimhi that we can think about what is not the case, although thinking reaches all the way to what IS the case. But Della Rocca is right that Kimhi cannot explain by virtue of what we are able to do this. The counter‐proposal says: (1) Thinking reaches to being in that we have learned to read things in the intersubjective spatial field of consciousness as model tokens of singular propositions about them. (2) Negation can be thought of because thinking has its very origin in absolute, non‐well‐founded negation. (shrink)

Mehr et al. seek to explain music's evolution in terms of a unitary proper function – signalling cooperative intent – which they cash out in two guises, coalition signalling and parental attention signalling. Although we recognize the role signalling almost certainly played in the evolution of music, we reject “ultimate” causal explanations which focus on a unidirectional, narrow range of causal factors.

The aim of this paper is to explore how the history of images and conceptual metaphors resulting from them that we use in educational reflections are formed regardless of if they are problematized in practical life. Insight into history shows how these images are shaped not only by our own experiences and by the context of our lives, but also by the history of such images, which are unconsciously inscribed in our metaphorical speech through so called “residues of meaning”. The (...) paper clarifies this, using the examples of alimentary images, that are a transition from nutrix (wet nurse) to nutritor (teacher). The text offers selected examples of consideration of alimentary images. These are among the most primitive and therefore the deepest images of human experience. This history is an example of a cultural line that goes from ancient educational imagination to the more recent forms of such images, even if always with different accents. (shrink)

This paper discusses the impact of East Asian philosophical ideas on the origins and development of martial arts. The article argues that the ideas of Daoist philosophy were developed into ‘soft styles’ or ‘internal schools’ that are based on the doctrine of ‘wuwei’ (action through non-action, effortless action) which follows the path of Yin. These styles are in opposition to ‘external’ or ‘hard styles’ of martial arts that follow the path of Yang. Daoist philosophy of ‘ziran’ (naturalness, spontaneity) influenced ‘animal’ (...) or ‘imitation styles’ and the paradigm of natural, unplanned, and unforced combat movements. The influence of Buddhism on martial arts is found in techniques of mental tranquillity training for the extreme conditions of combat. The work also shows the significance of Confucianism for the formation of a code of honor for warriors, which includes the ethics of duty and respect. (shrink)

The dependency of a speech recognition system on the accent of a user leads to the variation in its performance, as the people from different backgrounds have different accents. Accent labeling and conversion have been reported as a prospective solution for the challenges faced in language learning and various other voice-based advents. In the English TTS system, the accent labeling of unregistered words is another very important link besides the phonetic conversion. Since the importance of the primary stress is much (...) greater than that of the secondary stress, and the primary stress is easier to call than the secondary stress, the labeling of the primary stress is separated from the secondary stress. In this work, the labeling of primary accents uses a labeling algorithm that combines morphological rules and machine learning; the labeling of secondary accents is done entirely through machine learning algorithms. After 10 rounds of cross-validation, the average tagging accuracy rate of primary stress was 94%, the average tagging accuracy rate of secondary stress was 94%, and the total tagging accuracy rate was 83.6%. This perceptual study separates the labeling of primary and secondary accents providing the promising outcomes. (shrink)

This paper aims to apply contemporary theories of causation to historiography. The main purpose is to show that historians can use the concept of causation in a variety of ways, each of which is associated with different historiographical claims and different kinds of argumentation. Through this application, it will also become clear, contrary to what is often stated, that historical narratives are (in a specific way) causal, and that micro-history can be seen as a response to a very specific (causal) (...) problem of Braudelian macro-history. (shrink)

In this paper I make a reconstruction of Kant’s idea of aesthetic education and show the peculiarity of this idea in comparison with more familiar projects of Schiller and the German Romantics. In the first section I briefly outline those features of Kant’s ethics which are relevant for this problem, namely its universalistic character. In the second section I show how aesthetic experience, according to Kant, could help to make an individual less sensitive to the demands of particular interests and (...) motives. In particular, I discuss the roles of the beautiful and of the sublime. In the conclusion I briefly compare Kant’s idea of aesthetic education with Schiller’s idea of the same. (shrink)

In their use of correlations as a means to distinguish between different views on the normative/descriptive gap, Stanovich & West discuss the competence component but neglect the activation-utilization component of performance. Different degrees of motivation may introduce systematic variation that is confounded with the variation explained by cognitive capacity.

In ihrem Buch Existenz verteidigen Andreas Luckner und Sebastian Ostritsch die Position Saul Kripkes gegen den benachbarten Ansatz Timothy Williamsons und gegen die entferntere Tradition von Frege, Russell und Quine. Einig sind alle Parteien sich, dass Existenz als Dass-Sein zu denken ist im Unterschied zum Was- und Wie-Sein des Seienden oder, wie ich sagen werde, als formales Sein im Unterschied zum inhaltlichen Sein. Der Dissens hebt an bei der Frage, ob Existenz ein Prädikat erster Stufe oder eine Art Prädikat von (...) Prädikaten ist, wie Frege und die ihm folgen meinen, wenn sie Existenz als Quantor, d. h. unspezifische Zahlangabe zu Begriffsumfängen fassen. Kripke und Williamson dagegen erklären Existenz als eine nichtdiskriminierende Eigenschaft von Einzelnen, Kripke als eine kontingente,Williamson als eine notwendige. Luckner und Ostritsch schließen sich Kripke an und ich mich ihnen. (shrink)

Sustainability is currently the term dominating environmental policy. Its extensive political diffusion is in stark contrast, however, to the extent to which there is agreement over its meaning. Its ability to motivate is not in question, but a certain scepticism surrounds its ideological content. Since ideological terms have no objective basis, it is therefore important for the purposes of environmental policy to establish whether such scepticism is justified.

This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, I give an in-depth comparison and analysis of the theories of Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia, in which I highlight their most important resemblances and differences. What both have in common is their notion of the presence of the past as a ‘presence in absence’. They differ, however, with respect to the character of this past and the role representation plays in making it present. Second, I also argue that for (...) both Ankersmit and Runia, the presence of the past is always the present of our past, which excludes the experience of the otherness of the past, and which opens both theories to the criticisms of being self-centered and nationalistic. (shrink)

Die analytische Handlungstheorie ist gegenwärtig in einem Stadium, in dem sie sich anschickt, ihre vor allem von D. Davidson fixierte Programmatik zu verlassen. Unter den zwei Bedingungen, Beschreibungsabhängigkeit und Gründe-Ursachen-Synthese, gewinnt, anders als bei Davidson, die Erstere zunehmend größeres Gewicht. Den hoffnungsvollen Übergang zu einer holistisch-kontextuellen Handlungstheorie belegen drei neuere Diskussionen, deren Verlauf geschildert wird: das Wiedergewinnen der Absichten in Bratmans Plänetheorie, die Suche nach nicht auf Glauben/Wünsche-Paare reduzible Handlungsgründe und das Entdecken der Akteursaktivität, einschließlich der Rolle des normativ rekonstruierten (...) Akteurs. (shrink)

Myers' offer of cooperation as a medicine for ailing moral theories is welcomed as potentially helpful, even if his handling of it is diagnosed as implicitly one-sided consequentialist. His search for an ethically “substantive way of engaging with others” is shown as not coherent with his remarks on the tasks cooperation as an ethical concept has to fulfil. Instead, it is proposed that the concept be disentangled from the micro- problems Myers' wants it to solve, and that it be read (...) more freely, from the perspective of Rawls' conception of cooperation. (shrink)

During the last years Anglosaxon discussion about Marx and Marxism has been characterized by an intensified interest in historical materialism as a general theory of history. The most extensive, careful and analytically rigorous among several new treatments is the one by G.A. Cohen, which is the subject of four critical articles in the present issue of Analyse & Kritik. To make these articles and Cohen’s project understandable to the German reader, an attempt is made in the following to summarize the (...) main arguments of Cohen’s defence of historical materialism and of the ensuing comprehensive and detailed discussion. (shrink)

This collection takes stock of J.M. Coetzee's impact from a number of interesting angles, Including animals, sexuality, race, and reason. The time is truly ripe for such a volume.

Der moralische Kontraktualismus ist neben der kantischen und utilitaristischen Tradition die dritte Haupttradition einer aufgeklärten Moralphilosophie. Seine Kernthese besagt, daß moralische Normen und Forderungen legitim sind, wenn die Betroffenen sich aus ihren Interessen heraus auf die Etablierung dieser Normen hätten einigen können. Eine vernünftige Moral ist demnach, obwohl sie Freiheitsbeschränkungen verlangt, zum gegenseitigen Vorteil der Einzelnen. Die Autoren des Bandes diskutieren im Lichte neuerer Arbeiten die Vorzüge und Schwierigkeiten der moralischen Vertragstheorie. Zentrale Themen sind der Begriff der Moral, das Problem (...) der moralischen Normativität, der Zusammenhang von Moral und Interesse, von Moral und Rationalität sowie die Frage, welche moralischen Normen eine kontraktualistische Theorie konkret zu begründen vermag. (shrink)

Mouse tracking, a new action‐based measure of behavior, has advanced theories of decision making with the notion that cognitive and social decision making is fundamentally dynamic. Implicit in this theory is that people's decision strategies, such as discounting delayed rewards, are stable over task design and that mouse trajectory features correspond to specific segments of decision making. By applying the hierarchical drift diffusion model and the Bayesian delay discounting model, we tested these assumptions. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which (...) the “mouse‐tracking” design of decision‐making tasks (delay discounting task, DDT and stop‐signal task, SST) deviate from the standard “keypress” design of decision making tasks. We found remarkable agreement in delay discounting rates (intertemporal impatience) obtained in the keypress and mouse‐tracking versions of DDT (ρ = 0.90) even though these tasks were given about 1 week apart. Rates of evidence accumulation converged well in the two versions (DDT, ρ =.86; SST, ρ =.55). Omission/commission error in SST showed high agreement (ρ =.42, ρ =.53). Mouse‐motion features such as maximum velocity and AUC (area under the curve) correlated well with nondecision time (ρ = −.42) and boundary separation (ρ =.44)—the amount of information needed to accumulate prior to making a response. These results indicate that the response time (RT) and motion‐based decision tasks converge well at a fundamental level, and that mouse‐tracking features such as AUC and maximum velocity do indicate the degree of decision conflict and impulsivity. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue with Ernst Cassirer that anticipation plays an essential part in the constitution of time, as seen from a transcendental perspective. Time is, as any transcendental concept, regarded as basically relational and subjective and only in a derivative way objective and indifferent to us. This entails that memory is prior to history, and that anticipation is prior to prediction. In this paper, I will give some examples in order to argue for this point. Furthermore, I (...) will also argue, again with Cassirer and contra Henri Bergson, that time should be seen as a functional unity, and not as a collection of three different things-in-themselves (past, present and future). (shrink)

Hyperpolitics and Political Commitment in the Twenty-First Century What do the January 6th invasion of the Capitol and the anti-racist demonstrations of mid-2020 have in common? Both birthed some of the largest protest movements in American history, but also diminished rapidly after their initial, pre-revolutionary peak. This article reads the recent political sequence through the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’. In contrast to previous types of post-politics or mass politics, ‘hyperpolitics’ stands for a distinctly novel mode of political commitment characteristic of the (...) 2010s, in which a formerly apolitical public sphere finds itself intensely repoliticized, imposing itself on other domains such as the private, cultural, or economic. The return in question yet also runs across parameters that are more low-cost, low-entry, and low-duration than previous twentieth-century types, in stark contrast Max Weber’s typology of politics as the ‘slow boring of hard boards.’. (shrink)

This paper takes a stand on Hamblin semantics and its relation to the semantics-to-pragmatics interface. Biased questions, where the speaker finds one of the options more likely and expects the confirmation that p is true, raise a concern about the limits of Hamblin semantics. I argue that biased questions have modified Hamblin semantics, while unbiased questions have unconstrained Hamblin semantics. The optional bias feature explains compositionally. It is triggered by likelihood presuppositions ranging Hamblin sets and highlighting the preferred alternative(s). Biased (...) effects are exceptionally possible in alternative and wh-questions, but only in polar questions, they can be encoded lexically and grammatically. I argue that Hamblin semantics covers all core types of questions, while some of its applications for non-questions are problematic. (shrink)

abstract David Boonin, in his A Defense of Abortion, argues that abortions that involve killing the foetus are morally permissible, even if granting for the sake of argument that the foetus has a right to life. His primary argument is an argument by analogy to a 'trolley case'. I offer two lines of counterargument to his argument by analogy. First, I argue that Boonin's analogy between his trolley case and a normal unwanted pregnancy does not hold. I revise his trolley (...) case in light of my objections. Second, I argue that Boonin's arguments for the permissibility of killing, when applied to this revised trolley case — and by extension, typical unwanted pregnancies — do not succeed in justifying killing. (shrink)

Eliade and the Doctrine of Mystic Lights Eliade believed that in every religion there are reports about an experience of mystic light. Furthermore, all such reports mention that the person who experienced the light subsequently underwent a deep transformation of her or his spirit and began a new life, the life of a holy man or homo religiosus, which is identical – in its purest form – with the life of a mystic. A clear example of one such transformation is (...) Saul turning into Paul. But a closer analysis indicates, says the Author, that these changes can be of two kinds. They either come suddenly to an unsuspecting and unprepared individual, and that was the case of Saul, or they are a result of concentrated spiritual training, and such a case was described by Gregory Palamas. The former transformation leads to a religious conversion, the latter is the beginning of a new, mystic life. The Author argues that these forms of experience are seeing without using eyes, and as such, they may have served as a paradigm of vivid mental understanding. He quotes Plato and Heidegger to support these views. (shrink)

I argue that the two criteria traditionally identified as jointly sufficient for voluntary behavior according to Aristotle require qualification. Without such qualification, they admit troubling exceptions. Through minding these difficult examples, I conclude that a third condition mentioned by Aristotle – the eph' hēmin – is key to qualifying the original two criteria. What is eph' hēmin is that which is efficiently caused by appetite and teleologically caused by reason such that the agent could have, in theory, acted differently. I (...) propose that praise and blame are justified only when 1: the behavior is voluntary and 2: the agent is susceptible to the positive influences of appropriate praise and blame to help form, improve, or strengthen a good character. Through concentrating on the agent's affectability in morally salient situations, we may better understand the qualified criteria's role in voluntary human behavior in general. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that proper names serve as anchors identifying the individuals in the possible or real world. This hypothesis is tested on Old Icelandic narratives. A prominent feature of Old Icelandic sagas is that the narrative matter is not quite new. A Saga is reliable iff it refers to the events relevant for its audience and accepted as true by the whole community. I argue that proper names must be regarded as references to the background knowledge of (...) the medieval audience. I follow two contemporary Sagas based on the fresh events and show that proper names in a Saga mind were arranged in form of a database, each type of a personal designation having its charachteristic text-building profile. The form of the name and its frequency in the Saga are linked with the rank of the character. The high number of people mentioned in the Sagas is explained by the fact that the Sagas aimed at describing the real world, where the names of the individuals and the events they were involved cross-identified each other. Every character had its rigid identifiers. The total amount of propria is always higher than the number of active figures. I classify the Saga characters into five ranks and discuss their information-structural profiles. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present what I take to be a standard view of morality, and I argue that this view amounts to a paradox: the moral event or moral concern, the source of morality, ultimately leads, through moral theory, to a denial of itself. I will show how Badiou and Levinas take a way out of this and in doing so deny the possibility of anticipating the moral. Furthermore, I claim that this anticipatory moment can be introduced back (...) by means of the concept of “practical wisdom” as used in analytical virtue ethics. Finally, I argue that the Kantian notion of the sublime is structurally the same as the moral event in Badiou and Levinas, and that our view of the sublime can benefit from both Levinas’ view and the concept of “practical wisdom” as well. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Anton C. P. CAVAFY'S ARS POETICA ' It is generally recognized that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) was not born a poet but became one only through persistence and labor, reaching his "first step" sometime after the midpoint of his life. In his effort to assess the quality of his earlier poetic production and sharpen his sensitivity in facing self-criticism, he decided to put in writing his (...) personal thoughts on his work sometime in 1903. The text was written in English in a personal shorthand Cavafy had devised for his own use. It was found among the papers he left to A. Sengopoulos and published for the first time in 1963 by M. Peridis, who also supplied the suitable title Ars Poetica. It falls outside the scope of this essay to discuss the antecedents of this document. Taken as a whole, the text has all the clarity and directness required of a testament designed to serve as a personal guide and handbook. The problems it discusses are limited to the needs of the poet. In this regard, the Ars Poetica has neither the range of topics nor the theoretical scope of, for instance, Aristotle's Poetics. It is quite certain that the ideas that preoccupy Cavafy in the Ars Poetica had been on his mind for a period of years. However, the Ars Poetica is his first prose piece where he gives a systematic treatment to technical and critical issues directly related to the assessment of his work and his role as a poet. In order to project here a clear image of Cavafy's struggle to reach his technical maturity which came after 1910, we need first to discuss the persistent problems he faced during this crucial decade, then to examine the attitudes and values he embodied in certain representative early poems, and finally to relate them to the guiding principles he formulated in his self-addressed poetics of 1903. A number of interrelated problems confronted Cavafy in his late twenties and throughout his thirties. They emerged one by one, to 85 86Philosophy and Literature make more pressing the demand for a consistent solution and a complete recasting of his outlook. Coming to terms with them was extremely difficult. Aside from the emotional and sexual pressures he had to face alone, there was the absence of suitable ideas and conceptual tools to provide him with even the rudiments of an intellectual framework. Whatever he borrowed from Europe and England, or resurrected from his own Hellenic heritage, proved either beyond assimilation or insufficiently digested. The lingering issues fell roughly into four areas. (i) Despite his determination to devote his life to the writing of poetry, the quality of his work was discouraging. He knew this and as a result he often expressed uncertainty about his ability to proceed. Time and again he appeared suffering from a feeling of inadequacy, but nevertheless he sought to engage a reflective mood from which to draw encouragement and hope. (ii) On the theoretical side, he identified with the long tradition which assigned a coveted cultural role to the savant-poet as discloser of truth and spokesman for humanity; this despite the prevailing climate of opinion in his immediate environment which recognized no such high position in his case. Cavafy knew that his standing with the Greek community of Alexandria had gradually dwindled with the loss of family wealth and his lowly employment, and also that his expectations to be respected in his role as a poet and leader in communal affairs were futile. This denial of personal recognition in a society dominated by commerce and finance contributed to his mood of depression. The feeling of being an outcast, despite his associations with the upper social circles of Alexandria, became a constant irritant to his sense of pride. (iii) The course of culture, the destiny of human institutions and the workings of history, became puzzles as he tried to view them through the opaque glass of disillusionment. These were the grand themes actively discussed in the writings of leading European intellectuals, but to the young poet they had a different personal urgency. His vital concern in this connection was not understanding science... (shrink)