This chapter contains section titled: Peirce and Adama: Hopeful Pragmatism James and Roslin: Religious Hope Apollo and Tyrol: Social Hope Hope vs. Fear “A Flawed Creation” Notes.

Joan Oró Florensa (1923-2004), al mismo tiempo que fue un destacado científico del siglo XX, es una de las figuras más desconocidas y olvidadas por parte de la historiografía de la ciencia contemporánea. Su destacado papel en las primeras investigaciones sobre el origen de la vida, en los análisis bioquímicos de las muestras lunares recogidas en la misión Apollo 11, así como su decisiva participación en los experimentos biológicos de la misión Viking ―entre otras importantes aportaciones―, ameritan con mucho (...) el inicio de estudios históricos que atiendan y analicen pormenorizadamente alguna de las dimensiones de su poliédrica figura. Este artículo, que analiza su figura y aportaciones en el contexto histórico y científico en el que se desarrollaron y utiliza el archivo inédito de Joan Oró, busca conmemorarlo en el centenario de su nacimiento (2023) y contribuir a los estudios historiográficos sobre el bioquímico español. (shrink)

Previous chapter Rhuthmology as “Philosophy of Rhythm” Strikingly, in his Rhythmic Researches, the young Nietzsche refers many times to the project of a “philosophy of rhythm.” In one of his notes, he contemplates the idea of writing a larger book that the one he will finally publish. He explicitly places this new philosophy in line with what he will examine in The Birth of Tragedy: “Importance of Art, Dionysus and Apollo, Socrates, The position of the artist.” Exposed - Sur (...) le concept de rythme – Nouvel article. (shrink)

There is no broad dispute in the doctrine on the matter how and on what purpose did the drugs appear in the nature and in the society. Why does a certain spectrum of light and sound waves and electromagnetic radiations bring a person into a state of euphoria? The Author has united biological and chemical substances as well as the sources of other origin changing person’s consciousness into a joint hypersystem: narcogenes’ movement recorded in the past,observable in the present and (...) expected in the future. It is admissible to associate the sources of formation of the modern variety of narcogens with the origin of life by means of «the reasonable plan», «lucky coincidence», panspermia in their interaction or otherwise. The life distribution on the Earth during 3.5 billion years with the participation of narcogenes has caused such global phenomena as drug trafficking and narcomania (toxicomania). Today narcogenes are discovered in all earthly environments and the vector of theirmovement is directed by a man beyond the limits of the earthly surface. In a set of regular medicines they are placed onboard tens thousands flight vehicles, shuttles and ISS are supplied with them. In 1969 onboard «Apollo-11» narcogens were first delivered to an orbitof the Moon. The happenings of their «exterrestia» consumption on the circumterrestrial orbit have already been recorded. Onward are narcogenic mixers, nanorobots, transferring narcogenes in a human’s brain and so forth. The postglobal scope of the narcogenes’ movement may get a colossal swing as the people develop the deep space, build circumplanetary settlements (upward 10 thousand people) and planetary colonies. It is time that the scientists payattention to the prognostic side of the problem under consideration and develop preemptive measures. (shrink)

Visitare il “pianeta d’argento”, conquistare il silenzioso globo che rischiara ogni notte, è stato il sogno dell’uomo di età moderna. Tra Cinque e Settecento, infatti, dall’epoca delle grandi scoperte geografiche al secolo dei Lumi, scrittori, scienziati, uomini di fede e di cultura hanno tentato in ogni modo di concretizzare questa inafferrabile visione. Grazie a un lungo e minuzioso lavoro di ricerca, Marco Ghione racconta la loro storia e illustra le soluzioni tecniche che tanti, eccezionali cittadini della Repubblica delle Lettere hanno (...) elaborato per trasformare l’impossibile in realtà, dalle macchine volanti di Cyrano de Bergerac e Francis Godwin alle creature soprannaturali fantasticate da Keplero e Kircher. Intanto, scienziati e astronomi andavano puntualmente definendo le prime riproduzioni attendibili della superficie lunare, con una nomenclatura sistematica che, a partire dall’Almagestum novum di Giovanni Battista Riccioli, è giunta fino ai giorni nostri, all’impresa dell’Apollo 11 e allo sbarco sulla luna. Completa il volume la prima traduzione italiana di due testi fondamentali della letteratura in materia: l’Iter Lunare, di David Russen (1703), e A Trip to the Moon, di Murtagh McDermot (1727). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Temple as Ship in Odyssey 6.10R. Drew GriffithLike the good eighth-century oecist that he was,1 the founder of Scheria, Phaeacian king Nausithous, son of Poseidon and grandfather of Nausicaa and Clytonaus, adorned his new city with temples of the gods (, Od. 6.10). This phrase, a hapax in Homer, occupies the same metrical seat immediately before the hephthemimeral caesura as the common ship formula (cf., 24.299, also a hapax). (...) It is plausible, therefore, that the bard who described the work of this ship-loving king used the formula as a formal model. The note argues that this bard thought that temples were ships in which gods traveled. Though this claim may seem surprising at first, cultic, architectural, and linguistic aspects of the epics all support it.Let us begin with cult. From Iliad 1 on, epiphanies are common (43-47, 194-95, 359-61).2 While some gods like Apollo work from afar, most need physical contact, for example, in helping suppliants, and human travel to Olympus like that of Otus and Ephialtes or Bellerophon is out of the question. Gods periodically irrupt into the natural world: Zeus comes down in lightning (e.g., Ar. Pax 42); drinkers take in Dionysus and grow giddy (e.g., Soph. Ant. 964); one sees Pan in any sudden skittishness of the flock (e.g., Eur. Med. 1172). The trick, then, is to channel the gods' [End Page 541] strength to make it propitious. Perhaps for this reason, the basic prayer is the cletic hymn (Men. Rhet. 334.25-336.4) that asks the god to come to the worshipper (carm. pop. 871.1 PMG; Sappho fr. 1.5, 25, 2.1 Lobel-Page, Voigt; Anacreon 357.7 PMG = fr. 14.7 Gentili; Pl. Leg. 712B; Apocalypse 22.20) and may describe a magic vehicle for the purpose (Sappho fr. 1.8-9 Lobel-Page, Voigt),3 like the self-moving aerial car, vimāna, of Sanskrit verse to which a boat is compared at Raghuvanśa 16.68.4 Those who pray often do so by the sea (Il. 1.34, 348-51; Od. 2.260-61; Pind. Ol. 1.71-73, 6.58), and ships may be the site of epiphanies (e.g., Hymn. Hom. Dion. 2, etc.; cf. Exekias ABV 146,21; Hymn Hom. Ap. 388-451).When the Trojan women dedicate a robe to Athena (Il. 6.269-78), we are not told that they use a ship to carry it, but in the similar offering at the Panathenaea, such was indeed the case.5 This ship may have been a comparatively late addition to the Athenian festival, but it has a good Bronze Age antecedent as proved by the Theran ship-fresco.6Turning now to architecture, we note that early temples were perhaps quite small, since as adyta (Il. 5.448, etc.) or abata, which worshippers did not enter,7 they have no functional lower size limit. Surviving Greek temples, all of archaic date or later, are imposing stone structures but bear traces of wooden prototypes, pillars having replaced roughhewn logs and decorative guttae treenails. Excavators have found terracotta model-shrines at Perachora and in the Argive Heraeum,8 some of which may have been portable like those of the Egyptian Amun, Mut, and Chonsu, the juggernaut of Puri in Orissa, or the Tent of Meeting, the earliest Israelite shrine (Exod. 33.7, etc.).Greek temples were astronomically oriented, typically facing sunrise on the foundation day (cf. Plut. Num. 14.4; Lucian De Domo 6), while snubbing humbler coordinates like roads or nearby buildings.9 In [End Page 542] this, they resemble Khufu's pyramid in Egypt, the so-called air shafts of which helped the pharaoh's soul sail to its eternal home in the constellation Orion, giving like an alidad the angles between the tomb itself, the pharaoh's "horizon of eternity," (3ḫ.t (nt), Papyrus Abbott 2.2; The Great Harris Papyrus 3.6),10 the pole-star, and his final destination.11 This fact suggests a link with navigation, for Greeks connected ships and stars, thanks to the navigator's art. With both magnetite and iron,12 but... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Brevity, Conciseness, and Compression in Roman Poetic Criticism and the Text of Gellius' Noctes Atticae 19.9.10Amiel D. VardiGellius Reproduces in Noctes Atticae 19.9.10 four early Latin epigrams he reports to have been recited by his teacher Antonius Julianus, on which he remarks:quibus mundius, venustius, limatius, tersius Graecum Latinumve nihil quicquam reperiri puto.tersius Salmasius followed by most editors: persius Q, pessius Z, pressius FγNow that Salmasius' admiration for the Parisian (...) Q and the whole δ family has abated,1 there is no reason to prefer the emendation over the reading of F and γ, especially since the readings of both manuscripts of the δ family could easily have originated in. But Jacobus Gronovius, in his 1706 edition, objects to pressius on the grounds that the idea of conciseness is not relevant in this context.2 A consideration of both this reading and the emendation is therefore appropriate.There is no other occurrence of tersus in Noctes Atticae, though the word is quite a common literary term from the time of Quintilian on. In his Institutio Oratoria it is used with reference to oratory (12.10.20, 50), to elegy (10.1.93, tersus atque elegans), and to Horace's advantage over Lucilius (10.1.94, tersus ac purus). It serves the younger Pliny, again both for prose style (Ep. 2.3.1, 7.25.4) and for elegy (9.22.2, tersum, molle, iucundum), and Porphyrio ascribes it to Horace's style (ad Hor. S. 1.4.8, tersus atque eleganter). The meaning of the term seems always to be that of "polished" or "refined" and is thus not much different from limatus, which precedes it according to the vulgate reading in [End Page 291] NA 19.9.10. The combination limatius, tersius would thus be somewhat pleonastic, but such coupling of synonyms is not alien to Gellius' style,3 and the combination tersum ac limatum is also found in Quintilian (Inst. 12.10.50). The reading limatius, tersius in the Gellian passage therefore has no obvious lexical deficiencies, and if pressius had failed to satisfy, it would indeed have been a happy emendation.Pressus is an older stylistic term, commonly employed in rhetorical discussions by Cicero, the younger Seneca, Quintilian, the younger Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius. In this context it normally serves, side by side with brevis, as a Latin equivalent for, to designate the virtus dicendi of brevity, which was added to the Theophrastean by the Stoics but, except in narratio, not always favored by rhetoricians with a taste for the grand style, especially Cicero and his admirers.4 The term is coupled with limatus by Cicero (Brut. 35, Orat. 20) and Quintilian (Inst. 2.8.4, 11.1.3 twice), with reference to the genus subtile or the Atticist style. It serves Gellius in three other places (1.3.21, 2.6.5, 10.6.2), all in the adverbial comparative form pressius but not in the sense "concise," which would be its meaning in 19.9.10.5 With reference to poetry, pressus is found in this sense in Quintilian (Inst. 10.1.46, on Homer's style; 12.10.38, an advantage of the Greek language over Latin), and Silius Italicus employs the metaphor pressis metis, taken from chariot racing, with reference to epic narrative and corresponding to breviter... revolvere (Pun. 8.48).Terminology apart, the demand for brevity in poetic texts is quite common, and precedes that in rhetorical theory.6 In Roman poetic theory it is emphasized by Horace, both in Ars Poetica (25, 335-37) and in his criticism of Lucilius (S. 1.4.11-13, 1.10.50-51).7 Whereas in the passages from Ars Poetica Horace and the Hellenistic doctrines he follows8 [End Page 292] seem to adopt the rhetorical virtutes dicendi to poetry,9 the metaphor of the muddy stream ( flueret lutulentus) used in his Sermones suggests dependence on a completely different tradition, that of the poetic ideal of and Callimachus' Hymn to Apollo, already evoked in Catullus' poem 95.10 This fortuitous coincidence of rhetorical and Callimachean doctrines, often also formulated in the same terminology,11 continues to obfuscate the theoretical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Herodotus' Literary and Historical Method:Arion's Story (1.23-24)Vivienne GrayHerodotus' story of how the talented and original musical performer and conductor Arion of Methymna was rescued from the sea and carried to dry land by a dolphin is of great interest because of the literary and historical methods he uses.1 The story arises out of the siege of Miletus and is connected with it through Periander (1.20, 1.24.1, 7), but different (...) readings have been presented in order to make a better connection with the immediate or wider context.2 Questions have also been raised about the authenticity of Herodotus' inquiry and his own belief in the miracle.3 His normal inquiry (historia) involves akoe (what he heard), opsis (what he saw), and gnome (his judgment).4 He tells Arion's story mainly on the authority of the traditions of the Corinthians and Lesbians, whose agreement on it frames the story.5 He supplements this akoe with [End Page 11] apparent opsis, in the form of a "material proof": the dedication "of Arion" on a statue of a man on a dolphin, at Taenarum, to which his sources said the dolphin carried him. The genitive case of the dedication suggests that Arion dedicated it and inscribed it with his name.6 And Herodotus' description of the statue as "bronze, not big" suggests that he saw it. But he does not add his own gnome of belief, or disbelief, in the miracle.I would like to offer a new reading of Arion's story that combines insights into Herodotus' presentation of it and its context with some comments on Herodotus' own beliefs and his use of the oral traditions available to him.The StoryThe story goes that Arion had been spending most of his time at the court of Periander. Periander plays an important role in the story: his experience of Arion's miracle is the focus from beginning to end. The traditions that Herodotus cites present the story as a "very great wonder" () that "occurred to Periander in his lifetime" (1.23.1). They give an account of how it happened, and say that Arion gave an account to Periander, presumably in the same form (1.24.6). Periander experiences "disbelief" as a result of the "wonder" but conducts an "inquiry" that shows it to be true.7Arion decides to go west to acquire his fortune. He hires a Corinthian ship to take him back to Corinth, but the crew plots to rob him and make him kill himself, giving him a choice that seems to be no choice (): to kill himself on board and be buried, or to jump overboard (and not be buried). Arion promises to kill himself, but first secures the crew's permission to give a last performance, which he does in full dress, of "the shrill/rising tune" ().8 He then makes what appears to be the worse choice and jumps overboard, whereupon a dolphin rescues him and carries him safely to Taenarum. [End Page 12]Herodotus does not explain Arion's choice or directly connect his performance with his rescue, but Arion's religious dedication () at Taenarum implies that Arion, at least, believed that the dolphin came as a divine agent (1.24.8). Poseidon had a very famous shrine at Taenarum and was thought to save men from disaster at sea by sending his dolphin to assist them.9 Similar patterns of action in other stories strengthen the hypothesis that Arion has appealed to some divine force to rescue him.10 Croesus, for example, secures his divine salvation by shouting out to the god Apollo, appealing to him to stand by and deliver him from death if ever he has given him any gift that pleased him (1.87.1). Arion sings () instead of shouting, but a song from the world's best kitharode (1.23) is bound very much to please the god to whom it is addressed.11 The Magi sacrifice and sing () to the god of the wind and sacrifice to Thetis and the Nereids of the sea in order to quell a storm that is threatening them and prevent further... (shrink)

This study examines the death of Achilles in ancient myth, focusing on the hero's imperfect invulnerability. It is concluded that this concept is of late origin, perhaps of the Hellenistic period. Early evidence about Achilles' infancy does not suggest that he was made invulnerable, and early evidence concerning his death apparently indicates that Achilles was wounded more than once. The story of Achilles' heel as we know it is therefore late, though it is demonstrable that certain themes and motifs of (...) earlier traditions about Achilles were preserved in later traditions. What caused the concept of Achilles' imperfect invulnerability to emerge, it is proposed, was the late story in which the hero is ambushed in the temple of Thymbraean Apollo. Certainly Achilles was wounded in the lower leg in early Greek myth. An explanation is needed if this does not reflect the story of his imperfect invulnerability, and the arguments of several scholars are surveyed. The theory that the "swift-footed" hero was first immobilized by a lower wound before being slain is ultimately favored, though it is suggested that invulnerable armor and poison may have played a role. A comparative approach to myth and ritual is employed, with attention given to evidence from various areas and ages in an effort to illuminate stories about the infancy and death of Achilles. The study also assesses two alleged reflections in the Iliad of Achilles' death, the death of Patroclus in Book 16 and the wounding of Diomedes in Book 11. The evidence in ancient art and literature about the death of Achilles is often obscure, but this exploration of continuity and innovation in myth about Achilles should assist our understanding of it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Livy’s Written RomeWilliam SeaveyMary Jaeger. Livy’s Written Rome. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xii 1 205 pp. Cloth, $39.50.How Livy went about writing his immense history has been a topic of keen interest, and recent work such as Jaeger’s directs our thinking in new and interesting ways. Livian historiography has traditionally focused on Quellenforschung and more recently on the rhetorical influences that often remain unrecognized by (...) modern readers. A still newer kind of historiography, branching from rhetorical studies, considers the influence of space on a writer’s text, and it is attracted to both topographical and material issues. Indicative of such works in the last decade are Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor 1988); Eleanor Winsor Leach, The Rhetoric of Space (Princeton 1988); C. Nicolet, Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire (Ann Arbor 1991); and Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1993). Jaeger follows many historiographers in beginning with Livy’s preface, and then considering disparate episodes throughout Ab Urbe Condita before returning to the preface to reevaluate Livy’s method. By this approach, narrative is not just a chronological reflection of political and religious events; rather, spatial reminders (monumenta) may influence the organization of written narrative. Jaeger narrows her study to focus on “reminders that for various reasons fail to point unambiguously back to a particular person or event” (10). It is when Livy has restored in his text a [End Page 318] lost monumentum that his method is most readily observed: “when monuments fail and the text restores them, reminders of stories give way to stories about reminders” (11). This method of historiography, as Jaeger wields it, gives us a fresh look at an old text. It does not work equally well in all environments—witness the problems Sparta would offer such an approach, as both Jaeger (2) and, long ago, Thucydides realized. Yet more difficult would be monumental—in all senses of the word—societies such as those of ancient Egypt and Central America.Jaeger’s discussion of method and historiography (the Introduction and chapter 1) is excellent. Her survey of Livian historiographical research is thorough and attested by a wealth of judicious footnotes which review the relevant scholarship. The discussion of monumenta is particularly illuminating. Jaeger explains how the “monumentum stands between the res gestae and their literary celebration, so that two layers, the monumental and the literary, come between event and reader” (16). That all share certain qualities make them suitable for historical evaluation: “In sum, we can assume of all monumenta some common characteristics: an absent person or thing commemorated; a present audience reminded; a memory or an exhortation that is socially relevant; and a meaning determined jointly by the reminder, its physical context, and the circumstances of each viewer” (18). Jaeger’s belief that Daedalus’ labyrinth in the Aeneid (Veneris monumentum nefandae, 6.24–27) is the only exception to her standard that monumenta are “exposed to the public view” (17) is a bit strained, even without considering that Vergil’s ecphrasis describing the doors of Apollo’s temple is not really Roman at all. Moreover, Columella recorded that Hyginus collected precisely that sort of evidence: Hyginus veterum auctorum placita secretis dispersa monimentis industrie collegit (De Re Rustica 9.2.1). And what of all the Roman religious elements that are also secret (i.e., not exposed to public view)? It would be difficult to believe that there were no hidden monumenta among all the Roman sacra. Nevertheless, Jaeger’s approach to monumenta reinforces the importance of visualizing narrative as written by classical historians, which results in an illuminating and novel way of examining Livy’s historical text.After discussing the notion of monumenta in chapter 1 Jaeger proceeds to consider four separate episodes from Ab Urbe Condita, noting how Livy “maps the plot of a story onto the Roman landscape, then commemorates the particular enactment of the plot in a monument” (12). Chapter 2 considers the abduction of the Sabine women in AUC book 1, demonstrating a rhythmic flow of action between the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Callimachus and His CriticsFrederick T. GriffithsAlan Cameron. Callimachus and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. xiv + 534 pp. Cloth, $49.50, £37.50."Elegy was the great preoccupation of the age of Callimachus, and it was naturally the style appropriate for elegy rather than epic that Callimachus addressed in the prologue to his own original and polemical new elegy" (437). Professor Cameron's keenly anticipated argument (outlined in TAPA 122 (...) [1992] 305-12) does not disappoint, especially now that he includes among the "critics" not only such ancient "Telchines" as Asclepiades and Posidippus but also the Roman Callimacheans and "moderns with Hesiodic initiations on the brain" (415). To counter "the curious modern preoccupation with Hellenistic epic and epyllion" (ix), seen most starkly in interpretation of Catullus and the Augustans, Cameron interweaves two ambitious projects.First, the organizing argument is a reconstruction and dating of the Aetia so as to establish that the prologue (frag. 1 Pf.) introduced books 1 and 2 ca. 270 [End Page 339] B.C. amid debates about contemporary elegy. In place of the now generally discredited "feud" with Apollonius over monumental epic, Cameron posits a quarrel with Asclepiades and Posidippus over the epicizing Antimachean mode of elegy. The prologue is not a recusatio of grand epic (a Roman preoccupation); indeed, "... there is no mention of epic in the Aetia prologue" (457), and elegy would be a curious medium for dictating taste in hexameter. Nor does the prologue claim novelty for the Aetia as catalogue-style "Hesiodic elegy," which had been in fashion since the Lyde, and indeed so much so that "it was pseudo-Hesiodic rather than pseudo-Homeric writing that aroused Callimachus's ire" (363). The "Telchines" are the admirers of the Lyde, a poem that Callimachus assails as an "epic pastiche" (483), a monotonous, and the stylistic antithesis of the interesting subjectivity and personal voice demonstrated in his own Cydippe (ca. 279-274). For having compromised the distance of elegy from epic, Antimachus is left pointedly unnamed next to Mimnermus and Philitas (316) and further overshadowed by allusion to Aratus (in, frag. 1.11) as the proponent and paragon of. In sum, the prologue's polemic lies more completely within the moment and between the lines than has been suspected, and entirely within elegy but outside of theory: "So Callimachus's famous literary theories do not really amount to much-as theories" (452).Second, to understand how the Aetia speaks for its age we must understand the age rightly. To provide "a prolegomena to the study of Hellenistic (and so also Roman) poetry" (ix) Cameron pauses frequently in his reconstruction of the Aetia to launch diatribes against the folly of reducing Hellenistic poetry to the aestheticism and obscurantism of the "ivory tower," or to genre inversion (contra Rossi), Buchpoesie (contra Bing), or, worst of all, some "contest of Homer and Hesiod" about big and small epics. This rarefied "Alexandria" existed first in Rome and at a great remove from the continuities of Hellenic culture that shaped Callimachus' "real literary context, a world of cities as well as courts, a world of private symposia and public festivals" (ix). Multibook epics were too rare (contra Ziegler) to require recusatio, while the popularity of short hexameter poems precluded controversies such as are implied by the term of "epyllion" (contra Gutzwiller) or imputed to Theocritus (Id. 7, 13, and 22) and Callimachus (H. Apollo and Hecale). "To judge from the debate about the Lyde, it was elegy that preoccupied the more reflective poets and critics of the age" (451).Only a scholar with Cameron's range, good ear, and courage could undertake a two-pronged offensive of this sort, which is not less "original and polemical" than the elegy it celebrates. Recently published papyri, Byzantine misreaders, and the shifty tribe of epigrammatists have all been marshaled with equal authority for what is in part the elegiac pre-history to his distinguished The Greek Anthology from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford 1993). By the nature of the fragmentary evidence, both the elegy-centered age and its important (if not definitive) Aetia can be reconstructed only at the level of hypothesis, and readers will differ as... (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “You're Right. There's No Earth. It's All a Legend” “I'm Not a Cylon!…Maybe, But We Just Can't Take That Chance” “You Have to Have Something to Live For. Let it be Earth” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “Life is a Testament to Pain”: Suffering, Ignorance, and Interdependent Arising “All of This Has Happened Before…”: Karma and Rebirth “How Could Anyone Fall in Love with a Toaster?” Cylons as Persons? Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “Red, You're an Evil Cylon” “You Can't Fight Destiny”—or Can You? Manichaean “Sleeper Agents” “A Broken Machine Who Thinks She's Human” Will the Real Boomer Please Stand Up? “We Should Just Go Our Separate Ways” Notes.

Family life and one's career are incomparable values for him/her. The whole topic of incomparability of desires is veiled in confusion and controversy. Some people deny that there are any incomparable desires. This chapter explains meaning of incomparability, discusses incomparability as a fact of life that many of the desires are incomparable, and also examines why incomparability makes an enormous difference to decision‐making what patterns of incomparability the desires exhibit. The first dimension of incomparability is depth: how much thought and (...) how many comparisons with other wants the inability to choose will survive. Another dimension is generality, whether the incomparability concerns just individual wants or also the values that usually underlie them. The significance of some patterns of incomparability becomes clearer if one add another ingredient to the brew: the influence of beliefs on desires. The chapter considers an example to illustrate this influence. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “A Holdover from the Cylon Wars” The Resurrection Ship The Limit on Cylon Intelligence “The Cylons Send No One” “The Shape of Things to Come” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: What Is a Woman? “I Am a Viper Pilot” But Aren't Men and Women Different? Crossroads Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: Should We Stay or Should We Go Now? Frak the Numbers! Saving Starbuck? The Mark of Cain “Evil Men in the Gardens of Paradise?” Sacrifice Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “If This Is the Work of a Higher Power, Then They Have One Hell of a Sense of Humor” “I Am God” Giving Oneself Over to God “Could There Be A Connection…?” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “We're in the Middle of a War, and You're Taking Orders from a Schoolteacher?” “While the Chain of Command is Strict, It is Not Heartless. And Neither Am I” Helo's Halo: Can Genocide Ever be Justified? “It's Not Enough to Survive. One Has to be Worthy of Surviving” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “One Must Die to Know the Truth” “Prayer to the Cloud of Unknowing” Bored, as in Really Bored The Boxing of D'Anna Biers Notes.

In this paper I argue for the importance of pursuing Buddhist Meta-Ethics. Most contemporary studies of the nature of Buddhist Ethics proceed in isolation from the highly sophisticated epistemological theories developed within the Buddhist tradition. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that an intimate relationship holds between ethics and epistemology in Buddhism. To show this, I focus on Damien Keown's influential virtue ethical theorisation of Buddhist Ethics and demonstrate the conflicts that arise when it is brought into dialogue (...) with a contemporary exposition of two prominent Buddhist epistemological theories; namely, Dunne´s exposition of the views of Dharmakīrti and Candrakīrti. I highlight certain points of conflict between these ethical and epistemological theories and will argue that the resolution of this conflict requires revision (either in interpretation of theories or in the theories themselves) by all parties. I shall conclude by arguing for substantive revision to these theories via an engagement with this conflict and, in so doing, hope to exemplify some of the virtues of engaging with a meta-ethical methodology for the advancement of the respective domains of inquiry. (shrink)

This chapter discusses four ways in which the question of the price of a choice can arise: one trivial, one about risk, one awful, and one moral. It is very hard to compare the awfulness of a choice to the desirability or undesirability of the things one is choosing between. The undesirability of having to choose between loyalty to the child and opposition to terrorism seems to be incomparable both to the loyalty and to the opposition. The final decision is (...) made with the valuation one would use if forced to make a choice between all the options, and along the way to this final decision one discards less trusted valuations. The chapter also considers agenda‐manipulating strategies. They deal with a decision‐making situation by structuring the comparisons that are to be made in order to think it through. Agenda‐manipulation will arise naturally in many dilemma‐managing strategies. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Master Morality and Slave Morality Escaping Slavery by Creating Souls The Spiritual Move from Slave to Equal “They Have a Plan” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “A More Meaningful Impact” “Desperate People Take Desperate Measures” “An Extension of the Cylons' Corporeal Authority” “We're Gonna Be There, Tyin' the Knots, Makin' 'em Tight” “A New Day Requires New Thinking” Notes.

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

This chapter contains section titled: “I Don't Have to Listen. I'm the President” “Are You Alive?” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “How Is That Fair? How Is That in Any Way Fair?” “We Make Our Own Laws Now, Our Own Justice” “The Shape of Things to Come?” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “A Rational Universe Explained Through Rational Means” “That Is Sin. That Is Evil. And You Are Evil” “You Have a Gift, Kara… And I'm Not Gonna Let You Piss That Away” “The Gods Shall Lift Those Who Lift Each Other” “You Have to Believe in Something” Notes.

This chapter contains section titled: “We Must Survive, and We Will Survive”—But How? “Death Becomes a Learning Experience” “I Am Sharon and That's Part of What You Need to Understand” “It's Not Enough Just to Survive”—Or Is It? Notes.

It is tempting to regard the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln’s acclaimed Holy Terrors makes clear, were profoundly and intensely religious. Thus what we need after the events of 9/11, Lincoln argues, is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. Holy Terrors begins with a gripping dissection of the instruction manual given to each of the 9/11 hijackers. In their evocation of passages from the Quran, we learn (...) how the terrorists justified acts of destruction and mass murder “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” Lincoln then offers a provocative comparison of President Bush’s October 7, 2001 speech announcing U.S. military action in Afghanistan alongside the videotaped speech released by Osama bin Laden just a few hours later. As Lincoln authoritatively demonstrates, a close analysis of the rhetoric used by leaders as different as George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden—as well as Mohamed Atta and even Jerry Falwell—betrays startling similarities. These commonalities have considerable implications for our understanding of religion and its interrelationships with politics and culture in a postcolonial world, implications that Lincoln draws out with skill and sensitivity. With a chapter new to this edition, “Theses on Religion and Violence,” Holy Terrors remains one of the essential books on September 11 and a classic study on the character of religion. “Modernity has ended twice: in its Marxist form in 1989 Berlin, and in its liberal form on September 11, 2001. In order to understand such major historical changes we need both large-scale and focused analyses—a combination seldom to be found in one volume. But here Bruce Lincoln . . . has given us just such a mix of discrete and large-picture analysis.”—Stephen Healey, Christian Century “From time to time there appears a work . . . that serves to focus the wide-ranging, often contentious discussion of religion’s significance within broader cultural dynamics. Bruce Lincoln’s Holy Terrors is one such text. . . . Anyone still struggling toward a more nuanced comprehension of 9/11 would do well to spend time with this book.”—Theodore Pulcini, Middle East Journal. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: “We Are All Playing Our Parts” “God Has a Plan for You, Gaius” “Out of the Box Is Where I Live” “It's Time to Make Your Choice” Notes.

This is a chapter about changing the desires of others. People often have to coordinate their actions in order to get what they want. The need for coordination produces a practical problem and a philosophical problem. The difference between the problems is that in dealing with the practical one he/she does not have to get hung up about rationality. Different coordination problems generalize in different ways to more than two people or more than two actions. The prisoner's dilemma has received (...) more attention than these other situations because it has seemed to present the most intractable problems. If one can show how agents faced with prisoner's dilemmas can find their way to cooperation, then it will no longer seem implausible that people pursuing their individual good can achieve stable and mutually satisfactory social arrangements. (shrink)

This chapter describes a way of thinking, really a family of ways of thinking, which allows incomparables to be left incomparable. In the chapter, the patterns of decision making are very ordinary and unsurprising. But the point is to show that people do have ways of thinking that do not require them to balance the unbalanceable, and to begin to develop a vocabulary that helps reveal how they do this. The chapter discusses the following five dilemma‐managing principles: the rain‐check principle; (...) the anti‐compromise principle; compensation; the looking back principle; and unequal opportunities. It also considers how people think through some moral non‐dilemmas. That will help them to see what is going on in some non‐moral dilemmas. The given example concerns broken promises. Things get more complicated when the choice is not between two simple possibilities but a series, among some of which one has preferences. The chapter explains this with another trivial example. (shrink)

A good decision is one that leads to people's getting what they want. Luck plays a smaller role if they ask what makes a good decision‐making method or policy. This chapter discusses how often people will get more of what they want if their decisions are formed in this way, than they would have had they reasoned differently. It also describes the advantages or disadvantages of the dilemma‐managing strategies, and presents a systematic view of the strategies (partition‐shifting strategies, spreading strategies, (...) and revaluing strategies), with an emphasis on how to evaluate them. Different decisions involve different partitions. The choice of a suitable partition is one of the secret skills of decision‐making. A good partition should reveal the important factors that can affect the outcomes of the acts being considered, in such a way that these outcomes can easily be compared. (shrink)

To see some of the ways of changing desires begin with a comparison with the rather different case of belief. In the case of belief there are 'rational' ways of changing the opinions, by considering arguments and evidence, and 'non‐rational' ones, such as being hypnotized or joining a religious sect. This chapter discusses cases in which someone wants to change their desires. There is then a conflict between their second order desires and their simple, first order, desires. The chapter also (...) describes how to resolve a conflict between first and second order desires. In evaluating the lives that would follow from possible changes in one's desires one can take account of the pattern as well as the amount or variety of desires that are satisfied. This is inevitable, really, since one's second order as well as one's first order desires have to come under the scope of the shift. (shrink)

Family life and one's career are incomparable values for him/her. The whole topic of incomparability of desires is veiled in confusion and controversy. Some people deny that there are any incomparable desires. This chapter explains meaning of incomparability, discusses incomparability as a fact of life that many of the desires are incomparable, and also examines why incomparability makes an enormous difference to decision‐making what patterns of incomparability the desires exhibit. The first dimension of incomparability is depth: how much thought and (...) how many comparisons with other wants the inability to choose will survive. Another dimension is generality, whether the incomparability concerns just individual wants or also the values that usually underlie them. The significance of some patterns of incomparability becomes clearer if one add another ingredient to the brew: the influence of beliefs on desires. The chapter considers an example to illustrate this influence. (shrink)

People need strategies, to tell them either how to balance the preservation of life against the avoidance of pain or how to allocate the resources without having to balance them. This chapter describes a non‐balancing strategy. This strategy could be a helpful part of a society's decision‐making resources. The chapter also gives many non‐medical cases which present problems which are similar in one way or another. In all these cases the tension is between the preservation of life and various kinds (...) of welfare. The famine relief case could have been described also in terms of a slightly different tension, between avoiding misery as well as death and promoting only relatively trivial forms of welfare. The chapter suggests a revaluing of the aversion to death. In preventing a death one is preserving what one might call the fullness and the fillability of life. (shrink)

This chapter describes just one of the many attributes that a worthwhile life can have, one which connects both with the experience of the satisfyingness of life and with the dilemma‐managing strategies. Several of the dilemma‐managing strategies link choices to the overall pattern of the decision‐maker's life. All of these strategies resolve dilemmas by relating the incomparable desires that produce them to more nearly comparable preferences for kinds of lives. These strategies could be crudely summarized as: take the option which (...) will give him/her the better life. Or rather, they could be summarized this way if one accepts that lives are good when they conform to plans. In the chapter, the author argues that the sense of the satisfyingness of one's life need not come from any plan or pattern to it. In all of his examples, life has been organized by its connection with a single object of concern. (shrink)

The difficulty of a dilemma is often due to the pattern of one's desires: the way in which your wants for different things are related to one another. When one sees how many patterns desires can take one begins to appreciate the real difficulty of decision making. But one also begins to see that dilemmas are not all unfortunate and insoluble traps. There are good and not so good strategies for dealing with them. In dealing with the resulting dilemmas the (...) strategy may find ways of reducing them to more comparable desires, or it may not. Desires of each kind are often fairly easy to compare among themselves. Qualified trumps are a form of incomparable desire. This chapter gives simpler examples of this desire. In some cases, it is much less obvious how a conflict between first and second order desires should be resolved. The chapter discusses such case. (shrink)

This chapter presents a model of risk‐taking behaviour. That is, it describes some simpler patterns of preference than real people ever have, and then discusses some strategies that would make sense for people with these simple preferences when faced with choices between risky options. These strategies can also make sense for people, with the more complicated preferences. The chapter also discusses some more detailed assumptions about snobs' preferences. There are several ways in which the Snobs can find their way through (...) risky situations. The chapter considers two. The first is, in effect, to refuse to reason probabilistically. Given every risky prospect they can decide what the most likely outcome is, equate it to a certainty of that outcome, and choose accordingly. In more complex situations something closer to real probabilistic reasoning will be needed. And this is the second way in which preferences such as those of the snobs can come to terms with risk. (shrink)

Decision making comes under pressure when the stakes are high and the information is imperfect. That is risk. Most of the risks can be most easily presented in terms of tensions between the recommendations of a simple theory and the complex reactions. The theory is the standard philosophers' and economists' account of rationality in the face of risk, in terms of expected utility, and the cases derive mostly from the intuitive sense many people have had that there is something wrong (...) with the theory. This chapter aims to give a diagnosis of what underlies these intuitions. It also presents an extreme example bringing out one aspect of risk‐aversion. It further considers a family of related examples which bring out both the force of the EU rule and some of the problems with it. An appeal of EU lies in its connections with the intuitive 'grammar' of risk taking. (shrink)

This chapter contrasts moral motivation, as a problematic thing, with the apparently straightforward motives of self‐interest. It also contrasts moral dilemmas, in which one has to find an acceptable action in the midst of conflicting responsibilities and obligations, with practical or prudential dilemmas, in which the problem is getting as much as he/she can of what he/she want. The problem is that these contrasts are all different. They cut in different directions. For any two of the contrasts there are situations (...) which link the 'moral' side according to one contrast with the 'non‐moral' or merely self‐interested side according to the other. Thus in the case of the ageing addict self‐interest as getting what you want and self‐interest as getting a better life conflict. The chapter also gives the example that combines the plots of two famous novels (George Eliot's Silas Marner, and Balzac's novel Le Pe're Goriot), each clearly making a quasi‐moral point. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Fall of Baltar The Transhuman Temptation… Really! The First and Last Temptations of Baltar “There Must Be Some Way Out of Here” Notes.