The significance of the name of the goddess worshipped at Mantinea and at Tegea, Athena Alea, is correctly interpreted by M. Fougères in B.C.H. 16 , p. 573. “ Aléa Athèna,” he says, “signifie la deésse A1éa, qui ressemble à Athèna. Par cette addition on a voulu marquer les rapports entre la deésse Protectrice d'Arcadie et la deésse tutelaire d'Athènes.” He calls attention to the fact that in the language of Homer and Hesiod the Greek word άλέα denotes ‘la protection (...) qui éloigne le mal.’. (shrink)

The opinion has been expressed frequently of late, notably by Professor Mackail and Miss Stawell, that the Odyssey may well be the work of the advanced years of the Homer of the Iliad. Miss Stawell remarks that one of an alert mind must feel that the Odyssey is the poem of an older man—one who has conceived and written a poem before. She suggests that that poem may have been the Iliad. So Professor Mackail argues that a “different mind may (...) come to a poet with the lapse of years and with fresh experiences,” and that “the poet who produced the Iliad in the early prime of his life was a poet capable of the artistic and poetical change that is felt in the Odyssey, among new surroundings, with an altered view of life, with an imaginative ardour burning less strongly and with increased constructional mastery.”. (shrink)

The passage about Paeon's treatment of the wound of Ares in Iliad V. 899–904 has been neglected or misunderstood by the majority of commentators, and no one, so far as I know, has pointed out its significance for pre-Homeric culture in that part of the Balkan area in which archaeological research has shown a connection with and influence on the culture of North Greece. I refer to that part known as Old Servia, extending from Naissus, the modern Nish, at present (...) the temporary capital of Servia, and below Skopi, modern Uskub, into northern Macedonia. (shrink)

Since Hermann first suggested the likelihood of a considerable loss of verses from the text of the Heraclidae it has been generally assumed that the play has suffered either from some mischance in the copying of the manuscript or else at the hand of an interpolator. Hermann held that the end of the play had been lost: ‘Fabulae extrema pars videtur intercidisse, in qua fieri non poterat quin de Macaria referretur, eaque res solitis celebraretur lamentis.’ Kirchhoff places the lacuna after (...) line 629: ‘Post hunc versum multa desunt. Macariae narratio et Alcmenae matris [sic] lamentationes cum chori cantico integro; novit hanc fabulae partem auctor argumenti: **ταύτην μxs22EFν εxs1F50γενxs22EFς xs22EFποθανοxs22EFσαν xs22EFτίμησαν αxs1F50τοxs22EF δxs22EF τοxs1F7Aς πολεμxs22EFους xs22EFπιγνόντες παρόντας εxs1F30ς τxs22EFν μάχην xs1F65ρμησαν.’ Wilamowitz argues against the assumption of a ‘mechanischer Ausfall’ of a whole passage, and maintains that the play has been revised by a fourth century régisseur in order to adapt it to the capacity of his theatrical troupe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wildman's Effing Theodicy:The Problem of Suffering, the Ground of Being, and the Worship of SuchnessDemian Wheeler (bio)I. Confronting Suffering: Fictional Gods, Monstrous Evils, and Ghostly WhisperersWesley J. Wildman—"the comparing inquirer,"1 "the man who receives too many emails,"2 "the most original, audacious, creative, encyclopedic, and integrative thinker working within and across the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and the scientific study of religion in our time"3—is now a novelist! (...) His recently published first novel, The Winding Way Home, is an astounding and achingly beautiful story about a family searching for healing in the face of unspeakable tragedy and crushing grief. Our protagonist is Jesse, a strangely familiar philosopher, polymath, and professor, whose six-year-old daughter, Becca, is abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night. Needless to say, Becca's disappearance totally shatters the lives of Jesse, his beloved partner Alexandra, and their two boys, Matt and Josh.On the verge of a complete mental breakdown, and desperate to manage the anxiety, uncertainty, terror, and encroaching despair, Jesse begins to engage in a severe form of meditation, deliberately dwelling on images of what Becca might be enduring, however gruesome and devastating. He pictures her dead in the woods, sold to the highest bidder, imprisoned in an attic, abused physically and sexually, buried alive in a crate desperately praying to be rescued, treating each possible future "as a shard-like perspective on a fear-inducing, darkly humming [End Page 20] crystalline monstrosity." For Jesse, this visualization practice is an act of solidarity, not masochism, a way to love his precious little girl as she really is, no matter what she went through or is still going through. Anything less feels like a betrayal, like a "spineless retreat from the reality of Becca's life." Facing the brutal truth about Becca also becomes an integral part of his piety, his worship. As the saga unfolds, Jesse embarks on a weird but wild spiritual quest, a quest to see and surrender to the world in all its wonder and ambiguity, grace and threat, the world that gave him the greatest gift imaginable, Becca, a "beautiful, perfect little being," only to take her away and hand her over to a fate worse than death.4Later in the story, Jesse and Alexandra become foster parents to an abduction survivor named Maddy. Their worst nightmares about what probably happened to Becca actually did happen to Maddy. Stolen from her family at a young age and chained up in a cold, lonely basement, Maddy was subjected to years of torture, malnourishment, deprivation, disease, and rape, forced to bear the children of her captors. Shortly after Maddy and her kids move in, Jesse schedules a meeting with Father Jimmy, "his favorite delusional priest." Jesse admires and appreciates Father Jimmy's intelligence, lovingkindness, and nonjudgmental nature. But he is not bashful about challenging his "supernatural mumbo-jumbo."5 On this particular occasion, they gather to talk about the theological implications of Maddy's horrific life and whatever unthinkable horrors befell Becca. The conversation gets quite heated. Growing increasingly irate, Jesse asks Father Jimmy if he prays for Maddy, Becca, and other missing children and trusts in a God who permits their dreadful circumstances and could do something to ameliorate them. Father Jimmy nods in the affirmative and gently asks a question of his own: "Why would you be angry at a God you don't believe in?" Jesse thunders back:I'm not angry at your fictional God! … I'm angry at you. You worship and pray to a being who allowed Becca and Maddy to be raped and tortured, and in Becca's case probably murdered. And then you offer solace to me and my family in the form of prayers to change this deity's mind about what to do. As if that's supposed to make any of us feel better! Can't you see? You're commending to me a God whose behavior and decisions are so utterly appalling, so completely opposed to the good as I understand it, that I would devote my life to morally resisting this God's depravity... (shrink)

Harriet Taylor Mill and Anna Wheeler are two nineteenth-century British feminists generally over-shadowed by the fame of the men with whom they co-authored. Yet both made important and interesting contributions to political thought, particularly regarding deconstruction of (i) the patriarchal institution of marriage; and (ii) the current property regime which, in dominating workers, unfairly distributing the product of labour, and encouraging ‘individualism’, they believed did little to maximize the general happiness. Both were feminists, utilitarians, and socialists. How they (...) link these elements is both interestingly similar, and interestingly different. This article has four aims. Firstly, to make a strong claim concerning their authorial hand in works often considered to be solely the work of their male co-author. Secondly, to sketch those co-authoring relationships, and consider whether Taylor and Mill may even have consciously constructed their early letters ‘On Marriage' based upon what they knew of Thompson and Wheeler’s relationship. Thirdly, to map out their shared (though not identical) claim that marriage was a form of slavery, and the proposals they offered to free women from the domination of patriarchal relationships. Fourthly, to explore the way in which both thought female emancipation would be most truly realized via cooperative socialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers ed. by Linda Lopez McAllisterSue M. WeinbergLinda Lopez McAllister, editor. Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 345. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $22.50.Hypatia: born in the fourth century A.D.: philosopher, mathematician, astronomer, teacher; brutally murdered in Alexandria in 415 A.D—whether for holding religious views regarded as heretical or because she (...) was a woman who dared to be a scholar and teacher remains a matter of speculation. Today, she gives her name to the journal for feminist philosophy. She is a symbol for those women who, over the centuries, have struggled to be part of the philosophical life of their time.Until very recently, the centuries that separated Hypatia from the present were assumed to have been a philosophical desert for women. But times have changed. Hypatia’s Daughters is a sign of this change. It contains eighteen articles on seventeen philosophers: Hypatia; Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, and Christine de Pisan from the Middle Ages; Elizabeth of Bohemia, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Catharine Trotter, Belle van Zuylen and Mary Wollstonecraft from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; Anne Doyle Wheeler and Harriet Taylor Mill from the nineteenth; Charlotte Perkins Oilman, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, and Angela Davis from the late nineteenth century into contemporary times. Few are known as well as they deserve, but many names are familiar even to non-specialists. Their ideas, however, are another matter.The collection in no way constitutes a definitive selection of women philosophers; those discussed are not presented as the most significant women philosophers in the history of philosophy. (A different kind of study would be necessary for evaluations of that kind.) The women here studied have little in common as a group; they wrote on many topics of philosophical concern; their views and their supporting reasoning differ. Further, as the subjects of the articles differ in their ideas, so do the contributors’ approaches and their methods of studying those ideas differ. These differences are the strengths of a collection that is stimulating, enlightening, provocative. The following examples indicate their range.Andrea Nye examines the correspondence of Heloise and Abelard and, in a second article, of Elizabeth of Bohemia and Descartes. Heloise and Elizabeth are usually regarded as passive followers or, at best, no more than serious questioners seeking answers of their correspondents. Nye’s fresh look at the Heloise-Abelard correspondence finds not only important differences between two ways of thinking, but also sees already underlying their disagreement what she calls the “macroquestion” of philosophy’s future: philosophy as “a professional discipline independent of political or social concerns or... an ongoing critical and cultural discourse.” (25) Elizabeth’s persistent questions to Descartes reveal ideas that challenge his views, especially on moral issues and physiological-psychological [End Page 164] phenomena; these are views that have a greater complexity than the basic issue of mind-body interaction that is usually identified as central to their exchange.Writing on Harriet Taylor Mill, Jo Ellen Jacobs examines changing attitudes towards her subject, beginning with views of Taylor Mill’s contemporaries and moving through the decades into our time. She finds parallels between criticisms of Taylor Mill and attitudes towards the so-called intellectual woman. In times encouraging of women, Taylor Mill is regarded as having made important contributions to the development of J. S. Mill’s thinking, in addition to writing and speaking about her own ideas and positions that did not always follow those of J. S. Mill. In less encouraging times, her significance tends to be minimized.Hannah Arendt is not usually thought of as a feminist. Joanne Cutting-Gray, through her discussion of Arendt’s early book on Rahel Varnhagen, develops implications of that study for Arendt as a “feminist thinker,” in particular through her focus on “the politics of alterity.” Cutting-Gray finds in the Varnhagen biography “an analogy between Jewish and female alterity [that] can stretch our understanding of women and politics.” (281)And there is more, much more: Martha Brandt Bolton’s scholarly examination of the philosophical works... (shrink)

Optimising the 4E revolution in cognitive science arguably requires the rejection of two guiding commitments made by orthodox thinking in the field, namely that the material realisers of cognitive states and processes are located entirely inside the head, and that intelligent thought and action are to be explained in terms of the building and manipulation of content-bearing representations. In other words, the full-strength 4E revolution would be secured only by a position that delivered externalism plus antirepresentationalism. I argue that one (...) view in 4E space—extended functionalism—is appropriately poised to deliver externalism but not antirepresentationalism. By contrast, in the case of a competing 4E view—radical enactivism—even if that view can deliver antirepresentationalism, its pivotal notion of extensiveness falls short of establishing externalism. These conclusions are justified via an examination of, and by responding critically to, certain key arguments offered in support of their view by the radical enactivists. (shrink)

In his contribution to this issue, Shaun Gallagher casts a sharply focussed critical eye over positions which claim that action is to be explained, in part, by appeal to minimal representations. On...

Ever since Darwin, scholars have noted that cultural entities such as languages, laws and theories seem to evolve through variation, selection and replication. These essays consider whether this comparison is just a metaphor.

We analyze two problems in mathematics – the first (stated in our title) is extracted from Wittgenstein’s “Philosophy for Mathematicians”; the second (“What set of numbers is non-denumerable?”) is taken from Cantor. We then consider, by way of comparison, a problem in musical aesthetics concerning a Brahms variation on a theme by Haydn. Our aim is to bring out and elucidate the essentially riddle-like character of these problems.

What follows is a continuation of a debate that dates back to at least John Calvin and Jacobus Arminius but took on its naturalistic guise in the third generation of the Chicago school between Bernard Loomer and Bernard Meland. Basically, the argument pertains to whether God is to be associated with everything that is, including suffering and evil, or whether God is more rightly associated with what we take to be good or redemptive. Loomer defended the former position. Late in (...) life, he came to embrace pantheism, arguing that God and nature are identical. The thesis of his 1987 essay, “The Size of God,” was that the divine is to be equated with the world in its ambiguous and mysterious entirety—with the “Whole... (shrink)

The past few decades have seen patient autonomy ascend to a prime position in health care. Patient consent is seen as a key component to expression of autonomy. Yet, interventions may also be justified without consent because they are deemed to be in the public interest. We observe some subtle shifts in balance in these justifications in health care and illustrate these with a range of examples. We hope thereby to stimulate a more explicit debate so that health-care professionals can (...) manage these competing interests. (shrink)

This essay discusses the semiotic scaffolding of modern science, the roots of which lie in the Protestant Reformation and the latter’s repudiation of the “semiotics of nature” upon which medieval theology depended. Taking the fourteenth-century battles between realism and nominalism as the semiotic scaffolding of the Reformation which was subsequently built on nominalist principles, and the Reformation as what made possible the development of early modern science, this essay argues that nominalism, Protestantism, and early modern science were all infected by (...) the gnostic influences which had always accompanied Christianity from the start. Indicating that forms of creative discovery, in the arts, humanities and sciences, are closer to poetic forms than they are to the Baconian model which informed modern science, the essay goes on to link the latter gnostic-influenced metaphysics, motivated by a Reformation anxiety about sin and error, to the development of the modern “megamachine” as described by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine volumes 1 and 2. Finally the essay suggests that semiotically revivified life sciences might be capable of resolving some of the systemic and ecological problems which Mumford identifies. (shrink)

Among the first and foremost of American continental philosophers, Alphonso Lingis refines his own thought through a topic usually deemed unworthy for philosophical examination—passion. This book shows how Lingis’s thought has not only endured over so many productive decades but how it remains vital and even continues to grow.

How might humanity experience ultimate reality as intimately related to us, as liberating us individually and corporately from disorder, and as empowering our personal self-integration? With this question in mind, this work reexamines the images and concepts of Christian doctrinal tradition which--under the rubric of the "doctrine of the atonement"--have historically promoted this experience. The extended constructive essay which concludes the book makes extensive and foundational--though not uncritical--use of Whiteheadian process-relational thought to provide new ontological grounding to Christian images and (...) concepts of atonement. (shrink)