ZUSAMMENFASSUNGDie renommierte Religionsphilosophin Eleonore Stump bezieht seit über zwei Jahrzehnten in zahlreichen Publikationen zur Theodizeeproblematik Stellung. In der vorliegenden Untersuchung werden Stumps Überlegungen zum problem of evil systematisiert und kritisch gewürdigt. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die zentrale Annahme, auf der Stumps Theodizee beruht, die Pädagogisierung des Leids im Rahmen einer free will defence, über die Jahre hinweg keine substantielle Modifikation erfahren hat.SUMMARYSince more than two decades well-known philosopher of religion Eleonore Stump has discussed in numerous publications the problem of evil. (...) This paper aims at systematizing and evaluating Stump's considerations on this topic. The paper shows that Stump's crucial assumption of interpreting evil from a pedagogic point of view within a free will defence has not changed substantially over the years. (shrink)

The LIM domain kinases (LIMKs) are important actin cytoskeleton regulators. These proteins, LIMK1 and LIMK2, are nodes downstream of Rho GTPases and are the key enzymes that phosphorylate cofilin/actin depolymerization factors to regulate filament severing. They therefore perform an essential role in cascades that control actin depolymerization. Signaling of the LIMKs is carefully regulated by numerous inter‐ and intra‐molecular mechanisms. In this review, we discuss recent findings that improve the understanding of LIM domain kinase regulation mechanisms. We also provide an (...) up‐to‐date review of the role of the LIM domain kinases, their architectural features, how activity is impacted by other proteins, and the implications of these findings for human health and disease. (shrink)

The problem of stability in population dynamics concerns many domains of application in demography, biology, mechanics and mathematics. The problem is highly generic and independent of the population considered (human, animals, molecules,…). We give in this paper some examples of population dynamics concerning nucleic acids interacting through direct nucleic binding with small or cyclic RNAs acting on mRNAs or tRNAs as translation factors or through protein complexes expressed by genes and linked to DNA as transcription factors. The networks made of (...) these interactions between nucleic acids (considered respectively as edges and nodes of their interaction graph) are complex, but exhibit simple emergent asymptotic behaviours, when time tends to infinity, called attractors. We show that the quantity called attractor entropy plays a crucial role in the study of the stability and robustness of such genetic networks. (shrink)

The Hoffmann reflex (H-wave) is produced by alpha-motoneuron activation in the spinal cord. A feature of this electromyography response is that it exhibits fluctuations in amplitude even during repetitive stimulation with the same intensity of current. We herein explore the hypothesis that physical training induces plastic changes in the motor system. Such changes are evaluated with the fractal dimension (FD) analysis of the H-wave amplitude-fluctuations (H-wave FD) and the cross-covariance (CCV) between the bilateral H-wave amplitudes. The aim of this study (...) was to compare the H-wave FD as well as the CCV before and after track training in sedentary individuals and athletes. The training modality in all subjects consisted of running three times per week (for 13 weeks) in a concrete road of 5 km. Given the different physical condition of sedentary vs. athletes, the running time between sedentary and athletes was different. After training, the FD was significantly increased in sedentary individuals but significantly reduced in athletes, although there were no changes in spinal excitability in either group of subjects. Moreover, the CCV between bilateral H-waves exhibited a significant increase in athletes but not in sedentary individuals. These differential changes in the FD and CCV indicate that the plastic changes in the complexity of the H-wave amplitude fluctuations as well as the synaptic inputs to the Ia-motoneuron systems of both legs were correlated to the previous fitness history of the subjects. Furthermore, these findings demonstrate that the FD and CCV can be employed as indexes to study plastic changes in the human motor system. (shrink)

The scope of noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) could expand in the future to include detailed analysis of the fetal genome. This will allow for the testing for virtually any trait with a genetic contribution, including “non-medical” traits. Here we discuss the potential use of NIPT for these traits. We outline a scenario which highlights possible inconsistencies with ethical decision-making. We then discuss the case against permitting these uses. The objections include practical problems; increasing inequities; increasing the burden of choice; negative (...) impacts on the child, family, and society; and issues with implementation. We then outline the case for permitting the use of NIPT for these traits. These include arguments for reproductive liberty and autonomy; questioning the labeling of traits as “non-medical”; and the principle of procreative beneficence. This summary of the case for and against can serve as a basis for the development of a consistent and coherent ethical framework. (shrink)

La Pedagogía para la Paz en Colombia se brinda desde enfoques diseñados para promover valores como la paz, la convivencia pacífica y la justicia social, buscando cambiar actitudes y formas de relacionamiento para prevenir la violencia. Implica crear y fortalecer espacios de conciliación, promover el perdón, la reconciliación y abordar aspectos como la resolución de conflictos desde edades tempranas. Escuchar y valorar las narrativas de las víctimas del conflicto armado en el hecho victimizante de la desaparición forzada, es esencial para (...) construir una paz duradera, promoviendo el reconocimiento, la comprensión en la comunidad. La Pedagogía para la Paz implica un desafío para trabajar y construir un mundo libre de miedo, violencia, opresión, promoviendo la justicia, la dignidad y el amor por la humanidad. (shrink)

Ovid begins his overtly programmatic Amores 2.1 with the claim that Cupid, who had previously interfered with the poet's attempt to write an epic , has once again ordered him to reject epic subjects and to compose a book of decadent love-elegies instead. Faced with this new task, the poet dutifully proceeds to warn that his elegiac verses are not suitable for the prudish but hopes that they will be read by lovers. Among the prospective readers are young men who, (...) like Ovid himself, have been shot by Cupid's arrow. (shrink)

Quality of work life affects the quality of life. By applying amoral paradigms in decision making managers of business enterprises can cause a poor quality work life and reduce the quality of life. The explanation and prediction of ethical/unethical business behaviour should not always be attributed to individual managers, as it may result from strong culture and decision making systems. It is argued that the causes and the solutions to ethical dilemmas can often be found in a theory based on (...) integration of models of moral reasoning, decision schema, value congruence and corporate decision structures. The impact of exclusion of moral principles from the decision making process is illustrated by way of a case study. (shrink)

El presente artículo aborda el problema hegeliano del comienzo de la ciencia filosófica desde el prisma de la circularidad constitutiva del proceso lógico y, en consecuencia, de la vinculación especulativa entre el comienzo y el resultado. Siguiendo una metodología hermenéutica, la exposición está organizada en tres secciones. En la primera de ellas, el comentario se atendrá a la cuestión de la actualidad del comienzo de la Lógica. La segunda sección ofrecerá una aproximación al concepto del método, con la intención de (...) dilucidar en su naturaleza extensivo-intensiva el fundamento de la circularidad especulativa de lo lógico y de la integración dialéctica de sus momentos. En la última parte, la argumentación se enfocará en determinar la relevancia de dicha operación circular para la comprensión de la totalidad del programa filosófico hegeliano. (shrink)

This article analyzes the legal-philosophical situation of Artificial Intelligence and the intelligent robot on being a subject of Law to be considered a creative person or author. The contradiction involved in allowing an object to present the legal duality of being protected as an object that it is and at the same time being considered a subject by the resulting work is analyzed, an impairment or vulgarization for the subject of Law as a moral subject when proposing the fictio legis (...) de a moral object, which is not conceivable. Instead, an alternative to such an aporia is proposed, more fictitious than real. (shrink)

The thesis of Méndez is preceded by a preface by Cornelio Fabro, who explains the design of this important dissertation: the author gives a presentation of the metaphysics of Aquinas such as he sees it laid down in the Summa contra gentiles. He does so from the viewpoint of the doctrine of participation.

The hairdresser who carries Ovid's invitation to his puella in Amores 1.11 is almost immediately blamed for his rejection in 1.12, before that blame is transferred to the tablets carrying that invitation. Nape (the enslaved hairdresser of the puella) has been linked to the character Dipsas, appearing in 1.7, specifically through the descriptor sobria. By focussing on the use of the verb uerto, the reference to the mythical strix, and curses related to the old age of both Dipsas and the (...) tablets in 1.7 and 1.12, this note demonstrates that the supernatural word choice further connects Nape with Dipsas. (shrink)

A central tactic in Philo’s criticism of the design argument is the introduction of several alternative hypotheses, each of which is alleged to explain apparent design at least as well as Cleanthes’ analogical inference to an intelligent designer. In Part VI, Philo proposes that the world “…is an animal, and the Deity is the soul of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it” (DNR 6.3; 171); in Part VII, he suggests that “…it is a palpable and egregious partiality” to (...) favour reason as a probable cause of apparent design over other principles such as instinct, generation, vegetation, and “… a hundred others which lie open to our conjecture” (DNR 7.11; 178); and in Part VIII, he offers an ‘Epicurean’ hypothesis according to which the appearance of design is due to matter itself.1 It is widely agreed that by the end of Part VIII, Philo has convincingly shown that the empirical evidence considerably underdetermines the conclusion Cleanthes purported it to establish. Philo, at any rate, declares a sceptical triumph: “A total suspense of judgement is here our only reasonable resource” (DNR 8.12; 186-7). -/- Philo’s swift argument for divine amorality at the end of Part XI contrasts markedly with this scepticism.2 Here, Philo reasons with great confidence concerning what he takes to be the (only) four hypotheses concerning the morality of the first cause(s) of the universe: divine benevolence, divine malevolence, Manicheeism, and divine amorality. He argues briefly against the first, summarily rejects the second and third, and declares with apparent sincerity that “[t]he true conclusion is, that the original source of all things is entirely indifferent to all these principles, and has no more regard to good above ill than to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy” (DNR 11.15; 212). -/- I first discuss Philo’s argument for divine amorality, and I distinguish it from his earlier criticisms of any inference from mundane data to divine benevolence. In Section 2, I diagnose deficiencies in two contrary interpretations of the argument for divine amorality. In Section 3, I offer three reasons for rejecting the surface meaning of this argument. In Section 4, I reveal Philo’s argument to be a sophisticated parody of both Cleanthes’ natural theology and his appeal to the passional influence of the design hypothesis. Philo, I argue, does not intend to show that the Deity is probably amoral; rather, he intends to show Cleanthes – by literally arguing with him “in his own way” (DNR 2.11; 145) – that the tools of Cleanthes’ ‘experimental theism’ can equally be wielded in service of a wholly incompatible view. (shrink)

Is Democracy overrated? Does power corrupt? Or do corrupt people seek power? Do corporate puppet masters pull politicians’ strings? Why does Frank talk to the camera? Can politics deliver on the promise of justice? House of Cards depicts our worst fears about politics today. Love him or loathe him, Frank Underwood has charted an inimitable course through Washington politics. He and his cohorts depict the darkest dealings within the gleaming halls of our most revered political institutions. These 24 original essays (...) examine key philosophical issues behind the critically-acclaimed series—questions of truth, justice, equality, opportunity, and privilege. The amoral machinations of Underwood, the ultimate anti-hero, serve as an ideal backdrop for a discussion of the political theories of philosophers as diverse as Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Marx. From political and corporate ethics, race relations, and ruthless paragmatism to mass media collusion and sexual politics, these essays tackle a range of issues important not only to the series but to our understanding of society today. (shrink)

Este trabajo profundiza en la legitimación teológica perversa que el falso místico hace de sus actos sexuales. Con tal propósito, se hace una introducción histórica a las prácticas sexuales de carácter gnóstico y se considera el juego discursivo ambiguo entre lo exotérico y esotérico. Como ejemplo, se analizan algunas ambigüedades textuales en la obra de Javier Garrido OFM (condenado canónicamente por “falso misticismo”), a la luz de la investigación sobre los abusos sexuales de los hermanos Philippe OP y Jean Vanier. (...) Asimismo, se exploran tres coincidencias con ideas ajenas al cristianismo que divinizan la pulsión sexual. Y se concluye apelando al discernimiento y la prudencia sobre el lenguaje místico-esponsal, y a la claridad en la moral sexual. (shrink)

To the editor of a classical text manuscripts are useful as they can be induced to yield the truth. The purpose of this article is purely practical: to discuss in moderate compass, though in greater detail than an O.G.T. preface seems to demand, how the manuscripts of these poems can be used to find out what Ovid wrote. His text has been transmitted to us in circumstances which defy the rigid application of this or that ‘method’ of recension; and his (...) editors will sometimes be wise to recognize the limitations of the evidence and to cultivate a robust indifference to unnecessary detail. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 76–81 Comments on Eugene Thacker’s “Cosmic Pessimism” Nicola Masciandaro Anything you look forward to will destroy you, as it already has. —Vernon Howard In pessimism, the first axiom is a long, low, funereal sigh. The cosmicity of the sigh resides in its profound negative singularity. Moving via endless auto-releasement, it achieves the remote. “ Oltre la spera che piú larga gira / passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core ” [Beyond the sphere that circles widest / penetrates (...) the sigh that issues from my heart]. 1 The axiomatic sigh of the pessimist is in a way the pure word of philosophy, a thought that thinks without you, speaks where you are not. The live pneumatic form of the soul’s eventual exit from the dead body’s mouth, the sigh restores consciousness to the funeral of being, to the passing away that is existence. Pessimism speaks in piercing aphorisms because first it sighs. “Beyond the sphere passeth the arrow of our sigh. Hafiz! Silence.” 2 … pessimism is guilty of that most inexcusable of Occidental crimes—the crime of not pretending it’s for real. To the pessimist, the ‘real’ world—the world on whose behalf we are expected to wake up in the morning—is a ceaseless index of its own unreality. The pessimist’s day is not an illumined space for the advancement of experience and action, but a permanently and inescapably reflective zone, the vast interior of a mirror where each thing is only insofar as it is, at best, a false image of itself. Within this speculative situation, inside the doubleness of the mirror, pessimism splits into two paths, false and true, one that tries to fix pessimism (establish a relation with the mirror) and decides in favor of the apparent real, and another that totally falls for pessimism (enters the mirror) and communes with the greater reality of the unreal. These two paths are distinguished by their relation to pessimism’s guilt vis-à-vis the world’s reality-project. The first form, that which remains pessimism for the world and puts on a smiling face, stays guilty to itself (i.e. unconscious) and thus turns hypocritical, becoming at once the pessimism of the commoner who really just wants things to be better for himself and the pessimism of the elite who wants to critically refashion reality in his own image. The general form of this worldly, hypocritical pessimism is the impulse to ‘make the world a better place’, which is the global mask under which the world is diurnally made worse. The second form, that which follows pessimism away from the world and ceases to put on a smiling face, refuses guiltiness as itself theessential Occidental mode of pretense and turns honest, becoming at once the intelligent pessimism required of all ordinary action and the radical pessimism necessary for self-knowledge: seeing that no one is capable of doing good. The general form of this universal, honest pessimism is the impulse not to worry, to give up and embrace dereliction, which is the only real way the world is actually improved. Where worldly pessimism is the engine productive of interminably warring secular and sacred religions (good-projects), universal pessimism strives hopelessly for the paradise of a supremely instantiated pessimus: things are getting so bad that there is no longer any time for them to get worse; things are so constantly-instantly worst that this is BEST. Cosmic pessimism is the mode of universal pessimism which can yet discourse with the world, which has not chosen silence and can spread the inconceivably BAD NEWS in an orderly form ( kosmos ) that the world can understand (if it wanted to). … the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world. That is what the world is (the result of a confusion between the world and a statement about the world). … a generalized misanthropy without the anthropos. Pessimism crystallizes around this futility—it is its amor fati , rendered as musical form. Pessimism’s love of fate is a blind love, a love of the blindness of being human in a cosmos conceived around the human’s eclipse, a heavy levitation in the contradictory space between the inescapability of its having been and the impossibility of its will-be. Pessimism’s song of futility is a sensible way of loving fate, with a minimum of eros, by means of a kind of matrimonial love of the fatal. As music, pessimism stays open to the irreparable and the inexorable without the binding of affirmation, in the apparent absence of the radical, infinitely surplus will that absolute amor fati seems to require. Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent? “Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will scarcely be worth the trouble of his achieving it. We should aspire to the impossible, to absolute and infinite perfection [….] The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream: it is a norm of action, it is a beacon for high deeds [….] For true charity is a species of invasion [….] It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to anguish and torment of spirit.” 3 … the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought. “The paroxysm of interior experience leads you to regions where danger is absolute, because life which self-consciously actualizes its roots in experience can only negate itself [….] There are no arguments [….] On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos [….] I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing .” 4 It took three attempts before she was fully decapitated, all the while she continued, perhaps miraculously, to sing. According to the earliest account of Cecilia’s martyrdom, the beheading turns out worse. After not severing her head in three strokes, “the cruel executioner left her half dead” (seminecem eam cruentus carnifex dereliquit). 5 Cecilia’s effortlessly powerful endurance of the three strokes—a fitting icon for pessimism as an art of dereliction—demonstrates the “passivity and absence of effort [….] in which divine transcendence is dissolved.” 6 There’s a ghost that grows inside of me, damaged in the making, and there’s a hunt sprung from necessity, elliptical and drowned. Where the moving quiet of our insomnia offers up each thought, there’s a luminous field of grey inertia, and obsidian dreams burnt all the way down. Like words from a pre-waking dream. There is no reason to think that they are not. NOTES 1. Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova . ed. and trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1995. 41:10. 2. Hafiz of Shiraz. The Divan . trans. H. Wilberforce Clarke. London: Octagon Press. 1974. 10.9. 3. Miguel de Unamuno. The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations . trans. Anthony Kerrigan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1972. 305-6. 4. E.M. Cioran. On the Heights of Despair . trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992. 9-10. 5. Giacomo Laderchi. S. Caeciliae Virg[inis] et Mart[yris] Acta. . . Rome. 1723. 38. 6. Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche . trans. Bruce Boone. London: Continuum. 2004. 135. See Nicola Masciandaro. “ Half Dead: Parsing Cecilia .” A Commentary on Eugene Thacker’s "Cosmic Pessimism" Gary J. Shipley Pessimism is the refusal to seek distraction, the refusal to remodel failure into a platform for further (doomed) possibilities, the refusal of comfort, the acceptance of the sickness of healthy bodies, the cup of life overflowing with cold vomit. If, as Ligotti suggests when discussing Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1 humans prefer the anxieties of their familiar human lives to the contentment of an alien one, then the pessimist, we could argue, represents some perverted combination of the two, preferring (presuming he has a choice) the defamiliarization of human life to the contentment of its unquestioned mundanity. The quasi-religious state of mind that Wittgenstein would mention on occasion, that of “feeling absolutely safe,” 2 is a state the pessimist could only imagine being approximated by death, or perhaps some annihilative opiate-induced stupor. This Wittgensteinian commingling of certainty and faith looks every bit the futile gesture, a mere rephrasing of collapse or partial collapse. The only certainty open to the pessimist is that of the toxic formula of life itself—a formula known and lacuna-free. Certainty, far from being the gateway to deliverance, becomes the definitive impediment; and the possibility of salvation, as long as it remains, becomes crucially reliant on postulations of ignorance, epistemic gaps, a perennial incompleteness: “the perfect safety of wooed death […] the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the miniscule unknown.” 3 The height of Leibniz’s Panglossian insanity nurtured the idea that our knowing everything—via the universal calculus—could be accurately described a triumph, as opposed to a nightmare in which our every futility is laid bare. Stagnancy and boredom are perhaps two of the greatest ills of Western civilisation, and the most potent pessimism tells you that you’re stuck with both. The most we can hope for, by way of salvation, is to throw open our despair to the unknown. The fact that Schopenhauer’s pessimism stopped short of morality and allowed him to play the flute, as Nietzsche complained, highlights the predicament of a man who despite having adorned nothingness with a smiling face still found himself alive. The demand here is that it be felt: a cross-contamination of intellect and emotion. The safety net of numerous parentheses makes for a failed philosophy, rather than a philosophy of failure. Depressives make bad pessimists, because, unless they choose to die, living will always infect them with necessities of hope, forcing them to find something, anything (all the various “as ifs”) to make existence tolerable. For as Cioran observed, while “[d]epressions pay attention to life, they are the eyes of the devil, poisoned arrows which wound mortally any zest and love of life. Without them we know little, but with them, we cannot live.” 4 And even when cured of our depressions we’ll find ourselves consumed, eaten alive by the hyper-clinical (borderline autistic) mania that replaces them: a predicament captured all too clearly in the microscriptual fictions of Robert Walser, where spectral men and women stifle their depressive madness with protective comas of detail, their failed assimilations buried beneath thick crusts of remote data. Like Beckett’s Malone their stories may have ended, but cruelly their lives have not. Pessimism is an extraneous burden (a purposeless weight) that makes everything else harder to carry, while at the same time scooping it out and making it lighter. If pessimism had a sound it would be the harsh non-noise of tinnitus—the way that every person would hear themselves if they refused their distractions long enough to listen: a lungless scream from the extrasolar nothing of the self. The music of pessimism—if indeed we can imagine such a thing—is the reverberating echo of the world’s last sound, conjectured but never heard, audible only in its being listened for. The one consolation of this hollow paradox of audibility being, that “he will be least afraid of becoming nothing in death who has recognized that he is already nothing now.” 5 The pessimist suffers a derangement of the real, a labyrinthitis at the nucleus of his being: he’s the stumbling ghost relentlessly surprised that others can see him. If Cioran’s refusal is manifested in sleep (when even saying ‘no’ is too much of a commitment), then Pessoa’s resides in the dreams inside that sleep. Pessoa chooses to exploit the fact that he’s being “lived by some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddied” 6 by growing more voids to live him. His is a Gnostic breed of sleep, “sleeping as if the universe were a mistake,” 7 a sleep that dreams through Thacker’s cosmic pessimism (“a pessimism of the world-without-us.”, “the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time” 8 ), through the critical error of there being anything at all when there could be nothing. The metaphysical pessimist is someone who, however well life treats them, still desires to wake from it, as from the poisonous air of a bad dream. Pessimism is a paradox of age, being simultaneously young and old; its youth residing in a refusal to accept the authority of existence (its rich history, its inherent beneficence), a refusal to “get over” the horror of what it sees with its perpetually fresh eyes, and its maturity in the unceremonious disposal of the philosophical playthings (those futile architectures) of adolescence. As Thacker remarks: “Pessimism abjures all pretenses towards system—towards the purity of analysis and the dignity of critique.” 9 A sentiment shared with Pessoa, who duly categorizes those that choose to enact this futile struggle: “The creators of metaphysical systems and of psychological explanations are still in the primary stage of suffering.” 10 If the pessimist has shared a womb with anyone, it’s with the mystic and not the philosopher. As Schopenhauer tells us: “The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. […] But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.” 11 The crucial difference between the mystic and the pessimist is not the latter’s impassivity and defeatism, but his unwillingness/inability to contain in any way the spread of his voracious analyticity, his denial of incompleteness, his exhaustive devotion to failure. The truth of our predicament, though heard, is destined to remain unprocessed. Like the revelations of B.S. Johnson’s Haakon (“We rot and there’s nothing that can stop it / Can’t you feel the shaking horror of that?” 12 ) the pessimist’s truths are somehow too obvious to listen to, as if something inside us were saying, “Of course, but haven’t we gotten over that?” Pessimism is simple and ugly, and has no desire to make itself more complex or more attractive. The true moral pessimist knows that the Utilitarian’s accounts will always be in the red. He can see that for all his computational containments, his only honest path is a negative one, and that such a path has but one logical destination: that of wholesale human oblivion. Thacker notes how at the core of pessimism lies the notion of “the worst,” through which death is demoted by the all-pervasive suffering of a life that easily eclipses its threat. And so with doom made preferable to gloom, death begins to glint with promise, “like beauty passing through a nightmare.” 13 But even among pessimists suicide is, for the most part, thought to be an error. Schopenhauer, for instance, regarded suicide a mistake grounded in some fundamentally naïve disappointment or other. Pessoa too thought suicide an onerous escape tactic: “To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” 14 There is a call here to be accepting of and creative with the puppetry of your being, an insistence that it’s somehow a blunder to attempt to hide in death from the horrors you find inlife. 15 Tied up with this perseverance is the slippery notion of the good death, for maybe, as Blanchot warns, suicide is rarely something we can hope to get right, for the simple reason that “you cannot make of death an object of the will.” 16 “Even in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete,” 17 and this is not simply because the project itself belies something yet to be disclosed, but because the project itself is a thing waiting. It waits on a cure it knows will not come, but for which it cannot do anything (as long as it continues to do anything) but wait. NOTES 1. See Thomas Ligotti. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race . New York: Hippocampus Press. 2010. 91. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein. “A Lecture on Ethics.” Philosophical Review . (74) 1. 1965. 8. 3. Vladimir Nabokov. Pale Fire . New York: Vintage. 1989. 221. 4. E. M. Cioran. The Book of Delusions . trans. Camelia Elias. Hyperion. 5.1. (2010): 75. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 609. 6. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 67. 7. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 35. 8. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 68. 9. Ibid. 73. 10. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 341. 11. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation. vol. 2 . trans. E .F J. Payne. New York: Dover. 1966. 610-11. 12. B.S Johnson. “You’re Human Like the Rest of Them.” in Jonathan Coe. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson . London: Picador. 2004. 177. 13. Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet . trans. Richard Zenith. London: Penguin. 2002. 415. 14. Ibid. 199. 15. “Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.” Anne Sexton. No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose . ed. Steven Gould Axelrod. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1985. 92. 16. Maurice Blanchot. The Space of Literature . trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1989. 105. 17. Eugene Thacker. “Cosmic Pessimism.” continent. . 2.2 (2012): 75. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Commentary on Virgil, EcloguesJames J. O’HaraWendell Clausen. A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xxx + 328 pp. Paper, $27.95, Cloth, $60.00.This “first full-scale scholarly commentary on the complete book of poems known as the Eclogues to appear in English,” as the dust jacket proclaims, is a deeply learned, elegant, helpful, affectionate, humane and judicious guide to the language, style, text, plain meaning, and literary (...) antecedents of what are among the most elusive of ancient works. A sixteen-page introduction discusses “Pastoral Poetry,” “The Book of Eclogues” as a collection of carefully interrelated poems, and “The Composition of a Landscape” (mostly on trees and plants in Theocritus and Vergil). C. prints Mynors’ 1972 Oxford text, but at 3.102 argues for emending his certe neque amor causa est; vix ossibus haerent to hi certe (neque amor causa est), and would delete the refrain at 8.28a and 76. The volume is dedicated to Mynors; the Preface says that it was originally intended as a companion to his Georgics, published posthumously in 1990. C. offers a concise and original Introduction to each poem, focusing on major problems or features and presenting a modest bibliography, with more references to secondary works to come line by line, but the bibliography is highly selective. The commentary’s strengths lie in the discussion of textual problems and the interpretation of difficult Latin, in the remarks on style, diction, tone, rhetoric, and structure, and in the information on Vergil’s use of models, especially Hellenistic sources like Theocritus (extensive and helpful comments), Callimachus (C. naturally has more to say than earlier commentators), and Aratus, but also Roman sources like Lucretius or Plautus (more prominent here than in earlier commentaries, to good effect). Greek is translated in the notes; thus the commentary, like C.’s Virgil’s “Aeneid” and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1987), is at the same time both supremely learned, and accessible to highly literate non-specialists.Comments on specific poems:Eclogue 1: C. suggests that “the principal difficulty” here is that in alluding to Tityrus’ status Vergil has “deliberately confused” the private sense of libertas as freedom from slavery with its public or political sense as “the slogan of Octavian and his party.” The goal is to praise Octavian subtly and indirectly, and for more than just a personal favor, despite what the allegorical tradition has alleged. [End Page 332] On Tityrus’ planned offerings to the iuvenis in 42–43, C. champions Wissowa’s 1902 demonstration that Vergil alludes to once-monthly Hellenistic ruler cult, and points to honors decreed Octavian in 36 after the defeat of Sextus Pompey (but of course this depends on down-dating the collection; see below).Eclogues 3 and 7: The Introductions to the two amoebaean singing contests discuss the poetic problem of competitions in which neither singer may falter or fail, “for then the poem would be ruined.” C. argues that Vergil avoids this problem in 3 by having the contest end in a draw, and in 7 by having the poem describing the defeat of Thyrsis by Corydon be “dramatic—the imperfect recollection, that is, of a witness to an event and not, like the Third Eclogue, an omniscient poet’s description of it.” On 3.84 C. offers surprisingly little comment on the startling mention of Pollio; he is more helpful in the Introduction (xxi) but provides no cross-reference here; by contrast, on 9.35 he explains how “the pastoral illusion is momentarily shattered” by the mention of L. Varius Rufus.Eclogue 4: In an Introduction adapted from C.’s essay in J. L. Kugel, ed., Poetry and Prophecy (Ithaca 1990), C. focuses on a pre-collection version of the poem, which he suggests lacked the “brief pastoral apology” of 1–3 and “the emphatic—the rather too emphatic—reference to Pan and Arcadia near the end.” “To contemporary readers” of that poem, circulated during or soon after Pollio’s consulship, “the vexed question ‘Who is the boy?’ would not have occurred. They knew well enough who was meant: the expected son of Antony and Octavia and heir to... (shrink)

El propósito del artículo es esclarecer el modo en que los principales problemas tratados por J. Iribarne giran en torno de cuestiones éticas. Se subrayan dos lados del problema ético. Por un lado, se muestra el papel del cuerpo propio, la habitualidad, la memoria y la creciente moralización en la constitución de la identidad personal. En este proceso, una teleología individual se dirige hacia grados más elevados de libertad por medio de actos autónomos y racionales. Por el otro, una teleología (...) intersubjetiva da lugar a un habitar ético en el mundo que exige tanto actuar del modo más correcto de acuerdo con nuestras particulares posibilidades como estar vinculado con los otros por medio de lazos de amor. Finalmente se intenta mostrar la relación entre ética y el sentido de la vida a través de un análisis de preguntas referidas a la finitud, la esperanza y la muerte.The purpose of the article is to shed light on the way in which the main problems examined by J. Iribarne turn on ethical issues. Two sides of the ethical problem are stressed. On the one hand, the role of the living body, habituality, memory, and increasing moralization in the constitution of personal identity is highlighted. In this process, an individual teleology is directed to higher degrees of freedom by means of autonomous and rational acts. On the other hand, an intersubjective teleology brings forth an ethical dwelling in the world that entails both acting in the most correct manner according to our particular possibilities and being linked with the others by bonds of love. Finally, an attempt is made to show the relationship between ethics and the meaning of life through an analysis of issues that concern finitude, death, and hope. (shrink)