Cicero’s first criminal speech, Pro Roscio Amerino, gained acquittal for his client but also presented Cicero himself as an advocate of legality at a time of great political turmoil and uncertainty. He emphasizes the importance of good-faith contracts to the maintenance of civil society, while demonstrating that his opponents have abused the contracts of societas and mandatum in persecuting Roscius. Cicero’s positive model is his teacher Scaevola—murdered during the civil war and advocate of good-faith contracts and of the broader ideal (...) of vitae societas, a metaphorical contract that embodies the values of civil society which Cicero shares. (shrink)

The Alexandrian emphasis on smallness, elegance, and slightness at the expense of grand themes in major poetic genres was not preciosity for its own sake: although the poetry was written by and for scholars, it had much larger sources than the bibliothecal context in which it was composed. Since the time of the classical poets, much had changed. Earlier Greek poetry was an intimate part of the life of the city-state, written for its religious occasions and performed by its citizens. (...) But eh conquests of Alexander had altered the structure and the boundaries of the Greek world to an astonishing degree. Alexandria, the center of the poetic culture of the new age, was a city that had not even existed at the time of Euripides; it was in Egypt, not in Greece, and was a huge, polyglot community. As immigrants immersed in a new, impersonal, and bureaucratic society, the poets not unreasonably sought out what was small, intimate, and personal in their verses. The heroes of early Greek poetry are larger than life; those of Alexandrian poetry are life-size. They are human, like us; they have a childhood and an old age; they are afraid or in love or caught in a rainstorm. It was simply one way of reducing the world to more manageable dimensions. At the same time, the new world of Alexandria needed a new poetry. To continue writing epics about a mythology that seemed very far away was senseless; it was impossible to recapture either the style or the immediacy of Homer, lyric poetry, or Attic tragedy. The scholar-poets of Alexandria admired the literature of classical Greece; for them Homer was incomparable and inimitable, to be studied—but not to be copied. Far better, then, to find a new voice on a more manageable scale: instead of oral epic, erudite epyllion; instead of lyric, epigram; instead of tragedy, mime. The poets of an urban and unheroic world might long for but could never re-create the grandeur of the past. James E. G. Zetzel is associate professor of classics at Princeton University and editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association. He is the author of Latin Textual Criticism in Antiquity and, with Anthony T. Grafton and Glenn W. Most, has translated Friedrich August Wolf’s Prolegomena ad Homerum. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:C. Suetonius Tranquillus: De Grammaticis et RhetoribusJames E. G. ZetzelR. A. Kaster, ed. C. Suetonius Tranquillus: De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus. Edited with a translation, introduction, and commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. lx 1 370 pp. Cloth, $72.00.From a very early stage, the Romans were interested in their own literary history. In the second century B.C.E., Accius composed his didascalica; in the first century, Varro, Cornelius Nepos, and Julius Hyginus (...) all wrote biographies of literary figures; and early in the second century c.e. Suetonius wrote a set of books De uiris illustribus, giving accounts of the lives of Roman poets, historians, orators, philosophers—and teachers of grammar and rhetoric. Our knowledge of the first four categories of writers is exiguous: aside from Cicero’s Brutus, which is of more importance for chronology than for biography proper, we have the versions of some of Suetonius’ lives of the poets that are attached to scholia and the one-sentence notices excerpted from Suetonius by Jerome in his adaptation of Eusebius’ Chronicle; we also have occasional anecdotes in the elder Seneca, Aulus Gellius, and a few other sources. The vagaries of textual transmission, however, have left us much better off with the last of Suetonius’ rubrics: a single manuscript survived to the middle ages containing (along with Tacitus’ minor works) the portion of De uiris illustribus known as De grammaticis et rhetoribus (DGR). The text is badly preserved, and it is also incomplete: of the sixteen professors of rhetoric once included, lives of only five remain. Even so, it is a text of considerable importance for students of Roman education and, indeed, of Roman intellectual life: not only does it describe the origins of grammatical and rhetorical education at Rome, it discusses the origins, character, and students of the men who taught the elite of Rome; it preserves anecdotes involving the leading political and literary figures of the first centuries B.C.E. and c.e.; and along the way it offers quotations, otherwise unknown, from such figures as Valerius Cato, Helvius Cinna, Furius Bibaculus, Cicero, Asinius Pollio, and Asinius Gallus.Until now, DGR has been an extraordinarily difficult text to understand or [End Page 475] to use. Suetonius’ chronology is vague, his biographical reconstructions obscure, and his narratives maddeningly brief and anecdotal—not to mention the fact that the text itself is so corrupt that the words themselves are not always easy to ascertain. No longer: with Robert Kaster’s magnificent edition, DGR is a text that cannot only be read, but understood, used, and even (at times) admired. In some respects, K. is the perfect match for Suetonius: like Suetonius, K.’s principal interest is not in the internal history of ancient education, but in its external history, above all in the social context and significance of teaching at Rome. It should also be said, however, that in other ways K. is far better than Suetonius: where the ancient text is brief, elliptical, and anecdotal, K. is thorough, patient, and extraordinarily learned. K.’s edition includes a long introduction, a new critical text and facing translation, and an exhaustive commentary, followed by four appendices (of which the longest and most important concerns Suetonius’ use of the elder Seneca). A brief review can scarcely do justice to K.’s achievement; a few comments will have to suffice.Introduction: Although DGR is perhaps the portion of De uiris illustribus that modern scholars would most happily have done without, K. turns the very obscurity of the subject matter to good advantage. In writing of poets, historians, and the rest, Suetonius could make full use of earlier biographers such as Nepos and Hyginus; with the teachers, he had no such sources. As a result, DGR provides an excellent laboratory in which to observe Suetonius’ working methods: K. analyzes brilliantly the way in which he collected his information, how it is related to his research for the lives of literary figures, and the strengths and weaknesses of Suetonius’ approach. In both the introduction and the commentary (to singularly good effect in his analysis of DGR1–4 on the origins of grammatical teaching at Rome), K. pays close attention... (shrink)

Health research is increasingly being conducted on a global scale, particularly in the developing world to address leading causes of morbidity and mortality. While research interest has increased, building scientific capacity in the developing world has not kept pace. This often leads to the export of human tissue (defined broadly) from the developing to the developed world for analysis. These practices raise a number of important ethical issues that require attention.

Cedant arma togae, ‘let arms yield to the toga’. Thus begins the famous verse from Cicero's poem on his consulship that highlights the protagonist's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy by favourably contrasting this political achievement with success on the battlefield. But how does the line continue? Its conclusion is transmitted in two different versions,concedat laurea laudiandconcedat laurea linguae, and scholars have long been divided over which one is Cicero's original text. In this paper, we revisit the issue and not only (...) propose an answer to the question of what Cicero actually wrote, but also examine those attestations of the verse that date to the author's own lifetime, elucidating the contexts that account for the quotation of one variant rather than the other. (shrink)

Background There is a growing concern about artificial intelligence (AI) applications in healthcare that can disadvantage already under-represented and marginalised groups (eg, based on gender or race). Objectives Our objectives are to canvas the range of strategies stakeholders endorse in attempting to mitigate algorithmic bias, and to consider the ethical question of responsibility for algorithmic bias. Methodology The study involves in-depth, semistructured interviews with healthcare workers, screening programme managers, consumer health representatives, regulators, data scientists and developers. Results Findings reveal considerable (...) divergent views on three key issues. First, views on whether bias is a problem in healthcare AI varied, with most participants agreeing bias is a problem (which we call the bias-critical view), a small number believing the opposite (the bias-denial view), and some arguing that the benefits of AI outweigh any harms or wrongs arising from the bias problem (the bias-apologist view). Second, there was a disagreement on the strategies to mitigate bias, and who is responsible for such strategies. Finally, there were divergent views on whether to include or exclude sociocultural identifiers (eg, race, ethnicity or gender-diverse identities) in the development of AI as a way to mitigate bias. Conclusion/significance Based on the views of participants, we set out responses that stakeholders might pursue, including greater interdisciplinary collaboration, tailored stakeholder engagement activities, empirical studies to understand algorithmic bias and strategies to modify dominant approaches in AI development such as the use of participatory methods, and increased diversity and inclusion in research teams and research participant recruitment and selection. (shrink)

Choreography and Ceremony: The Artful Side of Action "Actions" are normally thought of as taken by individuals. But to understand their quality, it is not enough to classify them from the perspective of individual psychology (rational vs. emotional, technical vs. artistic, etc.). We need to grasp their relation to those forms of collective life which have a historical existence independent of specific individual action (institutions, the conventions of social gathering, the organizing principles of games, architecture, music, ritual, etc.). This paper (...) focuses on what characteristics such forms of collective life share, not what seems to separate them (eg. into sacred vs secular, technology vs creative art). The main features emphasized are their choreography, that is their enactment within commonly understood patterns of a spatial and temporal kind, as well as rules of interactive movement; and their ceremonial character, something which can be found in simple situations such as a conversation or a meal, though much more intensely in major religious ritual. A particularly resonant image for these enactments of social life is the dance. Because there is a ceremonial aspect to all social interaction, the paper argues that individual action, necessarily oriented to the social context, always has an "artful" side (however habitual or technical). The paper draws on the writings of Wittgenstein on action, and those of Collingwood on language and art, to shape the argument. Illustrations are provided of the "artful" employment of language (especially by actors on the stage), the "artful" side of material culture, and from the author's own ethnographic studies, the significance of dance among Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia. (shrink)

Questo articolo si sofferma su una curiosa lacuna nella tradizione pragmatista. Negli scritti dei pragmatisti americani classici (Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead e Lewis) pochissima attenzione è dedicata all'articolazione di una concezione delle pratiche e, più in generale, dei _pragmata_. L'autore offre uno schizzo di quella che egli ritiene essere una descrizione pragmatista delle pratiche umane. Sottolinea come per i pragmatisti stessi la teoria sia una pratica o, più precisamente, una famiglia allargata di pratiche in evoluzione, che intrattengono relazioni complesse (...) con altre pratiche. Inoltre, ritiene che una tale prospettiva sulle pratiche sia fondamentalmente in opposizione ai vari tentativi di fornire una giustificazione trascendentale per qualsiasi pratica umana. L'autore prende spunto da una breve ma suggestiva discussione sul linguaggio, la legge e la verità contenuta nel _Pragmatismo_ di William James e sviluppa le implicazioni della trattazione jamesiana di questi temi. Nel corso di questo lavoro, l'autore propone di comprendere un'opera _classica_ (come un testo filosofico o una composizione musicale) in una prospettiva strettamente storicista. L'articolo si conclude con una riflessione su quanto l'intelligenza creativa sia stata 'coscritta' dall'agenda bellicosa dei regimi nazionali o imperialistici, pur nutrendo la speranza che l'intelligenza creativa possa liberarsi in qualche misura dalla macchina bellica degli stati nazionali. (shrink)

Cicero's On the Commonwealth and On the Laws were his first and most substantial attempts to adapt Greek theories of political life to the circumstances of the Roman Republic. They represent Cicero's understanding of government and remain his most important works of political philosophy. On the Commonwealth survives only in part, and On the Laws was never completed. The new edition of this volume has been revised throughout to take account of recent scholarship, and features a new introduction, a new (...) bibliography, a chronological table and a biographical index. James E. G. Zetzel offers a scholarly reconstruction of the fragments of On the Commonwealth and a masterly translation of both dialogues. The texts are further supported by notes and synopsis, designed to assist students in politics, philosophy, ancient history, law and classics. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibility of weakening the criteria for causal explanation in Making Things Happen to yield various forms of non-causal explanation. These include the following: retaining the idea that explanations must answer what if things had been different questions but dropping the requirement the answers to such questions must take the form of claims about what would happen under interventions. Retaining the w- question requirement but allowing generalizations that hold for mathematical or conceptual reasons to figure in explanations. (...) Dropping the w-question requirement to accommodate the role of information about irrelevance in explanation. (shrink)

Explores the Pragmatists' contributions to American social thought, drawing upon the writings of William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, James Hayden Tufts, and their various critics. This work also explores the Pragmatic analysis of society's potential for ongoing intelligent inquiry and cooperative evaluation to address social ills.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the AmoresBetty Rose NagleBarbara Weiden Boyd. Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Innovation in the Amores. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. xii 1 252 pp. Cloth, $39.50.The “literary love affair” (130) in the Amores is as much (or more) an affair conducted with literature as it is one represented in literature. Although Barbara Boyd never puts it that way, this (...) is the essence of her argument. In her reading, this three-book collection of amatory elegies is the narrative of Ovid’s early career as a poet. This novel use of the genre—for literary autobiography—is one of the ways in which Ovid expands its boundaries. In Ovid’s Literary Loves Boyd intends to help readers appreciate the originality of the Amores, in part by showing in it the beginnings of that interest in redefining generic boundaries which in the past decade we have come to recognize, through the work of Stephen Hinds and others, as a hallmark of Ovid’s whole corpus.In her introduction, “The Isolation of Ovid’s Amores,” Boyd digests and assesses the current opinion about Ovid’s collection. Its “literary isolation” has resulted from the combined effects of the “generic fallacy” and what she calls the “progressive fallacy.” The latter (her own coinage) is the critical position which holds either that “what comes first is worst” or that “what comes last is worst” (5); accordingly, the Amores are early Ovid and hence inferior, and Ovid is the last of the elegists and hence inferior. As an antidote to the “generic fallacy” Boyd proposes James Zetzel’s “challenge of generic freedom,” itself the latest variation of Kroll’s “Kreuzung der Gattungen.” [End Page 468]Chapter 1, “Reused Language: Genre and Influence in the Interpretation of the Amores,” takes its point of departure from a comparison of the two propemptica Am. 2.11 and Propertius 1.8a. Boyd sets out “both to simplify and to clarify a method for reading imitation in the Amores” (19), and in doing so she makes a substantial contribution to the typology of imitation in Latin literature as a whole. She does this by bringing together two unlikely bedfellows, integrating G. P. Goold’s ideas about Ovid’s “formulae” and “instinctive” versification with G. B. Conte’s concepts of “poetic memory” and poetic language as “reused language.” She also employs Conte’s distinction between “exemplary model” (verbatim imitation) and “code model” (the system of generic rules familiar beforehand) and Richard Thomas’s preference for the term “reference” instead of “imitation.” For her purposes she distinguishes (30–31) between a “parallel,” which may “simply be a common topos” (30) rather than an actual imitation; a “formula,” which may be “a very precise mark of a poetic tradition” (30) without making a specific reference; and a “reference,” which is likely to engage with a whole tradition rather than simply allude to a single source. Finally, she distinguishes (47) “external allusion” (to another poet) from “self-imitation,” which in turn is differentiated into “’internal reference’ proper” (to an earlier poem in the same collection) and “self-imitation” (“reference across works”). These latter may well be, as she claims, “two different, though related, phenomena” (47), but “self-imitation” is not relevant to Boyd’s own discussion until her last chapter. In posing the question “How do we recognize ‘imitation’?” she distinguishes between imitation of “form and theme” (33) and imitation of “content” (34), using the latter term rather idiosyncratically to include “precise features, such as style, diction, and metrical character” (34).Chapter 2, “Literary Means and Ends: Ovid’s Ludus Poeticus,” continues the treatment of imitation in considering Ovid’s practice of “multiple allusion” (67, 89), according to Boyd “an aspect of his style that is far too little recognized and understood” (67). The goal is to clarify how Ovid views his literary past and what meaning his sources have for his use of them—in brief, as she neatly summarizes, “to move beyond equating Ovid’s inspiration and purpose with Propertius and parody, respectively” (50). She shows how in creating Sulmo as a literary landscape (Am. 2.16... (shrink)

The idea behind this book is that developing a conception of the physical world and a conception of mind is impossible without the exercise of agency, meaning "the power to alter at will one's perceptual inputs". The thesis is derived from a philosophical account of the role of agency in knowledge - the first time this has been attempted in the context of developmental psychology. The book is divided into three parts. In Part One, Russell argues that purely "representational" theories (...) of mind and of mental development have been overvalued, thereby clearing the ground for the book's central thesis. In Part Two, he proposes that, because objective experience depends upon the experience of agency, the development of the "object concept" in human infants is grounded in the development of executive-attentional capacities. In Part Three, an analysis of the links between agency and self-awareness generates an original theory of the nature of certain stage-like transitions in mental functioning and of the relationship between executive and mentalising deficits in autism. The book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in cognitive-developmental psychology, to philosophers of mind, and to anybody with an interest in cognitive science. (shrink)

This article explores the idea that Core Affect provides the emotional quality to any conscious state. Core Affect is the neurophysiological state always accessible as simply feeling good or bad, energized or enervated, even if it is not always the focus of attention. Core Affect, alone or more typically combined with other psychological processes, is found in the experiences of feeling, mood and emotion, including the subjective experiences of fear, anger and other so-called basic emotions which are commonly thought to (...) be raw, primitive, and universal. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In _Wittgenstein in Exile_, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein -- as an exile -- that helps make sense of this. Wittgenstein's exile (...) was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era -- Oswald Spengler's culture of the early nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlaß, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work. (shrink)

This paper defends an invariance-based account of laws of nature: Laws are generalizations that remain invariant under various sorts of changes. Alternatively, laws are generalizations that exhibit a certain kind of independence from background conditions.

I am interested in the use Kant makes of the pure intuition of space, and of properties and principles of space and spaces (i.e. figures, like spheres and lines), in the special metaphysical project of MAN. This is a large topic, so I will focus here on an aspect of it: the role of these things in his treatment of some of the laws of matter treated in the Dynamics and Mechanics Chapters. In MAN and other texts, Kant speaks of (...) space as the “ground,” “condition,” and “basis” of various laws, including the inverse-square and inverse-cube laws of attractive and repulsive force, and the Third Law of Mechanics. Moreover, in his proofs of all the laws just mentioned, the language of “construction” figures prominently, which suggests that Kant’s proofs (somehow) rest on or involve mathematical construction in his technical sense. Such claims give rise to a number of questions. How do properties and principles of space and spaces serve to ground this particular set of laws? Which spatial properties and principles is Kant appealing to? What, if anything, does the spatial grounding of the inverse-square and inverse-cube laws of diffusion (treated in the Dynamics Chapter) have in common with that of the Third treated in the Mechanics Chapter)? What role—if any—does mathematical construction play in Kant’s proofs of these laws? Finally, how if at all, are Kant’s grounding claims consistent with his other commitments—for example, how are they consistent with his notorious denial in Prolegomena §38 that there are any laws that “lie in space” (Prol 4:321)? I offer answers to these questions. (shrink)

Neoliberalism co-opts noisy riots like feminism and hardcore music--can melancholic siren songs fight back?

The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize the school of higher learning.

William James's definition of psychology as 'the science of mental life' has been heard so often that we are apt to forget how radically it diverges from the view of psychology which so many of its practitioners hold today.

Counterfactual theories of causation of the sort presented in Mackie, 1974, and Lewis, 1973 are a familiar part of the philosophical landscape. Such theories are typically advanced primarily as accounts of the metaphysics of causation. But they also raise empirical psychological issues concerning the processes and representations that underlie human causal reasoning. For example, do human subjects internally represent causal claims in terms of counterfactual judgments and when they engage in causal reasoning, does this involves reasoning about counterfactual claims? This (...) paper explores several such issues from a broadly interventionist perspective. (shrink)

What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the sorts of causal claims found in the special sciences (and in common sense) and, on the other hand, the world as described by physics? A standard picture goes like this: the fundamental laws of physics are causal laws in the sense that they can be interpreted as telling us that realizations of one set of physical factors or properties “causes” realizations of other properties. Causal claims in the special sciences are (...) then true (to the extent that they are) in virtue of “instantiating” these underlying causal laws; as it is often put, the latter serve as “truth-makers” for the former. The picture is thus one according to which the notion of cause, as it occurs in the special sciences, is reflected or “grounded” in a fairly straightforward and transparent way in a similar notion that occurs in fundamental physics. This paper explores some alternatives to this picture. (shrink)

This generous omnium-gatherum brings together all the writings William James published that have not appeared in previous volumes of this definitive edition of ...

Concise, well-written treatment of epochal theory of modern physics covers classical relativity and the relativity postulate, time dilation, the twin paradox, momentum and energy, particles of zero mass, electric and magnetic fields and forces and more. Only high school math needed. Replete with examples, ideal for self-study.

The ideas of mindfulness and no-self are intimately connected in Buddhist philosophy. This is because, in Buddhist Philosophy, the practice of mindfulness leads to the realization that there is no self. In contemporary mindfulness in psychology, the no-self theory has not played such a basic role. An outline of Buddhist philosophy is given showing how the ‘root delusion’ of having a self lies at the base of human suffering and how mindfulness, when appropriately deployed, enables one to free oneself from (...) this delusion and thus achieve psychological well-being. This is not to say that mindfulness based interventions do not help to alleviate suffering. Nor is it to say that people working in these areas should not use mindfulness in their own way. It is only to say that by ignoring the no-self experience, teachers and practioners are falling short of achieving what mindfulness was originally employed to achieve. (shrink)

Scientism is usually thought of as sinful, but it can be redeemed for our salvation. Scientism should not be dogmatic, nor should it ignore the actual limitations to current science. Other modes of inquiry deserve epistemic respect, and scientists should not be deferred to about matters beyond their expertise. However, limits should not be placed on what science can study and we cannot say in advance what the limits of future science will be. Where science conflicts with common sense, religion, (...) and tradition, it should be regarded as authoritative for the purposes of education and public policy as well as objective inquiry; and scientific knowledge is even relevant to moral and political deliberation. This is the core of scientism. This chapter elaborates a way of thinking of scientism as a stance characterized in terms of positive and negative components and argues for a humane form of scientism. (shrink)

Humility has not always been regarded as a virtue. Aristotle, if he recognized it at all, seems to have regarded it as a vice, a deficiency in regard to magnanimity. In the popular culture of the twenty-first century, while courage is held in high moral esteem, the regard given to humility is more questionable. Humility, however, is not universally dismissed as a virtue. Many see it as having moral value. In fact, a number of contemporary philosophers are relatively clear that (...) humility is a morally valuable trait and so is a moral virtue, although they disagree about its character. For traditional Christianity and Judaism, of course, and for other religious traditions, humility is a religious virtue. However, if humility is a religious virtue, is it different from humility as a moral virtue? Below, we shall start in section II with the question, What is the best way to understand the general notion of humility? In section III it shall be followed by the question, What are the core contrasting states that humility opposes? Third , in section IV we shall ask, Does humility as a religious virtue have a distinctive and abiding character? (shrink)