In his magisterial work Persephone, Zuntz drew a basic distinction between two sets of Orphic gold leaves—those known from the elaborate tumuli at Thurii, which he called Group A, and a more widely scattered series, Group B, then represented by two longer texts from Petelia in southern Italy and Pharsalus in Thessaly, and, in a shortened form, by a series of six short texts from the environs of Eleutherna in Crete. Three further finds have reinforced Zuntz's distinctions: first, a tablet (...) from Hipponium, the colony of Epizephyrian Locri in southern Italy, published by Foti and Pugliese Carratelli, then a lamella said to be from Thessaly but now in Malibu and published by Breslin, and finally a tablet said to be from Entella in Sicily and recently in Geneva, which was published in a bad transcription by Frel and much clarified by Riedweg. The first and third belong to Zuntz's Group B, while the second is close to his Group C. Pugliese Carratelli has published an exceptionally fine set of photographs of all the texts except those from Petelia and Entella. My restudy of the leaf from Petelia has led to some improved readings. Not even a drawing exists of the Entellan leaf, which no scholar except its first editor has ever seen. This fact prompted a reviewer of this article to wonder about its authenticity. In the absence of the object itself, such doubts can only be allayed if its text consistently contributes to improving our understanding of the archetype from which it is derived. One of the aims of this article is to show that it does indeed do so. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: New Evidence for the Intellectuals' Challenge to Greek Religion The Origins of Allegorical Interpretation “There Is Only One God and He Arranges Everything for the Best” Diagoras' Critique of the Mysteries and His Condemnation Diagoras of Melos and the Faith of Socrates Socrates Against the Poets The Religion of Socrates and His Condemnation The Dangers of Freethinking in Classical Athens.

The more I understand the Southslavic poetry and the nature of the unity of the oral poem, the clearer it seems to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey are very exactly, as we have them, each one of them the rounded and finished work of a single singer…. I even figure to myself, just now, the moment when the author of the Odyssey sat and dictated his song, while another, with writing materials, wrote it down verse by verse, even (...) in the way that our singers sit in the immobility of their thought, watching the motion of Nikola's hand across the empty page, when it will tell them it is the instant for them to speak the next verse. (shrink)

The On Poems by Philodemus of Gadara is our main source for Hellenistic literary and critical theory. This first edition of Book 2 includes a Greek text and facing English translation of the newly reconstructed treatise on poetry in ancient Greek, as well as a comprehensive introduction and incisive analytical commentary.

In Python's comic satyr play Agen Harpalus, Alexander's errant treasurer, is mocked for erecting costly buildings left and right to honour his dead lover, the notorious prostitute Pythionice:ἔστιν δ’ ὅπου μὲν ὁ κάλαμος πέϕυχ’ ὅδε†ϕέτωμ’ ἄορνον, οὑξ ἀριστερᾶς δ’ ὅδεπόρνης ὁ κλεινὸς ναός, ὃν δὴ Παλλίδηςτεύξας κατέγνω διὰ τὸ πρᾶγμ’ αὑτοῦ ϕυγήν.1–2 πέϕυκε· ὁ δ’ εϕετωμα ορνον Athenaei cod. A: ὅδε scr. Dindorf, ἄορνον Fiorillo †ϕέτωμ’ vox desperata: ϕάτνωμ’ Fiorillo, ἕλωμ’ Meineke, πέτρωμ’ Pezopulus, ϕλέωμ’ A. von Blumenthal, στόμωμ’ Erbse, ϕηγὼν (...) Friebel. (shrink)

Nouns and personal names ending in –εύς –ῆϝος are unique to Greek, and have often been deemed pre-Hellenic in origin simply on account of the lack of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) correspondences. Our failure to find convincing etymologies for βασιλεύς, ἑρμηνεύς, and βραβεύς has itself contributed to this view. However, we should hesitate, for general reasons, to posit pre-Hellenic origins for these words, since viable explanations both of βασιλεύς and of ἑρμηνεύς (if not of βραβεύς) lie near to hand. Although the explanation (...) of βασιλεύς that will be proposed below still presents difficulties, I believe that it improves on previous attempts. (shrink)

The Epicurean Colotes, in a work entitled Περὶ τοῦ ὅτι κατὰ τὰ τῶν ἄλλων φιλοσόφων οὐδὲ ζῆν ἔστιν, cited two fragments of Empedocles in order to prove that the poet denied that existence exists. Both are prominent in controversies about Empedocles’ physics and his usage of the term φύσις, but fr. 9 is very corrupt. To have any hope of restoring it, we will need to examine carefully Plutarch's explication de texte in his Adversus Colotem. Although there have been two (...) detailed treatments of this passage, neither has resolved the difficulties. (shrink)

This six volume Routledge Library Edition set is dedicated to the work of key nineteenth-century German thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose hugely influential work in the field of philosophy continues to be felt to this day. The six volumes, published between 1948 and 1988, represent a truly wide-ranging analysis of Nietzsche’s life and work, offering an excellent overview of the cannon of critical analysis and interpretation on Nietzsche in the twentieth century. The collection covers Nietzsche’s perspectives and influence upon a variety (...) of sociological and philosophical debates, as well as placing his work in the context of contemporaries such as Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Max Stirner. (shrink)

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

My heart was removed and replaced on May 17, 2006. No melodrama is intended here, just an unadorned factual statement. Transplants are transformative. In my case, that transformation led to bioethics.

This book is a succinct introduction to the orienting of attention.

Anthony Everett () argues that those who embrace the reality of fictional entities run into trouble when it comes to specifying criteria of character identity. More specifically, he argues that realists must reject natural principles governing the identity and distinctness of fictional characters due to the existence of fictions which leave it indeterminate whether certain characters are identical and the existence of fictions which say inconsistent things about the identities of their characters. Everett's critique has deservedly drawn much attention and (...) a number of defensive moves have been made by, or on the behalf of, fictional realists. My goal in this paper is to move this debate on a further step. I have three goals: to clarify the importance of Everett's discussion of identity criteria within the context of fictional realism, to reassess Everett's objections to realism in light of the resultant literature, and to develop a novel strategy for responding to Everett's concerns. On the approach to be developed, the problems emerge due to an indeterminacy inherent in the concept of a fictional character itself. (shrink)

The evolution of nonconceptive sexuality in bonobos and chimpanzees is discussed from a functional perspective. Bonobos and chimpanzees have three functions of sexual activity in common (paternity confusion, practice sex, and exchange for favors), but only bonobos use sex purely for communication about social relationships. Bonobo hypersexuality appears closely linked to the evolution of female-female alliances. I suggest that these alliances were made possible by relaxed feeding competition, that they were favored through their effect on reducing sexual coercion, and that (...) they are ultimately responsible for the relaxed social conditions that allowed the evolution of “communication sex.”. (shrink)

It is undeniable that the assumption of sincerity is important to assertion, and that assertion is central to the transmission of beliefs through human testimony. Discussions of testimony, however, often assume that the epistemic importance of sincerity to testimony is that of a (fallible) guarantee of access to the actual beliefs of the speaker. Other things being equal, we would do as well or better if we had some kind of unmediated access to the beliefs of the other person, without (...) the risks involved in the overt act of speaking, and the assumption of sincerity in speech is the closest we can come to this access. Contrary to this picture, I argue that sincerity has a quite different epistemic role to play in testimony than that of an indicator of the speaker's beliefs. The epistemology of testimony requires reference to the speaker as agent, and not just the speaker's beliefs, as well as a sense of 'expression of belief' that links it to the specifically addressive relation to another person. (shrink)

In Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene presents a compelling account of how the brain learns to read. Central to this account is his neuronal recycling hypothesis: neural circuitry is capable of being ‘recycled’ or converted to a different function that is cultural in nature. The original function of the circuitry is not entirely lost and constrains what the brain can learn. It is argued that the neural niche co-evolves with the environmental niche in a way that does not undermine (...) the core ideas of neuronal recycling, but which is quite different from the models of cognitive and cultural evolution provided by evolutionary psychology and epidemiology. Dehaene contrasts neuronal recycling with a naïve model of the brain as a general learning device that is unconstrained in what it can learn. Consequently a tension develops in Dehaene's account of the role of plasticity in the acquisition of language. It is argued that the functional and structural changes in the brain that Dehaene documents in great detail are driven by learning and that this learning-driven plasticity does not commit us to a naïve model of the brain. (shrink)

Some theorists hold that there is no serious, significant issue concerning cosmopolitanism. They hold that cosmopolitanism is either the anodyne doctrine that we have some duties to distant strangers merely on the ground of shared humanity or the absurd doctrine that we have no special moral duties based on special-ties such as those of friendship, family, and national community. This essay argues against this deflationary position by defending (1) a very extreme cosmopolitan doctrine that denies special-tie moral duties altogether and (...) (2) a slightly milder but still extreme form of cosmopolitanism that allows that there might be special-tie moral duties to intimate associates such as friends and family members but denies that broader social group associations such as those of subjection to a national state or national or ethnic community memberships ever constitute special ties that ground special moral duties. The defense proceeds by rebutting bad arguments leveled against extreme cosmopolitanisms. (shrink)

It is widely maintained that a clinical trial is ethical only if some form of equipoise between the treatments being compared obtains. To be in equipoise between two treatments A and B is to be cognitively indifferent between the statement ‘A is strictly more effective than B’ and its negation. It is natural to claim that equipoise regarding A and B is necessary for randomised assignment to treatments A and B to be beneficent and non‐maleficent and is sufficient for such (...) an assignment to be fair. Cashing this out precisely is difficult, and various forms of equipoise have been discussed which consider whose equipoise is relevant to the decision. This is to make judgement of equipoise something to be managed socially, while its prima facie significance is supposedly cognitive. Recent reconstructions of equipoise‐like concepts in epistemology give clues about how to understand equipoise cognitively. In this paper I examine some of this work and discuss how successful it has been. I suggest that while this work is promising, it still has far to go, and that while equipoise remains the best theory we have of the cognitive justification for clinical trials, it is nonetheless incoherent. (shrink)

Naturalistic philosophers ought to think that the mind is continuous with the rest of the world and should not, therefore, be surprised by the findings of the extended mind, cognitive integration and enactivism. Not everyone is convinced that all mental phenomena are continuous with the rest of the world. For example, intentionality is often formulated in a way that makes the mind discontinuous with the rest of the world. This is a consequence of Brentano’s formulation of intentionality, I suggest, and (...) can be overcome by revealing that the concept of intentional directedness as he receives it from the Scholastics is quite consistent with the continuity thesis. It is only when intentional directedness is conjoined with intentional inexistence that intentionality and content are consistent with a discontinuity thesis (such as Brentano’s thesis). This makes room to develop an account of intentional directedness that is consistent with the continuity thesis in the form of Peirce’s representational principle. I also argue against a form of the discontinuity thesis in the guise of the derived/underived content distinction. Having shown that intentionality is consistent with the continuity thesis I argue that we should focus on intentionality and representation as bodily enacted. I conclude that we would be better off focussing on representation and intentionality in action rather than giving abstract functional accounts of extended cognition. (shrink)