This provocative collection of essays written by the influential Greek scholar E. R. Dodds between 1929 and 1971. represents the wide range of his literary and philosophical interests. Insightful and learned, the essays combine profound scholarship with the lucid humanity of a teacher awareof the special value of Greek studies in the modern world.

Proclus' Elements of Theology is a concise summa of the Neoplatonic system in its fully developed form; and for the student of late Greek thought second in importance only to the Enneads of Plotinus. Professor Dodds has provided a critical text based on a personal examination of some forty manuscripts, together with an English translation and a philosophical and linguistic commentary. First published in 1933, this second edition includes an Appendix of Addenda et Corrigenda and is widely regarded and respected (...) as the definitive edition of the text today. (shrink)

This paperback edition of Dodds's standard edition of Plato's Gorgias is designed to meet the needs both of undergraduates and professional scholars. The text and apparatus criticus are based on a fresh survey of the evidence: two major manuscripts are here for the first time fully collated, and account has been taken both of new papyri and of the exceptionally rich indirect tradition. The text is supplemented by a full introduction giving details on the subject and structure of the dialogue, (...) its characters and intended historical setting, the real date of composition, and the background to Plato and Athens at the time of composition. The commentary, besides explaining Platonic usages and discussing textual points, aims to treat the historical, philosphical, and literary questions which arise from the text. (shrink)

We respond to a Letter to the Editor regarding "Principlism and contemporary ethical considerations for providers of transgender health care." We address criticisms by Castle & Klein (2024) of blatant fatphobia related to the ethical elements concerning BMI restrictions for gender-affirming surgery. Our response corrects several mischaracterizations of the article and clarifies our position. My co-authors and I remain focused on advocating for patient-centered, ethically sound, evidence-based, and equitable healthcare policies.

The last phase of Greek philosophy has until recently been less intelligently studied than any other, and in our understanding of its development there are still lamentable lacunae. Three errors in particular have in the past prevented a proper appreciation of Plotinus' place in the history of philosophy. The first was the failure to distinguish Neoplatonism from Platonism: this vitiates the work of many early exponents from Ficinus down to Kirchner. The second was the belief that the Neoplatonists, being ‘mystics,’ (...) were necessarily incomprehensible to the plain man or even to the plain philosopher. To have encouraged the persistence of this superstition in the nineteenth century is the least pardonable of Creuzer's many sins. The third was the chronological confusion involved in the ascription to Saint Paul's contemporary of the works of the pretended Dionysius Areopagita, which contain a fully-developed Neoplatonic theology. Though the fraud had been exposed by Scaliger, these writings continued down to the beginning of the nineteenth century to be used as evidence that the ‘Nsoplatonic trinity’ was an inferior imitation of the Christian one. When this false trail was at length abandoned the fashion for orientalizing explanations persisted in another guise: to the earliest historians of Neoplatonism, Simon and Vacherot, the school of Plotinus was ‘the school of Alexandria,’ and its inspiration was mainly Egyptian. Vacherot says of Neoplatonism that it is ‘essentially and radically oriental, having nothing of Greek thought but its language and procedure.’ Few would be found to-day to subscribe to so sweeping a pronouncement; but the existence of an important oriental element in Plotinus' thought is still affirmed by many French and German writers. (shrink)

Uncertainty and emotion are an inevitable part of everyday life and play a vital role in mental health. Yet, our understanding of how uncertainty and emotion interact is limited. Here, an online survey was conducted to examine whether uncertainty evokes and modulates a range of negative and positive emotions. The data show that uncertainty is predominantly associated with negative emotional states such as fear/anxiety. However, uncertainty was also found to modulate a variety of other negative and positive emotional states, depending (...) on the valence of an anticipated outcome and the sub parameter of uncertainty. Uncertainty increased the intensity of negative emotional states and decreased the intensity of positive emotional states. These findings support prior research suggesting that uncertainty is aversive and associated with negative emotional states such as fear and anxiety. However, the findings also revealed that uncertainty is involved in eliciting and modulating a wide array of emotional phenomena beyond fear and anxiety. This study highlights an opportunity for further study of how uncertainty and emotion interactions are conceptualised generally and in relation to mental health. (shrink)

Mr. G. S. Kirk's interesting and illuminating treatment of this curious fragment in CQ,. xliv , pp. 149–57, prompts me to offer some further conjectures on the reading and interpretation of lines 15–23, on the character of the fragment as a whole. I am indebted for valuable help both to Mr. Kirk himself and to Mr. C. H. Roberts.

The attempts of Verrall and Tucker to discover, without resorting to emendation, a construction for the participles in v. 285 have convinced only their authors. All other recent scholars either postulate a lacuna before this line or transpose it to follow v. 288, if they do not delete it altogether. All alike assume that both participles describe the behaviour of the victim of the underworld powers.

As the later phases of Greek thought are at last beginning to receive in England and Ireland the attention they merit, it is hoped that the following critical notes on Plotinus may be of interest to a few readers. Some involve points of doctrine; others are intended to illustrate certain shortcomings of the German school, who have hitherto been practically the sole workers in the textual field.

In the United States, prohibitionist policies are used as the primary approach to combat the negative effect of substance use on society. An extensive academic literature spanning the disciplines of economics, political science, and multiculturalism documents the great social costs of the United States’ “War on Drugs” both nationally and internationally. These costs come with at best marginal effect on substance abuse and other crimes linked to the drug trade. In many cases, there is a reason to believe that these (...) policies exacerbate the problems they aim to address. This article explores psychologists’ ethical commitments to social change concerning such drug policy, given the field of psychology’s expanding commitment to social justice. We examine arguments regarding the boundaries between psychologists’ personal and professional ethics with regard to political participation. Using drug prohibition as an exemplar, we suggest that many psychologists’ political actions and professional ethics may be misaligned. Ultimately, we conclude that the endorsement of prohibitionist drug policies is in direct conflict with the guiding ethical principles put forth by the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. (shrink)

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

Beginning in 2002, Wells Fargo began opening fraudulent accounts for unsuspecting customers. Stakeholders at every level either participated in, ignored, or tolerated the bank’s behavior that defrauded consumers on a massive scale. These unethical and well-documented schemes spanned more than a decade. Using public sources, this case recounts the events and ethical lapses that unfolded over the multiyear investigation of the Wells Fargo fraudulent accounts scandal and illuminates the general systemic failures of corporate culture and governance, public regulation, and market (...) responses to promote ethical business practices. This case provides the opportunity to consider what means for fostering ethical conduct might exist if a corporation can be big enough and rich enough that civil, criminal, regulatory, and market forces cannot deter unethical corporate practices, and if the market does not punish the corporation for a culture that promotes fraud. (shrink)

E.R. Dodds’ 1959 edition of Plato’s Gorgias is a conventional treatment of this dialogue, aimed at audiences interested in close study of the text. Dodds himself regretted this outcome. He felt he had lost sight of an earlier goal, formulated at a time of political turmoil on the eve of WorldWar II, of using the Gorgias to bring out ‘both the resemblance and the difference between Plato’s situation and that of the intellectual today’. The present paper attempts to reconstruct that (...) goal, as it survives residually in his edition, surfaces in his The Greeks and the Irrational, and appears in some writings from the 1930s, particularly in unpublished lectures. Dodds did frequently juxtapose ancient and modern conceptions of the intellectual, and in a way that cast Plato in a positive light, as someone politically engaged and self-critical, and acutely sensitive, as Dodds himself was, to the political implications of social psychology. (shrink)

John R. Searle claims that P.F. Strawson's well known objections to correspondence theories of truth can be side‐stepped, if we regard the correspondence theorist's facts as ‘conditions in the world’ rather than as complex objects. In response, I claim both that Searle's notion of a ‘condition in the world’ is obscure, and that such conditions cannot be the facts of a correspondence theorist on account of their being unsuited for truthmaking.The failure of Searle's attempt to come up with a correspondence (...) theory which evades Strawson's objections does not indicate that we should seek to formulate a correspondence theory in some other way. I argue that that the correspondence theorists's truthmaker axiom is improperly motivated, and, in the light of this, suggest that facts be treated as true propositions rather than as items which make propositions true. The article ends with a defence of this position against two recent objections. (shrink)

In this philosophy classic, which was first published in 1951, E. R. Dodds takes on the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism. Using the analytical tools of modern anthropology and psychology, Dodds asks, "Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from 'primitive' modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation?" Praised by reviewers as "an event in modern Greek scholarship" and "a book which it would (...) be difficult to over-praise," _The Greeks and the Irrational _was Volume 25 of the Sather Classical Lectures series. (shrink)

This paper sees me clarify, elaborate, and defend the conclusions reached in my ‘Musical Works as Eternal Types’ in the wake of objections raised by Robert Howell, R. A. Sharpe, and Saam Trivedi. In particular, I claim that the thesis that musical works are discovered rather than created by their composers is obligatory once we commit ourselves to thinking of works of music as types, and once we properly understand the ontological nature of types and properties. The central argument of (...) the paper is ‘the argument from the eternal existence of properties’, its moral being that types are eternal entities because they inherit their existence conditions from their eternally existent property-associates. The two key premises in this argument—that properties exist eternally, and that a type exists just in case its property-associate exists—are motivated and then defended at length. (shrink)

This provocative collection of essays written by the influential Greek scholar E. R. Dodds between 1929 and 1971. represents the wide range of his literary and philosophical interests. Insightful and learned, the essays combine profound scholarship with the lucid humanity of a teacher aware of the special value of Greek studies in the modern world.

Numenius and Ammonius, by E. R. Dodds.--Plotin zwischen Platon und Stoa, von W. Theiler.--Être, vie, pensée chez Plotin et avant Plotin, par P. Hadot.--Plotin et les gnostiques, par H. C. Puech.--Die Frage nach dem Transzendenten im Mittelplatonismus, von H. Dörrie.--Mito e poesia nelle Enneadi di Plotino, di V. Cilento.--Quelle oder Tradition? Von R. Harder.--"Bewusst" und "unbewusst" bei Plotin, von H. R. Schwyzer.--The background of the doctrine "That the intelligibles are not outside the intellect," by A. H. Armstrong.--Une comparaison chez Aristote, (...) Alexandre et Plotin, par P. Henry. (shrink)

The aim of this index of pre-1500 Platonic manuscripts is to prepare for a complete reediting of a new edition of Plato's works. The project, which began over ten years ago, brings together in one collection microfilms of all the older extant manuscript material. The index first lists the manuscripts according to the libraries in which they are found, including the library shelf number. The second half of the index lists the manuscripts by dialogue. The need for a new edition (...) of the Platonic text is based--for the most part--on the findings of E. R. Dodds in his work on the Gorgias. Dodds discovered that the nineteenth-century textual scholars oversimplified matters by assuming that the extant manuscripts were handed down by scribes. Dodds has shown that as much editing was done as transcribing; hence, the manuscripts could include "extensive possible unsystematic contamination." Also, the nineteenth-century scholars erred in assuming a "fixed rule of evidence." Thus--of three manuscripts-two having similar readings would be accepted and the third considered erroneous. However, probability theory shows that the agreement of two against one will work seven out of eight times. But the eighth instant will have the single reading as the right one--with no way of telling which out of the eight instances will have the single reading as the original. This new and convenient index should enhance Platonic scholarship.--J. J. R. (shrink)

Part of the Studies in Crime and Public Policy series, this book, written by one of the top philosophers of punishment, examines the main trends in penal theorizing over the past three decades. Duff asks what can justify criminal punishment, and then explores the legitimacy of actual practices by examining what would count as adequate justification for them. Duff argues that a "communicative conception of punishment," which he presents as a third way between consequentialist and retributive theories, offers the most (...) fruitful way of understanding punishment's meaning and justification. Duff addresses such questions as how much sentences should be constrained by proportionality requirements; what modalities of punishment best communicate their intended meaning; and what decisionmaking procedures he envisions. This book will appeal to criminologists, philosophers, and others interested in theories of punishment. (shrink)

The claim that managers have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to run the corporation in their interests is generally supported by two arguments: that shareholders are owners of a corporation and that they have a contract or agency relation with management. The latter argument is used by Kenneth E. Goodpaster, who rejects a multi-fiduciary, stakeholder approach on the grounds that the shareholder-management relation is “ethically different” because of its fiduciary character. Both of these arguments provide an inadequate basis for the (...) fiduciary duties of officers and directors of corporations. The basis is to be found, rather, in considerations of public policy, a point that was established in the Dodd-Berle exchange of the 1930s. This conclusion also shows the inadequacy of Goodpaster’s solution to the so-called stakeholder paradox, and an alternative solution to the paradox is presented. (shrink)

'Most of us are still groping for answers about what makes life worth living, or what confers meaning on individual lives', writes Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self. 'This is an essentially modern predicament.' Charles Taylor's latest book sets out to define the modern identity by tracing its genesis, analysing the writings of such thinkers as Augustine, Descartes, Montaigne, Luther, and many others. This then serves as a starting point for a renewed understanding of modernity. Taylor argues that modern (...) subjectivity has its roots in ideas of human good, and is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and attain the good. The modern turn inwards is far from being a disastrous rejection of rationality, as its critics contend, but has at its heart what Taylor calls the affirmation of ordinary life. He concludes that the modern identity, and its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, is far richer in moral sources that its detractors allow. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defence of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics. (shrink)

This paper examines social network size in contemporary Western society based on the exchange of Christmas cards. Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex. Age, household type, and the relationship to the individual influence network structure, although the proportion of kin remained relatively constant at around 21%. (...) Frequency of contact between network members was primarily determined by two classes of variable: passive factors (distance, work colleague, overseas) and active factors (emotional closeness, genetic relatedness). Controlling for the influence of passive factors on contact rates allowed the hierarchical structure of human social groups to be delimited. These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size. (shrink)