It is an interesting fact of our time that some of the best studies of communism and Marxism have been written by Catholic scholars. This book, based on a series of television programs in St. Louis aims at presenting an historical and theoretical understanding of the emergence of Marxism and the development of Communism. Written for the intelligent lay reader as an introduction to a complex subject, the treatment is lucid and balanced.—R. J. B.

We can infer moral conclusions from nonmoral evidence using a three-step procedure. First, we distinguish the processes generating belief so that their reliability in generating true belief is statistically predictable. Second, we assess the processes’ reliability, perhaps by observing how frequently they generate true nonmoral belief or logically inconsistent beliefs. Third, we adjust our credence in moral propositions in light of the truth ratios of the processes generating beliefs in them. This inferential route involves empirically discovering truths of the form (...) “Process P, which generates belief in moral proposition M, has truth ratio T", and using them to discover probabilities for moral propositions. The inferential route is noncircular, and progress along it is driven fundamentally by induction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.4 (2001) 527-531 [Access article in PDF] A Virgilian Crux: Aeneid 8.342-43 Neil Adkin When Evander conducts Aeneas around the future site of Rome, the objects of interest he points out to his guest include the following: "hinc lucum ingentem, quem Romulus acer asylum / rettulit, et gelida monstrat sub rupe Lupercal" (8.342-43). John Conington (1883, 119) complained that rettulit had "not been satisfactorily (...) explained." A century later, Gerhard Binder (1971, 118 with n. 27) repeated the complaint: "Über Vergils rettulit ist viel gerätselt worden." Binder's study was then followed by the unprecedented appearance of three different commentaries on this book of the Aeneid in three successive years. 1 None of them was however able to offer a satisfactory explanation of rettulit: the latest discussion of this passage is obliged to reiterate Conington's original complaint. 2 The purpose of the present article is to suggest a possible solution to this vexatious and long-standing crux.Servius Danielis was himself perplexed by this Virgilian passage, for which he felt the need to offer two alternative explanations: "retulit aut restituit aut nominavit" (Aen. 8.342). The second of these was accepted by Heyne (1833, 221: "retulit est appellavit"); however Conington rightly objected that there is no evidence for such a meaning of referre. The first exegesis proposed by Servius has on the other hand found widespread support. 3 It must however be pointed out that those who accept the equation of referre with restituere appear to have forgotten that the object of rettulit is not asylum, but lucum: while the "re-establishment" of an asylum makes excellent sense, the same can hardly be said of "re-establishing" a grove of trees. Servius himself detected an allusion to the asylum founded at Athens by the Heraclidae: "ideo ergo ait 'quod Romulus acer asylum retulit,' hoc est fecit ad imitationem [End Page 527] Atheniensis asyli" (Aen. 8.342). This interpretation of referre as signifying "to reproduce from a model" has similarly been widely accepted. 4 Such a construe is however open to the same objection that can be raised against restituere: while this rendering would have been admirably suited to asylum as direct object, the notion of "reproducing" a grove "from a model" is likewise far less satisfactory. 5 In support of both these explications it has been customary to adduce Aeneid 5.596-98: "hunc morem cursus atque haec certamina primus / Ascanius, Longam muris cum cingeret Albam, / rettulit." The supposed parallel is however illusory, since here referre simply governs a direct object, whereas in book 8 the same verb is instead employed in conjunction with the predicative apposition asylum. K. W. Gransden's commentary on this latter book (1976, 129) accordingly proposed the novel rendering "instituted as," which was however rejected by P. T. Eden's postscript (1986, 439) to his own commentary as "emphatically not a meaning of refero." Eden's commentary itself had taken rettulit as equivalent to reddidit. 6 This view that referre is here being used in the sense of "to render" had already been tentatively advanced by Conington himself; it too has received a certain measure of support. 7 In his latest contribution to the debate, however, Eden (1986, 440) changes his mind and instead adopts the unsatisfactory notion of Fordyce's commentary that rettulit signifies "reproduced from a model." Eden's reason for this volte-face is the following: "even if... the construction here of referre with a double accusative is an analogical imitation of reddere with the same construction, it cannot therefore also be presumed to share its meaning." Perhaps it is nonetheless possible to indicate how this objection of Eden's can be circumvented by a novel hypothesis which would at last appear to provide a key to this troublesomely enigmatic text. [End Page 528]Quintilian (Inst. 8.6.37) illustrates the rhetorical figure of metalempsis or transumptio with a reference to Odyssey 15.299 where thoos ("quick") is employed in the sense of oxus ("sharp"). Heinrich Lausberg (1990, 295) explains the figure as follows: "Die... (shrink)

Some philosophers (including Urmson, Humberstone, Shah, and Velleman) hold that believing that p distinctively involves applying a norm according to which the truth of p is a criterion for the success or correctness of the attitude. On this view, imagining and assuming differ from believing in that no such norm is applied. I argue against this view with counterexamples showing that applying the norm of truth is neither necessary nor sufficient for distinguishing believing from imagining and assuming. Then I argue (...) that the different functional properties of these mental states are enough to distinguish them, and that norm-application doesn't help us draw the functional distinctions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 368-370 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry, by David Bromwich; xvii & 256 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; $49.00 cloth, $16.00 paper. In his preface to this gathering of his essays and reviews on twentieth-century American and British poetry, David Bromwich regrets that it is "too late to suppress the (...) evidence of a critic educating himself in public" (p. xi). But even the earliest work reprinted in Skeptical Music--"The Making of the Auden Canon," published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1976, when the author was still a graduate student at Yale--hardly qualifies as juvenilia. Indeed, in Bromwich's case, evidence of a critic educating himself in public seems to have been suppressed from the start. No single explanation will account for an author's precocity, but the consistency of Bromwich's critical voice over the last quarter century is certainly related to his early preoccupation with William Hazlitt, the subject of his first book. In choosing Hazlitt as his model, Bromwich rejected what he took to be the legacy of systematic and professional literary theory extending from Coleridge to each new school of academic criticism. Bromwich's own development as a critic has therefore been subtler and more introspective than the critical retooling of so many of his colleagues. Although never far from the evaluative art of the reviewer, Bromwich has come to favor the more speculative dimension of his work. The more recent the piece, the more overt the attempt to imagine "what was in the poet's mind, or what was in the poem's mind, on the theory that certain thoughts and feelings are worth the trouble to characterize because of their strangeness and originality" (p. xi).Some of the most compelling chapters in Skeptical Music imagine what was in the poet's mind, or the poem's mind, by telling stories about complex relationships between poems by different poets--between the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, or T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane. These are stories about literary influence, or deep temperamental affinity. As in Harold Bloom's work, the stories are grounded in close readings, usually of the passages the critic prizes for their aesthetic superiority.A related procedure is at work in "Stevens and the Idea of the Hero"--a long speculative piece on Wallace Stevens's transfer of allegiance, at a crucial moment in his career, from the pragmatism of Nietzsche to the pragmatism of William James. What Stevens found "most persistently attractive" in Nietzsche's pragmatism, Bromwich coolly explains, was "the suggestion that the good of existence is change" and that "our most vivid acknowledgment of that good comes from the ability to imagine a life wiped clear of ourselves" (p. 71). But the Nietzschean sublime proved insufficient for Stevens. During the Second World War, the poet was confronted by "the reality of American soldiers going off to fight... for a cause which, as Stevens saw it, they could only make true by their fighting" (p. 68). Stevens turned to James for "the less brutal idea of a [End Page 368] man or woman who is made great by an enterprise in which others have a part" (p. 78).Bromwich's argument that Stevens became a more valuable poet when he located heroism in human solidarity, not just Nietzschean contingency and self-creation, bears a family resemblance to the work of one of James's heirs, Richard Rorty. Like Rorty, Bromwich often feels the pressure to adjudicate between the claims of the individual artist and the claims of the community; and like Rorty, he makes his judgements on a case by case basis, without recourse to a set standard, rule, or theory. In the closing chapter of Skeptical Music--"Is Taste Moral?"--Bromwich directly addresses the tension between aestheticism and the social good, a subject that also surfaces at the close of his preface and at numerous moments throughout the book. But the claims of the community seem relatively muted... (shrink)

This essay argues that there are theoretical benefits to keeping distinct—more pervasively than the literature has done so far—the psychological states of imagining that p versus believing that in-the-story p, when it comes to cognition of fiction and other forms of narrative. Positing both in the minds of a story’s audience helps explain the full range of reactions characteristic of story consumption. This distinction also has interesting conceptual and explanatory dimensions that haven’t been carefully observed, and the two mental state (...) types make distinct contributions to generating emotional responses to stories. Finally, the differences between the mental states illuminate how a given story can be both shared with others and at the same time experienced as personal. (shrink)

Are there basic religious certainties? That is, are there any beliefs which religious people legitimately hold without the need for rational justification? The question has been tackled, in different ways, by both Hinge Epistemologists and by Reformed Epistemologists. For the former, discussion has revolved around very general religious beliefs such as ‘God exists’ (e.g. Pritchard, 2000; Helm, 2001; Hoyt, 2007; Ariso, 2020). Reformed Epistemologists, like Alvin Plantinga, argue that Christian theism and particular Christian beliefs are ‘properly basic’ in that ‘I (...) don’t believe them on the basis of any other propositions’ (Plantinga, 1981, p. 42). In this paper I want to do two things. First, I give an account of what basic religious certainty is from a Wittgensteinian, Hinge Epistemology point of view. On this account I will argue that the clearest examples of basic religious certainties are found in local, historical and more narrow expressions of religious belief, as opposed to the very general acontextual religious beliefs usually discussed. Secondly, I challenge the Reformed Epistemological notion that Christian doctrine can be ‘properly basic’, mainly by showing that the New Testament writers did not treat very general religious beliefs, such as ‘God exists’ or God is good’, as properly basic in either the Hinge or Reformed Epistemological ways. I will conclude by drawing out some implications for contemporary Christian epistemology. (shrink)

Asconius 63 , commenting on the pro Cornelio: Fuerunt enim plures Quinti Metelli, ex quibus duo consulares, Pius et Creticus, de quibus apparet eum non dicere, duo autem adulescentes, Nepos et Celer, ex quibus nunc Nepotem significat. Eius enim patrem Q.Metellum Nepotem, Baliarici filium, Macedonici nepotem qui consul fuit cum T. Didio, Curio is de quo loquitur accusavit … Cicero and his scholiast refer to ‘duo Metelli, Celer et Nepos’ but like Asconius do not specify their relationship. Celer himself, followed (...) by Cicero in correspondence with him, calls Nepos his frater, but since both bore the praenomen Q., this cannot be the whole story. Celer's career shows that he was the elder, yet Nepos senior, according to Asconius, entrusted his feud with Curio not to him but to Nepos iunior. (shrink)

Artist Leonid Filatov. Kakimi raznorodnymi talantami on odaren! YArkij kinorezhisser. Blistatel'nyj parodist. Skazochnik. I vse, chto on delal - pechal'noe i mudroe - na radost' nam. Ego poeziya sozdaet obrazy dushevnoj zhizni lyudej, nepohozhih drug na druga, dazhe protivostoyaschih drug drugu. Eto svojstvo istinnogo iskusstva. Komedijnaya p'esa po motivam bessmertnogo romana Dyuma otkryla nam esche odnu storonu ego darovanij.

I Should like to draw attention to two little-known inscriptions of republican senators; both men deserve notice in that each of them may illustrate the early stages of the recruitment of provincial senators, from Transpadane and Narbonese Gaul respectively.

Sisenna Historiarum lib. iii: Lucium Memmium, socerum Gai Scriboni, tribunum plebis, quern Marci Livi consiliarium fuisse callebant et tune Gurionis oratorem … . Erat Hortensius in bello primo anno miles, altero tribunus militum, Sulpicius legatus; aberat etiam M. Antonius; exercebatur una lege iudicium Varia, ceteris propter bellum intermissis; cui frequens aderam, quamquam pro se ipsi dicebant oratores non illi quidem principes, L. Memmius et Q. Pompeius, sed oratores tamen, teste diserto utique [Jahn: MSS. uterque] Philippo, cuius in testimonio contentio et (...) vim accusatoris habebat et copiam. Reliqui qui turn principes numerabantur in magistratibus erant cotidieque fere a nobis in contionibus audiebantur …. (shrink)