Wittgenstein's remarks on mathematics have not received the recogni tion they deserve; they have for the most part been either ignored, or dismissed as unworthy of the author of the Tractatus and the I nvestiga tions. This is unfortunate, I believe, and not at all fair, for these remarks are not only enjoyable reading, as even the harshest critics have con ceded, but also a rich and genuine source of insight into the nature of mathematics. It is perhaps the fact (...) that they are more suggestive than systematic which has put so many people off; there is nothing here of formal derivation and very little attempt even at sustained and organized argumentation. The remarks are fragmentary and often obscure, if one does not recognize the point at which they are directed. Nevertheless, there is much here that is good, and even a fairly system atic and coherent account of mathematics. What I have tried to do in the following pages is to reconstruct the system behind the often rather disconnected commentary, and to show that when the theory emerges, most of the harsh criticism which has been directed against these re marks is seen to be without foundation. This is meant to be a sym pathetic account of Wittgenstein's views on mathematics, and I hope that it will at least contribute to a further reading and reassessment of his contributions to the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this articles.From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. by Julian Bourg.After the Deluge: New Perspectives on the Intellectual and Cultural History of Postwar France. Edited by Julian Bourg.The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin. Edited by George Crowder and Henry Hardy.The Task ofCriticism: Essays onPhilosophy, History, and Community. Edited by Joseph P. Fell, Vincent Colapietro, and Michael J. McGandy.Blackness and Modernity: the Colour ofHumanity and the Quest For Freedom. by Cecil Foster.The Meaning ofIdeology: (...) Cross‐Disciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Michael Freeden.What is Military History? by Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic.Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. by Daniel Martin Varisco. (shrink)

This comprehensive introduction presents the fundamentals of symbolic logic clearly, systematically, and in a straightforward style accessible to readers. Each chapter, or unit, is divided into easily comprehended small bites that enable learners to master the material step-by-step, rather than being overwhelmed by masses of information covered too quickly. The book provides extremely detailed explanations of procedures and techniques, and was written in the conviction that anyone can thoroughly master its content. A four-part organization covers sentential logic, monadic predicate logic, (...) relational predicate logic, and extra credit units that glimpse into alternative methods of logic and more advanced topics. (shrink)

This paper is one of the four interrelated action agenda papers resulting from the National Summit on Public Health Legal Preparedness convened in June 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multi-disciplinary partners. Each of the action agenda papers deals with one of the four core elements of public health legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities; competency in using those laws; coordination of law-based public health actions; and information. Options presented in this paper are for consideration by (...) policy makers and practitioners — in all jurisdictions and all relevant sectors and disciplines — with responsibilities for all-hazards emergency preparedness.Advancing and protecting the public's health depends upon the coordination of actions by many, diverse partners. For effective public health preparedness, there must be effective coordination of legal tools and law-based strategies across local, state, tribal, and federal jurisdictions, and also across sectors such as public health, health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, community design, and academia. (shrink)

In the last five years, a number of U.S. companies have either moved their locus of incorporation to countries with more favorable tax laws, or announced such moves. Given this trend toward “inversions”, and the polemics that have accompanied it, we offer two ways in which the ethics of such a move can be evaluated. We provide multinational executives with two applications of ethics to inversion: Kant’s deontological theory and the consequentialist perspective of utilitarianism.

The power of technology to transform religions, science, and political institutions has often been presented as nothing short of revolutionary. Does technology have a similarly transformative influence on societies’ morality? Scholars have not rigorously investigated the role of technology in moral revolutions, even though existing research on technomoral change suggests that this role may be considerable. In this paper, we explore what the role of technology in moral revolutions, understood as processes of radical group-level moral change, amounts to. We do (...) so by investigating four historical episodes of radical moral change in which technology plays a noteworthy role. Our case-studies illustrate the plurality of mechanisms involved in technomoral revolutions, but also suggest general patterns of technomoral change, such as technology’s capacity to stabilize and destabilize moral systems, and to make morally salient phenomena visible or invisible. We find several leads to expand and refine conceptual tools for analysing moral change, specifically by crystallizing the notions of ‘technomoral niche construction’ and ‘moral payoff mechanisms’. Coming to terms with the role of technology in radical moral change, we argue, enriches our understanding of moral revolutions, and alerts us to the depths of which technology can change our societies in wanted and unwanted ways. (shrink)

This collection of essays examines the ways in which disputes and controversies about the application of scientific knowledge are resolved. Four concrete examples of public controversy are considered in detail: the efficacy of Laetrile, the classification of homosexuality as a disease, the setting of safety standards in the workplace, and the utility of nuclear energy as a source of power. The essays in this volume show that debates about these cases are not confined to matters of empirical fact. Rather, as (...) is seen with most scientific and technical controversies, they focus on and are structured by complex ethical, economic, and political interests. Drs. Engelhardt and Caplan have brought together a distinguished group of scholars from the sciences and humanities, who sketch a theory of scientific controversy and attempt to provide recommendations about the ways in which both scientists and the public ought to seek more informed resolutions of highly contentious issues in science and technology. Scientific Controversies is offered as a contribution to the better understanding of the roles of both science and nonscientific interests in disputes and controversies pertaining to science and technology. (shrink)

To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

Carol Gilligan has identified two orientations to moral understanding; the dominant justice orientation and the under-valued care orientation. Based on her discernment of a voice of care, Gilligan challenges the adequacy of a deontological liberal framework for moral development and moral theory. This paper examines how the orientations of justice and care are played out in medical ethical theory. Specifically, I question whether the medical moral domain is adequately described by the norms of impartiality, universality, and equality that characterize the (...) liberal ideal. My analysis of justice -oriented medical ethics, focuses on the libertarian theory of H.T. Engelhardt and the contractarian theory of R.M. Veatch. I suggest that in the work of E.D. Pellegrino and D.C. Thomasma we find not only a more authentic representation of medical morality but also a project that is compatible with the care orientation's emphasis on human need and responsiveness to particular others. (shrink)

This article analyses the accusation of nihilism that F. H. Jacobi made against Fichte in a letter of mars. 1799, imputation that lays on the personal conception ofJacobi about the reason as a negative capacity which only can destroy its objects. The letter in question implicates two different types of nihilism: a)The cosmological one, accepted by Fichte and named acosmism by him. It is only a reformulation of the sensible world from practical principIes, but doesn't suppose an annihilation or scorn (...) of this world. Qn the contrary, the religious view, for example, shows the world as a manifestation of godlite and, hased on moral exigencies, doesn~t admit the existence of death. Of course, the immortality isn't for a particular soul but for the order of moral actions (= God). b) The radical one, which doesn't exist in Fichte and lays on a bad interpretation of bis intellectual intuition assumed from a point of view next to Schelling. (shrink)

The paper proposes to integrate literary studies in consciousness research to develop a strong ethical and existential dimension in the field. More specifically, it considers the value of fictional narrative for developing concepts of selfhood and personal identity that cohere with the reductionist explanations of human consciousness and self in modern empirical consciousness research. My central claim is that looking to the literary representations of human consciousness and existence that reject or are free from conventional essentialist ideas of self, agency, (...) and anthropocentrism can help 'normalize' the reductionist scientific descriptions of humans and reduce their psychologically and socio-culturally disruptive impact. The paper uses Virginia Woolf's The Waves as an example, showing how the novel's non-anthropocentric and non-essentialist conceptions of self and consciousness overlap with materialist theories in neuroscience and -philosophy but present these in a distinctive narrative framework and poetic terms that bring out the inherent emancipatory potential of the materialist explanation of human existence and offer the reader the possibility of relating to these experientially and emotionally. (shrink)

In this paper the cognitive, cultural, and linguistic bases for a pattern of conventionalization of two types of iconic handshapes are described. Work on sign languages has shown that handling handshapes and object handshapes express an agentive/non-agentive semantic distinction in many sign languages. H-HSs are used in agentive event descriptions and O-HSs are used in non-agentive event descriptions. In this work, American Sign Language and Italian Sign Language productions are compared as well as the corresponding groups of gesturers in each (...) country using “silent gesture.” While the gesture groups, in general, did not employ an H-HS/O-HS distinction, all participants used iconic handshapes more often in agentive than in no-agent event descriptions; moreover, none of the subjects produced an opposite pattern than the expected one . These effects are argued to be grounded in cognition. In addition, some individual gesturers were observed to produce the H-HS/O-HS opposition for agentive and non-agentive event descriptions—that is, more Italian than American adult gesturers. This effect is argued to be grounded in culture. Finally, the agentive/non-agentive handshape opposition is confirmed for signers of ASL and LIS, but previously unreported cross-linguistic differences were also found across both adult and child sign groups. It is, therefore, concluded that cognitive, cultural, and linguistic factors contribute to the conventionalization of this distinction of handshape type. (shrink)

[E.H. Gombrich wrote on May 13, 1975:] . . . I recently was invited to talk about "Art" at the Institution for Education of our University. There was a well-intentioned teacher there who put forward the view that we had no right whatever to influence the likes and dislikes of our pupils because every generation had a different outlook and we could not possibly tell what theirs would be. It is the same extreme relativism, which has invaded our art schools (...) and resulted in the doctrine that art could not possibly be taught because only what has been done already can be taught, and since art is creativity it is not possible to teach it. Q.E.D.—I recently asked my history finalists what "Quod erat demonstrandum" means and they did not know. . . . [Quentin Bell responded on May 15, 1975:] . . . Your teacher at the Institute, is he really a relativist? Isn't he a kind of religious zealot? I used to teach school children. With me there was a much better teacher . One day she came into the room where I had been teaching and found a series of the most surprising and beautiful water colours. "What are these?" said she. I explained that they were copies of Raphael made by eleven and twelve year old children. I would have gone on to explain how interested I was by their resemblance, not to Raphael but rather to Simone Martini, for they had all the shapes beautifully right but none of the internal drawing or the sentiment, but I was checked by her look of horror. "You've made them copy from Raphael?" she said. Her expression was exactly that of someone who had been casually informed that that I had committed a series of indecent assaults upon the brats. And in fact in subsequent conversation it appeared that this was very nearly what she did feel. For her, what she called "self expression" was as precious as virginity. E.H. Gombrich was director of the Warburg Institute and Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition at the University of London from 1959 to 1976. His books include The Story of Art, Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Norm and Form, Symbolic Images, The Heritage of Apelles, and In Search of Cultural History. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1960, a Commander of the British Empire in 1966, and was knighted in 1972. He is also a trustee of the British Museum and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Notes and Exchanges" ,"Standards of Truth: The Arrested Image and the Moving Eye" , and, with Quentin Bell, "Canons and Values in the Visual Arts: A Correspondence" . Quentin Bell is professor of the history and theory of art, Sussex University. He has written Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Of Human Finery, Ruskin, Victorian Artists and Bloomsbury. Other contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Art Critic and the Art Historian" , "Notes and Exchanges" , and "Bloomsbury and 'the Vulgar Passions'". (shrink)

A volume in Educational Leadership for Social Justice Series Editor Jeffrey S. Brooks, University of Idaho, Denise E. Armstrong, Brock University; Ira Bogotch, Florida Atlantic University; Sandra Harris, Lamar University; Whitney H. Sherman, Virginia Commonwealth University; George Theoharis, Syracuse University The purpose of this book is to examine and learn lessons from the way leadership for social justice is conceptualized in several disciplines and to consider how these lessons might improve the preparation and practice of school leaders. In particular, (...) we examine philosophy, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, public policy, and psychology. Our contention is that the field of educational leadership might consider taking a step backward in order to take several forward. That is, educational leadership researchers might re-examine social justice, both in terms of social and individual dynamics and as disciplinary-specific, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary phenomenon. By adopting this approach, we can connect and extend long-established lines of conceptual and empirical inquiry and thereby gain insights that may otherwise be overlooked or assumed. This holds great promise for generating, refining, and testing theories of social justice in educational leadership and will help strengthen already vibrant lines of inquiry. That is, rather than citing a single, or a few, works out of their disciplinary context it might be more fruitful to situate educational leadership for social justice research in their respective traditions. This could be carried out by extending extant lines of inquiry in educational leadership research and then incorporating lessons gleaned from this work into innovative practice. For example, why not more clearly establish lines of educational leadership and justice research into the Philosophy of Social Justice, Economics of Social Justice, Political Studies of Social Justice, Sociology of Social Justice, Anthropology of Social Justice, and the Public Policy of Social Justice as focused and discrete areas of inquiry? Once this new orientation toward the knowledge base of social justice and educational leadership is laid, we might then seek to explore some of the natural connections between traditions before ultimately investigating justice in educational leadership through a free association of ideas as the worlds of practice and research co-construct a "new" language they can use to discuss educational leadership. Such an endeavor may demand reconceptualization of both the processes and products of collaborative research and the communication of findings, but it will demand a breaking-down of methodological and epistemological biases and a more meaningful level and type of engagement between primary and applied knowledge bases. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AQUINAS ON THE EVALUATION OF HUMAN ACTIONS WILLIAM H. MARSHNER Christendom College Front Royal, Virginia AMONG THE questions dealt with in the Prima Secundae are those of what moral goodness "is" and on what basis it is attributed to some human actions but denied of others. Aquinas's answers are currently a matter of contention between the proportionalists and their critics, as is his answer to the question of (...) how human actions are classified. The presentation in the Prima Secundae does give rise to problems, thanks in part to Aquinas's pedagogical procedure. That procedure can be described as bit-by-bit exposition. Rather than set forth his whole view of a topic in one place, in a synthesis of some sort, and applying it piecemeal thereafter as subsequent questions may demand, the Common Doctor keeps his whole view back, exposing no more of it than is needed to resolve the particular issue at stake in a given article. The result of this, quite often, is that qualifications crucial to a fair comprehension of what he holds are scattered over places far removed from each other. Because what he holds on the classification and evaluation of human actions consists of several parts, each complicated, and all connected, his solution is unsuited to bit-by-bit exposition. Genuine doubts as to what the parts are, and how they come together, can arise. The purpose of the present paper is to present a synthesis that lets the whole picture emerge; as it emerges, certain attempts to read Aquinas in a manner supportive of the proportionalist position will be shown to conflict with the design of the whole. In his preface to qq. 18-20 in the Prima Secundae, Aquinas 347 348 WILLIAM H. MARSHNER describes their subject matter as the goodness or badness (bonitas vel malitia) of human actions. These abstract nouns are derived from the corresponding adjectives, "good" and "bad," and the very first thing Aquinas tells us (in the first sentence of q. 18, a. 1) is that "good" and "bad" are to be asserted of human actions in the same way as they are asserted of other things.' So how is that? A BACKGROUND TOPIC: 'GOOD' AND 'BAD' IN GENERAL If one should take up any item at all-an apple, a shoe-and say that the item is good, would one be purporting only to describe it as it is, or would one be purporting also to evaluate it in light of how it ought to be? Differently posed, does a proposition of the form "x is good" represent a product of speculative reason alone, or does it include an element, at least, from practical reasoning? Recent analytical philosophy is quite clear that the latter option is correct. "Good" and "bad" are terms which express evaluation rather than some sort of disinterested, theoretical description. 2 Aquinas can be read, at least, as holding the same view. In a text in which he defined a completely general sense of "good" (more general, for example, than just "human good"), he said: ratio boni est quod aliquid sit appetibile.3 To make out what this dictum means, two remarks are in order. First, the ratio of a term "T" is the reason anything is called T. Aquinas identified it as the aspect of things which the mind grasps and signifies through "T."4 He meant the aspect which would be "what it takes" for a thing to merit or verify the term, in case the term is applied to it. Thus the ratio of "good" is what it takes for 1 Respondeo dicendum quod de bono et malo in actionibus oportet loqui sicut de bono et malo in rebus.... ' The analytical philosophers derive a portion of their clarity on this issue from the celebrated remarks of David Hume on the difference between "is" and "ought": A Treatise on Human Nature, III, i,l. 3 See ST I, q. 5, q. 1. corpus, and many other places. Aquinas often quoted Aristotle's definition of "good" as what all things seek or tend toward (appetunt); the Stagirite's text is in the Nicomachaean Ethics, book I, chapter 1. 4 Ratio enim significata per... (shrink)

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of (...) the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language. (shrink)

In this APA blog, I appeal to two 2020 cases of algorithms gone wrong to motivate philosophical attention to algorithmic oppression. I offer a simple definition, then describe a few of the ways it is engendered. References and extends work by Safiya Noble, Cathy O'Neil, Ruha Benjamin, Virginia Eubanks, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Michael Kearns & Aaron Roth.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Logic Pamphlets of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related PiecesIrving H. AnellisFrancine F. Abeles, editor. The Logic Pamphlets of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Related Pieces. The Pamphlets of Lewis Carroll, 4. New York-Charlottesville-London: Lewis Carroll Society of North America-University Press of Virginia, 2010. Pp. xx + 271. Cloth, $75.00.Until William Bartley’s rediscovery and reconstruction of Dodgson’s lost Part II of Symbolic Logic, Lewis Carroll’s reputation in logic, (...) when taken seriously, rested upon his few published articles on logical paradoxes and puzzles, while his published books, The Game of Logic and Symbolic Logic, were regarded as suitable perhaps as pedagogical tools, but dismissed otherwise as amusements, on a par with the Alice works. Richard Braithwaite asserted (“Lewis Carroll as Logician”) that “Carroll regarded formal and symbolic logic not as a corpus of systematic knowledge about valid thought nor yet as an art for teaching a person to think correctly.” He suggested that Dodgson used his pseudonym for his popular and whimsical writings, reserving his legal name only for his serious mathematical products. Philosophers practicing linguistic analysis in their assault on nonsense deriving from misuse of language meanwhile developed an interest in Carroll (e.g. George Pitcher, “Wittgenstein, Nonsense, and Lewis Carroll”). Abeles, on the contrary, stresses the seriousness of Dodgson’s pedagogical and popularizing mission (195–99).Bartley’s discovery opened the door for reevaluating Dodgson as a serious logician, and Abeles has been in the forefront of that reevaluation. Her general introduction and introductions to the main divisions of this collection of Carroll’s publications (and additional material from his Nachlass and a handful of publications of others, composed in response to Carroll’s published articles) place his serious logical work and its significance in historical perspective, providing a deeper, more sophisticated view than found in Bartley’s “Editor’s Introduction” to Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic. Abeles also offers brief introductions to the individual entries, which describe their physical characteristics and circumstances of composition.Dodgson aligned with the majority of those British logicians of his day, starting with George Boole, who understood formal logic to be Aristotelian syllogistic, and symbolic logic to be syllogistic logic expressed algebraically. His notational innovation was employing indices to terms so that, independently of the arrangement of terms, propositions could easily be read; thus, “xy0” can be read as “no x are y” or “no y are x” and “x1y0” as “all x are not y” or “no x are y”. In dealing with the classical elimination problem in the class calculus—to determine the maximum information, without duplications, obtainable from a given set of premises—Dodgson in his later work and unpublished letters anticipated several concepts of automated theorem proving.Central to both geometry and to formal logic are the rules of logical inference that establish the validity of arguments and guarantee that conclusions inferred from true [End Page 506] premises are true. The modern analytic tableaux, or tree method, is a fundamental tool in this regard, both for deriving theorems and for determining the validity or invalidity of the proofs for propositional calculus and first-order predicate calculus.Introducing his reconstruction of Part II of Symbolic Logic, Bartley noted that, along with the logic diagrams that Carroll devised, he also devised a tableau method that strongly resembled Beth’s semantic tableaux. Abeles went more deeply and convincingly into that resemblance in her earlier research. Beth’s tableaux, together with Hintikka’s model sets, were the direct ancestors of Smullyan’s analytic tableaux, which in turn are the theoretical basis for the Robinson resolution method that continues to be central to much work in programming logic.Abeles has also shown that the work in Studies in Logic by Charles Peirce and his logic students at Johns Hopkins University served as a source of inspiration for Dodgson. More critically, she demonstrated that Dodgson devised and employed the tree method for carrying out proofs of syllogisms and chains of syllogisms, or soriteses, in Part II of Symbolic Logic (see her “Lewis Carroll’s Method of Trees: Its Origins in Studies in Logic,” Modern Logic 1 [1990]: 25–34). The tree... (shrink)

For years, the collection of DNA samples from individuals arrested for criminal misconduct has been advocated by police officials and endorsed by politicians. Louisiana, Virginia, California, and South Dakota have adopted laws to add DNA profiles derived from these samples to their DNA databases. Texas provides for DNA to be taken after indictment but before conviction. Although the U.S. Department of Justice initially shied away from the issue, the DNA Fingerprint Act of 20055 authorizes the collection of DNA from (...) individuals arrested for violations of certain federal criminal laws, and the inclusion in the national DNA database of all profiles from states that type DNA prior to conviction.But are these laws constitutional? In an article in a previous issue of this journal, and reprinted in this issue, Professor Tracey Maclin concludes that fidelity to precedent should lead the Supreme Court to strike down the Louisiana and Virginia laws as violations of the Fourth Amendment. (shrink)

Fully automated vehicles (AVs) hold promise toward providing numerous societal benefits including reducing road fatalities. However, we are uncertain about how individuals’ perceptions will influence their ability to accept and adopt AVs. The 28-item Automated Vehicle User Perception Survey (AVUPS) is a visual analog scale that was previously constructed, with established face and content validity, to assess individuals’ perceptions of AVs. In this study, we examined construct validity, via exploratory factor analysis and subsequent Mokken scale analyses. Next, internal consistency was (...) assessed via Cronbach’s alpha (α) and 2-week test–retest reliability was assessed via Spearman’s rho (ρ) and intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). The Mokken scale analyses resulted in a refined 20-item AVUPS and three Mokken subscales assessing specific domains of adults’ perceptions of AVs: (a)Intention to use; (b)perceived barriers; and (c)well-being. The Mokken scale analysis showed that all item-coefficients of homogeneity (H) exceeded 0.3, indicating that the items reflect a single latent variable. The AVUPS indicated a strong Mokken scale (Hscale= 0.51) with excellent internal consistency (α = 0.95) and test–retest reliability (ρ = 0.76, ICC = 0.95). Similarly, the three Mokken subscales ranged from moderate to strong (rangeHscale= 0.47–0.66) and had excellent internal consistency (range α = 0.84–0.94) and test–retest reliability (range ICC = 0.84–0.93). The AVUPS and three Mokken subscales of AV acceptance were validated in a moderate sample size (N= 312) of adults living in the United States. Two-week test–retest reliability was established using a subset of Amazon Mechanical Turk participants (N= 84). The AVUPS, or any combination of the three subscales, can be used to validly and reliably assess adults’ perceptions before and after being exposed to AVs. The AVUPS can be used to quantify adults’ acceptance of fully AVs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hercules Cross-dressed, Hercules Undressed: Unmasking the Construction of the Propertian amator In Elegy 4.9Sara H. LindheimVain trifles as they seem, clothes have, as they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.—Virginia Woolf, OrlandoPropertius begins 4.9 with his version of the story of Hercules and Cacus that he adapts from Virgil’s recently published (...) Aeneid. 1 Once he has recovered his stolen cattle, slain the monstrous, thieving Cacus and founded the Forum Boarium, the Propertian Hercules feels an overwhelming thirst. He hears the laughter of women and follows the sound to a grove in which the worship of the Bona Dea is taking place. Arriving on the threshold of the sanctuary, he pleads for some water from the spring he hears inside the grove, citing his heroic deeds as credentials for admittance. When his request achieves no immediate results, however, he considers that perhaps the women hesitate to open their sanctuary to a strong hero. He then offers a second self-presentation, this time telling how he once dressed as a woman and served Omphale, queen of Lydia. When the high priestess denies him entrance, reminding him that men, by religious prescription, cannot look upon the rites, Hercules gains access to the grove violently, drinks the spring dry, and announces that the Ara Maxima which he establishes 2 will forever exclude women from worship.The poem purports to offer a myth of origins for the Ara Maxima. Indeed, in the opening elegy to his fourth and final poetic collection, the poet proclaims his desire to dispense with love and to concentrate [End Page 43] instead on aetiology. Subscribing to Callimachean poetics, he will now compose aetiological verse on Roman subjects. Yet a second voice threatens the unity of the poet’s declaration, suggesting a second and incompatible thematic focus. Even as Propertius proclaims his bold, new stance, Horos the astrologer interrupts, insisting on the poet’s inability to leave behind themes of erotic elegy. 3 The programmatic elegy never resolves the tensions between the two poles of the bipartite agenda, promising that warring interests will haunt the elegies in the fourth book.It comes as no surprise, therefore, that antithetical arguments surface in poem 4.9. I argue that the tension animating the poem emerges from its two competing discourses about gender identity. An exploration of the three stories about the hero in the poem—the opening account offered by the poet, as well as the two self-defining, yet contradictory, narratives that Hercules weaves, in which he presents himself first as a great masculine force and then as the cross-dressed servant of Omphale—suggests the ephemeral nature of “real” gender identity. Considering briefly a modern theoretical model of cross-dressing, I examine Propertius’ own manipulation of transvestism to categorize gender, on the one hand, as a fluid construction, a social performance. On the other hand—and here lies the poem’s tension—a second, antithetical argument also emerges from the poem, which insists on the possibility of assigning persons to a specific gender category based on firm, stable criteria. When the priestess reads Hercules as man, and when the hero ultimately differentiates himself from woman by establishing male-only worship at the Ara Maxima, gender becomes essential or biological. The question I want to pose is: why do these discourses stand side by side, and what kind of synthesis between them ultimately materializes? Finally, I suggest that this debate about gender reaches beyond poem 4.9. By constructing Hercules so that the hero comes to represent, on an exaggerated scale, the Propertian amator, who himself vacillates between “masculine” and “feminine” identities, Propertius invites the reader to see a similar tension in the poet’s first three books of elegies. Thus, towards the end of his poetic career, the poet issues a reconsideration [End Page 44] of the portrait of the lover/poet in light of the questions elegy 4.9 raises about gender identity.While some might consider that to seek out, within ancient texts, whether gender appears essential or constructed in nature reveals an... (shrink)