This article discusses the way the ancient Greeks dealt with public and private debts, focusing on one specific aspect: debt cancellation. On the one hand, ancient Greeks were aware of the risks entailed in debt relief as a tool for fuelling civic strife: sources describe it as a demagogic or even criminal action often in association with the political agenda of tyrants. On the other hand, however, Greeks knew well also the benefic effects of debt (...) cancellation in coping with financial and political crisis. In late accounts of archaic history, debt relief is the solution to civic strife and the foundation act of political order. Some public decrees of the Hellenistic period attest debt relief as a communal decision of the polis, dictated by the necessity of preventing or solving ongoing or imminent crises. This second meaning and purpose of debt cancellation should perhaps urge us to reconsider from a different perspective the “politics of debt” in today’s Europe. (shrink)

Why should the work of the ancient and the medievals, so far as it relates to nature, still be of interest and an inspiration to us now? The contributions to this enlightening volume explore and uncover contemporary scholarship's debt to the classical and medieval past. Thinking About the Environment synthesizes religious thought and environmental theory to trace a trajectory from Mesopotamian mythology and classical and Hellenistic Greek, through classical Latin writers, to medieval Christian views of the natural world (...) and our relationship with it. The work also offers medieval Arabic and Jewish views on humanity's inseparability from nature. The volume concludes with a study of the breakdown between science and value in contemporary ecological thought. Thinking About the Environment will be a invaluable source book for those seeking to address environmental ethics from a historical perspective. (shrink)

"Hegel's debts to ancient philosophy are widely acknowledged by scholars, and by the philosopher himself. Roughly half of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy is devoted to ancient philosophy, and throughout his work Hegel frequently frames his positions in relation to the thinkers and movements of antiquity. This volume presents original essays from leading scholars dealing with Hegel's debts to ancient thinkers, as well as his own, often problematic readings of ancient philosophy. While around half (...) of the chapters discuss Hegel's treatment of Aristotle--a topic that has long been at the forefront of scholarship--the other half explore his relationship to such ancient figures as Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, Sextus Empiricus, and the Stoics. The essays challenge a number of longstanding scholarly assumptions regarding, for example, Hegel's denigration of the "mythical," his developmentalist approach to ancient thought, his conception of the state in relation to the Greek polis, his "hermeneutic" of the Platonic dialogues, and his use of Aristotelian concepts in arguments concerning the psyche, the body, and their unity and distinction.?"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This essay review of Margaret Atwood's Payback shows how the book's accomplishment is to provide a Jungian analysis of the “shadow” of wealth: the primitive meanings attached to debt deriving from ancient cultural configurations of a proper balance in the order of things. Debt is conceived in terms of social obligations, of guilt and sin, of revenge, and as a plot that structures the narrative of human life. Instead of simply looking to the archaic meanings of (...) class='Hi'>debt for its shadow side, this review attempts to take stock of what the recent credit crisis can teach us about the place of debt in our lives. It is a question of seeking out shadows that belong specifically to our global financial system, rather than belonging to ways of accounting order, honor, and revenge from a repressed past. If financial institutions, governments, businesses, and individuals were all exposed to high levels of debt, to whom was all this wealth owed? How does the shadow of debt affect economic behavior? Since debt forms the basis of further lending, debt increases through a multiplier effect without corresponding assets, which leads to an unstable system of virtuous or vicious cycles, and debt takes over some of the social, practical, and theoretical functions formerly held by God. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation of Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education to Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, particularly by examining the connection between the concepts of “play” and “appearance” in Schiller’s thought. The paper points out parallels between the two thinkers which remain unacknowledged in Gadamer’s critique of Schiller. The first main section of the paper examines the notion of play in Schiller, pointing out that Schiller conceives of play in a medial voice, much as Gadamer does. The second section directly takes (...) on Gadamer’s claim that Schiller’s notion of aesthetic appearance sunders art from truth, by arguing that Schiller conceives of appearance as a mode of truth. (shrink)

This paper explores Benjamin’s and Adorno’s materialist critique of the philosophy of history as a metaphysical fiction which harbors and shields the barbarism at the heart of culture. Each undertakes a radical critique of ontological, future-oriented notions of temporality and history, proposing instead a political understanding oriented to the past for the sake of the present or, more precisely, for the sake of actively resisting the persistent barbarism. The more culture insists on its progress beyond barbarism, the more it claims (...) to have overcome the past, the more insidious and invidious are its forms of oppression. I follow the consequences of Benjamin’s emphasis on the nihilism constitutive of philosophy of history by analyzing his claim that even the dead are not safe from the threat of annihilation. Second, I argue that Adorno’s radical critique of a culture and politics oriented toward the future, or rather to overcoming the past, constitutes an active resistance to the insidious barbarism at the heart of democracy. (shrink)

For some years, Matthew Meyer has labored at a comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche’s oeuvre that understands his philosophical and literary output as a revival of a particularly Greek mode of thought. This volume represents the culmination of much, but not all, of this previous work, and it serves also as a promise of future work in the same vein. The title, Reading Nietzsche Through the Ancients, is therefore a trifle misleading: Meyer is not reading all of Nietzsche through all the (...) ancients, but only some of Nietzsche through some of them. That is all for the good, so far as I am concerned, since I am usually suspicious of ambitions to resolve Nietzsche’s debt to antiquity in a single... (shrink)

Part One. In our strife to express the meanings of moral terms, we have neglected the one transparently built?in meaning: ?A man ought to keep his promises? could mean ?A man owes it to other men to keep his promises. Such is his debt and duty ? just what is due or owed?. This proposal is supported by the evidence of major languages of the world, ancient and modern, in all of which identical or closely related words serve (...) to express both the idea of material debt and that of moral obligation. But on study the revealing model and analogue of ?moral debt? is found, not in debts of exchange, the simplest and most obvious class of debts, but in debts of shared responsibility. Working from such models we conclude that ?A ought to do X? means X is part of A's share in the cost of the good community, the common cause and stake of all mankind? (shrink)

This collection of papers is equally rich in its range of subject matter and variety of approaches. Based on a conference held at Manchester, UK in 2004, it has made excellent use of the recent flowering of texts and discussions of Greek and Latin letters. It specifically acknowledges our common debt to M. B. Trapp's fine anthology, Greek and Latin Letters, with its substantial analytical introduction and eighty texts drawn from all periods, each with translation and commentary, to which (...) we can add Patricia Rosenmeyer's monograph, Ancient Epistolary Fictions, C. D. N. Costa's collection of translated Greek Fictional Letters, and now Bagnall and Cribiore's collection, Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt. (shrink)

The argument set out here provides a new understanding of the methods followed by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio for depicting the monuments of classical antiquity—in both his drawings and the plates of his seminal architectural treatises, the Quattro libri dell’architettura. It accepts the now-established view that Palladio’s early studies were frequently copied from the drawings of previous practitioners, but it reasons that his later output was also heavily dependent on past achievements. This is contrary to the claims Palladio made (...) in the Quattro libri, which contend that his drawings were based on surveys he had carried out himself, and to the confirmatory presumptions of modern-day scholars. The article first examines the ancient temples Palladio illustrated in the treatise, and observes that they have numerous features that are unsupported by the archaeological record but are also seen either in Palladio’s earlier copy drawings or in the graphic works of his predecessors or contemporaries. Secondly, it considers Palladio’s drawings of bath complexes, which remained unpublished only because of his death, noting that some of them are still reckoned to be invaluable and reliable records of then-accessible remains that Palladio was able to inspect but no longer exist. The conclusion here, however, is that his reconstructions were again based on earlier surveys that he judged dependable, but which he often then adapted and adjusted in line with his personal preferences. The article then continues with a discussion of his probable debts to older architects such as Michele Sanmicheli and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, and his relationship with his contemporary Pirro Ligorio, whose drawings are often markedly similar to Palladio’s. It concludes by considering whether Palladio’s coverage of ancient architecture reveals the extent of such knowledge at the midpoint of the sixteenth century. (shrink)

The political philosopher Leo Strauss is famous for contending that any synthesis of reason and revelation is impossible, since they are irreconcilable antagonists. Yet he is also famous for praising the secular regime of liberal democracy as the best regime for all human beings, even though he is well aware that modern philosophers such as Spinoza thought this regime must make use of biblical morality to promote good citizenship. Is democracy, then, both religious and secular? Strauss thought that Spinoza was (...) contradictory in teaching that reason and revelation should be separated from each other while also insisting that a secular democratic politics still requires the biblical morality of charity. The paradox that liberal democracy is both religious and secular, which is central to Spinoza, was dismissed by Strauss as a Machiavellian subterfuge or the cynical attempt to use religion for political purposes. In order to adhere to his dualistic separation of reason and revelation, Strauss turned to ancient Greek political philosophy, particularly the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, as the true ground of liberal democracy since this classical tradition was never exposed to biblical revelation. Yet, the illiberal and hierarchical implications of Greek political thought, which clash with Strauss’s modern views on human individuality and dignity, ultimately take him back to the biblically based philosophies of Spinoza and Kierkegaard, who teach the paradox that the Bible is the true foundation of human freedom. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:110 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY History of Aesthetics, Vol. I. Ancient Aesthetics. By Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. J. Harrell. Trans. Adam and Ann Czerniawski. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-352.) History of Aesthetics, Vol. II. Medieval Aesthetics. By WladySlaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. C. Barrett. Trans. R. M. Montgomery. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-315.) These two volumes of Tatarkiewicz' monumental history (...) of aesthetics, the third volume (to 1700) of which is now being prepared for press, have been reviewed already in the major aesthetic journals in Europe and America following their publication in Polish. Since Polish is not one of my languages, I can say nothing about the adequacy of the (rather obscured) translators and their work. The editors of both volumes have done their difficult work thoroughly, though the usual inconsistencies of spelling and such creep in. British spellings of judgement, centre, and colour, for example, appear in one part of a volume, while center, color, and judgment appear in another part. These are rare and not at all irksome details. On p. 220 of volume I, Aristotle has become a Stagiryte (sic). If the editors and translators actually re-checked all of those Greek, Polish and English texts--to say nothing of the Latin--they have earned a very large debt indeed. Again, my selective ignorance eliminates me from assessment. Tatarkiewicz' historical writing is surgical and Lacon-like. His major achievement lies in refraining from philosophical animadversions and for sticking strictly to his topic, no matter how tempting the theoretic distractions. Actually one expects a history of aesthetics to find the locus of aesthetic theory in the usual systematic frameworks of outstanding philosophers, but again Tatarkiewicz knows better than to try to provide these settings. His device is to stay exactly with the texts of authors, and to provide as much evidence for his statements as a printed work will allow. His scholarship is truly prodigious, and the work will live as reference for a long time to come. But it is more than a reference. There are some remarkable novelties included that bear mention. First of all, Tatarkiewicz' opening analysis of what must be included in a history of aesthetics is penetrating and convincing. In addition to the major "dualities" of aesthetics (beauty-art, subjective-objective aesthetics, psychological-sociological aesthetics, descriptive-prescriptive aesthetics, etc.) he simply accepts the necessity to find evidence of aesthetic history among statements by artists, among the inexplicit and inarticulate art works, in the vox populi and cultural actions of people. Thus the "evidence" he adduces will often displease the theoretical purist. Next, one is impressed by the great antiquity of some key issues that are being avidly pursued today. What is impressive is not that they are being repeated now, but that modern writers so rarely recognize (or acknowledge) their historical sources---or seem to care to. A careful study of this history might do much to reduce the growing volume in aesthetics----or at least to change the direction of emphasis significantly. One is surprised to note which figures emerge as of first rate importance in the history of aesthetics, important for different reasons. These figures stand out: Democritus, Plotinus, Aristotle, Vitruvius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Johannes Scotus Erigena, to select only a few. The first Polish philosopher, Vitelo, anticipates much modern psychologizing in advancing the work of Alhazen. Ockham, not so surprising, contributes major advances, as do Augustine and Aquinas. BOOK REVIEWS 111 One fascinating item is the author's extensive account of the most violent and extended controversy in the history of aesthetics---the veneration of images and the disputes between the Iconoclasts and the Iconophiles. This sometimes physical battle raged for over 100 years! The Byzantine society, obviously, took art seriously. Tatarkiewicz' great labor is an object lesson in historiography and bibliographic technique. At one and the same time it demonstrates how much of value remains to be discovered by careful adherence to the detail of scholarship, while it also displays how much fruitful scholarship depends upon a brilliant and profoundly informed mind. Such a work, in short, could only have descended from a fully mature... (shrink)

The idea that Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato is simplistic and inaccurate. Much of modern and contemporary epistemology owes a debt not so much to Platonism or Aristotelianism as to their antithesis: scepticism. Recent discussions in the history of philosophy have sparked a great deal of interest in the ancient sceptics, but until now they have been misunderstood and the significance of their philosophy not fully appreciated.

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 134-178.

"Ever since Vlastos' "Theology and Philosophy in Early Greek Thought," scholars have known that a consideration of ancient philosophy without attention to its theological, cosmological and soteriological dimensions remains onesided. Yet, philosophers continue to discuss thinkers such as Parmenides and Plato without knowledge of their debt to the archaic religious traditions. Perhaps our own religious prejudices allow us to see only a "polis religion" in Greek religion, while our modern philosophical openness and emphasis on reason induce us to (...) rehabilitate ancient philosophy by what we consider the highest standard of knowledge: proper argumentation. Yet, it is possible to see ancient philosophy as operating according to a different system of meaning, a different "logic." Such a different sense of logic operates in myth and other narratives, where the argument is neither completely illogical nor rational in the positivist sense. The articles in this volume undertake a critical engagement with this unspoken legacy of Greek religion. The aim of the volume as a whole is to show how, beyond the formalities and fallacies of arguments, something more profound is at stake in ancient philosophy: the salvation of the philosopher-initiate."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Epicurus’ debt to Democritus’ metaphysics is obvious. Even where Epicurus feels the need to modify Democritus’ metaphysics because of its skeptical or fatalist implications, he is working within Democritus’ general framework. The situation is quite different in ethics. Ancient critics of Epicurus claim that the Cyrenaics’ hedonism is the inspiration for his ethics, and in modern times, Epicurus’ ethics is usually viewed in the context of Aristotle’s eudaimonism.

Education is increasingly vocational and structured to serve the ongoing exponential increase in economic growth. Climate change is an outcome of these same economic values and praxes. Attempts to shift these values and our approach to technology are continually absorbed and overcome by the pressing motif of economic growth. In this article, Ruth Irwin uses Martin Heidegger's concept of the technological enframing of modernity to view economic growth. John Maynard Keynes's notion of economic growth has impacted the pace of consumerism (...) that now permeates every aspect of knowing about the world we live in. Irwin asks us to think through technological enframing anew by looking to an early mechanical Greek artifact, the Antikythera mechanism, which depicts a cyclical notion of time used by ancient cultures to define the rhythm of economic productivity. The earth-centric cosmos embodied by this mechanism helped the Mesopotamian economy stay within the parameters of the local ecology and demonstrates that cyclical economic growth may enable a civilization to maintain a steady state over time and survive for millennia. An earth-centric cosmology creates a different set of values, one that emphasizes the need to regulate the pace of consumerism rather than allowing it free rein “as by an Invisible Hand.” The role of education in this exploration is twofold: first, it is a pivotal site for cultural exploration and transformation; and second, the expectations of the state strictly limit the forms education can take, so that as long as promoting economic growth defines state expectations, education will remain subservient to these values. If we aim to overcome climate change, Irwin concludes, we need to transform the expectations for education from society as well as from teachers. (shrink)

David Konstan argues that the term philia, in Aristotle, represents an elective, affective relationship, and not, as many scholars have maintained, a relation of mutual obligation, like that of kinship, with no necessary affective element; in addition, he disambiguates two senses of philia, one corresponding to “love”, the other designating the reciprocal affection characteristic of friendship.

Louisa Shea explores modernity's debt to Cynicism by examining the works of thinkers who turned to the ancient Cynics as a model for reinventing philosophy and ...

Schelling’s 1794 commentary on the Timaeus makes extensive use of Plato’s Philebus, particularly the principles of limit and unlimited. In this article, we demonstrate the resonances between Schelling’s 1794 treatment of the metaphysics of the Philebus and his 1798 philosophy of nature. Attention to these resonances demonstrates an underexplored but important debt to Plato in Schelling’s philosophy of nature. In particular, Schelling is indebted to Plato’s late metaphysics in his model of the iterative combination of two basic principles: a (...) productive, positive principle, akin to Plato’s unlimited, and a limiting, negative principle, akin to Plato’s limit. In Schelling’s philosophy of nature, the iterative interaction of these principles both provides a common ground for and accounts for the differences between inorganic and organic nature. (shrink)

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), author of the Essays (published in successive, revised and expanded editions from 1580 until after his death), deserves to be recognized as the first) philosophic architect of modern liberalism, that is, a doctrine that advocates the advancement of individual liberty (under law), and consequently a reduction in the scope and purpose of government to securing what are represented by Montaigne’s successors (Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and the American Founders) as people’s inherent rights to their life, liberty, property, (...) and the “pursuit of happiness” as they conceive it. His outward, periodic professions of extreme conservatism and of homage to the Catholic Church are merely a rhetorical cover designed to protect the author from being persecuted (and his book from being banned). As a practitioner of what he describes as esoteric rhetoric (attributing it to the ancient political philosophers), Montaigne invites careful readers to see through his rhetorical concealment by noting how his conservative professions are undermined by the overall train of his reasoning and argument. Although Montaigne’s argument for liberal individualism may have gone too far in its influence over the long run (that is, the 21st century), we citizens of modern liberal regimes owe him a debt of gratitude for helping to liberate us from the reign of arbitrary monarchs, oppressive aristocrats, and clerical oppressors. (shrink)

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own (...) class='Hi'>debt to him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 70-75. cartography of ghosts . . . And as a way to talk . . . of temporality the topography of imagination, this body whose dirty entry into the articulation of history as rapturous becoming & unbecoming, greeted with violence, i take permission to extend this grace —Akilah Oliver from “An Arriving Guard of Angels Thusly Coming To Greet” Our disappearance is already here. —Jacques Derrida, 117 I wrestled with death as a threshold, an aporia, a bandit, (...) a part of life. —Akilah Oliver Moraine in geological lingo is that which is left behind. Moraine- a euphemism for the de-stabilizing referent of the writer-ly body as a “troubled and troubling landscape marked by cultural and historical signifiers, the body as flesh memory [...] the body as transitory” (Oliver, Author Statement). Moraine— a geological metaphor of the poet as a holder of memory, as an accumulation of rocks and debris carried along the edge, terminal, dropped at the foot of language (in language). “Flesh Memory” according to Akilah Oliver is "that which my body recalls [...] everything has to do with the task of remembrance and its narrative reinvention [...] I was always translating an idea of the world as it presented itself at any given time. To write was a choice about how to be seen, how to enter the world as translator, actor, participant, in the dialogues that apparently made the real 'real'" (Levitsky). Flesh. Memory. The stuff some poems are made from. The stuff that gets abandoned, gleaned, and picked up by more flesh and memory. "My body, my life has always felt like a kaleidoscopic rip in the dominant fabric [...] has always been a dialogue with the impossible and the apparent” (Levitsky). The impossible-body or poet's body anticipates and performs (through language) an irretrievable death. IN APORIA I realized everything I must have been doing must have been Death. It was Christmas or Labor Day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million’ or ‘going to die’.” — Andy Warhol I’m trying on egos, [a justification for the planet’s continuance]. Oh hello transgressor, you’ve come to collect utilitarian debts, humbling narrative space. Give me condition and wheatgrass, I his body disintegrating. I his body is ossification. Death my habit radius, yeah yeah. I his body can’t refuse this summons. I can’t get out this fucking room. Tell me something different about torture dear Trickster. Tell me about the lightness my mother told me to pick the one i love the best how it signals everything I ever wish to believe true just holy on my ship. I jump all over this house. this is it [what I thought is thought only, nothing more deceptive than]: I his body keeps thinking someone will come along, touch me. As like human or lima bean. I’m cradling you to my breast, you are looking out. A little wooden lion you & Peter carve on Bluff Street is quieting across your cheekbone. Not at all like the kind of terror found in sleep, on trembling grounds. It is yesterday now. I have not had a chance to dance in this century. Tonight I shall kill someone, a condition to remember Sunday morning. To think of lives as repetitions [rather than singular serial incarnations]. To understand your death is as exacerbating as trying to figure out why as schoolchildren in mid-nineteen-sixties Southern California we performed reflexive motions: cutting out lace snowflakes, reading Dick and Jane search for their missing mittens, imagining snow. Disintegrat ing . The -ing gerund catapults from the non-finite verb into past, present, future. The -ing as a tail pinned to death, a dog spinning to bite and never fully reaching itself, always shy of the end, circumreferential; a double copulative: deathing. Possessively AO calls it “habit radius” (a virtual fetish attribute) or an inescapable death presence that “confronts us with the paradox of an unattainable object [...] through it’s being unattainable” (Agamben, 27). A flirtation or dialogue with an unknowable thing and aporia utilized as investigative instrument to engage (death) while (in Southern California) we “perform reflexive motions,” cut lace snowflakes, imagine snow, and pay rent like “yeah, yeah” what else is new. And this too, fiction. The book I wish to right. The restored fallen, heroic. Did you expect a different grace from the world? Or upon exit? I’m working on “tough.” They think I am already. All ready. Who is the dead person? Is "I'm sorry" real to a dead person? Browning grass. My hands on this table. A contentious century. A place to pay rent. Redemptive moments. Am I now the dead person? Dead person, dead person, will you partake in my persimmon feast? The body inside the body astounds, confesses sins of the funhouse. I too have admired the people of this planet. Their frilly, orderly intellects. The use they’ve made of cardamom, radiation as well. How they’ve pasteurized milk, loaned surnames to stars, captured tribes, diseases, streets, and ideas too. The living-body as archive: is it possible to experience the living-body as archive without a (kind of) death? Sifting the rubble, rummaging through hoarded debris, skin sheds, memory-napping, and re-awoken (in flesh and) on terrain. “An investigative poetics seeks to unravel staid communities of thought and grasp at what might always be just beyond reach; a poetics of inquiry that lies between language as meaning, and language as rapturous entry into the world of posited ideas and idealism”( Levitsky). Something snaps. Lights blow out prior to embarking upon an investigative poetics. It begins with a question (often a sexy aporia) that leads to openings. "Every politics of memory [...] implies an intervention of the state. It's a state that legislates and acts with regard to the nonfinite mass of materials to be stored, materials which must be collected, preserved” (Derrida & Stiegler, 62). It seems poetic investigation already contains the potentiality of an (invisible) archive if the writer is “always writing” especially when not. Here’s my stupid digital romantic inclination: the living-body (of a poet) is a self-sustaining archive of non-finite memories. But not even I really believe that. AO innovated and sculpted an investigative poetic praxis. In a conversation with poet Rachel Levitsky, poetic-voice is viewed not as a precious identifier, but as a means to think through/about form, concluding that form is linked to framing. While poetic-voice may have tendency to precede form, it also erupts as a result of framing techniques. “They are frames that hold the shape of thinking (which is also to say of imagining) [...].”7 This reminds me of my rabbit who symmetrically chewed the corners of his hutch, which makes me wonder if it’s an expression of the shape of some animal anxiety tick I won’t ever have access to. Beyond the form/frame, death is an unoriginal yet unique limit; death is a damn deathless thing. It functions as a source of poetic investigation; that thing always “just beyond reach.” And how is death not a fetish (in this case an obsessive reverence for something non-material)? “Insofar as it [death] is a presence, a fetish [...] it is in fact something concrete and tangible; but insofar as it is the presence of an absence, it is, at the same time, immaterial and intangible, because it alludes continuously beyond itself to something that can never really be possessed [...] The fetish is [...] a sign of an absence, it is not an unrepeatable unique object; on the contrary, it is something infinitely capable of substitution, without any successive incarnations ever succeeding in exhausting the nullity of which it is the symbol” (Agamben, 33). AO utilized absence (the absent body [catapulted by the death of a beloved]) as an apparatus to investigate. In the process of conversing with absence or that which is absent, the absent body is affectionately objectified, incessantly summonsed back to a place of recognition, of objects, a desire for the absent body to remain intact while exiting the structural limits of grammar and syntax by moving into chant forms “to say what cannot be said” (Levitsky). from AN ARRIVING GUARD OF ANGELS THUSLY COMING TO GREET dear oluchi- the light is blinking rapidly on the black boxy machine. your room seems bigger than before and i am still planning to read some of those robert jordan books of yours. yesterday at the used bookstore where i was browsing the mysteries to “stall reality” (they are really not mysteries at all, they just employ death as the plot mistress but are unable to grasp its mystery at all)—well the point is, things were calm down here for a while and the world was little. i want to be big like you. or i want you not vast, not dead, not gone, but human small and here. i am so selfish. that is what i really want. to see you again. to oil your scalp. to hear you walk in the door, say ma i’m home . give me a chance to say welcome home son. or when leaving, don’t forget your hat . what do you wear out there? i wish you could have taken your new shoes with you. i’m so proud of you. i’m sorry for the way you died. i miss you all the time. even before, i missed you. out there, one time, some different men said: “shake for me girl, i wanna be your backdoor man.” who dat you love. 5/18/03 A letter-poem in sixteen lines “dear oluchi-” is safe-housed in epistolary form. Poetic voice is rendered as internal thought meanderings, a not-so-much confession, private/(pillow?) talk in the desire to be heard/witnessed by the referent and reader with an intent to absolve. The diminutive “i” bears a relation to poet Fanny Howe’s “little g God” in that “One of the (many) things I like about little g God is that you can have a vodka tonic while you talk to little g God, sing along to Bowie’s “I’m Afraid Of Americans,” and hum Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” though maybe not all at the same time” (Oliver, 2009). Towards the middle of the poem AO is at a used bookstore and remarks on the funny employment of death as a ‘plot mistress’ that ‘they’ (the dubious employed mystery authors) are ‘unable to grasp’, thereby giving death a mouthpiece, a modeling job, something to do to pass the time. from THE VISIBLE UNSEEN When I first saw graffiti, I recognized in it an ugly aesthetic, a dialectics of violence, a distortion of limbs, a hieroglyph. It was only later when I read the names of the dead that I then saw the path of ghosts charted there; its narrative of loss for the visible unseen whose place in history has been fictionalized and rendered unseen under the totalizing glare of history. Inscriptions, traces, specters. Graffiti begs a public face just as ghosts require non-ghosts (humans) to sense them. The “visible unseen” is a game of hide-and-seek between public viewer and graffiti-inscriber, an ephemeral-violent aesthetic on an ephemeral-policed canvas. Graffiti-inscribers already submit to being forgotten, expect to be washed away; perhaps it’s a holy urban mandala created by gangster-type monks without Buddhism. [...] in its refusal to disappear it forces a discourse in the public imagination we are forced to see what we would rather not, to make sense of an encoded language that we cannot read on the level of meaning. it irritates, forces its agency on us, speaks outside and beyond semiotic reach. An epic font-size pervading the public’s imagination, illegible, I could just close my eyes, remain passive, drive past, abandon it beyond reach, push it further away beyond death walls. In Barcelona I watched a clean up crew wash walls with an awesome water hose but I was more intrigued by their bodies; not a distortion of limbs, not hieroglyph but also not entirely legible; the laboring body permanently erasing specters of the city, and of course they knew it was also an invitation for the ghosts to return. Graffiti is death’s little sister, is also an aporia. [...] Graffiti (fr GK -graph(os), something drawn or written, to diagram or chart) attempts to stage the impossible: to erase the essence of its own subjectivity. Graffiti is a cartography of ghosts, a mapping of elegiac rapture (the transporting of a person from one place to another, as in heaven) and rupture (the state of being broken open.) Dwelling is a fiction stasis. [...] The notion of the past as being something done with, a look-back event, inhibits the possibility of reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture. If graffiti posits history as always in the process of becoming undone. [...] Because what is the body, if not also a complex temple, an unstable site through which to negotiate subjects, materiality, economies, gods, and modes of representations? The site where we are all already belated. Graphein meaning “to write.” “Derrida says every archive makes a law, and the law of genre is its own rupture” (Bloch, 39). However, graffiti is an (non/anti)-archive of erasure due to (the politics of) washing out its subjectivity, which only adds onto (or is symptomatic of) its character. The inhibition of “reading graffiti as rapture, as rupture” is partly due to it being a “look-back” event in that it’s process involves scratching through layers to reveal previous specters underneath. Graffiti (as an ancient genre) has always been a thing of ‘becoming undone’, and therefore ‘belated and always in arrival’ (Levitsky). It’s a Dionysian activity done at night with it’s back turned toward us. "The specter [...] is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood [...] appearing for vision, to the brightness of day [...] something becomes almost visible which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates in a night light" (Derrida & Stiegler, 115). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christ in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus by Andrew Hofer, O.P.Lewis AyresChrist in the Life and Teaching of Gregory of Nazianzus. By Andrew Hofer, O.P. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xi + 270. $105.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-19-968194-5.Fr. Andrew Hofer has written a cleverly conceived treatise on Gregory Nazianzen, one whose main focus is Gregory’s vision of his own life (and the life of Christians (...) more generally) as both imitatio Christi and participatio Christi. Hofer grounds his account of this imitatio and participatio in Gregory’s core dogmatic account of the person of Christ. The book thus offers us a study, focusing on one central author, of the ways in which a Nicene Christology could shape and stimulate (as well as be shaped and stimulated by) an account of the Christian life.The first chapter is an extended meditation on the nature of the “word” in Gregory. Here, Hofer begins by exploring how Gregory situates himself in the ancient battle—or at least the ancient literary topos of such a battle—between philosophy and rhetoric. Not surprisingly, Hofer emphasizes that Gregory sees himself as a philosopher, but one for whom the Christian life offers the true form of a philosophical life. The discussion then turns toward ways in which Gregory sees the Scriptures as providing a basis for discussing and modeling virtually all aspects of the Christian life. Hofer offers a little discussion of the manner in which Gregory adapts ancient rhetorical traditions of, for example, the paradeigma (see 44), but these debts are acknowledged mostly en passant.The second chapter takes us to the heart of the book and does an excellent job of setting up the author’s theme. Considering Gregory’s poetic auto-biographical [End Page 314] writing, Hofer argues that Gregory not only “blends Christ into the troubles, fears, and joys of his own life” but that he also “makes present the baptismal mysteries of one’s life immersed in Christ’s life” (56). In chapter 5, this extra dimension will receive a foundation in an account of the ways in which Gregory sees Christians drawn into the very events of Christ’s life (156-60, commenting particularly on Gregory’s Or. 40). There, Hofer emphasizes that Christ’s life is itself “a mimesis of ours” (160), creating realities that may be models for ours, models into which we are then drawn. But, in chapter 2 itself, Hofer’s main concern is to show the sheer variety of ways in which Gregory interweaves the scriptural account of Christ’s life and ministry with his own. This complex set of reference styles is termed Gregory’s “autobiographical Christology.”Chapter 3 pursues this agenda by turning to the ways in which Gregory uses the terminology of “mixture” to describe Christ—and to describe Christ’s relationship to Christians. It is this chapter that Stanley Hauerwas, were he endorsing the book, would say is “worth the price of the book alone.” Two things are particularly noteworthy. The first is the helpful discussion of the philosophical traditions that lie behind the terms Gregory uses. Hofer wishes us to take seriously traditions of thought on this theme that run between Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias, rather than to place most weight on the Stoic tradition. Hofer advocates for his thesis in a sensitive fashion, emphasizing the difficulty in distinguishing distinct traditions in late antiquity. Second, there is much to be learned from the manner in which Hofer stretches discussion of Christ himself as “mixture” so that it provides insight into Gregory’s account of the Christian’s relationship with Christ.Chapter 4 follows a similar pattern, showing that a discussion of Christ’s person in Gregory’s writings (in this case, the famous sequence epp. 101, 102, and 202) has repercussions for wider themes. This chapter is less successful, in large part because of the sheer scale of the exercise attempted by Hofer. The largest section of the chapter (123-47) offers an extended discussion of Gregory’s ep. 101. This famous letter gives an extended critique of Christological error. Hofer begins by situating... (shrink)

In order to clarify the objectives of bankruptcy, to reveal the true essence of bankruptcy procedure and the origin of legal terms, it is necessary to ascertain the nature of this institute of law, as well as the reasons for its creation and development. This article provides historic analysis of the development of the institute of bankruptcy procedure. For this purpose, a historic comparative research is undertaken in the article, in order to find certain parallels of bankruptcy procedure under Roman (...) law and the modern bankruptcy procedure. Roman law has been chosen as the most phenomenal ancient law for the purposes of undertaking a historic analysis of the development of bankruptcy procedure. In the authors’ opinion, it it the best example that reveals the origin of bankruptcy procedure, and the reasons for its formation. Analysis of certain private law institutes of Roman law enables the authors to conclude that the main features (principles) of the bankruptcy procedure formed precisely under Roman law: replacement of personal liability by pecuniary; public auction as a form of realization of debtor’s property; transition from selling of debtor’s property as a whole to disposal of property in divided property units; creation of subject, who administers auctions of debtor’s property under oath not to act in selfish purposes; setting of a term of 30 days, during which a debtor has to cover the debts (claims’ dispute resolution); establishment of the institute of informing creditors about initiated procedures of debt retrieval and encouragement to join these procedures; establishment of the ban to recover debts from household items; laying of the foundations of the institute of peace agreement between the debtor and his creditors; establishment of actio Pauliana - a remedy for the protection of creditors rights. The mentioned rules in one way or another eventually have been transferred to legal acts on legal relations in case of bankruptcy of many foreign countries. (shrink)

This book investigates the thought of two of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, Plato and his predecessor Anaxagoras, with respect to their metaphysical accounts of objects and their properties. The book introduces a fresh perspective on these two thinkers' ideas, displaying the debt of Plato's theory on Anaxagoras's, and principally arguing that their core metaphysical concept is overlap; overlap between properties and things in the world. Initially Plato endorses Anaxagoras's model of constitutional overlap, and subsequently develops qualitative overlap. (...) Overlap is the crux to our understanding of objects participating in Forms in Plato's metaphysics; of Plato's account of relata without relations; of the role of Forms as causes; of the metaphysics of necessity; and of the role of the Great Kinds and of the paradeigma in the development of Plato's thought. Anna Marmodoro argues that Plato is ground-breaking in the history of metaphysics, in different ways from those acknowledged so far, and with respect to more metaphysical questions than had been hitherto appreciated; e.g. Plato's treatment of structure as property; of complexity; and his introduction of the first ever account of metaphysical emergence. In addition to these results, Marmodoro makes Anaxagoras's and Plato's systems philosophically accessible to us, today's philosophers, by applying conceptual tools from analytic metaphysics to the study of ancient metaphysics. In this way, the book brings Anaxagoras's and Plato's ideas to bear on todays' philosophical discussions and opens up new venues of research for current philosophical discussions. (shrink)

In the concluding section of Twilight of the Idols, entitled "What I Owe the Ancients," Nietzsche tells us that his debt to the Greeks has little to do with Greek philosophy. Plato is portrayed as simply a step toward Christian moralism, and Nietzsche states more generally that "the philosophers are the decadents of Greek culture" (TI "Ancients" 3).1 In contrast, he remarks that "my recreation, my preference, my cure from all Platonism has always been Thucydides" (TI "Ancients" 2). This (...) esteem for Thucydides is found throughout Nietzsche's published works and notes, without the counterbalance of even a single critical remark.2But what exactly does Nietzsche owe Thucydides? Some elements of that debt are clear .. (shrink)

Modern moral and political philosophy is in debt with natural law theory, both in its ancient and mediaeval elaborations. While the very notion of a natural law has proved highly controversial among 20th Century scholars, the last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in it. Indeed, the threats and challenges as result of multiculturalism, plural societies and global changes have generated a renewed attention to natural law theory. Clearly, it offers solid basis as possible framework to a better (...) understanding of human goods without contradictions and partial bias. The purpose of the present volume is to provide an overview of the history of this concept (Cicero, St. Paul, Aquinas, Melanchthon, Montaigne, Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Burke, Kant, MacIntyre, etc.) as well as a deep understanding of ongoing research, both in Europe and in America. Furthermore, the specificity of these studies will be of particular value to philosophers, law-philosophers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and theologians, and those concerned on such issues as the relation between law and moral norm, law and practical reason, and the presence of the idea of natural law in several prominent thinkers. It includes a selected bibliography on natural law. The book also provides an excellent introduction to several of the major topics in natural law theory making it useful both as a reference text and as a sourcebook for academics alike. Natural law is a rich, complex, and highly disputed term. Since its first appearances in the history of Western civilization, it has been used both to point to God as the source of the moral order and to assert that there is an objective order of justice in nature that men and their laws ought to respect. In modern times, natural law theory gave birth to what we usually call "human rights." Unlike the meaning of the term, the importance of an ongoing debate on natural law and on the theories related to it is undisputable. This is why I welcome today this new collection of essays edited by Alejandro Nèstor Garcìa Martìnez, Mario Å ilar and Josè M. Torralba. Natural Law: Historical, Systematic and Juridical Approaches includes a wide variety of studies, covering key authors and issues in natural law theory. Younger students will appreciate the clarity of the chapters, and more trained readers the detailed and accurate bibliographical references that each of them offers. The editors's choice to go from a historical approach to contemporary theories, and then to theoretical and more practical issues is also commendable. Students in philosophy and in legal theory will greatly benefit from this book. Fulvio Di Blasi, author of God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas. (shrink)

I examine the kind of alliances and ironic crossing of borders that constitute an ecofeminist subjectivity by appeal to a postcolonial literary imagination and ahistorical philosophical argumentation. I link the theoretical insights of a modern short story “Bestiality” with a concept of “congenital debt” found in the ancient Vedic corpus to suggest a notion of ecological selfhood that transforms into the idea of a “gift community” to encompass nonhumans as well as people on the fringes of society, but (...) without the usual problems associated with such a two-pronged extensionism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AN OBSERVATION ON ROBERT LAUDER'S REVIEW OF G. A. McCOOL, S.J.1 RoMANus CEssARro, O.P. Dominican House of Studies Washington, District of Columbia BECAUSE OF HIS scholarly commentary on the development of Roman Catholic theology in the 19th and 20th centuries, students interested in the history of this period owe a debt of gratitude to Fr. Gerald McCool, S.J. In a recent issue of this journal, Robert Lauder presented (...) a clear and sympathetic account of two major works, in which McCool identifies and evaluates the figures and currents that he considers of central importance for a proper understanding of Roman Catholic intellectual life from before the First Vatican Council (1869-70) to after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).2 On Lauder's account, McCool records in these books " the movement within Thomism from its reliance on the commentators Cajetan and John of St. Thomas and the strong influence of hard-line Dominican Thomists such as Garrigou-Lagrange to the transcendental Thomism of Rahner and Lonergan" (p. 308). In his most recent study, From Uniity to Pluralism, McCool concentrates on the work of Joseph Marechal, Pierre Rousselot, Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson. Lauder believes that " McCool correctly cites these four thinkers as the key to Thomism's movement towards a greater openness to other thought patterns" (p. 308), but regrets that McCool failed to go further and provide " a detailed 1 See Robert E. Lauder, "On Being or not Being a Thomist," The Thomist 55 (1991): 301-319. 2 Gerald A. McCool, S.J., Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method and From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989). The first volume was originally published as Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Centur31 (New York: The Seabury Press, 1977). 701 702 ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. discussion of the presence of St. Thomas's insights in the thought of Rahner and Lonergan... the two most influential Catholic thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century" (p. 318). Apart from this reservation, which even Lauder considers " a backhanded compliment " (p. 318), I observe no point either at which Lauder takes issue with how McCool narrates the history of Catholic theology from roughly the middle of the 19th-century to the present or where he suggests alternative approaches for interpreting the significance of the individuals and events that figure prominently in McCool's narrative. In his Foreword to T. M. Schoof's A Survey of Catholic Theology 1800-1970, Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx warned its readers against making the book " a kind of ' theological canonisation ' of the theologians mentioned to the exclusion of others." 3 I would like to sound a similar note of caution with respect to McCool's version of the history of Thomism. For while I share Lauder's appreciation of McCool's careful scholarship, I am not at all convinced that McCool has uncovered the whole story, nor that his interpretation of the events which he chronicles warrants the lavish praise that Lauder bestows on it. In particular, I suggest that Lauder uncritically adopts McCool's attitude towards certain Dominican theologians who, even though they remain little known in the English-speaking world, still contributed to the upbuilding of theological culture entre les deux guerres. For example, in From Unity to Pluralism, McCool describes the Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as a "conservative " Thomist (p. 212), which, in the context of the narrative as McCool relates it, sounds more like ideological pigeonholing, than an honest attempt to describe adequately what a philosopher such as Kenneth Schmitz recently referred to as the "structured" Thomism of Garrigou-Lagrange.4 In the same s T. M. Schoof, A Survey of Catholic Theology 1800-1970, Foreword by Edward Schillebeeckx (New York: Paulist Newman Press, 1970), p. 4. 4 In the first lecture, " In the Beginning : New Paths for Ancient Teachings " of the 1991 McGivney Lecture Series entitled "At the Center of the Human Drama: The Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II." The four lectures will be published by The Catholic University of America Press. ROBERT LAUDER'S REVIEW OF G. A. MCCOOL, S.J. 703 manner, McCool talks about... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World by Laura M. HartmanDavid CloutierThe Christian Consumer: Living Faithfully in a Fragile World LAURA M. HARTMAN New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 256 pp. $29.95Laura Hartman has written an elegant, graceful, and gentle book about a topic often inspiring jeremiads: consumer society. Setting out to provide “an effective and explicitly practical ethics of consumption” (5), she develops an ethical (...) language that goes beyond sociological generalizations about “consumerism.” She structures her study by engaging ancient and contemporary theological sources to discuss “four primary considerations” (21): avoiding sin, embracing creation, loving the neighbor, and envisioning the future. Each represents a “node” of “theological reflection: sin, creation, love, and the reign of God” (25). In each area, she is unusually careful to point out the limitations of any one consideration without the others. Avoiding sin, for example, can become “a self-focused pursuit of holiness” (52); embracing creation can ignore justice concerns or, worse, lead to prosperity theology. Such limitations are less apparent when considering the final two areas. In loving the neighbor, the challenge is balancing considerations between close and distant neighbors. Finally, Hartman makes an impassioned case for Sabbath-keeping and Eucharist as practices of our destined eschatological fullness, even while recognizing that an overemphasis on these can lead to escapism and bickering over “vague and idiosyncratic” differences among Christians (167). By attending to all four notions, Hartman is able to offer a much richer picture of the conceptual field in which our consumption choices should be made. A closing chapter imagines a dinner conversation among three of her frequent interlocutors, Shannon Jung, Elizabeth Theokritoff, and James Nash, as well as applying the concepts to concrete choices of transportation and meat-eating.The book goes a long way toward its stated goal. Hartman has a skillful grasp of the complexities of both contemporary consumption practices and theological description. She displays a remarkably generous attitude toward a variety of voices, engaging positively figures as disparate as the severe abolitionist John Woolman and the prosperity televangelist Creflo Dollar. Her generosity works well; I can imagine this book being especially effective with students or church groups who might be alienated by a stronger anticonsumerism screed. As a work [End Page 247] of constructive ethics, though, the generosity leaves open a lot of questions. Hartman describes her methodology as “using a blend of methods,” owing some debts to “principalism” and to virtue ethics, explaining her four considerations “as diverse lenses on one holistic vision of virtuous consumption” (28). The four “considerations” are described as “not principles” but “actions that produce virtue” or “a school of virtue” (27)—neither are they moral rules, despite their being phrased in the form of verbal commands to action. This methodological looseness enables her to voice multiple harmony lines, which “form a chorus of perspectives on consumption” (5). But this approach can slip from generosity to vagueness. How does one determine what is off-key? The application section seems to have difficulty adjudicating particular actions; there is in effect a nonrational “weighing” that goes on, one that sometimes seems to reduce to a consideration of (incommensurable) competing consequences.The project could be furthered in two ways. First, Hartman could consider some way of ordering the considerations—not strictly ordinally but rather, for example, by recognizing that avoiding sin is a prelude to a proper embrace of creation and that creation is ordered to communion. The sequencing of her chapters hints at such an ordering, but she does not make use of it. While not reducing everything to love of God and neighbor, certainly sin, creation, and even eschatology point to this telos. Second, Hartman could go further in developing the language of virtue—for example, temperance and prudence—as a way of specifying more clearly what both avoiding sin and embracing creation mean. But her template is a valuable orientation to further needed work on this important topic. It should find a wide audience. [End Page 248]David CloutierMount St. Mary’s UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Medieval and early modern Jewish philosophers developed their thinking in conversation with various bodies of literature. The influence of ancient Greek – primarily Aristotle (and pseudo-Aristotle) – and Arabic sources was fundamental for the very constitution of medieval Jewish philosophical discourse. Toward the late Middle Ages Jewish philosophers also established a critical dialogue with Christian scholastics. Next to these philosophical corpora, Jewish philosophers drew significantly upon Rabbinic sources (Talmud and the numerous Midrashim) and the Hebrew Bible. In order to (...) clarify the unique as well as shared elements in the thought of medieval Jewish philosophers, we will begin this chapter with a brief study of some early Rabbinic sources on the purpose of the world, i.e., why it came to be and why it is sustained in existence. In the second part of this chapter, we will study Maimonides’ critique of the veracity and usefulness of the belief in (anthropocentric) teleology, and the critical reception of his views by later philosophers. The third part will address discussions of divine teleology in Kabbalistic literature. Our exposition will concentrate mostly on a specific early-eighteenth-century text that is one of the most lucid and rigorous presentations of Lurianic Kabbalah. The fourth and final section will elucidate Spinoza’s critique of teleology, its precise target and scope, and its debt to earlier sources discussed in this chapter. (shrink)

What is sin? Is it simply wrongdoing? Why do its effects linger over time? In this sensitive, imaginative, and original work, Gary Anderson shows how changing conceptions of sin and forgiveness lay at the very heart of the biblical tradition. Spanning nearly two thousand years, the book brilliantly demonstrates how sin, once conceived of as a physical burden, becomes, over time, eclipsed by economic metaphors. Transformed from a weight that an individual carried, sin becomes a debt that must be (...) repaid in order to be redeemed in God's eyes. Anderson shows how this ancient Jewish revolution in thought shaped the way the Christian church understood the death and resurrection of Jesus and eventually led to the development of various penitential disciplines, deeds of charity, and even papal indulgences. In so doing it reveals how these changing notions of sin provided a spur for the Protestant Reformation. Broad in scope while still exceptionally attentive to detail, this ambitious and profound book unveils one of the most seismic shifts that occurred in religious belief and practice, deepening our understanding of one of the most fundamental aspects of human experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Hyperbole Enters Politics: What Can Be Learned From Antiquity and Our Hyperbolist-In-Chief W. ROBERT CONNOR introduction: an age of hyperbole Everywhere we turn these days we encounter hyperbole—in the colloquialisms of every day speech, advertising, salesmanship, letters of recommendation, sports-casting, and not least in political discourse. This may be a good moment, then, to open a conversation between ancient and modern understandings of verbal “over-shoot,” as the (...) Greek term for exaggeration might be rendered in English. The evidence gathered in H. Lausberg’s Handbook of Literary Rhetoric1 shows that while ancient rhetoricians agreed that hyperbole should be counted among the “figures of speech,” they found much to argue about: was hyperbole a violation of the Aristotelian middle course, hence an extreme to be avoided, or was it a legitimate form of augmentation (auxēsis in Greek, amplificatio in Latin)? Could diminution (meiōsis ) also be regarded as a form of hyperbole? In the interpretation of texts hyperbole poses a further difficulty —unlike simile, alliteration or some other figures of speech, it is “unmarked,” that is, it has no linguistic sign to alert the reader to its presence. Hyperbole likes to disguise itself as if it were going to a masquerade ball, presenting itself as simile or wearing metaphorical dress, or appearing not infrequently as litotes. It can sneak up on you and take you by surprise. The critic Longinus in On the Sublime, ch. 38, and some rhetoricians noted that hyperbole could be most arion 26.3 winter 2019 powerful when least recognized. Many ancient rhetoricians and some modern critics, however, have followed Quintilian, who asserted that “expressions (often hyperbolic), such as “storms of public assemblies, thunderbolts of eloquence, are used merely for ornament” (Institutes 8.6.7). In this view hyperbole is a conspicuous ornament used to embellish speech and make it more elegant and attractive, but today it is more often treated either as an excuse for an outrageous statement (as when the CEO of Cambridge Analytica characterized as “a certain amount of hyperbole” his suggestion of using prostitutes to discredit a political opponent), or as a euphemism for a falsehood (as when a politician promises he will eliminate the national debt—$20 trillion—and his budget director shrugs the claim off as “hyperbole.”) The term seems to extinguish any feeling of embarrassment. None of these understandings of hyperbole is simply wrong, but together they eclipse an alternative view, grounded in one ancient understanding of language, and corroborated by modern experience. In this approach language in general and hyperbole in particular are not simply a set of signs whose meaning is arbitrarily determined by social convention. Instead, they have their own nature (physis, as Isocrates says in Panegyricus 8) and hence their own power to arouse and motivate listeners. Hyperbole, viewed in this light, is a force in its own right, with the ability to give voice to otherwise unarticulated emotions, to intensify them, to push aside doubts and hesitations, and then to turn feelings into action. Language is power, and hyperbole, as an extreme form of language, provides great power to those who use it skillfully. These need not be the docile students of the rhetoricians ; politicians sometimes seem to have an innate understanding of it. The extreme breed among them, the demagogues, are often the ones who know best how to put this extreme of language to use. True, you don’t have to be a politician to put hyperbole to work. It is a favorite mode of speech among lovers, poets, travellers. Holy Men use it, too: Jesus of Nazareth, for exam16 when hyperbole enters politics ple, proclaimed that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God (Matthew 19.24). Almost everyone uses it at some point, except policy wonks whose soulless prose withers before its onslaughts. When people use hyperbole they may be neither lying nor embroidering the truth to make it more ornamental. They exalt and intensify what they see as truth, make it come alive, and thereby rouse their listeners from apathy and distraction. Ordinary people, too, use... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Women Englishing Homer RICHARD HUGHES GIBSON Seven kingdoms strove in which should swell the womb / That bore great Homer; whom Fame freed from tomb,” so begins the fourth of “Certain ancient Greek Epigrams ” that George Chapman placed at the head of his Odyssey at its debut in 1615.1 The epigram was no mere antiquarian dressing for the text. It suggests a historical parallel with the (...) translator’s own feat—for this Odyssey appeared on the heels of Chapman’s 1611 Iliad, the first complete English translation of Homer directly from the Greek. Indeed, the title page of that Iliad boasted, “Never before in any language truly translated” (italics mine). In “Englishing ” Homer (as he put it), Chapman had vanquished not only local rivals but also the whole international field.2 Through Chapman, England bore Homer anew. Yet within a few decades challengers appeared. An octogenarian Thomas Hobbes published an Odyssey translation in 1675 and an Iliad the following year. Alexander Pope’s versions (Iliad, 1715–1720; Odyssey, 1726) were bestsellers in the next century, yet others soon enough sought to better them, including the poet William Cowper (Iliad, 1791; Odyssey, 1809). The rate of Homeric production then intensified in the nineteenth century, becoming in Edith Hall’s apt phrase a “national pastime” in Victorian Britain—and, I would add, in the United States too.3 In the 1860s, a new English Iliad or Odyssey debuted nearly every year, making Matthew Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, seem prescient in selecting “On Translating Homer” as the topic for his 1860 lecture series. Anglo-American output of new English Homers has been steady ever since. The opening decades arion 26.3 winter 2019 of our century have been especially high-yielding—more than ten new Iliads and eight new Odysseys have appeared in print alongside fresh editions of twentieth-century favorites. Digital versions now circulate, too. To Chapman we might thus reply: Once seven Greek cities strove to be Homer’s nurse; now seventy tomes vie to be his English verse. Run down the complete bibliography, and a pattern already hinted in my list of notables becomes pronounced: name after name after name belongs to a man. Flip around a bit, and one can often find traces of women in these volumes. Hobbes, for example, argued in the preface to his translations that women have as “just” a “pretence” (in the sense of “claim”) as men to the moral education afforded by heroic poems, though one might cynically read this as a marketing strategy.4 Pope readily acknowledged his debt to the scholarship of Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, Homer’s first French female translator, and listed prominent female supporters in the subscription lists at the front of his editions.5 Women thus long factored into the business of “Englishing” classical texts, though almost exclusively as paying audience members. For more than four centuries, Homer’s English audience listened to a boys’ choir. That tune has only just begun to change thanks to the efforts of three women: the classicist and nonfiction writer Caroline Alexander, who became the first woman to publish a complete English Iliad in 2015; Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who published the first English Odyssey by a female translator in 2017; and the poet Alice Oswald, whose selective translation of the Iliad, Memorial, appeared in 2011.6 By virtue of their appearance in such short order, these books have been, and surely will be henceforth, grouped together. And rightly so: ending the male monopoly on the English channel to Homer is a major development. The Homeric epics have not only shaped Western culture; they enjoy enduring prestige. You still need to know Homer to fancy yourself “well-read.” These three books are thus 36 on women englishing homer potent symbols. They mark the passage of English-speaking women from the audience of male efforts to curate and transmit tradition to participants in those endeavors—from the subscription lists, we might say, to the title page. We sell these translations short, though, if we allow their collective meaning to obscure the patent differences in Alexander’s, Wilson’s, and Oswald... (shrink)

Nine years before the fall of Constantinople, in 1444, cardinal Bessarion in his third and last letter addressed to Constantine Palaeologus, Despot of Mystra, expressed his deep concern about the economic, political, cultural, social and moral crisis, maintaining that the multidimensional crisis would inevitably lead to Byzantium’s decline. Bessarion stresses that the aristocracy’s biased policy, the burdensome taxation, the low level of business activity, the complete lack of technological advancements and the deficient education system not only shaped the Peloponnesian state (...) but also transformed the once brave, conscientious and studious Greeks into a cowardly, indolent and ignorant people. Realizing that the constitution of Greek society and the behavior of its citizens are impediments to modernization and to cultural progress, Bessarion proposes a series of reforms based on a revival of Ancient Greek culture and on technological advances of West that would lead to a well-governed, self-sufficient and independent Greek state. On 23 April 2010, 566 years after Bessarion’s letter, the Greek government requested financial assistance from the European Support Mechanism in order to avert the probability of default in Greece. The fiscal deficit, the swelling sovereign debt and the global financial recession shape Greece in crisis. The aim of this paper is to give an interpretative presentation of Bessarion’s letter with reference to modern Greece; to analyze the causes of the Byzantine Empire’s decline and the recommended reforms in comparison to the causes of the financial crisis in Greece and the implementation of austerity measures. I will prove that nowadays modern Greeks face the same problems with the Greeks of Peloponnese such as political corruption, administrative incompetence, excessive taxation, economic impoverishment, class inequality, unemployment, reduced business activity and inability to exploit natural resources. In this sense, I will show that the identity crisis of modern Hellenism was first cultivated and formed gradually from the Renaissance to modern Greece. (shrink)

Winfried bühler's edition of Moschus’ Europa [Hermes, Einzelschrift 12 [1960]) has had the rare accolade of unstinted praise from reviewers in all languages. And deservedly so. Its text is eminently sound, its commentary relevantly erudite and richly instructive particularly about Moschus’ stylistic debts and paternities. Bühler's review of the Europa saga in ancient literature supersedes all that was written previously. And finally, his detailed collation of the nine independent manuscripts of the text establishes for the first time the full (...) evidence for a completely effective stemma which few will challenge and none substantially alter. (shrink)

Benner, Erica. Machiavelli’s Ethics. Princeton, 2009. 527p bibl index afp; ISBN 9780691141763, $75.00; ISBN 9780691141770 pbk, $35.00.

Reviewed in CHOICE, April 2010

This major new study of Machiavelli’s moral and political philosophy by Benner (Yale) argues that most readings of Machiavelli suffer from a failure to appreciate his debt to Greek sources, particularly the Socratic tradition of moral and political philosophy. Benner argues that when read in the light of his Greek sources, Machiavelli appears as much less the immoralist or (...) sophist he often is taken for and instead as a serious moral philosopher very much concerned with the republican ideals of justice and the rule of law. The author does not ignore Machiavelli’s more infamous dicta, but argues that a careful reading shows that they are expressions of views he ultimately rejects. Particularly noteworthy here is her careful attention to Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.
Benner’s reading of Machiavelli is far too complex and subtle for such a brief summary. Her research is meticulous and her arguments finely honed. This important contribution to both Machiavelli studies and the history of political philosophy will be indispensable for scholars.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and faculty/researchers. — B. T. Harding

Endorsements:

"Machiavelli's Ethics is a superb scholarly book. Erica Benner does truly impressive work in analyzing Machiavelli's views on the most fundamental ethical issues--including necessity and virtue, justice and injustice, and ends and means. She shows, with very solid evidence, that Machiavelli did in fact worry a lot about justice and that he put it at the core of his republican theory."--Maurizio Viroli, author of Niccolò's Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli

"Machiavelli's Ethics is excellent--learned, subtle, highly original, and a constant pleasure to read. And, since it is really a study of Machiavelli's thought in its entirety, it is also the first book of its kind. Its originality lies in taking seriously the claim by some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers--notably Bacon, Spinoza, and Alberico Gentili--that Machiavelli was essentially a moral and political philosopher. Erica Benner does a brilliant job of resurrecting this neglected Machiavelli."--Giulia Sissa, University of California, Los Angeles


About the book, from the publisher:
Machiavelli's Ethics challenges the most entrenched understandings of Machiavelli, arguing that he was a moral and political philosopher who consistently favored the rule of law over that of men, that he had a coherent theory of justice, and that he did not defend the "Machiavellian" maxim that the ends justify the means. By carefully reconstructing the principled foundations of his political theory, Erica Benner gives the most complete account yet of Machiavelli's thought. She argues that his difficult and puzzling style of writing owes far more to ancient Greek sources than is usually recognized, as does his chief aim: to teach readers not how to produce deceptive political appearances and rhetoric, but how to see through them. Drawing on a close reading of Greek authors--including Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch--Benner identifies a powerful and neglected key to understanding Machiavelli.

This important new interpretation is based on the most comprehensive study of Machiavelli's writings to date, including a detailed examination of all of his major works: The Prince, The Discourses, The Art of War, and Florentine Histories. It helps explain why readers such as Bacon and Rousseau could see Machiavelli as a fellow moral philosopher, and how they could view The Prince as an ethical and republican text. By identifying a rigorous structure of principles behind Machiavelli's historical examples, the book should also open up fresh debates about his relationship to later philosophers, including Rousseau, Hobbes, and Kant.
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Active in Alexandria during the second half of the third century, Dioscorides is the author of some forty epigrams preserved in theAnthologia Palatina. Five of these epigrams are concerned with Greek playwrights: three dramatists of the archaic and classical periods, Thespis, Aeschylus and Sophocles, and two contemporary ones, Sositheus and Machon. Dioscorides conceived four epigrams as two pairs (Thespis and Aeschylus, Sophocles and Sositheus) clearly marked by verbal connections, and celebrates each playwright for his original contribution to the history of (...) Greek drama. Thespis boasts to have discovered tragedy; Aeschylus to have elevated it. The twin epigrams devoted to Sophocles and Sositheus present Sophocles as refining the satyrs and Sositheus as making them, once again, primitive. Finally, Machon is singled out for his comedies as ‘worthy remnants of ancient art (τέχνης … ἀρχαίης)’. Dioscorides’ miniature history of Greek drama, which is interesting both for its debts to the ancient tradition surrounding classical playwrights and for the light it sheds on contemporary drama, clearly smacks of archaizing sympathies. They drive Dioscorides’ selection of authors and his treatment of contemporary dramatists: both Sositheus and Machon are praised for consciously looking back to the masters of the past. My focus is on Sositheus and his ‘new’ satyr-play. After discussing the relationship that Dioscorides establishes between Sophocles’ and Sositheus’ satyrs, and reviewing scholarly interpretations of Sositheus’ innovations, I will argue that Dioscorides speaks the language of New Music. His epigram celebrates Sositheus as rejecting New Music and its trends, and as composing satyr plays that were musically old fashioned and therefore reactionary. (shrink)

Derived from Heidegger's interpretation of attractive force with a high volume of inspired beauty care and a master not only the followers. And in order to maintain this special, he followed the great classical psychologists: Ferdinand learning. He also won in the traditional school psychology professor at the certificate, but his real motive is not subject to the ancient hope臘Heidegger was carried out by the interpretation of the full amount of impact force. Nevertheless, Heidegger's classic is still up to (...) the United States: "true management and methods" to maintain significant influence over. Up to the United States as a major interpreter of Heidegger's thinking, and faithful friend. In about two more people, I turned to introduce three other in Heidegger, Gadamer's major research on the influence of the philosopher: Park Latin chart, sub-km Aristotle and Hegel. First we look at the future Park Latin chart, I think the focus on conversation and dialogue up to the United States and the "dialectic dialogue" concept. The relative importance of making it true, so true that people with reasonable doubt and dialogue. Although there are many plans to pull up to the United States Park effect, but I make up as two points and a U.S. interlocutor's talent and try to prove. I have given up by the United States with three coming from Aristotle's concept of sub-km: wise , mimetic and tragedy. Wise is to predict the results of practical wisdom for the rational, he does not see a formula-based learning, as can be, but based on life experience. That mimic the Department of Aristotle in the sub-km only copy, and is reasonable in real life, the ultimate communicator. Finally, the tragedy is not the only sub-km Aristotle considers the six parts of the structure, but compassion and fear the experience of change in the audience angle of view, it is up to the United States in view of the viewer's experience of understanding and application, is a kind of tragedy action meaningful participation and experience. Beneficiary of up to U.S. history in Hegel's awareness of personal, Hegel's dialectic, as well as their knowledge to the arts is the current acceptance of the senses. He does not agree with Hegel referred to the "art of the past things," Hegel explains how this point. Shortly we will be able to see the remarkable work of art as a nervous balcony. Let me give you a visit in Heidelberg, Heidegger's experience in the United States up to the lecture, he objected to clarify and to hide his own dialectic and Hegel's dialectic with links, because at the end of Hegel's philosophy of total abstraction knowledge. In the second part of this lecture, I turned to the analysis of Gadamer's thesis on the art of "the relevance of the United States," and Heidegger in this direction is the famous "Art works of origin> thesis compared. In the late writings, Heidegger shows that there is not his main independent and self-study will be presented in the art of the earth and the world as a tension. In Gadamer's thesis in art, he follows Heidegger in the hope臘by establishing the art of human culture, learn the origin of works of art ontology analysis. He discussed all the cultural roots of the game , the difference between symbolic meaning and religious ceremonies. But he formed an art theory of the problem to analyze, it also clarifies the classical art and contemporary abstract art. In these three elements: the game, symbols and festivals, art up to the United States to find a structure is more deep cultural roots. As in the early hope臘ceremony, dance performances and tragedy. Gadamer's encounter with the magnetic force of Heidegger's interpretations made him cautious not to become simply a follower of the great master. To maintain his independence, he studied with Paul Friedländer, the great classical philologist. He attained certification in classical philology to teach in the secondary schools, but his true motive was to be able to resist the powerful interpretations of Greek philosophy put forward by Heidegger. Nevertheless, Heidegger remained a major leavening influence on Gadamer's classic, Truth and Method, and Gadamer became a major interpreter of Heidegger's thought, and a constant friend. After a few comparisons between them, I turn to three major philosophers other than Heidegger who contributed concepts to Gadamer's masterwork: Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. Regarding Plato, I point to the emphasis in Gadamer on dialogue and conversation and the concept of eumeneis elenchoi, the respect the opponent that recognizes that he could be right, so they join together in dialogue in quest of the truth. Although there are many other debts to Plato in Gadamer, I point to these two and testify to Gadamer's gifts as a conversationalist and debater. I single out three concepts of Aristotle that Gadamer used: phronesis, mimesis, and tragedy. Phronesis is the practical wisdom that goes beyond calculative reason. It is based not on formulas that can be learned but on experience of life . Mimesis in Aristotle is not just copying, but on a recognition that ultimately conveyed truth about life. Finally, tragedy for Aristotle is not just a structure with six parts but an experience of pity and terror that transformed the perspective of the viewer. This was important in the hermeneutics of Gadamer that looked at the viewer's experience of recognition and application, a participatory experience of the meaning of the action of the tragedy. Gadamer is indebted to Hegel for the historical character of consciousness, the Hegelian dialectic, and the recognition that that art is a sensuous representation of the real. He did not agree with Hegel that art was a thing of the past, and also explained what Hegel meant by this: we no longer saw art as a disclosure of the divine. I mention an experience I had of Heidegger's visit to Heidelberg, where he spoke after Gadamer's lecture rejecting his effort to connect his dialect of clearing and concealing with Hegelian dialectic, because Hegel's philosophy always ended in absolute knowledge. For the second major part of the lecture, I turn to an analysis of Gadamer's essay on art, The Relevance of the Beautiful , comparable in a way to Heidegger's famous lectures on The Origin of the Work of Art . In the latter work, Heidegger declares his independence of his masterwork and presents art in terms of the tension between earth and world. In Gadamer's essay on art, he goes beyond the Heideggerian emphasis on the ontology of the artwork by seeking to establish the anthropological roots of art in Greek culture. He discusses the roots of all culture in play, the significance of the symbol, and the meaning of religious festivals. But he begins with an analysis of the problem of formulating a theory of art that does justice both to classical art and contemporary nonrepresentational art. In all three elements, play, symbol, and festival, Gadamer finds a foundation for art in the deep roots of our culture as found in the ritual, dance, and tragic plays of ancient Greece. (shrink)

Given the uncontested and universally acknowledged debt that Suhrawardis philosophy owes to Avicenna in its entirety, then the problem becomes why Suhrawardi presented himself as following these ancient philosophers, and especially Plato, rather than Avicenna. But this is the subject of the book on Suhrawardi that has yet to be written. One hopes that some student of this influential philosopher will soon undertake to do it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Suffering of Economic Injustice:A Christian PerspectiveUlrich DuchrowTogether we are facing a global kairos of humanity because these years are decisive for whether our civilization will irreversibly continue to produce death or whether we find a way out toward a life-enhancing new culture. So let me try to make a humble contribution to our common search for liberation from suffering toward life through justice.suffering caused by economic injustice in (...) the axial age and in the capitalist civilization of modernityWe do not need to spend much time on describing the sufferings caused by economic injustice. They cry to high heaven every day. Jean Ziegler, the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, speaks of more than 60 million people dying of hunger and its consequences every year, especially children, although there is more than enough to feed them. That is an annual World War II against the poor. He continues to say: “A child that dies of hunger is murdered.” He calls this a daily crime against humanity.1 Others call it structural genocide.2 All these victims are human beings with a human face, according to biblical tradition created in the image of God. So we are talking about murdering living images of God, about blasphemy.Also, the blue planet Earth’s suffering is growing dramatically. The extinction of species is accelerating, desertification is expanding, the poisoning of water and soil is increasing, and climate change is producing irreversible effects like lifting the sea level, devouring islands in the Pacific and growing parts of Bangladesh, creating weather disasters everywhere, and possibly increasing temperature in parts of Africa by ten degrees. We all know this, but so far we have not been able to make the necessary changes in global economics and politics to stop or at least slow it.Often forgotten are the psychological and spiritual sufferings and diseases of a growing number of people. In India an average of more than fifty farmers, driven into debt beyond their means, commit suicide daily out of despair.3 Workers suffer increasing stress and anxiety, and middle-class people fall into depression, projected to be the second most common illness in 2020, according the World Health Organization. So what are the roots of all of this? [End Page 27]My thesis is that what we are experiencing now started nearly three thousand years ago within what is called the Axial Age, beginning in the eighth century bce, in the whole of Eurasia from Greece to China. At that time a new economy started to appear in daily life, built on money and private property. It had tremendous social as well as psychological and spiritual effects. To analyze what happened then helps us understand what is happening today. Looking at the responses to this development by the different faiths and philosophies in Israel/Judah, India, China, and Greece may also help us to better understand the tasks and possibilities of engaged Buddhists and liberation theologians in our age.The philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the term “Axial Age.”4 According to him, the experience of violent crises between 800 and 200 bce might have prompted the parallel efforts of the prophets, the Buddha, Confucius, Daoism, and Greek philosophy to find new foundations for living together. He characterized the new approach as intellectual and spiritual (geistig), looking only marginally at the economic and political context. Recently Karen Armstrong and, based on her findings, Jeremy Rifkin took up this theory, looking particularly at war and violence as causes for the responses within the different cultures.5 Also José María Vigil, who is present here, has just published a chapter in his book on Theology of Axiality and Axial Theology.6 As far as the sociohistoric context of the Axial Age is concerned my thesis comes nearest to what David Graeber has worked out in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years,7 although he is not very interested in the religious responses. Combining his insights with my own research,8 let me summarize how the new economy affects ancient societies.Money as unit of account was used in the palaces and temples of Mesopotamia as early... (shrink)

Explores how the emotional experience of gratitude has been enlisted in neoliberal governance through the language of debt. In The Art of Gratitude, Jeremy David Engels sketches a genealogy of gratitude from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary self-help movement. One of the most striking things about gratitude, Engels finds, is how consistently it is described using the language of indebtedness. A chief purpose of this, he contends, is to make us more comfortable living lives in debt, (...) with the nefarious effect of pacifying the citizenry so we are less likely to speak out about social and economic injustice. To counteract this, he proposes an alternative art of gratitude-as-thanksgiving that is inspired by Indian philosophy, particularly the yoga philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras. He argues that this art of gratitude can challenge neoliberalism by reorienting our politics away from resentment, anger, and guilt and toward a democratic ethic of thanksgiving and the common good. Jeremy David Engels is the Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University. He is the author of The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy and Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. (shrink)

The De officiis of Ambrose of Milan is one of the most important texts of Latin Patristic literature. Modelled on the De Officiis of Cicero, it sets out Ambrose's ethical vision for his clergy, synthesizing ancient Stoic assumptions on virtue and expediency with Biblical patterns of humility, charity, and self-denial to present a paradigm of a church hierarchy capable of making the right impact on its social world. Ambrose aspires to demonstrate that the age of profound principles is now (...) available.This new edition constitutes the first Modern English translation of Ambrose's Latin. The Text and Translation in Volume 1 are accompanied by a detailed Commentary that concentrates on Ambrose's debts to Cicero and his attempts to renovate his philosophical inheritance. An extensive Introduction analyses his ethical ideals and sets them in their social context. (shrink)