In this paper, I first discuss Augustine’s description of time and relate this to Boethius’ explanation of the distinction between time and eternity. I then connect this distinction to Augustine’s understanding of memory as an image of eternity, showing that the analogy between God and the human with reference to time involves a comparison not between eternity and time, but rather, between eternity and a limited experience of eternity within the mind and its distension: time is not the image of (...) eternity, the human mind is, particularly its power of memory (memoria). The accounts of time and eternity of both thinkers provide further evidence for Augustine’s influence on and importance for the thought of Boethius. Both figures describe the past and future as united in the present under the divine purview of God. (shrink)

The future state of the redeemed human being in heaven is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down in this life. Nevertheless, Augustine and Anselm speculate on the heavenly life of the human being, proceeding from certain theological premises gathered from Scripture, and their arguments often both mirror and complement one another. Because Anselm and Augustine hold the premise that human beings in heaven are “equal to the angels” (Luke 20:36), our understanding of the heavenly condition of the human can (...) be illuminated by angelology, and vice-versa; each reveals the nature of the other. The paper examines aspects of the positions of Augustine and Anselm on the original state of the angels, their fall, and their confirmation, and then explores the condition of prelapsarian Adam and the transformation of the elect in order to illuminate how these figures conceive the afterlife. The angelologies (and demonologies) of Augustine and Anselm help one to understand the heavenly goal of human life, how the redeemed state of human beings differs from their original condition in Eden, and why there is no redemption for the fallen angels. (shrink)

This paper, as a response to Mark K. Spencer’s, “Perceiving the Image of God in the Whole Human Person” in the present volume, argues in defence of Aquinas’s position that the Imago Dei is limited in the human being to the rational, intellective soul alone. While the author agrees with Spencer that the hierarchical relation between body and soul in the human composite must be maintained while avoiding the various permeations of dualism, nevertheless, the Imago Dei cannot be located in (...) the human body or the principle of the body considered within the body/soul composite without betraying a number of fundamental Thomistic metaphysical principles. Essential to these includes Aquinas’s position that an image of God should image not only the Divine Nature, but also the Trinitarian relations between the Divine Persons. Further, the paper also argues that a phenomenology of sense experience could not, on principle, attain to an image of God in the whole human person within a Thomistic framework generally. (shrink)

Although recent scholarship has begun to clarify Porphyry’s position on the first principle in its distinction from that of Plotinus we must be careful not to gloss over the crucial ramifications of Porphyry’s developments. The Plotinian One is beyond Being, and thus beyond all relation and difference. In his attempt to understand how such a principle can be productive of all else that follows from it, Porphyry considers the Plotinian One in both its transcendent and creative aspects, introducing the notions (...) of difference and self-relation within the One itself. Porphyry’s modifications of Plotinus’s doctrine, however, result in a first principle having a character utterly distinct from what Plotinus envisioned, and from what I believe Plotinus would have accepted. Because Porphyry’s first principle is relational, it loses its decisive Plotinian character as absolutely transcendent. This distinction between the first principles of Porphyry and Plotinus has important ramifications for each of their philosophical itineraria, and further strengthens the status of Plotinus within the Neoplatonic tradition. Plotinus is a unique thinker within the Neoplatonic tradition, and we must be careful not to equate Neoplatonism with Plotinus, when in fact, it is Plotinus who against both his own predecessors and successors often stands alone. (shrink)

Augustin est bien connu comme défenseur d’une « théorie privative » du mal. On peut lire, par exemple, dans les Confessions que « le mal n’est que la privation du bien, à la limite du pur néant ». Le problème, cependant, avec les théories privatives du mal est qu’elles ne nous offrent pas, généralement, une explication robuste ni de l’activité du mal, ni de son pouvoir à causer des effets bien réels ; effets desquels l’expérience demande, malgré tout, une explication (...) rationnelle. Or, selon Augustin, la privation seule ne permet pas de rendre compte de toutes les manifestations du mal. L’explication privative du mal est, certes, la plus étudiée par la littérature ; mais elle ne constitue qu’une partie du tableau. Cet article veut souligner quatre moments de l’explication du mal qu’Augustin propose : le mal comme privation ; le mal comme parasite par rapport à l’être ; le mal comme perversion de la volonté ; et finalement, le mal comme conflit d’intérêts. Chacun de ces moments éclaire un type de mal, mais aucun ne permet à lui seul de rendre compte du problème. Pris ensemble, cependant, et gardant leurs différences respectives à l’esprit, la réponse d’Augustin à la question du mal se révèle beaucoup plus sophistiquée et exhaustive qu’on ne voudrait souvent l’admettre lorsqu’on se limite uniquement à la théorie de la privation. | : Augustine is well-known for advocating a ‘privation theory’ of evil. In Confessions, he writes that “evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.” The problem with privation theories of evil generally is that they do not provide a robust enough account of the activity and power of evil to cause the very real effects for which experience demands a rational explanation. For Augustine, however, privation alone does not fully account for evil in all of its manifestations. The privation account of evil receives much scholarly treatment, but it is only part of the complete Augustinian picture. This paper outlines four accounts of evil in Augustine : evil as privation, as parasitic on being, as perversion of the will, and as conflict of interest. Each deals with a kind of evil, but none alone provides a complete account. Taken together, however, with their differences in mind, Augustine’s explanation of evil is shown to be much more sophisticated and comprehensive than is often recognised when one limits one’s understanding of Augustine’s conception of evil to the privation theory alone. (shrink)

This paper examines demonic agency and epistemology in the thought of Augustine. When Augustine claims that demons can “work miracles,” he means this in a specific sense: the actions and intelligence of demons are only miraculous from the standpoint of humans, whose powers of perception and action are limited in relation to those of demons. The character of demons’ bodies and the length of their lives provide abilities beyond what humans possess, but, as natural, created beings, demons adhere to the (...) physical rules of nature. Demons possess neither supernatural powers, nor perfect knowledge. Just as our wonder ceases when we are shown how a magic trick is executed, human astonishment makes way for rational understanding once we comprehend demonic nature. (shrink)

Bryant’s paper, "A Logic of Multiplicities: Deleuze, Immanence, and Onticology," is useful for showing how the historical legacy of hierarchy in its many philosophical forms is still present, important, and, in fact, required even by those such as Bryant who would seek to deconstruct or ignore it. The following response will discuss Bryant’s presentation of his alternative position and throughout point out: a) the straw-man versions of hierarchy that Bryant employs; b) why what Bryant claims to be inherent negatively in (...) hierarchy is not the case; c) how Bryant’s position actually relies upon hierarchy for its own explication, and finally; d) the various principles of hierarchical metaphysics that are required in order to make sense of experience and reality. These latter include the notions that i) there are many kinds of hierarchy; ii) Being and Unity are prior to Multiplicity; iii) relation without substance is incoherent; iv) hierarchy is not inherently tyrannical; v) the distinction between essentially and accidentally ordered causal series is a real and useful one; and vi) the existence of hierarchy is more self evident than is flat ontology. (shrink)

Augustine asserted that demons (and angels) have material bodies, while Aquinas denied demonic corporeality, upholding that demons are separated, incorporeal, intelligible substances. Augustine’s conception of demons as composite substances possessing an immaterial soul and an aerial body is insufficient, in Thomas’s view, to account for certain empirical phenomena observed in demoniacs. However, Thomas, while providing more detailed accounts of demonic possession according to his development of Aristotelian psychology, does not avail of this demonic incorporeal eminence when analysing demonic attacks: demonic (...) agency is still confined to the material body. Aquinas’s account of demonic possession need not, on the face of it, require an immaterial cause. In his renouncement of the strong Christian tradition affirming demonic corporeality, Aquinas either conflates the need for a demonic agent with a requirement for a super corporeal one, or subordinates his demonology and angelology to a deeper, more fundamental Dionysian metaphysical principle of creative diffusion to which these adhere in a secondary way. (shrink)

This chapter describes Porphyry’s demonology, focusing specifically on the nature of the demonic body and Porphyry’s reliance upon it within his account in order to highlight certain difficulties in the demonology of Iamblichus, which, although denying the materiality of demons, nevertheless has to account for the very things that demonic bodies were understood to address. Through an examination of Porphyry’s demonology and his explanation of the classification of demons and their nature, this paper will raise questions needing to be answered (...) within Iamblichean demonology. In fact, these questions are more important for Iamblichus than they are for Porphyry; given the state of the entirely descended Iamblichean soul and its need for material forms and avenues of mediation and purification, the function of demons is more essential for Iamblichus than it is for Porphyry. We cannot speak of ‘demons’ in Iamblichus without qualification, or without at least making the distinction between the good and the evil, recognizing that whatever one says about the former, the same might not apply to the latter. (shrink)

Richard Asher was an English physician and writer. Born in Brighton, the son of a clergyman, he was educated at Lancing College and studied medicine at the London Hospital, qualifying in 1934. After various junior posts at the London and West Middlesex Hospitals, he was appointed physician at the Central Middlesex Hospital in 1943. The Central Middlesex was a former municipal hospital, and Asher was among a group of young consultants who transformed this medical backwater into a center with a (...) high reputation for its clinical work, research, and teaching. Asher was a general physician.. (shrink)

Augustine asserted that demons have material bodies, while Aquinas denied demonic corporeality, upholding that demons are separated, incorporeal, intelligible substances. Augustine’s conception of demons as composite substances possessing an immaterial soul and an aerial body is insufficient, in Thomas’s view, to account for certain empirical phenomena observed in demoniacs. However, Thomas, while providing more detailed accounts of demonic possession according to his development of Aristotelian psychology, does not avail of this demonic incorporeal eminence when analysing demonic attacks: demonic agency is (...) still confined to the material body. Aquinas’s account of demonic possession need not, on the face of it, require an immaterial cause. In his renouncement of the strong Christian tradition affirming demonic corporeality, Aquinas either conflates the need for a demonic agent with a requirement for a super corporeal one, or subordinates his demonology and angelology to a deeper, more fundamental Dionysian metaphysical principle of creative diffusion to which these adhere in a secondary way. (shrink)

There is a tension in Porphyry’s writings concerning his attitude towards sorcery in general and the invocation of demons in particular. In his De Abstinentia, which contains his most extended surviving demonology, Porphyry distinguishes between good and evil demons and the respective groups of people by whom they are invoked and with whom they are associated. While association with evil demonic entities is condemned by Porphyry, he nevertheless suggests that there is a role for a philosophical treatment of demonic agency. (...) The beneficent demons warn humanity of the impending dangers brought on by the maleficent “so far as they are able … by revelations in dreams, or through an inspired soul, or in many other ways” (De Abs. 2.41.3). The meanings of the signs and revelations granted by the beneficent demons, however, are not explicitly apparent, for “not everyone understands what the signs mean, just as not everyone can read what is written, but only the person who has learned letters” (De Abs. 2.41.4). Porphyry claims that it is partially the role of the philosopher to recognize and interpret these signs and to distinguish them from the lies and deceptions of the evil demons (De Abs. 2.49.2). In the Letter to Anebo, however, Porphyry is much more skeptical about the efficacy of demons (good and evil): the effectiveness of theurgy and sorcery is called into doubt. While Porphyry does claim that certain things can be divined from natural signs, he denies here that divinities or demons are involved in such predictions (Letter to Anebo 25, 28), and he doubts the sorcerous power to bind and control demonic forces. It seems then, that at least the Letter, theurgy and sorcery could be ineffective, and therefore, unnecessary for the salvation of the human soul. Indeed, for Porphyry, for the purification of the soul, theurgy and demonic aid are unnecessary at best, and dangerously counterintuitive at worst. (shrink)

This paper examines Dante’s treatment of the suicides in Canto 13 of Inferno in light of certain Platonic arguments against suicide. I argue that Dante’s presentation of the suicides in many ways illustrates a similar philosophical understanding of the body-soul relation and the subsequent concerns about the effect of suicide on the human being. Dante’s Christian position emphasizes the importance of the body and shows how it is necessary for the human body-soul composite. I focus on two of Dante’s problems (...) with suicide. First, his association of the suicides with the harpies of the Aeneid demonstrates that suicide is an act of pride whereby the human being overestimates his capacity to foresee future events and fails to trust in Divine Providence. Second, Dante presents the suicides as being still tied to, and concerned for their reputation in, the world of the living, despite their own violent severing of their bodily connection to it—a connection required for human activity. By focusing on these Neoplatonic arguments against suicide, I shed light on Dante’s Christian understanding of the body-soul relation and how this understanding contributes to the condemnation of suicide. Human nature requires the body and bodily activity in the world of finite affairs. In Dante’s depiction, suicide is violence. Although there were pagans who defended suicide for certain escapist or intellectual reasons, both they and Dante’s suicides share a common error: they fail to accept the essential nature of the human essence as having a bodily as well as a spiritual end. Returning directly to the Neoplatonic texts that influenced and resonate throughout the tradition that Dante inherits allows us to elucidate and highlight certain features of Dante’s thought and interpret his contrapasso in ways that might otherwise remain unnoticed. (shrink)

Peter Lombard lamented the abandonment of Augustine’s position affirming the materiality of demons and the demonic body, since by his time (some 700 years after Augustine), under the influence of the Pseudo-Dionysius, it was generally agreed within the Christian tradition that demons (and angels) are intelligible, disembodied substances. The principles that the cosmos is spatially and materially divided and stratified and that demons share ontologically in the nature of the part that they inhabit allowed figures such as Apuleius, Porphyry, and (...) Augustine to account for various aspects of demonic nature and activity that seemed to follow from reason, revelation, and practical experience. The material body of the demon and its relation to the pneuma, or vehicle of the soul, is often invoked to explain demonic agency and the extent of demonic knowledge and to distinguish between evil and good demons (or angels). The following paper weighs in on and clarifies Augustine’s demonic ontology. Although scholars generally recognise Augustine’s position maintaining that demons possess aerial bodies, nevertheless, the ambiguity surrounding Augustine’s opinion, attested to even by Peter Lombard, is overlooked, and Augustine’s conviction is often taken for granted and supported by citing the prominent City of God, the very work in which Augustine’s own views are suspect. This paper provides support to the assessment of Augustine’s doctrine of the demonic body by examining his cosmology, particularly his spatial and elemental division of the cosmos, and exhibits his adherence to the spatio-material principle according to which a creature’s bodily constitution is cognate with the elemental composition of the physical stratum of the cosmos in which they dwell. The paper concludes by indicating how Augustine’s explanations of demonic agency, far from being ambiguous on the nature of the demonic body, are in fact premised on their aerial corporeality, thereby demonstrating more definitively his conviction that demons possess material bodies. (shrink)

Neoplatonic Demons and Angels is a collection of studies which examine the place reserved for angels and demons not only by the main Neoplatonic philosophers, but also in Gnosticism, the Chaldaean Oracles and Christian Neoplatonism.

It is important to have an adequate model of uncertainty, since decisions must be made before the uncertainty can be resolved. For instance, flood defenses must be designed before we know the future distribution of flood events. It is standardly assumed that probability theory offers the best model of uncertain information. I think there are reasons to be sceptical of this claim. I criticise some arguments for the claim that probability theory is the only adequate model of uncertainty. In particular (...) I critique Dutch book arguments, representation theorems, and accuracy based arguments. Then I put forward my preferred model: imprecise probabilities. These are sets of probability measures. I offer several motivations for this model of uncertain belief, and suggest a number of interpretations of the framework. I also defend the model against some criticisms, including the so-called problem of dilation. I apply this framework to decision problems in the abstract. I discuss some decision rules from the literature including Levi’s E-admissibility and the more permissive rule favoured by Walley, among others. I then point towards some applications to climate decisions. My conclusions are largely negative: decision making under such severe uncertainty is inevitably difficult. I finish with a case study of scientific uncertainty. Climate modellers attempt to offer probabilistic forecasts of future climate change. There is reason to be sceptical that the model probabilities offered really do reflect the chances of future climate change, at least at regional scales and long lead times. Indeed, scientific uncertainty is multi-dimensional, and difficult to quantify. I argue that probability theory is not an adequate representation of the kinds of severe uncertainty that arise in some areas in science. I claim that this requires that we look for a better framework for modelling uncertainty. (shrink)

By turns beautiful, poignant, frightening, and funny, Eyewitness is a personal pictorial record of life in Northern Ireland over nearly forty years. Murphy's photographs are accompanied by detailed and candid captions revealing the events, people, and atmosphere in the region. This book is distributed for O'Brien Press, Dublin and is for sale only in the United States, it's territories and dependencies, Canada, and the Philippines.

In this article, Seamus Mulryan contends that dialogue about questions that matter to a body politic require the ethical virtue of courage, which is distinct from the virtue of intellectual humility, and this is of central importance in the education of members of a pluralist society. Mulryan begins with Robert Kunzman's theory of Ethical Dialogue and departs from it through Hans-Georg Gadamer's theory of hermeneutic experience and Charles Taylor's claims about the inextricable relationship between self-intelligibility and moral spaces. Finally, Mulryan (...) illustrates the promises and perils of courageous dialogue as an educative activity by way of Plato's Meno, Protagoras, and Gorgias. (shrink)

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies of syntactic priming of the English dative alternation. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study (N = 140) of children aged 3−9 years, in which we found strong evidence of abstract priming and the lexical boost, but (...) little evidence that either effect was moderated by age. We found weak evidence for a prime surprisal effect; however, exploratory analyses revealed a protracted developmental trajectory for verb-structure biases, providing an explanation as for why prime surprisal effects are more elusive in developmental populations. In a longitudinal study (N = 102) of children in tightly controlled age bands at 42, 48, and 54 months, we found priming effects emerged on trials with verb overlap early but did not observe clear evidence of priming on trials without verb overlap until 54 months. There was no evidence of a prime surprisal effect at any time point and none of the effects were moderated by age. The results relating to the emergence of the abstract priming and lexical boost effects are consistent with prediction-based models, while the absence of age-related effects appears to reflect the structure-specific challenges the dative presents to English-acquiring children. Overall, our complex pattern of findings demonstrates the value of developmental data sets in testing psycholinguistic theory. (shrink)

Econophysics is a new and exciting cross-disciplinary research field that applies models and modelling techniques from statistical physics to economic systems. It is not, however, without its critics: prominent figures in more mainstream economic theory have criticized some elements of the methodology of econophysics. One of the main lines of criticism concerns the nature of the modelling assumptions and idealizations involved, and a particular target are ‘kinetic exchange’ approaches used to model the emergence of inequality within the distribution of individual (...) monetary income. This article will consider such models in detail, and assess the warrant of the criticisms drawing upon the philosophical literature on modelling and idealization. Our aim is to provide the first steps towards informed mediation of this important and interesting interdisciplinary debate, and our hope is to offer guidance with regard to both the practice of modelling inequality, and the inequality of modelling practice. _1_ Introduction _1.1_ Econophysics and its discontents _1.2_ Against burglar economics _2_ Modelling Inequality _2.1_ Mainstream economic models for income distribution _2.2_ Econophysics models for income distribution _3_ Idealizations in Kinetic Exchange Models _3.1_ Binary interactions _3.2_ Conservation principles _3.3_ Exchange dynamics _ 4 _ Fat Tails and Savings _ 5 _ Evaluation. (shrink)

There is consensus that the adult lexicon exhibits lexical competition. In particular, substantial evidence demonstrates that words with more phonologically similar neighbors are recognized less efficiently than words with fewer neighbors. How and when these effects emerge in the child's lexicon is less clear. In the current paper, we build on previous research by testing whether phonological onset density slows lexical access in a large sample of 100 English‐acquiring 30‐month‐olds. The children participated in a visual world looking‐while‐listening task, in which (...) their attention was directed to one of two objects on a computer screen while their eye movements were recorded. We found moderate evidence of inhibitory effects of onset neighborhood density on lexical access and clear evidence for an interaction between onset neighborhood density and vocabulary, with larger effects of onset neighborhood density for children with larger vocabularies. Results suggest the lexicons of 30‐month‐olds exhibit lexical‐level competition, with competition increasing with vocabulary size. (shrink)

In this study we analyze daily data on television viewing in the Netherlands. We postulate hypotheses on supply and demand factors that could impact the amount of daily viewing time. Although the general assumption is that supply and demand often correlate, we see that for television this is only marginally the case. Especially diversity of program supply, often deemed very important in media markets, does not affect (positively or negatively) television viewing behavior. Most variation in television viewing can be attributed (...) to habit and to regular events (e. g. weekends, Christmas) and to unexpected events (e. g. the 9/11 WTC attack). We also find that weather conditions interact with program types, so that, for example, in winter times people favor entertainment programs even more, suggesting that people use television for mood management. (shrink)

This article focuses on the recent evolution of global policy agendas in two key parts of the communications sector: the internet and telecommunications. It explores the key regulatory governance ideas and practices that have come to the fore in shaping these fast-moving policy arenas. It sheds light on the ways in which selected global institutional contexts have played vital roles in shaping telecommunications and internet policy agendas as well as the resulting implications. In doing so, the paper explores a number (...) of key junctures in the evolution of policy at the international level, highlighting the positions of ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ hemisphere states at critical moments of change. The article contends that sectoral internationalization in telecommunications and the internet has reinforced – rather than created a context for positive change in – the traditional order of North-South relations in these parts of the global information economy and society. (shrink)

This chapter explores the topic of imprecise probabilities as it relates to model validation. IP is a family of formal methods that aim to provide a better representationRepresentation of severe uncertainty than is possible with standard probabilistic methods. Among the methods discussed here are using sets of probabilities to represent uncertainty, and using functions that do not satisfy the additvity property. We discuss the basics of IP, some examples of IP in computer simulation contexts, possible interpretations of the IP framework (...) and some conceptual problems for the approach. We conclude with a discussion of IP in the context of model validation. (shrink)

His attempt to answer that question had been anticipated in the eighteenth century by writers as varied as Swift, Diderot and Hume; and was addressed again, under Burke's influence, in the nineteenth century by some who are often regarded as exemplars of liberalism, such as Tocqueville and Lord Acton, or as enemies to it, such as John Henry Newman."--Jacket.

ABSTRACT This article examines Oscar Wilde’s liberal socialist tract, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’. It posits three discrete arguments. It argues, firstly, that in ‘The Soul of Man’ Wilde was deeply engaged with the socialist theory of William Morris. It claims that Wilde not only repudiated Morris’s aesthetic philosophy, rejecting Morris’s views about co-operation, usefulness, and tradition, and pouring scorn on the notion of dignity in manual labour, but that Wilde also echoed Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere, in (...) two important respects: namely, in his account of crime and punishment on the one hand, and in his treatment of the notion of human nature on the other. Secondly, this article argues that, in ‘The Soul of Man’, Wilde drew on both Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Stuart Mill. It shows how Wilde plagiarised and repurposed ideas drawn from Emerson’s essay, ‘Self-Reliance’. But, in addition, it demonstrates how Wilde duplicated Mill’s view of democracy, individuality, and progress as set out in On Liberty. Finally, then, this article argues that, in his treatment of thrift, gratitude, discontent, and rebellion, Wilde was strongly influenced by Charles Baudelaire’s dramatisation of ‘true philanthropy’ in the narrative prose poem, ‘Let’s Beat Up The Poor!’. (shrink)

THE notion of quantity is basic and it is no surprise that Aristotle refers to it in many places. There are two main discussions, that in the Categories—a part of the Organon which is of great interest to modern logicians and that spread over the physical treatises. Naturally the two treatments overlap, but modern logic is at a far remove from classical cosmology and it is fairly easy to separate them at their sources. This I have attempted to do by (...) considering quantity as an attribute and as divisible. There follows a brief consideration of the notions arrived at for their relevance to modern mathematics with particular reference to the real number system and the notion of infinity. (shrink)

It is in the context of this auditory imagination that I wish to discuss the language of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, and Philip Larkin. All of them return to an origin and bring something back, all three live off the hump of the English poetic achievement, all three, here and now, in England, imply a continuity with another England, there and then. All three are hoarders and shorers of what they take to be the real England. All three treat England (...) as a region—or rather treat their region as England—in different and complementary ways. I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial—Yeats, MacDiarmid, Carlos Williams. They are aware of their Englishness as deposits in the descending storeys of the literary and historical past. Their very terrain is becoming consciously precious. A desire to preserve indigenous traditions, to keep open the imagination's supply lines to the past, to receive from the stations of Anglo-Saxon confirmations of ancestry, to perceive in the rituals of show Saturdays and race-meetings and seaside outings, of church-going and marriages at Whitsun, and in the necessities that crave expression after the ritual of church-going has passed away, to perceive in these a continuity of communal ways, and a confirmation of an identity which is threatened—all this is signified by their language. Seamus Heaney, recognized today as one of Ireland's leading poets, has received numerous honors, among them the E. C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Irish Academy of Letters Award, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences E. M. Forster Award. His published poems have been collected in four volumes: Death of a Naturalist , Door in the Dark , Wintering Out , and North . In another form this essay was delivered as the Beckham Lecture at Berkeley in the spring of 1976. He has also contributed to the Summer 1981 issue on “Current Unstated Assumptions about Poetry” for Critical Inquiry. (shrink)