BĪRŪNĪ, ABŪ RAYḤĀN MOḤAMMAD b. Aḥmad (362/973- after 442/1050), scholar and polymath of the period of the late Samanids and early Ghaznavids and one of the two greatest intellectual figures of his time in the eastern lands of the Muslim world, the other being Ebn Sīnā.

: The written renderings of Turkish names, so frequently encountered in the history of the pre-modern ruling dynasties of the Central and Eastern Islamic lands, suffered badly in the past from the deformations of authors and copyists, mainly Arabs and Persians, who did not themselves know Turkish. Moreover, these renderings have often been perpetuated by modern historians of Islam, few of whom have bothered to elucidate these names and to set forth their correct forms and meanings. The present study discusses (...) some of the very diverse principles behind medieval Turkish onomastic and uses these specifically for a consideration of the names of some prominent military commanders of the Great Seljuq sultans, ruling essentially in Persia and Iraq during the 11th and 12th centuries. (shrink)

One of the more intriguing figures of the first period of the Successors is Nicanor, the lieutenant and admiral of Cassander. He came into prominence when he assumed command of the Macedonian garrison at Athens, late in 319 B.c. After distinguishing himself there he took a fleet to the Bosporus, where with Antigonus' collaboration he won a decisive victory over Polyperchon's royal navy. Subsequently his aspirations became sufficiently lofty to threaten his patron's security, and Cassander took elaborate precautions to ensure (...) his arrest and condemnation. Nicanor was clearly a figure of considerable importance; yet no source even hints at his origins and family background. Can conjecture go any way to filling the gaps? (shrink)

Eastward Ho! Diplomats, Travellers and Interpreters of the Middle East and Beyond, 1600–1940. By C. Edmund Bosworth. London: East and West Publishing, 2012. Pp. xxvii + 280. £25.

Everywhere the 1990s have been characterized by an odd mixture of ideological triumphalism-Fukuyama's "end of history" being only the crassest example-and of ideological uncertainty-can there be, should there be, a "third way"? For all its pretensions to universality, the "New World Order" has never lost a fragility in appearance. Students of historiography can scarcely be surprised to learn that an uneasiness over the present and future has in turn frequently entailed uncertainty about the past and particularly about those parts of (...) the past which had seemed most able to give clear and significant "lessons."One evident example is the history of what in my Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima I called the "long" Second World War, that is, that crisis in confidence in the relationship between political and economic liberalism and the nation-state which, by the end of 1938, had left only Britain, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia as in any sense preserving those "liberal" freedoms which had spread across Europe since 1789. In this article, I briefly review the most recent difficulties World War II combatant societies have had in locating a usable past in the history of those times. However, my major focus is on the specific case of Italy, very much a border state in the Cold War system, and today the political home of an "Olive Tree" and a "Liberty Pole" whose historical antecedents and whose philosophical base for the future are less than limpid. 1990s Italian historians thus give very mixed messages about the Fascist past; these are the messages I describe and decode. (shrink)

De Interpretatione is among Aristotle's most influential and widely read writings; C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system. He shows that De Interpretatione is not a disjointed essay on ill-connected subjects, as traditionally thought, but a highly organized and systematic treatise on logic, argument, and dialectic.

This study analyses the sensitivity of public goods contributions through the lens of psychological motives. We report the results of a public goods experiment in which subjects were induced with the motives of care and anger through autobiographical recall. Subjects’ preferences, beliefs, and perceptions under each motive are compared with those of subjects experiencing a neutral autobiographical recall control condition. We find, but only for those subjects with the highest comprehension of the game, that care elicits significantly higher contributions than (...) anger, with the control treatment in between. This positive influence of the care motive on unconditional giving is accounted for partly by preferences for giving and partly by beliefs concerning greater contributions by others. Anger also affects attention to own and other’s payoffs and perceptions of the game’s incentive structure. (shrink)

How do we determine whether individuals accept the actual consistency of a political argument instead of just its rhetorical good looks? This article answers this question by proposing an interpretation of political argument within the constraints of political liberalism. It utilises modern developments in the philosophy of logic and language to reclaim ‘meaningless nonsense’ from use as a partisan war cry and to build up political argument as something more than a power struggle between competing conceptions of the good. Standard (...) solutions for ‘clarifying’ meaning through descriptive definition encounter difficulties with the biases of status quo idioms, as well as partisan translations and circularity. Collectively called linguistic gerrymandering, these difficulties threaten political liberalism’s underlying coherency. The proposed interpretation of political argument overcomes this with a new brand of conceptual analysis that can falsifiably determine whether rhetoric has hijacked political argument. (shrink)

Analytic political philosophy tries to make our political language more precise. But in doing so it risks departing from our natural language and intuitions. This article examines this tension. We...

This paper identifies that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a negative effect on software piracy rates in addition to consolidating prior research that economic development and the cultural dimension of individualism also negatively affect piracy rates. Using data for 59 countries from 2000 to 2005, the findings show that economic well-being, individualism and technology development as measured by ICT expenditures explain between 70% and 82% of the variation in software piracy rates during this period. The research results provide important (...) implications for policy makers and business practitioners to help reduce software piracy. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen a welcome erosion of traditional dogmas of Alexander scholarship, and a number of hallowed theories, raised on a cushion of metaphysical speculation above the mundane historical evidence, have succumbed to attacks based on rigorous logic and source analysis. The brotherhood of man as a vision of Alexander is dead, as is the idea that all Alexander sources can be divided into sheep and goats, the one based on extracts from the archives and the other (...) mere rhetorical fantasy. One notable theory, however, still flourishes and has indeed been described as one of the few certainties among Alexander's aims. This is the so-called policy of fusion. As so often, the idea and terminology go back to J. G. Droysen, who hailed Alexander's marriage to Rhoxane as a symbol of the fusion of Europe and Asia, which the king recognised as the consequence of his victory. At Susa the fusion of east and west was complete and Alexander, as interpreted by Droysen, saw in that fusion the guarantee of the strength and stability of his empire. Once enunciated, Droysen's formulation passed down the mainstream of German historiography, to Kaerst, Wilcken, Berve and Schachermeyr, and has penetrated to almost all arteries of Alexander scholarship. Like the figure of Alexander himself the theory is flexible and capable of strange metamorphoses. In the hands of Tarn it developed into the idea of all subjects, Greek and barbarian, living together in unity and concord in a universal empire of peace. The polar opposite is an essay of Helmut Berve, written in the heady days before the Second World War, in which he claimed that Alexander, with commendable respect for Aryan supremacy, planned a blending of the Macedonian and Persian peoples, so that the two racially related Herrenvölkerwould lord it over the rest of the world empire. On Berve's interpretation the policy had two stages. Alexander first recognised the merits of the Iranian peoples and placed them alongside the Macedonians in his court and army hierarchy. Next came the ‘Blutvermischung’, the integration of the two peoples by marriage. (shrink)

Ii is a well-known fact that the men of the Macedonian phalanx under Philip and Alexander were known collectively asor ‘foot companions’. Our first reference to the name comes from Demosthenes, who in his second Olynthiac tries unconvincingly to disparage the fighting qualities of Philip's mercenaries andDemosthenes adds no explanation, and it was left to commentators and lexicographers to unearth a relevant fragment from thePhilippicaof Anaximenes of Lampsacus.

Propaganda and history are often inseparable. Most governments are in a position to control the dissemination of evidence, and if an event is embarrassing or damaging, the relevant evidence is certain to be distorted or withheld. Moreover the writers of history, however innocent their motives, cannot disregard the official apologia of their rulers. One notes with interest that the learned authors of the official Soviet history of the world portray the invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 as a (...) crusade of liberation. Of course it might be true that the people liberated by the Red Army were glad to be rid of ‘the arbitrary despotism of the Polish Pans’ and that in the subsequent elections there was absolute freedom of choice and overwhelming support for union with the Ukraine, but the fact remains that it was impossible for membersof the Moscow Academy to contradict their government's justification of the invasion. (shrink)

For all its celebrity, Thucydides' Funeral Speech remains an enigma. ‘Unquantifiably authentic’ is how one scholar describes it, and the description betrays a measure of despair. We feel that the speech is authentic in some sense of the word. To some degree it corresponds to what Pericles actually said in the winter of 431/30 BC, but the degree of correspondence is a mystery. All agree that Thucydides framed the speech in his own words and integrated it with his historical narrative, (...) so as to recall and answer Archidamus' encomium of Sparta in Book I. It also anticipates the forthcoming description of the plague with mordant, subtle allusions. (shrink)

New evidence often complicates as much as it clarifies. That truth is well illustrated by Stephen Tracy's recent and brilliant discovery that a tiny unpublished fragment of an Attic inscription belongs to a known decree . The decree has hitherto been recognised as an enactment of the oligarchy imposed by Antipater in 322. Its proposer, Archedicus of Lamptrae, was a leading member of the new regime and held the most influential office of state, that of anagrapheus, in 320/19.2 Appropriately enough (...) the decree confers honours upon members of the Macedonian court, but as the stone now reveals, it is phrased in a remarkable and anomalous manner: ‘in order that as many as possible of the friends of the king and of Antipater may be honoured by the Athenian people and confer benefactions upon the city’. There is no question about the meaning. The decree refers to friends of an unknown king, who are also friends of Antipater. But after Alexander's death there was a dual kingship. Philip III Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV reigned jointly and are generally termed ‘the kings’. How can the singular singular be explained? (shrink)

Alexander's satrapal appointments in Syria have long been a focal point of scholarly dissension, for the relevant passages in the ancient sources are uniformly inconsistent and sometimes disconcertingly corrupt. A running debate continued until 1935, when Oscar Leuze presented a monumental survey of the ancient evidence together with exhaustive refutation of the hypotheses advanced by earlier scholars. Since then the problems of Syria under Alexander have been left virtually undisturbed, which is a pity. In the first place, Leuze's treatment is (...) not impregnable. His massive discussion tends to convince through sheer accumulation of argument rather than by the cogency of its logic, which can often be faulted. (shrink)

Arrian is regarded as the most authoritative of the extant sources for the reign of Alexander the Great. It is his work that is usually chosen to provide the narrative core of modern histories, and very often a mere reference to ‘the reliable Arrian’ is considered sufficient to guarantee the veracity of the information derived from him. What gives Arrian his prestige is his reliance on contemporary sources, Ptolemy and Aristobulus. It is recognized that Arrian's narrative is based primarily upon (...) Ptolemy, and, as long as Ptolemy is regarded as an impeccable mine of facts for Alexander's reign and Arrian's work is accepted as a faithful reproduction of Ptolemy, the Anabasis Alexandri stands out as a uniquely authoritative record of Alexander's reign. (shrink)

Both Carnap and Quine made significant contributions to the philosophy of mathematics despite their diversedviews. Carnap endorsed the dichotomy between analytic and synthetic knowledge and classified certainmathematical questions as internal questions appealing to logic and convention. On the contrary, Quine wasopposed to the analytic-synthetic distinction and promoted a holistic view of scientific inquiry. The purpose of thispaper is to argue that in light of the recent advancement of experimental mathematics such as Monte Carlosimulations, limiting mathematical inquiry to the domain of (...) logic is unjustified. Robustness studies implemented inMonte Carlo Studies demonstrate that mathematics is on par with other experimental-based sciences. (shrink)

My title is deliberately provocative. What could be less humanitarian than the Melian Dialogue? For most readers of Thucydides it is the paradigm of imperial brutality, ranking with the braggadocio of Sennacherib's Rabshakeh in its insistence upon the coercive force of temporal power. The Melians are assured that the rule of law is not applicable to them. As the weaker party they can only accept the demands of the stronger and be content that they are not more extreme. Appeals to (...) moral or religious norms are quite irrelevant, for in their position the Melians simply cannot afford them—as little as Mr. Doolittle could afford middle-class morality. The message is a hard one, and it has elicited outrage over the centuries from the majority of scholars who tend to prefer the καλὰ ὀνόματα of propaganda to the harsh underlying realities of imperial expansion. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing shortly after a war to protect western values had resulted in a new world order, finds it inconceivable that Athenian generals could discount divinely-inspired hope and insist on the imperative of force or that the Melians, that tiny state, would prefer the nobler to the safer course. In this he is echoed by George Grote, writing in the expansionist days of the early nineteenth century: ‘a civilized conqueror is bound by received international morality to furnish some justification—a good plea, if he can—a false plea or a sham plea if he has not better’. Instead, says Grote, the Athenian envoy ‘disdains the conventional arts of civilized diplomacy’; and the inevitable conclusion for him, as it had been for Dionysius, is that the Dialogue is fundamentally bogus, a composition of Thucydides ‘to bring out the sentiments of a disdainful and confident conqueror in dramatic antithesis’. (shrink)

The royal house of Pontus claimed to be descended from the cream of the old Persian nobility, the Seven Families, and to have received its lands as the gift of Darius I. The claim is first attested by Polybius, and it became common currency in the reign of Mithridates Eupator. Since Théodore Reinach wrote his magisterial history of the Pontic kingdom, the royal pretensions of the regime have been dismissed as apocryphal.