Ἀσέβεια is one of Greek religion's vexatious topics. It was a crime, or γραφή, as well as a religious wrong according to ‘sacred law’. It happened to be the charge in the most famous Greek trial, that of Socrates, and thus became part of alocus classicus, with the result, as Kenneth Dover showed, that later reports of ἀσέβεια trials were often distorted by the influence of Socrates' example. Focussing mostly on the sources found reliable by Dover, this article proposes that (...) ἀσέβεια sometimes resembled μίασμα, which was contagious religious pollution. An impious person could sometimes spread his or her ἀσέβεια, and others could catch it. (shrink)

The people of classical Athens did not regard suicide as a crime committed by the victim. Instead, the Athenians regarded suicide as a crime committed by the instrument that the victim used, or by the victim's hand as opposed to the victim himself. This non-human agent was culpable, just like non-human agents were blamed for accidental deaths. Although suicide victims were innocent, inanimate agents were guilty. In Sophocles'Ajax, for example, the sword that the hero turned upon himself was blamed for (...) his death. The Athenian response to suicide was more about objects than it was about people. (shrink)

A generation ago Moses Finley said that the councils and the assemblies in the Homeric poems were not genuine deliberative bodies but looser, less productive gatherings. Finley and others regarded these bodies as transitional, so that regular councils and assemblies appear only later, in systems like those identified with Lycurgus and Solon. In recent years scholars have returned to an older view that Homeric deliberative bodies were well enough organized to make decisions, even if leaders or dissenters could undermine these (...) decisions. Differences between councils, on the one hand, and assemblies, on the other, have not been prominent in this scholarship. The noteworthy exception is Fabian Schulz's 2011 dissertation on parallels between Homeric councils and the Spartan Gerousia, in which he draws several comparisons between βουλαί and ἀγοραί. (shrink)

F. S. McNeilly; XIII—Immorality and the Law, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 66, Issue 1, 1 June 1966, Pages 167–182, https://doi.org/10.1093/ar.

An updated and extended second edition supporting the findings of its well-known predecessor which claimed that courts employ common-sense notions of causation in determining legal responsibility.

First published in 1931 and originally delivered as the Deems Lectures at New York University in 1929, this book examines what scientific discoveries in many different branches of science reveal, and the implications of such discoveries for philosophy. Esteemed philosopher F. S. C. Northrop surveys a variety of advances, including relativity and quantum mechanics, and how they correlate to his epistemological theory of concepts. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of science and (...) the connection between science and philosophy. (shrink)

The subject of this book is the relationship between the Soviet regime and the Soviet middleclass citizen.

Upshot: In this response, I address the points raised in the commentaries, in particular those related to the scalability and robustness of the mechanism CALM, to its relation with the CAES architecture, and to the transition from sensorimotor to symbolic.