Lords of Asia Minor: An Introduction to the Lydians. By Annick Payne and Jorit Wintjes. Philippika, vol. 93. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2016. Pp. x + 144, illus. €29.80.

Why cantoribus? The reference of the phrase cantores Euphorionis has been much discussed, by the author of this note among others. But what is the sense of cantores? The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, Lewis and Short, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary variously classify Tusc. 3.45 as an instance of cantor in the special sense of ‘supporter’, ‘imitator’, or ‘eulogist’. Recently, however, W. Allen suggested that this may be to read too much into the word: ‘… cantor could well have the standard (...) meaning of personal and private recitation of poetry. Since sometime cantare and legere have a semantic identity, however, it may be possible that the word cantores in hi cantores Euphorionis has a meaning no more momentous than that of lector. ’. (shrink)

There is no hint in either work that any of the information contained in this reconstruction of family relationships might be open to serious question. It is the purpose of this note to suggest that this is none the less the case. The problem concerns the supposed wives and children of Isokratesü adoptive son Aphareus. The information presented on this subject depends on two passages of the pseudo-Plutarchan Vitae Decem Oratorum. The first is a list of members of the family (...) buried in Kynosarges, which mentions Isokratesü. (shrink)

Is there or is there not a reference here to the Megarian Decree? Opinions have differed and no doubt will continue to do so. However, considerable authority has recently been thrown behind the proposition that the matter can be decided on purely linguistic grounds, that merely as a matter of use of Greek the passage cannot contain a reference to the Megarian Decree. This seems, on investigation, to be false, and since confusion appears to persist in the books about the (...) interpretation of Thucydides' text a short discussion may perhaps be of value. (shrink)

Both patently incorrect readings and long-established emendations have a habit of retaining their places in texts of ancient authors with few or no questions asked. This paper considers two examples of this phenomenon in Book 15 of Diodorus' Bibliotheke.

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that supports (...) a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years :28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially automated driving already becoming standard in new cars from a number of manufacturers, the question of ethical and legal standards becomes virulent. For exam-ple, while automated and autonomous cars, being equipped with appropriate detection sensors, processors, and intelligent mapping material, have a chance of being much safer than human-driven cars in (...) many regards, situations will arise in which accidents cannot be completely avoided. Such situations will have to be dealt with when programming the software of these vehicles. In several instances, internationally, regulations have been passed, based on legal considerations of road safety, mostly. However, to date, there have been few, if any, cases of a broader ethics code for autonomous or automated driving preceding actual regulation and being based on a broadly composed ethics committee of independent experts. In July 2016, the German Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt, appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, which began its work in September 2016. In June 2017, this committee presented a code of ethics which was published in German and in English. It consists of 20 ethical guidelines. Having been a member of this committee, I will present the main ethical topics of these guidelines and the discussions that lay behind them. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.