In an earlier paper it was argued that in the famous chariot simile at the end of the first Georgic, Virgil imitates a passage from the Choephoroi of Aeschylus describing the onset of Orestes' madness. It was also suggested that Virgil may have been intentionally drawing a parallel between Octavian and the son of Agamemnon. Orestes avenged his father by murdering his mother Clytemnestra, but in so doing he deepened the guilt that afflicted Argos and thus gave new life to (...) the curse that lay on the house of Tantalus. So too, perhaps, Virgil is warning Octavian that in seeking to avenge his ‘father’ Caesar by killing his murderers at Philippi he is precipitating civil war, and so continuing the cycle of blood-guilt which similarly afflicts the Roman people. If such a suggestion seems fantastic it can now be supported by analogy from an explicit parallelism of Octavian and Orestes in a passage of Claudian. The first part of the passage in question reads as follows: Maurusius Atlas Gildonis Furias, Alaricum barbara Peuce nutrierat, qui saepe tuum sprevere profana mente patrem. Thracum venienti e flnibus alter Hebri clausit aquas; alter praecepta vocantis respuit auxiliisque ad proxima bella negatis abiurata palam Libyae possederat arva. (shrink)

Of the four surviving fragments of Varius' De Morte1 perhaps the most widely discussed has been the first: Vendidit hie Latium populis agrosque Quiritum eripuit, fixit leges pretio atque refixit This is imitated by Virgil, whose Sibyl says of a soul in Tartarus: Vendidit hie auro patriam dominumque potentem imposuit; fixit leges pretio atque refixit Most commentators, quoting Cic. Phil. 12.5.12, connect both passages exclusively with Antony, and rightly point to Servius' words on v. 622, ‘possumus Antonium accipere’. What should (...) be stressed, however, is that Servius also thinks the words ‘vendidit hie auro patriam’ have a general reference, but are at the same time designed to recall historical individuals, of whom he names two: etiam haec licet generaliter dicantur, habent tamen specialitatem: nam Lasthenes Olynthum Philippo vendidit, Curio Caesari XXVII. S. Romam: de quo Lucanus Gallorum captus spoliis et Caesaris auro. (shrink)

BLWith Latin text and English translation The epic poem the Thebaid was composed by Statius about AD 80 to 92 in twelve books. The subject is the expedition of the Seven against Thebes in support of the attempt by Oedipus' son Polyneices to recover the throne from his brother Eteocles. Book IX is set in the midst of the fighting before the eventual death of the two brothers. In this new edition of Book IX Dr Dewar accompanies the Latin (...) text with apparatus criticus, a translation, and an extensive introduction and commentary. The introduction contains sections on Statius' life and works, a summary of the epic, its themes and characters, and poetry, the textual tradition, and Statius' influence on later European literature. The commentary, the first on the ninth book to be published in Britain this century, is written in the light of recent scholarship. It examines in close detail Statius' style and language, use of models, and literary intentions. It is Dr Dewar's hope that this edition will help to explain the poem's great popularity in the Middle Ages, and even restore something of its lost prestige. (shrink)

Hippomedon is stoutly defending the body of his fallen comrade Tydeus against a mass of Thebans who press him hard: there is a break in the attack allowing him to return fire while his allies Alcon and Idas with their troops come to his aid. It is grammatically possible that iaculantum could be taken with tela, but style and word order make this most unlikely.

Hippomedon is stoutly defending the body of his fallen comrade Tydeus against a mass of Thebans who press him hard: there is a break in the attack allowing him to return fire while his allies Alcon and Idas with their troops come to his aid. It is grammatically possible that iaculantum could be taken with tela, but style and word order make this most unlikely.

The extravagant, not to say fulsome, praise showered upon Nero in Lucan's proem to his De Bello Civili tends to divide scholars neatly into two factions. In the blue corner are those for whom it is ‘obviously’ sarcastic or ironic in some degree, whether they consider it intended to be circulated privately or understood only by a small group of initiates, or else see it as actually being designed to offend the princeps. In the red we find those who attempt (...) to explain what the modern palate finds offensive by reference to the Realien of Nero's reign and to the processes of literary representation in general—and what we loosely call ‘rhetoric’ in particular—current in the poetry of the time. (shrink)

tantane me tenuit vivendi, nate, voluptas, ut pro me hostili paterer succedere dextrae, quern genui? tuane haec genitor per vulnera servor morte tua vivens? heu, nunc misero mihi demum exitium infelix, nunc alte vulnus adactum!

This is the only undisputed fragment of Nero's poetry which is longer than a single line. It is preserved for us by the scholiast on Lucan 3.261, who gives us the additional piece of information that it belongs to Nero's ‘first book’. It is overwhelmingly likely that this refers to the first book of Nero‘s epic Troica, his most famous work and the only one, as far as we know, to have been comprised of several books.1 Since the fragment is (...) the most significant surviving, but this attribution to the Troica cannot be quite certain, Morel and Büchner list it as fragment 1 with the simple heading ‘E libro primo’ and scrupulously keep it entirely separate from Servius’ two testimonia on the content of the poem. This entirely sensible procedure, however, may trap the unwary reader into assuming that not a word of Nero's epic actually survives. (shrink)

The eunuch Eutropius began his ascendancy over Arcadius, Emperor of the East, in late 395, following the murder of the Praetorian Prefect Rufinus. Eutropius, despite his physical shortcomings, ‘sullied the Fasti’ by holding the consulate in 399. By the end of that same year, however, collusion between the barbarian general Gainas and Tribigild, leader of a rebellion of Ostrogoths in Asia Minor, resulted in Eutropius’ fall from power. He was exiled to Cyprus and executed shortly afterwards.

How may we characterize the intrinsic structure of physical quantities such as mass, length, or electric charge? This article shows that group-theoretic methods—specifically, the notion of a free and transitive group action—provide an elegant way of characterizing the structure of scalar quantities, and uses this to give an intrinsic treatment of vector quantities. It also gives a general account of how different scalar or vector quantities may be algebraically combined with one another. Finally, it uses this apparatus to give a (...) simple intrinsic treatment of Newtonian gravitation. (shrink)

The Royal Liverpool Children’s Inquiry investigated the circumstances leading to the removal, retention, and disposal of human tissue, including children’s organs, at the Royal Liverpool Children’s NHS Trust . It recommended changes to procedures for obtaining consent for postmortems and retaining organs and tissues for research or education. However, the report contains five areas of confusion. Firstly, it allowed the cultural and historical traditions of horror over the use and misuse of body parts to suffuse the logical analysis of past (...) wrongs and future rights. Secondly, it makes an inappropriate conflation between seeking redress for past wrongs and shaping future policy. Thirdly, the report takes a muddled stance over the value of bodily integrity at burial. Fourthly, the report is inconsistent over the justification for future organ and tissue collections. Fifthly, the notion of “respect” is used with troublesome looseness. The extent to which subsequent policy work has furthered the search for greater ethical clarity over these difficult issues is discussed, together with reflection on three particular improvements that could be made to the process of such an inquiry. (shrink)

This book explores how contemporary educational research and curriculum occlude the vital and enduring relationship between education and well-being. Beginning with the consequences of the reductive tendencies of educational research and moving through the consequences of the technical and instrumental tendencies of curriculum, this book challenges how contemporary education as a whole reduces human beings to “things” and funnels them according to predetermined knowledge forms representative of the dominant socioeconomic ideology. Through a philosophical exploration of original conceptions of education and (...) well-being, this book attempts to recover an understanding of education that embodies how we learn to uncover and relate to our own possibilities for a more meaningful life which is a life of well-being. (shrink)

Data science, and the related field of big data, is an emerging discipline involving the analysis of data to solve problems and develop insights. This rapidly growing domain promises many benefits to both consumers and businesses. However, the use of big data analytics can also introduce many ethical concerns, stemming from, for example, the possible loss of privacy or the harming of a sub-category of the population via a classification algorithm. To help address these potential ethical challenges, this paper maps (...) and describes the main ethical themes that were identified via systematic literature review. It then identifies a possible structure to integrate these themes within a data science project, thus helping to provide some structure in the on-going debate with respect to the possible ethical situations that can arise when using data science analytics. (shrink)

This book defends a form of ethical intuitionism, according to which (i) there are objective moral truths; (ii) we know some of these truths through a kind of immediate, intellectual awareness, or "intuition"; and (iii) our knowledge of moral truths gives us reasons for action independent of our desires. The author rebuts all the major objections to this theory and shows that the alternative theories about the nature of ethics all face grave difficulties.

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

Part I: The representation of life -- Can life be given a real definition? -- The representation of the living individual -- The representation of the life-form itself -- Part II: Naive action theory -- Types of practical explanation -- Naive explanation of action -- Action and time -- Part III: Practical generality -- Two tendencies in practical philosophy -- Practices and dispositions as sources of the goodness of individual actions -- Practice and disposition as sources of individual action.

Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence. Or perhaps it must be reliably formed. Or perhaps there are some other "good-making" features it must have. But does a belief's justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists, who tend to focus (...) on scientific or theoretical beliefs as the ideal, insist that such awareness is required for justification. Externalists, who think children's ordinary beliefs in obvious facts are paradigm cases of justified belief, say it isn't required. Michael Bergmann's book offers a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism. (shrink)

While much attention has gone towards ethical, legal, and social implications of direct-to-consumer genetic testing over the past decades, the rise of new forms of consumer omics has largely escaped scrutiny. In this paper, we analyze the product descriptions, promotional messages, terms of service, and privacy policies of five epigenetic and seven microbiomic testing companies. The advent of such tests online represents a significant shift in consumer omics, from a focus on inherited molecules with genetic tests, to broader interest for (...) information about the lives of individuals, such as chronological and biological age, exposures, and lifestyle. Building on previous literature about direct-to-consumer genetic testing, and taking this shift into account, we identify limitations, gaps and inconsistencies in current practices and policies of the new companies. Best practice standards and regulations applicable across different omic sample and data types is a necessary first step in the promotion of responsible consumer omics. (shrink)

Suppose that one thinks that certain symmetries of a theory reveal “surplus structure”. What would a formalism without that surplus structure look like? The conventional answer is that it would be a reduced theory: a theory which traffics only in structures invariant under the relevant symmetry. In this paper, I argue that there is a neglected alternative: one can work with a sophisticated version of the theory, in which the symmetries act as isomorphisms.

Externalist theories of justification create the possibility of cases in which everything appears to one relevantly similar with respect to two propositions, yet one proposition is justified while the other is not. Internalists find this difficult to accept, because it seems irrational in such a case to affirm one proposition and not the other. The underlying internalist intuition supports a specific internalist theory, Phenomenal Conservatism, on which epistemic justification is conferred by appearances.

At the University of Sheffield during 2011 and 2012, a leading group of philosophers, psychologists, and others gathered to explore the nature and significance of implicit bias. The two volumes of Implicit Bias and Philosophy emerge from these workshops. Each volume philosophically examines core areas of psychological research on implicit bias as well as the ramifications of implicit bias for core areas of philosophy. Volume I: Metaphysics and Epistemology is comprised of two parts: “The Nature of Implicit Attitudes, Implicit Bias, (...) and Stereotype Threat,” and “Skepticism, Social Knowledge, and Rationality.” The first part contains chapters examining the relationship between implicit attitudes and “dual process” models of the mind; the role of affect in the formation and change of implicit associations; the unity (or disunity) of implicit attitudes; whether implicit biases are mental states at all; and whether performances on stereotype-relevant tasks are automatic and unconscious or intentional and strategic. The second part contains chapters examining implicit bias and skepticism; the effects of implicit bias on scientific research; the accessibility of social stereotypes in epistemic environments; the effects of implicit bias on the self-perception of members of stigmatized social groups as rational agents; the role of gender stereotypes in philosophy; and the role of heuristics in biased reasoning. (shrink)

In this engaging and spirited text, Michael Lynch argues that truth does matter, in both our personal and political lives. He explains that the growing cynicism over truth stems in large part from our confusion over what truth is.

Causation: A Realist Approach Traditional empiricist accounts of causation and laws of nature have been reductionist in the sense of entailing that given a complete specification of the non-causal properties of and relations among particulars, it is therefore logically determined both what laws there are and what events are causally related. It is argued here, however, that reductionist accounts of causation and of laws of nature are exposed to decisive objections, and thus that the time has come for empiricists to (...) break with that tradition. -/- The basic goal of this book, therefore, is to set out and defend realistic accounts of those concepts. In the case of causal relations, for example, Tooley maintains that causation is basically a matter of theoretical relations between states of affairs that underlie and explain relative frequencies. He also argues that such an approach avoids the objections that tell against reductionist accounts and that it does so without making causal relations epistemologically inaccessible. (shrink)

This Element explores what it means for two theories in physics to be equivalent, and what lessons can be drawn about their structure as a result. It does so through a twofold approach. On the one hand, it provides a synoptic overview of the logical tools that have been employed in recent philosophy of physics to explore these topics: definition, translation, Ramsey sentences, and category theory. On the other, it provides a detailed case study of how these ideas may be (...) applied to understand the dynamical and spatiotemporal structure of Newtonian mechanics - in particular, in light of the symmetries of Newtonian theory. In so doing, it brings together a great deal of exciting recent work in the literature, and is sure to be a valuable companion for all those interested in these topics. (shrink)

Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal. “Penetrating and sprightly...Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive...Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity...[Rosen] is in (...) general an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.” —Samuel Moyn, The Nation “[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education “Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons.” —Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

edition (unseen), $12.95. traditions, bringing into being new modes of understanding. Paper Anthropology, and particularly ethnography, is torn between two quests, one to capture the diversity of social life and the other to discover universal principles structuring that diversity. Jackson examines these quests within the context of ethnographic fieldwork, focusing on the relationship between ethnographers and the people they study. He is concerned with defining the anthropological project as something more than the projection of the anthropologist's traditions and concerns onto (...) an alien culture. Rather, he would have the project open a genuine dialogue between people from different cultures or Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Michael G. Titelbaum presents a new Bayesian framework for modeling rational degrees of belief—the first of its kind to represent rational requirements on agents who undergo certainty loss.

This article gives an explicit presentation of Newtonian gravitation on the backdrop of Maxwell space-time, giving a sense in which acceleration is relative in gravitational theory. However, caution is needed: assessing whether this is a robust or interesting sense of the relativity of acceleration depends on some subtle technical issues and on substantive philosophical questions over how to identify the space-time structure of a theory.