Foucault’s later writings continue his analyses of subject-formation but now with a view to foregrounding an active subject capable of self-transformation via ascetical and other self-imposed disciplinary practices. In my essay, I engage Foucault’s studies of ancient Greco-Roman and Christian technologies of the self with a two-fold purpose in view. First, I bring to the fore additional continuities either downplayed or overlooked by Foucault’s analysis between Greco-Roman transformative practices including self-writing, correspondence, and the hupomnemata and Christian (...) ascetical and epistolary practices. Second, I add exegetical support to recent arguments denying Foucault’s advocacy for the death of the subject per se. In fact, my analyses show that Foucault’s ethico-aesthetic turn and its corresponding concern with self-transformation and self-(re)constitution via ascetical practices assumes a subject with rational and volitional capacities. Without these capacities, the art of living Foucault describes is not possible. (shrink)

A review is undertaken of the contributions of 38 classical authors, from Pythagoras in the 6th century BCE to Isidore in the 6th century CE, to the classification of the sciences. Such classifications include some that are more theoretical in function, some that are more practical. The emergence of the quadrivium and trivium is charted; the Greek concept of “enkýklios paideía” and the Latin term “artēs liberales” are defined; and the ways in which the form, content, and function of science (...) classifications change during this period are assessed. (shrink)

This very long book sets out to track and trace the working-class men and, less commonly, women who, against the limited expectations of their social position, learned Greek and Latin as an aspiration for personal change. The ideology of the book is clear and welcome: these figures “offer us a new ancestral backstory for a discipline sorely in need of a democratic makeover.” The book's twenty-five chapters explore how classics and class were linked in the educational system of Britain and (...) in its cultural performativity: Is he a gentleman? Does he have Greek? became the paradigmatic questions, as the study of classics became a sign of cultural attainment and social exclusion. This book sets out to explore the counterstory of the cobblers and shepherds who, like Jude the Obscure, fought against society's oppressiveness to access classical learning.The book's breadth is exemplary. It looks at the issue through genres and media, through different communities and national identities, through the prosopography of ragged-trousered philanthropists, beggar-lecturers, body-building performers, and through other institutions and people who helped, including adult-education teachers, kind bosses, supportive vicars, and fiery communists. This breadth, and the fascinating research that it encapsulates, will make this book a fantastic resource for future scholarship: it outlines the richness of a field that has been all too rarely explored properly. If you do not know Stephen Duck, “the thresher poet,” or Hawkie, the crutch-wielding beggar who performed from the books he sold on the streets of Glasgow, then this book is the place to the meet them. The cast list alone is worth the entrance ticket.Yet this very breadth is also the source of the book's limitations. The sheer number of cases listed, treated at similar length and depth, repeatedly conceals the complexity and even the interest of individual figures or events. So, the numerous representations of Vesuvius in shows around London in the first half of the nineteenth century—after the discoveries at Pompeii—are duly noted as a source of excitement and knowledge about antiquity, but against the recent treatment by Clare Pettitt in Serial Forms (which came out the same year) this mere noting looks desperately thin. There is little discussion of how the characters themselves talked about or negotiated class. This deficiency is particularly important for someone like Charles Kingsley, who was very active in the Chartist movement but also became Queen Victoria's chaplain and the professor of history at Cambridge. There are hilarious descriptions of Kingsley's stammering engagement with the working-class leaders he actively supported, which capture how awkward the interaction of classes could be even and especially when the participants shared a goal of transformation. (Ed Richardson's Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in the Pursuit of Antiquity is good on these moments of awkwardness but is one of several books whose absence from the notes looks pointed.) The authors list cases of working men who were picked up by fashionable society as poets or scholars, many of whom were dropped almost as quickly back into penury—but the telling description of such a case in Kingsley's Alton Locke is passed over, although it reveals an acute self-consciousness about such narratives in a best-selling novel.The very structure of the book tends toward listing cases rather than analyzing them in depth. It is not clear why “Shoemaker classicists” should take up a chapter, bar there having been some. Nor is it clear why some figures are not included. John Brown was an uneducated Scottish shepherd who taught himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. He was discovered by a professor, one John Pringle, when he went into a shop to buy a secondhand Greek Testament (though his own church thought this newfound and inexplicable linguistic brilliance suspicious or even satanic). Brown went on to write the wonderfully titled The Self-Interpreting Bible, which remained in print and sold very widely for more than a century after its publication in 1778—especially after it was championed by the evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. It is a pity that Brown escaped the authors’ net, but religion, one of the main reasons to learn the classical languages, is downplayed throughout this study, although its imbrication with classics is everywhere in evidence. The book, significantly enough, leads rather toward a rosy-eyed depiction of posh classical communists like Geoffrey de Ste. Croix and George Thompson, and other such heroes of the authors.The authors are much more at home in the years of ardent republicanism in the decades on either side of the turn of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, when socialism and communism became embedded in British life. The last half of the nineteenth century, when classics really established itself institutionally as a discipline, and its revolutionary potential moved away from the zeal of the Romantic philhellenists into the artistic idealism of a Richard Wagner or the sexual freedom of an Oscar Wilde, are less adequately explored. The huge attendance at art galleries and the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace as a route to encountering the past of antiquity in material form are barely addressed (Kate Nichols's Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace would have helped); nor do shows like Astley's Circus get air time (Rachel Bryant Davies's Troy, Carthage, and the Victorians is revealing). It is particularly noticeable in such a voluminous study that there is no discussion of how turning to Greek was a crucial route for the self-understanding of what was considered transgressive male sexuality—and for a particular engagement between the classes. To understand the social force of classics requires a deeper appreciation of the dynamics between conservatism and transformation, disciplinarity and self-discovery. The big picture of how classics matters is lost in the gems picked out by the authors. Gems they are, but their facets need more attention and their setting a broader perspective. (shrink)

The Sandal-Binder Aphrodite, a witty variation on Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Knidos, is one of the most frequently reproduced sculptural types in Greco-Roman art. Created in a variety of materials throughout the Mediterranean, extant versions of this iconography show the goddess in the act of tying (or possibly untying) her sandal. Although a large number of these works of art date between the first and fourth century CE, most studies on the Sandal-Binder have approached it primarily as an expression (...) of Hellenistic Greek artistic trends. The present study shifts our attention away from the cultural milieu of the Sandal-Binder’s creation to that of its reception. Two well-preserved examples—one from a house in Pompeii and the other from London—attest to the process of translating or adapting this sensual image of Aphrodite to a Roman ideological framework. In both cases, it is through the language of body adornment that this transformation is achieved: while the example from Pompeii (a marble statuette adorned with gold paint) shows the goddess wearing contemporary jewelry and clothing, the diminutive silver figurine from London is part of a fashionable hairpin that points to the dissemination of imperial hairstyles in Rome’s remotest province. By calling attention to their design and function, this essay highlights the complex polysemy of Roman Sandal-Binders and the powerful messages they communicated to a diverse audience of viewers both at the heart of the empire and in the provinces. (shrink)

It is the aim of this work to examine the pivotal role of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) as a judge of classical sculpture and as a major contributor to German art criticism. John Harry North seeks to identify the key features of his treatment of classical beauty, particularly in his famous descriptions of large-scale classical sculpture. Five case studies are offered to demonstrate the academic classicism that formed the core of his philosophy of art. North aims to establish Winckelmann's place (...) in the development of the German language. His prose contributed to a literary style that was suitable for the expression of an emotional response to visual experiences. His use of rhetoric in the assessment of classical art, however, make his judgements propagandist rather than analytical. The published works of Winckelmann, his draft essays and his collected private correspondence are advanced as criteria in the evaluation of his impact on the development of German classicism that culminated in the Weimar group of poets and writers. His Grecophile enthusiasm, however, led him to introduce stylistic categories in the development of classical marble sculpture that are no longer regarded as truly reflecting the evolution of Greco-Roman art. Thus his historicity and his classification of styles remain in doubt. Winckelmann proposed that the training of modern artists should concentrate on the observation and imitation of classical models instead of looking to nature as the source of inspiration. This plan succeeded to some extent in the generation that followed his untimely death. Throughout the succeeding century, artists and their sponsors did favour classical models and developed stylistic classicism in European freestanding sculpture, in painting and in architecture. (shrink)

In modern times, the philosophical and theological meaning of work acquires an urgency anticipated by the Marxistic materialism and the Christian spirituality, as witnessed by the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts of Karl Marx and the encyclical letter Laborems Exercens of John Paul II. But this preoccupation was already present in earlier times. In Greco-Roman history there were aulical preconceptions about the work of man 's hands, but there were also religious associations of workers where work was celebrated. The fact that (...) God incarnated in a carpenter made Him familiar with such work. The Church Fathers interpret the work of man 's hands as glorification of God, service to one's neighbor and perfection of self In 1127, during the intellectual and social revolution of the twelfth century, Hugh of Saint-Victor gave a philosophical statute to the mechanical arts in his Didascalicon. Saint Bernard, in De Diligendo Deo, identifies work with the flirts of the four degrees of that love which is the supreme law of the universe ordained for God, the supreme love. (shrink)

From Plato to Postmodernism presents the cultural history of the West in one concise volume. Nearly four thousand years of Western history are woven together into an unfolding story in which we see how movements and individuals contributed to the philosophy, literature and art that have shaped today's world. The story begins with the West's Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins, moving through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Romanticism to twenty-first century postmodernity. The author covers key figures such as (...) Moses, Michelangelo, Mozart and Marx, setting them in context and highlighting their main contributions. Illustrations and a comprehensive glossary help explain important terms such as ‘gothic', ‘baroque', ‘stream of consciousness' and ‘the death of God', and clarify movements such as Neoplatonism, Renaissance humanism and existentialism. -/- For students, this book bridges the gap between what is taught in schools and the cultural knowledge required at university, providing an indispensible grounding in the story of Western culture. For all readers, it offers an invitation to take an enjoyable tour through the fascinating history of Western thought, literature and art. (shrink)

Those supporting laws permitting assisted suicide seem to enact a thin morality, one that permits people who desire AS to get it in the terminal stages of an illness, and that provide safeguards both for those who desire AS and do not desire it. This article explores the way in which all AS legislation subtly frames the question of AS such that AS becomes the clearest option; ensconcing AS in law also gives a moral legitimacy to suicide. Thus, the morality (...) of laws permitting AS are not morally thin. I describe how AS laws create a different social imaginary for dying in Western cultures, one that competes with the traditional Christian understanding. Legalized AS is inevitable in Western liberal democracies, and I claim that the Church, which transformed the ancient Greco-Roman culture, will once again have to create alternative structures, creating a new Ars moriendi, in order to challenge the modern statecraft for killing. (shrink)

This study is dedicated to examining how the principles and values that mark the difference between the ancient Greco-Roman and biblical traditions help us to think about what (and who) we look at when we look at art. We begin with the Bible's self-reflexive communication to its readers regarding the status of its own images and then consider works by Michelangelo, Tejo Remy, and Charles White—while also calling on Shakespeare, Hegel, and Kierkegaard—to show that art in the biblical (...) tradition presupposes and expresses love as the transformation of life's finite immediacies, the transformation of its finite givens, into the gift. We argue, overall, that the art of the biblical tradition demands that viewers pose the question of whether, where, and how deeply they find in those works—and in themselves—the principle of love as the redemption of finitude, the redemption of existence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Petrification of Cleopatra in Nineteenth Century Art MARGARET MALAMUD MARTHA MALAMUD What did Cleopatra look like? Was she a Roman, a Ptolemaic Greek, an Egyptian, an African? Was she a precocious child, a devastatingly beautiful seductress, an astute practitioner of imperial politics, a murderess, a longnosed blue-stocking? [Figure 1] Cleopatra is dead, but “Cleopatra ” exists in the eye of the beholder. What other human being has (...) been portrayed in such “infinite variety”? In her life, and even more in her afterlife, the protean queen of the Nile has, like a shaft of sunlight focused through a magnifying glass, clarified and set ablaze underlying ideologies and overt assertions of race and gender, manifested differently in disparate times and places. Here we consider two case studies of nineteenth century representations of Cleopatra in stone: William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra (1860) and Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra (1876). [Figarion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 Figure 1: Bust of Cleopatra VII, 40–30 bce, Altes Museum, Berlin. 32 the petrification of cleopatra ure 2] Story, a wealthy and well-connected white expatriate living in Rome, gave the famous queen features that deviated from classicizing portrayals of the queen and struck critics as startling and original. American artist Edmonia Lewis, of Black West Indies / Ojibwa Native American descent, lived and worked in Rome, but as a poor, racially-mixed female artist she moved in quite different social circles than Story. Her decision to sculpt the Egyptian queen as a white woman Figure 2: William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1858; this carving 1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Margaret Malamud, Martha Malamud 33 dying in agony during the last moments of her suicide shocked and fascinated critics. Both works display a very different understanding of women, the Orient, the Classical past, and the exotic Black other. We understand and contextualize these strikingly different representations of Cleopatra by looking at the comments of contemporary writers and critics. Lewis and her Death of Cleopatra inspired the twenty-first century Black poet Tyehimba Jess, with whose poetic evocation of Lewis and her work we conclude. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when most portrayals were of Cleopatra as a classical Greek beauty, William Wetmore Story boldly gave the famous queen African features. Story, an American emigré artist and “cultural influencer,” was living in Rome on the eve of the American Civil War. While there, he sculpted Cleopatra, which he began in 1858, completed in 1860, and exhibited to great acclaim at the 1862 World Exposition in London. Story was from Boston, where abolitionist sentiments were prominent, and was well aware of racial politics in the United States. Concerned by British support for the American South, he wrote a series of letters from Rome to the British Daily News in December of 1861 in which he denounced the institution of slavery, explained why he was devoted to the Union, and urged British neutrality in the Civil War. His Cleopatra was a provocative abolitionist statement. From the late eighteenth century on, free African Americans faced two pressing tasks: to refute charges that they were racially inferior to white people and to insert themselves into the historical record. ManyAfrican Americans and their supporters argued that there was a clear connection between ancient Africa (Ethiopia and Egypt) and the classical world based on their reading of classical texts and late eighteenth and early nineteenth century world histories. Educated African Americans documented the debt of Greece and Rome to Egyptian civilization, and repeatedly pointed out that Egypt was a major source of the cultural achievements of Greco-Roman an- 34 the petrification of cleopatra tiquity.It was conventional wisdom that Egyptian civilization influenced Greece. What was new and controversial was the assertion of a racial connection between ancient Egyptians and modern African Americans. Abolitionists used this constructed racial history to argue that the magnificent civilization of ancient Egypt and its influences on Greek and Roman culture were proof that African Americans were not racially inferior and therefore fully worthy to be citizens with equal rights in the American Republic.1 By the 1860s it had become a commonplace in American abolitionist circles that antiquity ’s most famous queen was... (shrink)

The image of the classical Mediterranean environment of the Greeks and Romans had a formative influence on the art, literature, and historical perception of modern Europe and America. How closely does is this image congruent with the ancient environment as it in reality existed? In particular, how forested was the ancient Mediterranean world, was there deforestation, and if so, what were its effects? The consensus of historians, geographers, and other scholars from the mid-nineteenth century through the first three quarters of (...) the twentieth century was that human activities had depleted the forests to a major extent and caused severe erosion. My research confirmed this general picture. Since then, revisionist historians have questioned these conclusions, maintaining instead that little environmental damage was done to forests and soils in ancient Greco-Roman times. In a reconsideration of the question, this paper looks at recent scientific work providing proxy evidence for the condition of forests at various times in ancient history. I look at three scientific methodologies, namely anthracology, palynology, and computer modeling. Each of these avenues of research offers support for the concept of forest change, both in abundance and species composition, and episodes of deforestation and erosion, and confirms my earlier work. (shrink)

Is there a distinctly Jewish rhetoric? It's a worthwhile (and difficult) question to answer: with its several thousand-year-old tradition of disquisition, argument, knowledge making, and philosophy, a Jewish rhetoric, whatever it might look like, would have a longer tradition than the Greco-Roman one that has served as the underpinning of most of what we think of as Western philosophy. The Jewish and Hellenic worlds shared trade routes, cultural space, and texts beginning in the first millennium BCE, and in (...) the thousand years between the rise of Athens as a hub of literacy and philosophy and the partition of the Roman Empire, Jewish culture underwent a drastic shift as Jews went from the Babylonian exile, to the .. (shrink)

Among the schools of philosophy in the Greco-Roman world, there was Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, and Skepticism to name the most prominent and influential. There was however another "school" and that was known as Cynicism. The Cynics were not scholars or writers. Like a Jesus, or a Socrates, or a Buddha, they were oralists whose memorable utterances and actions were transmitted to posterity by admirers (and detractors). It is doubtful whether we can even justly call them philosophers, as they (...) did not organize themselves into a school or possess a set of systematic doctrines. Their mode of life was a philosophy of doing. The Cynics were, to put it in contemporary terms, lifestylists and performance artists. The most famous Cynic, Diogenes of Sinope, threw out his bowl, as one less thing he needed, when he saw a young boy drinking with his hands. He also comically, when Alexander the Great asked what he could do for him, replied "Get out of my sun" making clear the young conqueror had nothing to offer him. And yet the Cynics, as Mark Usher aims to show in this collection, did purvey some core values that distinguished them in their own time and recommends them to ours. Indeed, they speak with some urgency to our current predicaments involving climate change, socio-economic uncertainty, and psychic malaise. Their "less is more" approach to living anticipates our contemporary fashion for decluttering, minimalism, and simpler more natural ways of living. Like ancient Thoreaus, their disentanglement of our needs from our wants provides an object lesson in prioritizing truly human goods. The Cynics also exemplified the idea that subsistence lifestyles are sustainable lifestyles, and the principle behind their lived example gives the lie to the modern article of faith that economic development and growth are synonymous with quality of life. Finally, their embrace of cosmopolitanism-the Cynics coined the word-flies in the face of the resurgent nativism that threatens the stability of nations, including our own. The Cynics championed their positions on the grounds that each of them accorded with a state of affairs found in Nature. Their appeal to the example of non-human agents, animals in particular, is highly instructive as it validates the intrinsic worth of the non-human world more broadly, foreshadowing thereby a central tenet of modern environmental philosophy. Taken as a whole, this volume will aim to recover the Cynic ways of thinking and living and refurbish them and make them relevant for our modern, beleaguered world. (shrink)

The study of Greco-Roman civilisation is as exciting and innovative today as it has ever been. This intriguing collection of essays by contemporary classicists reveals new discoveries, new interpretations and new ways of exploring the experiences of the ancient world. Through one and a half millennia of literature, politics, philosophy, law, religion and art, the classical world formed the origin of western culture and thought. This book emphasises the many ways in which it continues to engage with contemporary (...) life. (shrink)

The study of Greco-Roman civilisation is as exciting and innovative today as it has ever been. This intriguing collection of essays by contemporary classicists reveals new discoveries, new interpretations and new ways of exploring the experiences of the ancient world. Through one and a half millennia of literature, politics, philosophy, law, religion and art, the classical world formed the origin of western culture and thought. This book emphasises the many ways in which it continues to engage with contemporary (...) life. Offering a wide variety of authorial style, the chapters range in subject matter from contemporary poets' exploitation of Greek and Latin authors, via newly discovered literary texts and art works, to modern arguments about ancient democracy and slavery, and close readings of the great poets and philosophers of antiquity. This engaging book reflects the current rejuvenation of classical studies and will fascinate anyone with an interest in western history. (shrink)

Mimesis is one of the oldest, most fundamental concepts in Western aesthetics. This book offers a new, searching treatment of its long history at the center of theories of representational art: above all, in the highly influential writings of Plato and Aristotle, but also in later Greco-Roman philosophy and criticism, and subsequently in many areas of aesthetic controversy from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. Combining classical scholarship, philosophical analysis, and the history of ideas--and ranging across discussion of (...) poetry, painting, and music--Stephen Halliwell shows with a wealth of detail how mimesis, at all stages of its evolution, has been a more complex, variable concept than its conventional translation of "imitation" can now convey. Far from providing a static model of artistic representation, mimesis has generated many different models of art, encompassing a spectrum of positions from realism to idealism. Under the influence of Platonist and Aristotelian paradigms, mimesis has been a crux of debate between proponents of what Halliwell calls "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation in both the visual and musico-poetic arts. This debate is about not only the fraught relationship between art and reality but also the psychology and ethics of how we experience and are affected by mimetic art. Moving expertly between ancient and modern traditions, Halliwell contends that the history of mimesis hinges on problems that continue to be of urgent concern for contemporary aesthetics. (shrink)

Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love, 436 pages./ Somaesthetics, the field cultivated by Richard Shusterman since 1997, bore another juicy fruit for our enjoyment. This time, his interdisciplinary research – integrating the theoretical, empirical, and practical disciplines related to bodily perception, presentation, and performance – resulted in an excellent cross-cultural study of the classical arts of love developed over centuries in such traditions as the Greco-Roman, Chinese, Indian, Muslim, Medieval (...) and European Renaissance. Somaesthetic methodology provides fertile ground for such a comparative inquiry by encouraging new ways to understand the cultural dimension of human sexuality. It complements the popular 4EC perspectives applied in cognitive science which explore cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and expanded: emphasizing our bodily interaction with the physical and social environment. Shusterman’s analysis of the classical arts of love as aesthetically refining sexual experience gives due acknowledgement to our somatic and sensual, but also emotional and imagery engagement in the world, commonly neglected in modern philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristotle’s Phantasia in the Rhetoric:Lexis, Appearance, and the Epideictic Function of DiscourseNed O’GormanIntroductionThe well-known opening line of Aristotle's Rhetoric, where he defines rhetoric as a "counterpart" (antistrophos) to dialectic, has spurred many conversations on Aristotelian rhetoric and motivated the widespread interpretation of Aristotle's theory of civic discourse as heavily rationalistic. This study starts from a statement in the Rhetoric less discussed, yet still important, that suggests that a visual (...) aspect inheres in Aristotle's theory of rhetoric. Near the beginning of book 3, which deals with lexis (style, sometimes subsuming delivery1 ), Aristotle conjoins lexis and phantasia with the copula "is" (eimi): "The subject of expression [lexeôs], however, has some small necessary place in all teaching; for to speak in one way rather than another does make some difference in regard to clarity, though not a great difference; but all these things are forms of outward show [phantasia] and intended to affect the audience" (1404a).2 Whereas scholars exploring the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic have compared and contrasted the Rhetoric and the Topics, I explore rhetoric's relationship with phantasia by reading the Rhetoric alongside De Anima. De Anima is Aristotle's seminal account of the senses and their relationship to psychê (often translated "soul"). It addresses topics intimately connected to rhetoric: perception, cognition, deliberation, visualization, imagination, and the image. Phantasia is integral to each of these psychic processes and to Aristotle's understanding of the function of appearance in human experience. Hence, itis a lens suitable for exploring the relationship between Aristotle's conception of civic discourse and his notions of sight and appearances as they relate to perception, interpretation, deliberation, and judgment. I find in Aristotle's phantasia a tie between his art of rhetoric and his psychology and phenomenology (anachronistic though these terms are). Aristotle's psychological works, as Richard McKeon points out, are foundational to Aristotle's philosophy, and thus to his Rhetoric. [End Page 16] "Psychological inquiries occupy an extremely important position in the philosophy of Aristotle, for the conception of the psychê lays the foundation for the continuity of functions in nature" (1947, 142). De Anima, especially, articulates the psychological and phenomenological conceptions often tacitly at work in the Rhetoric.The importance of phantasia for the trajectory of ancient rhetorical and aesthetic theory is seen in the parallels between the visual arts, rhetoric, and poetics in Greek and Roman thought.3 As David Freedberg states (perhaps, slightly overstates), parallels between painting and poetry are "to be found everywhere in classical literature" (1989, 50). With respect to such visual-verbal parallels in Aristotle, D. Thomas Benediktson's reading of Aristotle's psychological, poetic, and rhetorical works concludes that phantasia ties together the visual and the literary. "[Aristotle's passages on phantasia] do help to see why Aristotle took for granted the similarity, almost the identity, of literature and the visual arts. Both types of art are imagistic; they present to the viewer either an image, as in visual art, or as in literature, a set of moving images that the soul then uses as raw data (phantasia) to enable thought to occur" (2000, 170). Phantasia developed a legacy in Hellenistic aesthetics, where it came to designate suprarealism in painting, moving art "beyond imitation" (Fowler 1989, 180–81). In later Greco-Roman works, phantasia was used to designate vivid imagery in written and oral discourse, imagery that could create sights and scenes in the minds of audience members. As Quintilian noted in his discussion of forensic rhetoric, in Latin phantasiai were termed visiones. Here, phantasiabecame a mode of displacing narrative in rhetorical discourse:There are certain experiences which the Greeks call phantasiai, and the Romans visions [visiones], whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes.... From such impressions arises that enargeia which Cicero calls illumination [illustration] and actuality [evidential], which makes us seem not so much to narrate [dicere] as to exhibit [ostendere] the actual scene.(Institutio Oratoria 4.2.29, 32)Quintilian's invocations of phantasia and enargeia can be traced to Aristotle's discussion of rhetorical style in book... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Music, Mind, and Morality:Arousing the Body PoliticPhilip Alperson (bio) and Noël Carroll (bio)I. IntroductionIf like Aristotle one agrees that the responsibility of philosophy is to offer as comprehensive a picture of phenomena as possible, then one must admit that sometimes the methods and goals of analytic philosophy stand in the way of getting the job done properly; they may even distort one's findings. This is not said in order (...) to eschew analytic philosophy. It is simply a reminder that sometimes we need to stand back and check to reassure ourselves that the tail is not wagging the dog.One example of where this danger looms is in the philosophy of art. In the eighteenth century the Modern System of the Arts was born.1 It included the practices that we think nowadays are the appropriate inhabitants of art schools and art centers and the legitimate beneficiaries of programs like the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States. These arts included poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance, and sometimes gardening. These are what we might call the arts with a "capital A."This is a different way of understanding the notion of the arts and the nomenclature from which they derive in Latin and Greek. For Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, arts were simply any skilled practice. Poetry, for Aristotle at least, was an art, but so were navigation, medicine, and statecraft. And there were, of course, the martial arts. What happens with the emergence of the Modern System of the Arts—otherwise known as the Fine Arts, or the Beaux Arts, or, for us, the Arts with a capital A—is that a subset of the arts in the Greco-Roman sense were selected out and christened as a class unto itself, [End Page 1] different from the other "small a" arts. Whereas once upon a time chemists and painters might have been grouped together in the same guild in virtue of the fact that both types of workers ground substances, such as pigment; with the advent of the Modern System of the Arts, chemists and painters became first and foremost categorically different.However, the consolidation of the class of Arts with a capital A demanded a theoretical answer to the question of what criterion an art form had to meet in order to gain membership in the Modern System of the Arts. The first suggestion was that a candidate practice had to possess the capacity to imitate the beautiful in nature. This was not a definition that had legs. For when absolute or pure instrumental music—or, as Peter Kivy calls it, music alone2 —took center stage as the most important form of music as well as the Art with a capital A to which all the other arts putatively aspired, the criteria for entry into the Modern System of the Arts had to be reconceived. Since music alone could not creditably be described as the imitation of the beautiful in nature (or, for that matter, the imitation of anything else), a new license for practicing Art with a capital A had to be found. And this has become one of the animating tasks of the analytic philosophy of art.But the analytic philosophy of art comes with a certain bias toward discharging this task. It is committed to finding an essentialist answer to resolving the question of what warrants citizenship in the republic of Art (with a capital A). That is, what makes something an Artistic practice or, for that matter, a work of Art such that it is different from other things? What separates the Arts and the artworks from everything else?Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the most popular and recurring proposals here is that the Arts are what are primarily intended to promote aesthetic experience where that has formerly been characterized as disinterested pleasure but, more recently, as experience valued for its own sake. Experience valued for its own sake, of course, is virtually by definition conceptually independent from any other end, whereas the practices that do not belong to the Modern System of the Arts are primarily devoted to securing other ends—useful or utilitarian ends, knowledge... (shrink)

ABSTRACT To modern scholars, the naturalistic fallacy looks out of place in Greco-Roman antiquity owing to the robust associations between nature, especially human nature, and moral norms. Yet nature was understood by ancient authors not only as a norm but also as a form of necessity. The Greco-Roman philosophical schools grappled with how to reconcile the idea that human nature is given with the idea that it is a goal to be reached. This essay looks at (...) the Stoic concept of oikeiōsis as one strategy for effecting such a reconciliation. Drawing on natural history, these Stoic sources used examples of animal behavior to illustrate a process whereby nature “entrusts” all animals, including humans, with the care of their own survival. Nature is thus both what is given to the animal and what the animal achieves in a powerful but also problematic synthesis here called the “naturalistic fantasy.”. (shrink)

The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, which has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as will be argued, normative as well. It is also proposed that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the Greek concept of technē tou biou, literally "craft of life." The ancients did not distinguish between craft and fine art, and the meaning of technē, even in its Latin form, ars, (...) still retains the meaning of skillful crafting and discipline. In Greco-Roman culture, techniques were very specific, covering dietetics, economics, and erotics. In ancient China, moral cultivation was intimately connected to the arts, from archery to poetry, music, and dance, such that virtually every activity would have both moral and aesthetic meaning. Using R. D. Collingwood's distinction between craft and fine art, it is proposed that the latter, particularly the performing arts of music and dance, can serve as a model for virtue ethics in our times. (shrink)

The theme of the specificity of medical causes in the Greco-Roman world is part of a wider research project on the notion of causality, the starting point of which is Aristotle and his seminal theorisation of the four causes. It therefore seemed useful to introduce this collection with a synthetic presentation of the Aristotelian conception of medicine, which is characterised by the knowledge of causes and represents a paradigm for the other arts and practical knowledge.

The most constructive response to the crisis in moral theory has been the revival of virtue ethics, which has the advantages of being personal, contextual, and, as will be argued, normative as well. It is also proposed that the best way to refound virtue ethics is to return to the Greek concept of technē tou biou, literally "craft of life." The ancients did not distinguish between craft and fine art, and the meaning of technē, even in its Latin form, ars, (...) still retains the meaning of skillful crafting and discipline. In Greco-Roman culture, techniques were very specific, covering dietetics, economics, and erotics. In ancient China, moral cultivation was intimately connected to the arts, from archery to poetry, music, and dance, such that virtually every activity would have both moral and aesthetic meaning. Using R. D. Collingwood's distinction between craft and fine art, it is proposed that the latter, particularly the performing arts of music and dance, can serve as a model for virtue ethics in our times. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 136-146MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous ParatextPatrick AmstutzTranslated by Gerald MooreUpon its publication, Le bain de Diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. Klossowski's name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and Sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read this (...) fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossow-ski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de Diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de Diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault ["La prose d'Actéon"], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L'Arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de Diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception.An Uncertain IdentityQuinsat emphasizes the "series of 'tableaux' that glazes Le Bain de Diane" in accordance with a "circular" descriptive movement, he says, "from vision to commentary, attributed to the deferral without end of signs, and which feeds the entire work of Pierre Klossowski" [95]. And if he borrows the term "exegesis" from Foucault to describe the genre of the work, he immediately associates it with that of "narrative." A quarter of a century earlier, a commentary in the new Nouvelle revue française had already underlined the "disconcerting" character of Klossowski's book, by accentuating not only the strangeness of its thematic, but also the difficulties posed by the uncertainty of its generic belonging (which is echoed by the absent mention of a paratext): the critic, hesitating, suggested somewhat confusedly a typological kinship with philosophical commentary, theological scholasticism, prose poetry, series of paintings, historical narrative and even the analysis of myths [Amer 144]. In fact, this mythological "reverie," neither an essay nor a narrative, is, from this point of view, a typically Klossowskian [End Page 136] book, as Ian James has more recently reminded us [143]. Le bain de Diane mixes erudite commentary and narrative discourse so well that it entices its commentators into the traps of scholarly, historical, and philological annotation. Yet this would be to forget, as Maurice Blanchot has observed [92–94], that the written oeuvre of Klossowski belongs fully to the field of literature, even more so than to those of philosophy, theology, or psychoanalysis.When it comes to discerning the literariness of this literary object, which the different paratextual and intertextual stakes and levels underline, the principal difficulty consists in not losing oneself in a mythological labyrinth and innumerable variants of the cult of Artemis, which was one of the most significant, oldest, and popular cults of the Greco-Roman era and which plunges into a world on whose complexity historians and philologists have insisted on many occasions. The study of Klossowski's sources could lead one through multiple disciplines (philology, mythography, psychoanalysis, the history of religions, history of art, French literature—all centuries cobbled together, and so on) to overly vast inquiries: the goddess "of a thousand names" assumes a properly vertiginous semiotic richness, and the cult of Artemis, before being linked to that of Apollo, stretches back to time immemorial where, behind Artemis, can be glimpsed the Asiatic figure of a Great Mother Goddess, whose... (shrink)

What is the relationship between art history and its objects? Responding to Jaś Elsner’s claim that art-historical writing is inevitably ekphrastic, this essay revisits a site of intense disciplinary anxiety—Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1759 description of the Belvedere Torso and its revised version in his 1764 History of Ancient Art. Description has been cast as the “scapegoat” (or pharmakos) of Winckelmann’s art history—that which must be excised yet is fundamental to the operations of the whole. But although it often serves as (...) a site of perceived excess and sublimation in his work, the ekphrastic elements of Winckelmann’s prose are nevertheless some of the most historicist aspects of his scholarship, shaped by a deep engagement with Greco-Roman ekphrastic literature. Description, in this sense, serves as a Platonic pharmakon—both affliction and cure for classical art history’s medial and ontological separation from its ruined and fragmented objects. In Winckelmann’s description of the torso, ekphrasis holds out the potential for the statue’s “completion” (Ergänzung). But understood according to eighteenth-century practices of visual restoration, this raises the question of whether such “whole-making” should be understood as proper or supplemental to the original image. What does it mean to “re-member” the Belvedere Torso through ekphrastic strategies drawn from antiquity itself? And what does this imply for our own textual (and pharmacological) mediations of the visual? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Vagaries of Exemplarity: Distortion or Dismissal?Michel JeanneretExample is an uncertain looking-glass, all embracing, turning all ways.Montaigne 1Ancients and Moderns: Negotiating CoexistenceDo the Ancients provide the Renaissance with a repertoire of infallible examples? Do they have such absolute authority that their models, whether ethical or aesthetic, retain their relevance in every circumstance? The question is part and parcel of that thinking, which is fundamental to the sixteenth century, on (...) the status of Greco-Roman paradigms in the management of public and private life, or in the methods of science and the arts. Before analyzing two particular responses to classical exemplarity—by Erasmus and Montaigne—we shall set the problem in its general context.Whether lobbying for intense faithfulness to the models or recognizing the need for divergence, whether insisting on continuity or the need for change, on the possibility or impossibility of equaling the masters, everyone in the sixteenth century measured art, knowledge, and moral reflection according to the Greek and Roman norm. Scholars and artists together entered into this exchange on a daily basis and everybody, whatever the extent of their dependence, knew that their work could not be conceived or perceived as anything other than the more or less free modification of a particular vestige of classical heritage. To escape tradition was unthinkable, but to accept it resignedly was absurd. All room for maneuver was therefore in the shifting difference between [End Page 565] old and new, and in the extent of its transformation. 2 It is then predictable, given these conditions, that the transmission of classical examples should be subject to turbulence without, however, undergoing any violent break.The question was even more relevant given that the sense of history, the consciousness of time past being irrevocably lost took on a new resonance now. Recognizing and acknowledging the phenomenon of irreversible development—whether good or bad—counts as one of the most important intellectual acquisitions of the Renaissance. 3 The Middle Ages had been able to maintain the illusion of continuity and, by dressing Antiquity up in the manners and colors of feudal chivalry, had seen itself reflected in it as in a mirror. With the influx of new documents and the perfecting of more rigorous methods of interpretation—the techniques of philology—intellectuals had to acknowledge evident change. The past could no longer be modeled on the present; all imitation would henceforth be witness to the impossibility of any perfect match. At the same time as the classical world was coming to light, it was also getting further away, getting lost. This bereavement sometimes sparked off enough regressive nostalgia to provide matter for many an antiquarian project. In reaction to this loss, most humanists were motivated into salvaging the salvageable by injecting a dose of novelty into the rift created by their awareness of history. The intellectuals of the Renaissance would often have felt as if they were reenacting the famous encounter of the Romans and the Greeks; like the Romans they wanted to be both conquering and conquered, free and faithful, differing and deferring. For them also the antique model will be an ideal simultaneously present and lost, necessary and foreign.Two opposing solutions to this dilemma seemed to offer themselves: on the one hand an unconditional return to the sources minimizing the effects of history, and on the other an exploitation of the eclipses of the past, giving the present a chance to fight it out with the Ancients. We shall sketch out each of these two strategies: both the methods of respectful transmission and those of transformative intervention.Fine-tuned by the humanists, philology was closely linked to the advent of historical consciousness. Since classical civilization had definitively come to an end, the philologist devoted himself to reconstituting and preserving it, in all its original specificity. He removed the layers of interference accumulated over the centuries, reestablished the texts in their authentic versions, maybe even providing commentary on the meaning of the work within its context. Theoretically his intervention stopped there. Acknowledging the difference and [End Page 566] superiority of past authors, he did not touch their works except to restore them to their pristine selves. Soon... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose Aristotle? Which Aristotelianism? A Historical Prolegomenon to Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical CultureCarol PosterThe description of various works of logical and rhetorical theory as “Aristotelian,” although far from unusual, is not particularly informative, because it assumes, incorrectly, that there is some ultimate singular Aristotle being imitated by all authors who consider themselves, or who are labeled by others, Aristotelian. In fact, there never has been an interpretation of (...) Aristotle that satisfies the canon of St. Vincent of Lerins, “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”; instead, there have been almost as many Aristotles as there have been interpreters of Aristotle. Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993), therefore, is not so much situated against the background of some single, unique, undisputed Aristotle but, rather, as he himself mentions, within an evolving tradition of Aristotelianism.The historical transformations of Aristotle include two distinct traditions, one oriented toward scientific-technical philosophy andthe other toward rhetorical-poetic and ethical humanism.1 The technical-philosophccical tradition, in which Aristotle was conceived primarily [End Page 375] as metaphysician and natural philosopher, emphasized the logical treatises of the organon, the speculative systems of the Physics and Metaphysics, and the scientific works of the biological treatises. This tradition originated in the Greco-Roman middle and Neoplatonic schools and has had a continuous history stretching through the Middle Ages, Counterreformation, neo-Thomism, and certain contemporary European postmodernisms. The rhetoricalhumanistic tradition, on the other hand, emphasizing the Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and ethical treatises, views Aristotle as a practical philosopher, concerned with the productive arts and those matters about which knowledge is probable rather than certain. This rhetorical-humanistic tradition was a relatively negligible aspect of Aristotle’s ancient reception, had a slight presence in the Islamic and Latin traditions, developed in certain strands of Renaissance humanism, and came to fruition in the late eighteenth century, primarily, though not exclusively, within a Protestant tradition. In eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain, the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle found expression directly in neoclassical poetics and, in a more complicated fashion, in a group of authors (including the Scottish moderates and the slightly later Oxford Noetics) who enlisted Aristotle in a battle against skepticism and materialism. It is the latter of the two strands of the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle that resurfaces (albeit in an indirect and mediated fashion) in the work of Alastair MacIntyre, Richard McKeon (and other members of the Chicago school), and Thomas Farrell, who used Aristotle’s model of probable deliberation and habituated virtue to construct an alternative to twentieth-century skepticism and materialism.Significant Strata of Aristotelian ReceptionThe history of Aristotelian reception is not monolithic. There has been tremendous variation across periods and national traditions of what works were considered authentically Aristotelian, which of those works were considered important, and how they were interpreted. The phases of Aristotelian reception immediately relevant to Farrell’s work include Greco-Roman Platonism, Islamic commentary, medieval Latin Christianity, Renaissance humanistic textual recovery, neoclassical “Aristotelianism,” early modern Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism, and the nineteenthcentury rehabilitation of Aristotle. This article will summarize briefly pre eighteenth-century interpretations of Aristotle as prolegomena to a close analysis of the works of two eighteenth-century Scotsmen, James Moor [End Page 376] and John Gillies, whose reconfiguration of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Organon as tools for practical wisdom in modern society anticipated (and, albeit indirectly, influenced) Farrell.2AntiquityTwo distinct strands of Aristotelian reception, the rhetorical-humanistic and technical-philosophical, originated in antiquity. Of these, the rhetorical-humanistic strand was substantially less important. Neither the Poetics nor the Rhetoric was well known in antiquity. The Rhetoric was not the subject of a Greek commentary until the Byzantine period and, although occasionally cited by Greco-Roman rhetoricians including Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, was not widely or carefully read.3 The Poetics was also virtually unknown and was never the subject of an ancient commentary.4The Greek commentaries on Aristotle, which are predominantly technical-philosophical in character, include some fifteen thousand pages of extant text. Despite the existence of a distinct ancient Peripatetic school, the majority of commentaries were produced in the Platonic schools, where the works of Aristotle... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Myrmidon vs. the AbbessHow Contrasting Mechanisms to Resolve Mimetic Contagion in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Comedy of Errors Stand as a Warning Against the Rejection of Christianity in Favor of Resurgent Homeric EthosBrian P. Quaranta (bio)This investigation started with a question: Why does Shakespeare hate the Iliad?The question arose after first reading Troilus and Cressida (T&C), Shakespeare's play set during the Trojan War. In his retelling, all (...) claims to glory for Homer's heroes are undermined; a world that is presented by Homer as brutal but honorable is replaced, by Shakespeare, with one that is rife with social and physical disease. As I continued to consider why Shakespeare displayed such hostility toward the Iliad, I found myself recognizing multiple, much more subtle, allusions to the Trojan War in another of his plays set in ancient Greece, The Comedy of Errors (COE). In time, it became apparent that the connection of these two plays with each other, and with the Iliad, was deliberate; through this comparison, Shakespeare rejects the Homeric ethos in favor of a Christian one. A consideration of René Girard's work on Shakespeare helps to bring home the connection between the plays and the concern that they illuminate.In his Theatre of Envy, Girard famously claimed that Shakespeare was consciously familiar with the concepts of mimetic desire and its relationship [End Page 183] to collective violence.1 He drew upon T&C and COE for examples: T&C for its explication of the importance of degree, its employment of collective murder, and the association of mimetic contagion with disease,2 and COE primarily for its emphasis on the special role of twins in mimetic theory as exemplars of identical rivals.3 Girard, I believe, is correct that Shakespeare understood the mechanisms and implications of mimetic theory, and he demonstrates how in these plays its consequences play out in a purely pagan world, and then in another in which there is a saving Christian intervention.The intellectual current of Shakespeare's time has been characterized by two primary themes: Reformation and Renaissance. The use of the word reformation, when taken on its own terms, suggests a benign and necessary process. But for an Englishman in the late 16th century, reformation also would have meant violence, displacement, fracture, war, and the disintegration of a once-unified Christendom. This crumbling of the ancient universal catholic church was accompanied by the Renaissance, a term used to refer to the rebirth of interest in, and progressive obsession with, the culture and literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans.4 My argument is that the two plays discussed here can be read as Shakespeare's response to these developments, demonstrating an anxiety over the threat of resurgent pagan values to a troubled Christianity, with T&C's ending standing as a warning of the danger of a return to the scapegoat mechanism, and COE reminding the reader of the power of the Christian alternative.The essay begins with a brief reminder of the depth of the enthusiasm for the classical era that emerged in Europe in the century leading up to, and including, the life of Shakespeare. I then detail the surprising ways in which Shakespeare thoroughly upends expectations in his retelling of the Trojan War story, discrediting the original tale. Next, the similarities of the Comedy of Errors to Troilus and Cressida, and to the Iliad, are documented. Because this area has received little previous scholarly attention, and because it is crucial to the argument, the inversions of the Trojan War in COE are meticulously detailed. Once it has been established that the two plays both respond to the Iliad, Girard's mimetic theory is brought to bear to explain the very different endings of the plays and to reveal Shakespeare's underlying concern about the Homeric ethos.THE RENAISSANCE AND SHAKESPEARE'S RESPONSE TO THE CLASSICSThe emerging triumph of the Greco-Roman pagan world over the renaissance mind, and its intrusion into the Christian realm, are evident in the development [End Page 184] of visual art in the decades preceding Shakespeare's work. Works by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Giulio Romano, depicting... (shrink)

It is the metaphoric doubling of past into present that gave Renaissance ekphrastic representations its techniques of self-understanding. In effect, in the ekphrastic doubling of the past in the present, we notice that historicity becomes an inalienable part of its contemporary credibility. The reduction of distance between life and art, as evident in contemporary obsession with selfies and photographs, thus begins to become the central project of early modern ekphrasis, enhanced in the Renaissance. In sum, art becomes equivalent to legal (...) tender, and ekphrasis, a principle of exchange and substitution, through which objects and artefacts seem to be in danger of losing their particularities and gaining new generic human values. When Shakespeare wrote The Rape of Lucrece, it was ekphrasis that allowed Shakespeare to speak about the ills of his own times through a Greco-Roman subject. The metaphorical implications that his story has for the issues of good government and private and public securit... (shrink)

On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant's 1784 text, "What Is Enlightenment?" Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the "art of not being governed in this particular way," one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the "politics of truth." This volume (...) presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a "new ethics" that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science. (shrink)

In presenting a selection of twenty-eight texts in translation with introductory essays, Vincent L. Wimbush and his co-authors have produced the first book on asceticism that does full justice to the varieties of ascetic behavior in the Greco-Roman world. The texts, representative of different religious cults, philosophical schools, and geographical locations, are organized by literary genre into five parts that give a fascinating overview of the ascetic tradition.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Two Books on Thomas HobbesPerez ZagorinQuentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xvi, 477p.The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Noel Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), lxxxv, 1008p.The literature on Hobbes in English and other European languages has grown so large in the past two decades that it has become almost unmanageable by students of the philosopher. No one who (...) is interested in Hobbes, however, can afford to overlook the two books that are reviewed here, the first, Quentin Skinner’s study of the relationship of Hobbes to rhetoric, and the second, Noel Malcolm’s edition of Hobbes’s correspondence.Skinner is well known not only as a leading British Hobbes scholar and historian of early modern political thought but likewise for his ideas concerning the correct method of studying the history of political philosophy. In a view akin to R. G. Collingwood’s he maintains that there are no permanent or perennial questions in political philosophy and that a historical approach based on a thorough comprehension of context is the only way to grasp what political philosophers are doing and saying when they write their texts. In implementing this prescription, he argues that to understand a historical text it is necessary to reconstruct its author’s intentions and the meaning of his ideas by ascertaining the linguistic conventions and usages and the intellectual currents and back-ground that form its context. He offers the present study both as an exem-plification of this method and as a new interpretation of the principles of Hobbes’s political philosophy which takes rhetoric as its focal theme. His aim, he tells us, is to situate Hobbes’s theory and practice of civil science within its intellectual context and to depict the philosopher less as the author of a philosophical system than as a contributor to a series of debates about the moral sciences within Renaissance culture. Our judgment of the success of his work will accordingly depend on whether or not we are satisfied that rhetoric possessed for Hobbes and his philosophy the crucial significance that Skinner claims for it [End Page 361].In recent years a number of scholars have discussed Hobbes’s attitude to rhetoric, and there have been at least two books on the subject. 1 Commensurate, however, with its ambitious goal of proffering a new interpretation of Hobbes’s work on politics, Skinner’s treatment of his involvement with rhetoric is much richer and far more learned than preceding studies. By rhetoric most people nowadays mean no more than a writer’s literary strategy, but this is not what Skinner intends by the term. He deals with rhetoric precisely as Hobbes would have understood it and in the sense it bore in the ancient world and the Renaissance, when it signified a major discipline of knowledge concerned with the various figures of speech and devices of language that constituted an art of persuasion and eloquence indispensable in the education of the orator, the statesman, the writer, and the gentleman.Skinner perceives Hobbes’s mind as formed in the early years of his career by his classical education and immersion in the literary-rhetorical culture of English Renaissance humanism derived from Greco-Roman antiquity and ancient authors on rhetoric like Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Starting from this point, he pictures Hobbes’s intellectual evolution as consisting of three successive stages: a humanist, a scientific, and a scientific-humanist. In the first, as a late Renaissance intellectual, Hobbes’s initial interest in politics as a civil science was shaped by his involvement in the humanistic disciplines of rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral and political philosophy. The result was the publication in 1629 of his English translation of Thucydides’ History, with the observations contained in his introduction. In the second stage he turned against the literary-rhetorical character of Renaissance culture and its approach to politics. This shift, which occurred in the 1630s, was caused by his discovery of the geometrical method, his pursuit of his scientific interests through his association with Sir Charles Cavendish and his friends, and his introduction to the Parisian scientific circle of Marin... (shrink)

This dissertation analyzes the three main philosophical movements which informed the intellectual world of Paul and his Greco-Roman contemporaries during the 1st century B.C.E. through the 2nd century C.E. In Part I, I analyze the moral transformation systems of the Middle Platonists , Neo-Stoics , and Greco-Roman Epicureans . I pay attention to the language of power in the analyses of Chapters 1--3, and to how power plays a salient role in philosophical discussions on the passions (...) and on their role in moral progress. What emerges from Part I are the following main conclusions: Despite the very different conceptualizations of the passions in Platonism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism, all three schools nonetheless viewed desire as a form of power and self-mastery over them as an expression of the sage's power. The power of the philosopher was the power of sight. That is, the sage saw himself and his potential errors correctly; and the sage saw the moral standard according to which one should conform. ;Part II is an attempt to show how a study of ancient philosophy of mind can help inform our understanding of Paul's letter recipients and Paul himself. The test case is the situation at Roman Corinth. Of all the philosophies of mind discussed in Part I, I make the initial case that the ideological framework which best explains the attitudes of the Corinthian strong over such issues such as sex with prostitutes is Epicurean philosophy and their ethics of the stomach. Sex is a natural desire and so is permissible in their moral framework. Finally, Chapter 5 examines extensively the external evidence for an Epicurean movement in the city of Roman Corinth. It makes the case for the presence of Epicurean converts among Corinth's urban leadership who, as immigrants, moved to Corinth from neighboring Greek cities and from Rome itself when Corinth was refound as a Roman colony in 44 B.C.E. The greatest epigraphic evidence for Corinthian Epicureans are the inscriptions dedicated to Junia Theodora and Gallio. (shrink)

In this article we engage with and against Foucault's provocation to think about diagrams of subjectivation. With Foucault we take up his meditation on spirituality and propose a Buddhist alternative to Greco-Roman technologies of self. Against Foucault's notion of an ‘arts of existence’ we suggest instead ‘cultivation of virtue’, drawing on, as an example, a famous Buddhist meditation on compassion. We conclude the article by proposing rethinking doctoral supervision in terms of a cultivation of virtue.

Resumen: Para reconstruir el pasado de Europa, los cronistas medievales debieron recurrir a un cúmulo de textos narrativos de origen griego y romano, atiborrados de elementos de carácter mitológico, dioses y héroes. En el presente artículo exponemos el proceso de evemerismo empleado por esos clérigos cristianos para depurar doctrinalmente la historia antigua. El análisis de las crónicas universales redactadas en el siglo XII muestra la construcción de un discurso narrativo basado en un rico lenguaje compuesto de sustantivos, adjetivos y sus (...) derivados adverbiales, tendiente a desacreditar la veracidad de la mitología clásica.: In order to reconstruct Europe’s past, the medieval chroniclers had to resort to a series of narrative texts of Greek and Roman origin, which were full of mythological elements, gods and heroes. In this paper we present the process of euhemerism used by these Christian clerics to doctrinally purify ancient history. The analysis of the universal chronicles written in the XII century reveals the construction of a narrative discourse based upon a rich language composed of nouns, adjectives and adverbs, with the purpose of discrediting the veracity of classical mythology. (shrink)

The author argues that ancient Skepticism may be most suited to deal with two crises in the Age of COVID-19: both the physical or epidemiological aspects of the pandemic, and the epistemological and ethical crisis of increasing disbelief in the sciences. Following Michel Bitbol, I suggest one way to mitigate this crisis of faith may be for science to become more epistemically modest, renouncing some of its claims to describe reality as it objectively is, and adopting an “intransitive” rather than (...) a “transitive” approach to Nature. This was the attitude adopted by the Greco-Roman medical school of the Empirics, which may also be of assistance in combatting the urgent problem of Fake News. The epistemology of Skepticism and the scientific methodology of the closely related Medical Empiricism shows that an epistemically modest, non-interventionist approach to science is quite compatible with a robust and sophisticated proto-experimental scientific methodology. (shrink)

A poesia, em seu sentido mais amplo, surge como ponto de partida para todos os conhecimentos acerca do homem e do mundo. Assim, o poeta não é apenas um artista que produz versos, mas o que busca uma intermediação entre o humano e o divino. Este artigo tem como proposta estudar a poesia e a arte de Michelangelo Buonarroti a partir do conceito de “Figura”, definido na obra de Auerbach, analisando o poético na obra do artista italiano a partir de (...) suas relações com o profético. Tanto na pintura dos afrescos da Capela Sistina, quanto na escrita de seus poemas, Michelangelo nos revela a luta do artista para atribuir à obra sentidos transcendentais, transformando a Arte em revelação divina, que exige uma interpretação dos seus leitores. Seguindo essa ideia, o gênio italiano passa a unir figuras pagãs e cristãs, como sibilas greco-romanas e profetas judaico-cristãos, para reler o passado, interpretar o presente e prenunciar o futuro.Palavras-chave: Poesia; Profético; Michelangelo; Auerbach.Poetry, in its broadest sense, emerges as a starting point for all knowledge about man and the world. The poet is not only an artist that writes verses, but one who seeks to intercede between the human and the divine. This article aims at studying the poetry and art of Michelangelo Buonarroti taking the concept of "Figure", as defined in the work of Auerbach, and analyzing the poetic work of the Italian artist and how it relates to prophetic themes. Both in the painting of the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel and in his poems, Michelangelo reveals the battle of the artist to assign a sense of transcendence, transforming Art in a divine revelation, which will require an interpretation of their readers. Grounded on this idea, the Italian genius blends Christian and pagan figures, such as Greco-Romans Sybils and Judeo-Christian prophets, to reread the past, interpret the present and foreshadow the future.Keywords: Poetry; Prophetic; Michelangelo; Auerbach.- DOI: 10.5752/P.2175-5841.2012v10n25p75. (shrink)

Luke in the preface of his Gospel says that he is going to write ‘in an orderly account’ (Lk 1:3). However, scholars have no consensus about the kind of order Luke is seeking. Many believe that Luke writes as a historian. Because Greco-Roman historians seem to have a practice to indicate in their prefaces the writing methodologies of their writings, this article aims to ascertain Luke’s writing order through a comparison of Luke’s two prefaces with those in the (...) writings of the Greco-Roman historians. This article proposes that Luke most likely adopts the common writing methodologies of the Greco-Roman historians and writes in chronological order. (shrink)

Max J. Lee examines the philosophies of Platonism and Stoicism during the Greco-Roman era and their rivals including Diaspora Judaism and Pauline Christianity on how to transform a person's character from vice to virtue. He describes each philosophical school's respective teachings on diverse moral topoi such as emotional control, ethical action and habit, character formation, training, mentorship, and deity." --provided by publisher.

The author argues that ancient Skepticism may be most suited to deal with two crises in the Age of COVID-19: both the physical or epidemiological aspects of the pandemic, and the epistemological and ethical crisis of increasing disbelief in the sciences. Following Michel Bitbol, I suggest one way to mitigate this crisis of faith may be for science to become more epistemically modest, renouncing some of its claims to describe reality as it objectively is, and adopting an “intransitive” rather than (...) a “transitive” approach to Nature. This was the attitude adopted by the Greco-Roman medical school of the Empirics, which may also be of assistance in combatting the urgent problem of Fake News. The epistemology of Skepticism and the scientific methodology of the closely related Medical Empiricism shows that an epistemically modest, non-interventionist approach to science is quite compatible with a robust and sophisticated proto-experimental scientific methodology. (shrink)

This inaugural lecture considers three main aspects of the relationship between science and morality in Greco-Roman antiquity: first some of the ancient debates on the morality of particular scientific research programmes, especially in connection with the practice of human and animal dissection and vivisection; secondly ancient attempts to secure the autonomy and objectivity of natural scientific inquiry; and thirdly the continuing influence - in certain areas of ancient science - of values, including moral and political values, and of (...) the assumption of the privileged position occupied by human beings in the animal kingdom and the cosmos. (shrink)

This long-awaited translation of Das literarische Kunstwerk makes available for the first time in English Roman Ingarden's influential study. Though it is inter-disciplinary in scope, situated as it is on the borderlines of ontology and logic, philosophy of literature and theory of language, Ingarden's work has a deliberately narrow focus: the literary work, its structure and mode of existence. The Literary Work of Art establishes the groundwork for a philosophy of literature, i.e., an ontology in terms of which the (...) basic general structure of all literary works can be determined. This "essential anatomy" makes basic tools and concepts available for rigorous and subtle aesthetic analysis. (shrink)