This volume brings together philosophers and psychologists to investigate the phenomenon of transformative change and a host of fascinating questions it prompts. Taking their departure from seminal work on transformative choice and experience by L. A. Paul and Edna Ullmann-Margalit, the authors pursue fundamental questions concerning the nature of rationality, the limits of the imagination, and the metaphysics of the self. They also strike out into new areas, including value theory, aesthetics, moral and political philosophy. Several chapters present the results (...) of experimental investigation into the psychology of transformation, self-concept, and moral learning. (shrink)

I intend, here, in reflecting on my life to see if, by taking what appear to me in retrospect to be three critical points of vantage from which to describe my situation, my intentions and the thought, if any, which lay behind them, I can be of service.

Ordinary judgments about personal identity are complicated by the fact that phrases like “same person” and “different person” have multiple uses in ordinary English. This complication calls into question the significance of recent experimental work on this topic. For example, Tobia (2015) found that judgments of personal identity were significantly affected by whether the moral change described in a vignette was for the better or for the worse, while Strohminger and Nichols (2014) found that loss of moral conscience had more (...) of an effect on identity judgments than loss of biographical memory. In each case, however, there are grounds for questioning whether the judgments elicited in these experiments engaged a concept of numerical personal identity at all (cf. Berniūnas and Dranseika 2016; Dranseika 2017; Starmans and Bloom 2018). In two pre-registered studies we validate this criticism while also showing a way to address it: instead of attempting to engage the concept of numerical identity through specialized language or the terms of an imaginary philosophical debate, we should consider instead how the identity of a person is described through the connected use of proper names, definite descriptions, and the personal pronouns “I”, “you”, “he”, and “she”. When the experiments above are revisited in this way, there is no evidence that the differences in question had an effect on ordinary identity judgments. (shrink)

What are human rights? In this article Enoch Powell, MP (a former Conservative Minister of Health), approaches this question through a critical discussion of Article 25 (I) of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Professor R S Downie in his accompanying commentary analyses Mr Powell's statements and takes up in particular Mr Powell's argument that claiming rights for one person entails compulsion on another person. In Professor Downie's view there is nothing in Article 25 (...) (I) that cannot embody acceptable moral rights, the commonly accepted interpretation of that Article of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which many people think is wholly acceptable. (shrink)

For the past 300 years and more the inhabitants of Great Britain (or perhaps more accurately of England) have been content to be "godly and quietly governed" under unique arrangements, which may, if they must, be classified as a parliamentary monarchy. The course of being so governed has been characterised by oscillations between, on the one hand, governments whose appeal to their fellow countrymen is to conserve existing institutions and, on the other, governments whose appeal is their call for innovation. (...) The rhetoric in which the two appeals are couched has been correspondingly contrasting. (shrink)

In C.Q. 1935, 72–82 and 150–163 I published some observations on Herodotus which were the by-product of a translation. Those which follow are the similar by-product of a lexicon. It says much for the delusive simplicity of Herodotus that it is still possible to reap a critical crop from an author who has been read by Reiske, Dobree and Cobet. Had van Herwerden not edited Herodotus, the harvest would have been twice as large.

Commenting on Thucydides I, 136: ναγκáζεται… παρ' αδμητον τòν Μολοσσѿν βασιλέα, ντα α τ ᾦ ο λον, καταλσαι, Shilleto once wroteb: ‘After some thought I have acquiesced in ατᾦ, i.e. in Latin, qui ei erat inimicus. Still inimicum suum would be as natural. In Latin MSS., as sui cannot be con-founded with is , a Critic of course more or less sees his way. But in Greek, as far as my experience goes, we are in a labyrinth without a clue.’.

IN C.Q., 1933, 3/4, PP. 208–221, the passages in Herodotus where the subject of a clause is referred to pronominally in the same or a dependent clause were collected and classified according to the nature of the grammatical dependence. This was done to discover Herodotus' practice in using, or not using, the reflexive, so that the knowledge might serve as a guide in the recension of Attic authors, whose αντ and ατ are constantly and inevitably confounded with ατ. In the (...) present article I shall classify on the same scheme the 1,150 relevant passages of Thucydides, referring constantly to the habits of Herodotus already established, and noting the lessons which result for future editors of Thucydides' text. Some preliminary remarks are necessary. (shrink)

Commenting on Thucydides I, 136: ναγκáζεται… παρ' αδμητον τòν Μολοσσѿν βασιλέα, ντα α τ ᾦ ο λον, καταλσαι, Shilleto once wroteb: ‘After some thought I have acquiesced in ατᾦ, i.e. in Latin, qui ei erat inimicus. Still inimicum suum would be as natural. In Latin MSS., as sui cannot be con-founded with is, a Critic of course more or less sees his way. But in Greek, as far as my experience goes, we are in a labyrinth without a clue.’.

IN C.Q., 1933, 3/4, PP. 208–221, the passages in Herodotus where the subject of a clause is referred to pronominally in the same or a dependent clause were collected and classified according to the nature of the grammatical dependence. This was done to discover Herodotus' practice in using, or not using, the reflexive, so that the knowledge might serve as a guide in the recension of Attic authors, whose αντ and ατ are constantly and inevitably confounded with ατ. In the (...) present article I shall classify on the same scheme the 1,150 relevant passages of Thucydides, referring constantly to the habits of Herodotus already established, and noting the lessons which result for future editors of Thucydides' text. Some preliminary remarks are necessary. (shrink)

The present paper is based on one entitled ‘The papyri and the text of Thucydides’, which I read before the Fifth International Congress of Papyrology in Oxford on August 31st, 1937. Later in the same year appeared Vittorio Bartoletti's Pisa dissertation Per la storia del testo di Tucidide, of which I was privileged to see a draft in 1935. I have several times saved space here by referring to Bartoletti for a collection of the evidence.

I intend, here, in reflecting on my life to see if, by taking what appear to me in retrospect to be three critical points of vantage from which to describe my situation, my intentions and the thought, if any, which lay behind them, I can be of service.

Parisinus suppl. gr. 256 was written, to judge from the hand, not long after 1300. As far as the end of book VI the writer copied both text and scholia from a descendant of M. At that point another MS. came into his hands. This was no other than that ancestor of J which, as we saw on p. 87, had received valuable readings from the source ω. From this MS. the scribe now corrected what he had already written, copied (...) the two remaining books, and added the two Lives before the text and the Epistula Dionysii ad Ammaeum after it. From 1—for so, after Dain , I shall style our MS.—was copied the MS. from which, after it had been perfunctorily corrected from another source, was copied X. (shrink)

Parisinus suppl. gr. 256 was written, to judge from the hand, not long after 1300. As far as the end of book VI the writer copied both text and scholia from a descendant of M. At that point another MS. came into his hands. This was no other than that ancestor of J which, as we saw on p. 87, had received valuable readings from the source ω. From this MS. the scribe now corrected what he had already written, copied (...) the two remaining books, and added the two Lives before the text and the Epistula Dionysii ad Ammaeum after it. From 1—for so, after Dain, I shall style our MS.—was copied the MS. from which, after it had been perfunctorily corrected from another source, was copied X. (shrink)

The remarks I wish to make upon the Thucydides scholia in Bâle University MS. no. E III 4 will be clearer if prefaced by an outline history of the scholia to Thucydides in general.The editio princeps contained no scholia. They made their first appearance in the following year as an appendix to the Aldine Gemistius and Herodian. The same scholia were then reprinted in the Juntine edition as a frame to the text. In the Hervagian edition of Camerarius they were (...) relegated to the end, and Camerarius claims in his prefatory epistle to have expended some trouble in emending them. Henceforward the same corpus of scholia, unchanged save for occasional emendation, passes on from edition to edition, either framing the text, as in Stephanus, or beneath it, as in Stephanus, Hudson, Duker, Gottleber-Bauer-Beck. (shrink)

In 1461 the refugee Byzantine scholar Michael Apostolius, who since the fall of Constantinople had resided chiefly in Crete, paid a visit to his native city. There he copied a MS of Thucydides and brought the copy back with him to Crete, whither two other MSS of that author had already been taken. These few facts underlie and explain the complex relationships of at least ten extant MSS of Thucydides, which were written during the following generation by Apostolius and other (...) scholars in Crete for their private use or more often for sale to their Venetian masters. All are descendants of one of those three original arrivals, or, by contamination, of more than one of them. (shrink)