On the Unity of Orphic and Milesian Thought

1986 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 321-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aryeh Finkelberg

In the first volume ofA History of Greek PhilosophyW. K. C. Guthrie points out that “the promulgators ofteletaiin the name of Orpheus were concerned in the religious sphere with the same problem of the relation between the One and the Many which in a different form was the problem of the Milesian philosophers.” Elsewhere Guthrie provides a more detailed explanation of the similarities and differences between the Orphic and the Milesian treatment of the One-Many problem:Sixth-century religious and philosophical thought … was dominated by one central problem, the problem of the One and the Many. This appeared in two forms, one referring to the macrocosm, the other to the microcosm. In its first form it was the problem of the Milesian natural philosophers, who asked: “What is the relation between the manifold variety of the world in which we live and the one primary substance out of which, as we are convinced, it must in the first place have arisen?” In its second form it was the problem of the religious minds of the age. Their question was: “What is the relation of each individual man to the divine, to which we feel we are akin, and how can we best realize and actualize the potential unity which underlies the two?”

PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


Author(s):  
L. I. Ivonina

The article analyzes the main features of the Caroline era in the history of Britain, which were reflected in the cultural representation of the power of King Charles I Stuart and the court’s daily life in the 1630s. The author shows that, on the one hand, the cult of peace and the greatness of the monarch were the cultural product of the Caroline court against the background of the Thirty Years' War in continental Europe. On the other hand, there was a spread of various forms of escapism, the departure into the world of illusions. On the whole, the representation of the power of Charles Stuart and the court’s daily life were in line with the general trend of the time. At the same time, the court of Charles I reflected his personality. Thinly sensing and even determining the artistic tastes of his era, the English king abstracted from its political and social context.


Author(s):  
Justin E. H. Smith

This chapter undertakes an extensive treatment of the place of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the history of the concept of race. In particular, the chapter draws out the significant points of difference between Leibniz's view, on the one hand, and Bernier's biogeographical view, on the other. It shows, in fact, that Leibniz remains thoroughly committed to a conception of race that is rooted in earlier ideas about the temporal succession of members of a family or lineage. Moreover, the chapter reveals in what way his analysis of race may be seen as a concrete application of his very deepest philosophical commitment, according to which the order of the world amounts to a multiplicity that is underlain by unity.


Author(s):  
Reinhard Bork ◽  
Renato Mangano

This chapter deals with European cross-border issues concerning groups of companies. This chapter, after outlining the difficulties encountered throughout the world in defining and regulating the group, focuses on the specific policy choices endorsed by the EIR, which clearly does not lay down any form of substantive consolidation. Instead, the EIR, on the one hand, seems to permit the ‘one group—one COMI’ rule, even to a limited extent, and, on the other hand, provides for two different regulatory devices of procedural consolidation, one based on the duties of ‘cooperation and communication’ and the other on a system of ‘coordination’ to be set up between the many proceedings affecting companies belonging to the same group.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Campbell Orchard

<p>Revitalised by Mussolini in the early twentieth century as a symbol of the ‘New Roman Empire’, Roma has endured a long history of national representation. Traditionally the figure of Roma is on the one side associated by historians with the Roman imperial cult and Augustus, and on the other by Numismatists as the helmeted female figure on the coinage of the Roman Republic. However, these figures are not presently considered one and the same. When describing this figure, Roma is considered a Greek innovation travelling west, which naturally discounts well over two centuries of Roman issued coinage. Roma inaugurated by Hadrian and previously manipulated by Augustus was not simply a Greek import, but a complex Roman idea, which, true to Roman form, incorporated native and foreign elements in shaping an outward looking signifier of Roman identity.</p>


Caminhando ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Matthias Grenzer - Translation of João Batista Ribeiro Santos

The Pentateuch is a cultural heritage of Humanity. The world narrated in it belongs to the second millennium B.C., and the narratives, poems, and sets of laws contained therein were composed during the first six centuries of the first millennium B.C. On the one hand, by bringing together epic, lyrical, and legal poetry, the one hundred and eighty-seven chapters constitute, in the form of five books, a masterpiece in the history of literature. On the other hand, it is literature that proposes to cultivate memory, either in relation to the narrated world, or in view of the period of its composer, sometimes narrating, sometimes legislating, sometimes singing. Moreover, as literature aimed at history, the texts of the Pentateuch promote enormous theological reflection. The main goal seems to be to think God. Thus the first five books of the Jewish Bible and the Christian Bible, with their narrated models of faith and behavior, turned into poems and defined by legal formulations, became the foundational reference for the religion of ancient Israel, of which Judaism was born and, from the latter, Christianity. Also Jesus of Nazareth, in the four New Testament Gospels, is presented in relation to Abraham and Moses, and stands out as a unique teacher with regard to the laws contained in the Pentateuch.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103
Author(s):  
Michael Schmitz

AbstractIn this paper I first introduce Tomasello’s notion of thought and his account of its emergence and development through differentiation, arguing that it calls into question the theory bias of the philosophical tradition on thought as well as its frequent atomism. I then raise some worries that he may be overextending the concept of thought, arguing that we should recognize an area of intentionality intermediate between action and perception on the one hand and thought on the other. After that I argue that the co-operative nature of humans is reflected in the very structure of their intentionality and thought: in co-operative modes such as the mode of joint attention and action and the we-mode, they experience and represent others as co-subjects of joint relations to situations in the world rather than as mere objects. In conclusion, I briefly comment on what Tomasello refers to as one of two big open questions in the theory of collective intentionality, namely that of the irreducibility of jointness.


Author(s):  
C. J. Lyall

The conquest of the Persian and half of the Byzantine Empire by the Arabs, under the banner of Islam in the seventh century, was one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world. On the one side were ranged the forces of two highly-organized military powers, Imperial New Rome and Imperial Persia, which for over three centuries had been engaged in constant conflict with each other. Although this necessarily tended to exhaust the material resources of the combatants, it would naturally be supposed that it must have given them military experience, and their leaders a training in generalship, adequate to enable them to face with confidence of victory enemies hitherto regarded with contempt as mere barbarians. On the other side we see hosts of men, reared in a country where the conditions of life have always been of the hardest and most precarious, divided by tribal feuds and secular hatreds, poorly armed, with no practice in warfare against disciplined foes, and with no allies to swell their legions. Yet from the beginning the progress of the Arabs was one of almost uninterrupted success.


Author(s):  
G. E. R. Lloyd

A sense of the difference between right and wrong and a corresponding recognition of a concept of morality can be widely, maybe even universally, attested, as has been suggested for the Golden Rule (treat others as you would have them treat you). But how far does the great variety of explicit codified legal systems that can be attested across the world and over time undermine any possibility of treating law or even ‘custom’ as a robust cross-cultural category? This chapter investigates the similarities and differences in those systems in ancient societies (Greece, China) and in modern ones (e.g. Papua New Guinea) to throw light on the one hand on the importance of law for social order but on the other on the difficulties facing any programme to secure lasting justice.


China Report ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-281
Author(s):  
Nidhi Maini

Ranking alongside the top bicycling nations of the world, Japan today boasts of a deeply engrained cycling culture. While the technological prowess of Japan’s bicycle industry is well known, there exists no scholarly study investigating the socio-cultural impact of cycling in Japan, specifically its role in emancipation of women. How the modern women of Japan scaled barriers to mobility riding their way to modernity in an oppressive male-dominated society is not yet known. The objective of this paper is to examine women cyclists in Japan in the context of modernisation. On the one hand, viewing bicycles helps examine the Japanese economy from the perspective of ordinary women as active consumers (as against their passive image) whose demand for bicycles was certainly an essential ingredient for the growth of bicycle industry. On the other hand, it serves to question the predominant view of consumption stagnation in interwar Japan. Most importantly, as countries around the world continue to make laudable efforts to encourage women cyclists, a leaf can be drawn by policymakers from the history of forgotten cycling heroines of Japan to accelerate women’s socio-economic empowerment.


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