Between Utopia and History

2020 ◽  
pp. 27-70
Author(s):  
Dorota M. Dutsch
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
Literary Portraits

Chapter I draws on Lucian’s Portraits to envision composite iconic figures that readers construct from other literary portraits. Ten “snapshots” provide raw material for such composite images of Pythagorean women. The snapshots are drawn from Pythagorean acousmata; Plato’s dialogues, and the writings of Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus, Neanthes, and Timaeus of Tauromenium. These extracts cited in the works of Imperial writers are shaped by several competing ideologies that cannot be reduced to a single originary account about historical Pythagorean women. Next to testimonies praising Pythagorean women’s aristocratic pedigrees and traditional virtues are found others asserting their achievements as philosophers. It is possible to arrange these literary portraits into different modern narratives, documenting either the exclusion of women from Greek philosophical history or their exclusion. But second-century CE testimonies reveal an ancient reading practice that favored a narrative of inclusion.

The High Road

2021 ◽  
pp. 117-136
Author(s):  
Tamar Schapiro
Keyword(s):  
Raw Material ◽  
Brute Force ◽  
The Difference ◽  
High Road

In this chapter, I begin to show how the inner animal view meets the constraints I laid out. What is the relation between your instinctive part and your deciding part? It cannot be that of rider to horse, because that would be an internalized brute force view. I argue further that it cannot be that of ruler to citizenry, as in Korsgaard’s constitution model of the soul, because that makes the difference between inclination and will too shallow. Instead of looking for familiar analogies, I claim, we should accept that this relation is sui generis, while still articulating a conception that meets the three constraints. Here I focus on non-voluntariness and deliberative role. I explain why it is challenging to meet these constraints jointly. I then show how the inner animal view can be developed so as to meet both. Your inclinations are non-voluntary because they are guided by your instinctive mind, which is different from your deciding mind. They can nevertheless play a deliberative role, because you can take your inner animal’s thinking as raw material and “incorporate” it into a maxim that you can regard as worthy of your choice.

scholarly journals Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros, Irenaeus, and the Essence of Christianity

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-47
Author(s):  
John Kaufman
Keyword(s):  
Second Century ◽  
Critical Reading ◽  
Christian Love ◽  
Normative Basis

In Anders Nygren’s seminal study of the Christian concept of love, Eros och Agape, the second century bishop and theologian Irenaeus of Lyons is given an important role in the development of the “Christian idea of love”. In this chapter, I will critically discuss certain aspects of Nygren’s and his colleague Gustaf Aulen’s treatment of Irenaeus. Nygren and Aulen presuppose that one can delineate “pure” concepts or ideas or motifs in history (such as “Christian love”), they maintain that it makes sense to speak of the “essence” of Christianity as a given, and they find their normative basis in the genius of Luther, against which they can evaluate the genuineness of any given conception of Christianity. This is of course both provincial and anachronistic. A critical reading of Nygren’s and Aulen’s understanding of Irenaeus and the concept of Christian love raises important questions concerning objectivity, normativity and givenness. I argue in this chapter that there are no stable given “ideas” or “motifs” that can be “identified” or “discovered” or “described” objectively. I believe it is possible, however, to give accounts that will be recognizable and plausible to others who are familiar with the fragmentary sources upon which our accounts are based. At best, we can together construct plausible understandings of a concept such as Christian love, or of a thinker such as Irenaeus, or of something as broad and multifaceted as Christianity – without purporting to have found the true “essence” of the thing we are studying.

Mental representation of economic crisis in Italian and Swiss samples 1The authors would like to thank Maurizio Mistri for his help in the construction of items. This research was supported by a grant from the Italian Murst (ex 40%).

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucia Savadori ◽  
Eraldo Nicotra ◽  
Rino Rumiati ◽  
Roberto Tamborini
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Mental Representation ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
National Context ◽  
Cluster Procedure ◽  
Total N ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Important Symptom

The content and structure of mental representation of economic crises were studied and the flexibility of the structure in different social contexts was tested. Italian and Swiss samples (Total N = 98) were compared with respect to their judgments as to how a series of concrete examples of events representing abstract indicators were relevant symptoms of economic crisis. Mental representations were derived using a cluster procedure. Results showed that the relevance of the indicators varied as a function of national context. The growth of unemployment was judged to be by far the most important symptom of an economic crisis but the Swiss sample judged bankruptcies as more symptomatic than Italians who considered inflation, raw material prices and external accounts to be more relevant. A different clustering structure was found for the two samples: the locations of unemployment and gross domestic production indicators were the main differences in representations.

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