Pyrrho (c.365–c.275 BC)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Brunschwig
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Patron Saint ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
Greek Philosopher ◽  
Extensive Documentation ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Suspension Of Judgment ◽  
Pyrrhonian Scepticism

The Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis gave his name first to the most influential version of ancient scepticism (Pyrrhonism), and later to scepticism as such (pyrrhonism). Like Socrates, he wrote nothing, despite which – or thanks to which – he too became one of the great figures of philosophy. Although he has vanished behind his own legend, he must have helped nurture that legend: his unique personality palpably exercised an unequalled fascination on his acquaintances, and through them, on many others. We possess, thanks especially to Sextus Empiricus, extensive documentation of what can be called ‘Neo-Pyrrhonian’ scepticism, because from the time of Aenesidemus (first century bc) it invoked Pyrrho as its patron saint. But Pyrrho’s own thought is hard to recover. The documentary evidence for him is mainly anecdotal, and the principal doxography is more or less directly dependent on his leading disciple Timon of Phlius, who managed to present himself as Pyrrho’s mere ‘spokesman’, but who was in fact perhaps rather more than that. The main question, which is still unanswered, is whether Pyrrho was primarily or even solely a moralist, the champion of an ethical outlook based on indifference and insensibility, or whether he had already explicitly set up the weaponry of the sceptical critique of knowledge which underlies the epistemological watchword ‘suspension of judgment’.

Aenesidemus (1st century BC)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.J. Hankinson
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Greek Philosopher ◽  
Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Aenesidemus was a Greek philosopher of the first century bc who revived Pyrrhonian Scepticism, formulating the basic Ten Modes of Scepticism, or tropoi, and demonstrating that concepts such as cause, explanation, goodness and the goal of life engendered endemic and undecidable dispute; faced with this the Sceptic suspends judgment – and tranquillity follows.

Hume and Ancient Pyrrhonian Scepticism

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-116
Author(s):  
Peter S. Fosl
Keyword(s):  
General Framework ◽  
Common Life ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
Suspension Of Judgment ◽  
Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Chapter Three charts the development of ancient Pyrrhonism, from its origins with Pyrrho of Elis through Timon of Phlius and Aenesidemus, concluding with the chronicling work of Sextus Empiricus. The chapter unpacks the conceptual apparatus of Pyrrhonism in some detail, including: scepticism as practice (agogê), its Fourfold way of observing appearances (phainomena), its observance (teresis) of the pre-theoretical understandings (prolepsis) of common life (ho bios ho koinos), its argumentative modes (tropoi, both Aenesidemus’ ten and Agrippa’s five tropes), its suspension of judgment (epochê), its practice of balancing oppositions (isosthenia), its non-assertive silence (aphasia) about what is hidden (ta adêla), its critiques of causality, its Apelletic method, its critical and inquiring openness (zetesis), its quasi-goal of tranquillity (ataraxia), and its anti-Platonic ideas about recollection. The chapter closes with a seven-point General Framework defining Pyrrhonian Scepticism.

Asian Scientists on the Move

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anju Mary Paul
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Research Output ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
First Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Migration System ◽  
Science Story ◽  
Scientific Research Output ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Set Up

The growing scientific research output from Asia has been making headlines since the start of the twenty-first century. But behind this science story, there is a migration story. The elite scientists who are pursuing cutting-edge research in Asia are rarely 'homegrown' talent but were typically born in Asia, trained in the West, and then returned to work in Asia. Asian Scientists on the Move explores why more and more Asian scientists are choosing to return to Asia, and what happens after their return, when these scientists set up labs in Asia and start training the next generation of Asian scientists. Drawing on evocative firsthand accounts from 119 Western-trained Asian scientists about their migration decisions and experiences, and in-depth analysis of the scientific field in four country case studies - China, India, Singapore and Taiwan - the book reveals the growing complexity of the Asian scientist migration system.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Ulrike Elisabeth Stockhausen
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Significant Shift ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Line Position ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
Immigrant And Refugee ◽  
Evangelical Theology

The introduction outlines how American evangelical Christians have responded to refugees and immigrants to the United States since the early 1960s and into the twenty-first century. It sketches the evangelical theology of hospitality, which drove this activism into the late 1980s, and notes the significant shift which took place in evangelical immigration attitudes in the 1990s. While political leanings have always shaped evangelicals’ practical responses and political positions on immigration, mainstream evangelicals’ alliance with the Republican Party profoundly impacted their theology of hospitality as the Grand Old Party shifted toward a hard-line position on immigration. The introduction provides historical context for this activism and introduces the main question which drives the book: Why did evangelicals for many years embrace an immigrant- and refugee-friendly theology, only to replace their scriptural convictions with a more skeptical interpretation of the biblical record once the issue became subject to a deeply polarized political debate?

Relativity against dogmatism in Sextus Empiricus

2020 ◽  
pp. 226-245
Author(s):  
Matthew Duncombe
Keyword(s):  
Indirect Evidence ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Sextus often tells us that relativity underpins Pyrrhonian Scepticism. Some scholarship focuses on the role of relativity in overarching Pyrrhonist sceptical strategies. Much less scholarship addresses relativity in Sextus’ criticism of particular dogmatic concepts. This chapter argues that Sextus invokes conceptual relativity—a version of constitutive relativity—in his treatment of three dogmatic concepts: signs, causes, and demonstration. However, as a Pyrrhonist, Sextus would likely resist committing himself to a certain concept of relativity, even a conceptual one. This chapter argues that Sextus employs conceptual relativity dialectically against his dogmatic opponents. First, the chapter sets up the two readings of Sextus’ view of relativity. The chapter then presents direct and indirect evidence that the conceptual view is present in Sextus.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Laura Robson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
State Building ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Primary Mode

This chapter introduces the main question of the book: how did mass violence come to be a primary—perhaps the primary—mode of making political claims in the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East? It asks when mass violence became a constitutive aspect of the political landscape of the region, why it took precedence over other strategies of state building and establishing political authority, and how governments, armies, and civilians alike came to think of mass violence as a viable and legitimate mode of claiming political space and national rights. Drawing on several different and largely separate historiographies, this introduction argues, makes it possible to produce a synthetic account of violence in the twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean that takes account of regional developments as much as individual national histories.

Meek as milk and large as logic: A corpus study of the non-standard poetic simile

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-220 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roi Tartakovsky ◽  
Yeshayahu Shen
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Salient Feature ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
British National Corpus ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Operational Criteria ◽  
Unexpected Difficulty ◽  
National Corpus

A novel distinction is proposed between two types of closed similes: the standard and the non-standard. While the standard simile presents a ground that is a salient feature of the source term (e.g. meek as a lamb), the non-standard simile somewhat enigmatically supplies a non-salient ground (e.g. meek as milk). The latter thus violates a deep-seated norm of similes and presents interpreters with unexpected difficulty, whereby the concept set up to be an exemplar of a quality is actually less than ideal to fulfil this role. The main question addressed here is how these two simile types are relatively distributed across poetic and non-poetic corpora. We elaborate the criteria for what constitutes the non-standard simile, including separating it out from adjacent phenomena like the ironic simile (e.g. brave as a mouse), and go on to explain our operational criteria for salience. Then, we report culling 329 closed similes from an anthology of poetry and 350 closed similes from two corpora of non-poetic discourse, the Corpus of Historical American English and the British National Corpus. An independent judge rated the salience of each ground-and-source pair of each of the similes, presented in randomized order. Results show that while the standard simile is found in both types of discourse, the non-standard kind is only marginally present in the non-poetic corpora but makes up over 40% of the similes in the poetic corpus. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theories of poetic language and literariness.

scholarly journals Pylos and Sphacteria

1898 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 147-159
Author(s):  
Ronald M. Burrows
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Complete Collection ◽  
Early Number ◽  
Set Up

In my first article on Pylos and Sphacteria I made the rash promise that in an early number of this Journal I would support my theories by documentary evidence. It is with shame that I realise that this is now two years ago. Various circumstances have delayed me. I have been unable to visit Greece again myself, and the friends who were kind enough to do the work for me were constantly baulked by the storminess of the place. Not only was it often impossible to set up a camera ὁπότε πνεῦμα ἐκ πόντου εἴη but even to reach Sphacteria at all. Of the Pylian boatmen, as I know from my own experience, it cannot be said that ἀφειδὴς ὁ κατάπλους καθέστηκε It is only as a patchwork of the results of three different expeditions that I am now in a position to publish a plan of the παλαιὸν ἔρυμα and a fairly complete collection of photographs. In the present article my business will be to act as showman to this series; I have little new to add, and, happily, no fresh opponent to meet. My collaborators have, I think, on practically every point on which they have expressed an opinion, given their support to my views.

scholarly journals “Put not / Beyond the sphere of your activity”: The Fictional Afterlives of Ben Jonson

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-191
Author(s):  
Richard O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Alternative Model ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
First Century ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Cultural Assumptions ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Holy Writ

This article investigates the cultural assumptions which underpin five twentieth and twenty-first century fictional depictions of Ben Jonson. Despite the wealth of documentary evidence for Jonson's dramatic and fractious biography, its particular richness has rarely captured the imagination of contemporary authors. To account for the much-reduced presence Jonson occupies in the ongoing fictionalization of the English Renaissance, the author outlines the development of a pseudo-biographical narrative of Jonson's life which evolved over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in relation to the emerging narrative of Shakespeare's. Jonson came to be presented as pedantic, ponderous, and ultimately outclassed by the dramatist who was his main contemporary rival, whose early reputation he was instrumental in creating. Furthermore, this gradual diminution of Jonson's own complexities was directly linked to his success within his lifetime. Outliving Shakespeare and offering an alternative model for theatrical achievement, Jonson presented a threat which had to be neutralized in the service of a protective impulse towards Shakespeare's reputation as a unique genius. The article offers some early instances of semi-fictional anecdotes about Jonson and Shakespeare which present the two dramatists as interchangeable subjects. It then assesses at length more recent Jonson-characters in Brahms and Simon's No Bed for Bacon, Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, Edward Bond's Bingo, Rudyard Kipling's “Proofs of Holy Writ”, and Jude Morgan's The Secret Life of William Shakespeare in the light of the historical reframing of Jonson's life and temperament. Finally, it makes the case for Jonson's story as one particularly suited to our current cultural landscape.

Skepticism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bett
Keyword(s):  
Central Point ◽  
Second Sophistic ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Suspension Of Judgment ◽  
Academic Skepticism

This chapter assesses the relations between Greco-Roman philosophical skepticism, centered on the attitude of suspension of judgment, and the Second Sophistic. It begins with Favorinus, who identified as an Academic skeptic, and whose rhetorical activity is recognizably related to the practice of Academic skepticism, but who also engaged with the Pyrrhonist skeptical tradition. The rest of the chapter addresses Pyrrhonism, particularly Sextus Empiricus. The central point is Sextus’s complete lack of reference to the Second Sophistic, despite its being almost certainly contemporary with him. This may be due in part to his self-effacement and disengagement from the public arena, which is encouraged by the Pyrrhonist goal of ataraxia. But it also seems to be connected with the peculiar anachronism of his intellectual engagements, both concerning philosophy and (in his Against the Rhetoricians) concerning rhetoric itself.

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