The Curse of the Creator

This chapter examines the Marcionite interpretation of Galatians 3:13. In this verse, Christ “becomes” a curse on the cross. As the source text (Deut 21:23) shows, Christ was cursed specifically by the creator. The creator’s curse against Christ, despite its presumed salvific benefit, was an act of harm incompatible with the popular Platonic view that the divine cannot inflict evil. Cursing, however, is part of the character of the creator as shown by Yahweh’s curse of Cain, Canaan, and the Israelites. Patristic writers all concurred in trying to soften or deny the divine curse against Christ but ended up accentuating the problem. Marcionites viewed the creator’s curse against Christ as incriminating the creator’s character. Whatever good resulted from the curse was not planned by the creator and could not exculpate him. A being who cursed the sinless Christian savior was not only lacking goodness from a Marcionite perspective; he could only be evil.

Plato and Aristotle on Our Perceptual Beginnings

I consider the Platonic background for Aristotle’s account of our cognitive development. On the Platonic view, we learn from perception in a purely causal sense: our perceptions lead us to reflect on their shortcomings, and thereby prompt us to recollect the knowledge of the Forms relative to which they fall short. But perception is not something that would supply us with a valuable kind of knowledge, or be useful except as a means to recollect: the fact that our learning begins from perception is just a lamentable consequence of our embodied existence. Aristotle presents his account of the perceptual origins of our learning as a challenge to this sort of view. He does so, I argue, precisely because he takes perception to be an epistemically valuable capacity—a capacity whose exercise supplies us with sophisticated forms of knowledge, and provides a foundation for our learning, rather than merely prompting it.

Privatizaion of Higher Education and Excellence Without a Soul

Privatization of education in both developed and developing countries over the last century has registered a positive trend in the field of education. With the rise of capitalism and privatization of higher education by the government of Uganda, there is an increasing attempt to privatize public services, including education, so that citizens will have to buy them at market value rather than have them provided by the government. The department of higher education in Uganda concentrates strongly on the role of education in servicing the economy through taxation to the neglect of its social and developmental responsibilities. The vision of the university as a place for the education of the elite and for elite education has had a powerful historical precedent in Plato’s Academy. To what extent the Platonic view of education still dominates our thinking about the role and purposes of universities is arguable. Commercialization is normalized and its operational values and purposes have been encoded in the systems of all types of universities. Correlatively, what is happening in the universities is that they are being asked to produce commercially oriented professionals rather than public-interest professionals. While this may seem like merely a change in form rather than substance, the danger with this advancing marketised individualism is that it will further weaken public interest values among those who are being educated in private universities. In this paper, the writer presents an examination on the impact of privatization of higher education on the original purpose and values of education to the individual, the society and the Ugandan nation as a whole hence promoting privatization of higher education and excellence without soul.

The Initial Anthropology in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

In the ‘Foreword’, I address some aspects of Academician Georg Brutian’s philosophy. The Initial Anthropology paper follows. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle considers the relation of ethical theory to anthropology in a specific way. He sets out an initial anthropology that describes the human through its common and non-common elements to plants as well as to ‘other animals’. The conclusion is that the human animal is the only living being that is endowed with reason and carries out ‘practical life’. We may call this difference ‘the anthropological difference’. In his ethical theory, Aristotle points to the limits of the anthropological difference. On the one hand, he holds that only practical theory can explain the ‘practical life’ as well as the ‘human Good’. On the other hand, he highlights that the human is higher than the ‘other animals’, since the human is endowed with the divine element of intellect; nevertheless, there are beings that are ‘more divine’ than the human. Thus Aristotle corroborates the human and its practical life, without abandoning the Socratic-Platonic view of the Divine. In this aspect, the alleged anthropocentrism of Aristotle’s ethics is to be reconsidered.

The virtue of innovation: innovation through the lenses of biological evolution

We rehearse the processes of innovation and discovery in general terms, using as our main metaphor the biological concept of an evolutionary fitness landscape. Incremental and disruptive innovations are seen, respectively, as successful searches carried out locally or more widely. They may also be understood as reflecting evolution by mutation (incremental) versus recombination (disruptive). We also bring a platonic view, focusing on virtue and memory. We use ‘virtue’ as a measure of efforts, including the knowledge required to come up with disruptive and incremental innovations, and ‘memory’ as a measure of their lifespan, i.e. how long they are remembered. Fostering innovation, in the evolutionary metaphor, means providing the wherewithal to promote novelty, good objective functions that one is trying to optimize, and means to improve one's knowledge of, and ability to navigate, the landscape one is searching. Recombination necessarily implies multi- or inter-disciplinarity. These principles are generic to all kinds of creativity, novel ideas formation and the development of new products and technologies.

Disciplining Song in Sixteenth-Century Geneva

Song was frequently disciplined in the sixteenth-century Consistory of Geneva as part of the broad program of social Reform led by Calvin. Between 1542 and 1552, more than one hundred cases involving illicit singing came before the Consistory court. These cases reveal the Consistory’s persistent attempt to control the singing of all members of Genevan society regardless of social status or situation. They also offer a new field of evidence for exploring the boundaries between proper (honneste) and improper (deshonneste) singing in Reformed communities. The bulk of the cases surveyed from this period involved charges of illicit singing alongside other immoral behaviors, such as gambling and fornication. These cases directly linked indecent singing to other forbidden acts—a connection that worked out a neo-Platonic view of music in juridical process and provided the rationalization for the entire project of disciplining song in the courts. Concerns over improper song leading to illicit behavior and ultimately to social disorder were dramatically illustrated in a cluster of Consistory cases related to the famous Bolsec affair that exploded in Geneva near the end of the year 1551. Bolsec’s contrafactum on the tune of Psalm 23 from the Geneva Psalter—written during Bolsec’s lengthy stay in prison—spread his dissenting theology to his supporters and enacted the dangerous potential of song to disrupt the unity of the Reformed city.

The Syntax of Life: Gregory Bateson and the “Platonic View”

The essay follows the fil rouge of ancient Greek thinking in the work of Gregory Bateson, an unusually multi-faceted and energetically nomadic intellect in the landscape of twentieth-century hyper-specialized disciplines, whose eclectic research focused on the question of life and of human participation in a living world. Through the reverberation of Neoplatonic motifs and echoing pre-Socratic intuitions, Bateson reflects on the “pattern which connects”—the λόγος that says one and all things, and the interpenetration of one and all things, thus operating as the connective tissue of all that is, the communicational web of contacts, exchanges, and transmissions, perhaps the nervous system of life.

Priscian on Divine Ideas and Mental Conceptions: The Discussions in the Glosulae in Priscianum, the Notae Dunelmenses, William of Champeaux and Abelard

Priscian's Institutiones Grammaticae, which rely on Stoic and Neoplatonic sources, constituted an important, although quite neglected, link in the chain of transmission of ancient philosophy in the Middle Ages. There is, in particular, a passage where Priscian discusses the vexed claim that common names can be proper names of the universal species and where he talks about the ideas existing in the divine mind. At the beginning of the 12th century, the anonymous Glosulae super Priscianum and the Notae Dunelmenses, which heavily quote William of Champeaux (as master G.), interpret the passage in the context of a growing interest in the problem of universals, raising semantic as well as ontological questions, and introducing a Platonic view on universals in the discussions on the signification of the noun. Moreover, this same passage will be used by Abelard to elaborate one of his opinions about the signification of universal or common names—that they signify "mental conceptions".