Ancient Theory Research Articles

Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy by Alex Dressler

Reviewed by: Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy by Alex Dressler G. Reydams-Schils Alex Dressler. Personification and the Feminine in Roman Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiii + 312 pp. Cloth, £80. This book is a bit of a wild ride, which makes it enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, in the eyes of this reviewer at least. But there may well be too much going on, with the impressive range of intellectual resources from which Alex Dressler draws. Many of his footnotes could be turned into graduate seminars. The core idea, as the author himself summarizes it (253), is as follows: "it was the aesthetic artifact of the feminine, in the form of the personifications of grammatically feminine abstractions, that the Roman philosopher persistently included in his attempt to understand who and what he was, and it was this that escaped his effort and his unflagging interest in discriminating male and female." This aesthetic dimension, Dressler argues, opens up the possibility of a "reparative" reading not only of ancient accounts, but also of our own current condition, and therefore of hope, feminist and other. Dressler's primary method is that of post-modern deconstruction, according to which any attempt at creating binaries is inherently unstable and ends up undermining itself. In his analysis of Roman philosophy he also brings to bear ancient theories of rhetoric and grammar, as well as literary theory, and other strands in the ancient tradition. His use of "ownness," for instance, allows him to group together philosophical notions such as the Stoic "appropriation" (oikeiôsis) and any number of literary and rhetorical devices that express subjectivity and personhood, and that are sometimes overlooked in current treatments of Roman philosophy. But here, instead of questioning the very binary construct of philosophy versus literature (or rhetoric) itself, the author adopts too much of an apologetic tone, and spends too much effort on a discourse of self-justification arguing against the current dominant mode of philosophy in Anglo-American circles. The distinction between philosophy and literature is an anachronism. If instead we define "philosophy" in terms the ancients themselves used, a much richer picture emerges, and the division between argument and metaphor is no longer tenable. The crucial question becomes not what metaphors do in the midst of a philosophical exposition, but what philosophical contribution is made by them qua metaphors. But perhaps the author needs metaphors to remain on the other side of philosophical discourse to allow for what he has called the "aesthetic feminine" to exert its (salutary) disruptive influence. In accounts of Roman philosophers such as Cicero, Lucretius, and Seneca, Dressler sees a subversive feminine at work—of traits usually attributed to women such as passivity, dependence, and embodiment—that undermines the attempts at construing masculinity and relegating women to the status of the excluded and socially inferior (the "subaltern"). This subversion can take place at different levels and through a range of processes. 1. The intellectual rigor of this work shines through especially in its conceptual apparatus (Ch. 2). Personhood, Dressler posits, always incorporates a third-person perspective; one is constituted as a person also insofar as one [End Page 568] is seen and shaped by others. In a process which Dressler calls dynamic personification (76ff.), when a Roman male subject constitutes himself as a person he may be erasing his original dependence on women and relegating the feminine to the level of personification, but these feminine personifications such as Natura end up being indispensable to the constitution of himself as a person. Thus, in such personifications the feminine reenters, and gender roles are reversed when, for instance, a male agent passively submits to the agency of personified Nature qua grammatically feminine. Through the process of dynamic personification the male self comes to realize its fundamental dependency on others. Dressler illustrates this core idea with an analysis of the widely discussed passages from Book Three of Cicero's On Ends on the role of nature in the Stoic process of "appropriation" (3.16ff. and 3.62–4; Ch. 3). But these passages immediately raise questions that could undermine Dressler's mode of reading. First, even when Nature is represented as an agent...

伊藤東涯的文章學—古義學派的古文理論及其中國溯源

伊藤東涯的文章學—古義學派的古文理論及其中國溯源

Memory and Narrative – and Time

This article seeks to develop the recent attention to memory by outlining a hermeneutical approach that links memory closely to philosophical reflections on referentiality, narrativity and temporality. From insights of modern and ancient theories of memory, the the present approach insists that memory is referential in that its images are held to derive from outside memory, that it is narrative in that it is believed to picture a socially conditioned reality, and that it is temporal in that it depends on time in order to navigate between the past and the present. This hermeneutical approach is form-critically and rhetorically relevant, because it becomes visible in the uses of forms taught in the Progymnasmata, especially in the attempt to present them with convincing clarity, as seen in the combination of two chreiai and one diēgēma Mark 1:29–39. Further study of the hermeneutics of memory will redirect our concept of history and reveal the extent to which memory served the early Christians in their search for existential meaning and identity.

The ambivalence of purification and the challenge of transformation in The Rites of Passage and in early Christian texts

In this article I analyze Van Gennep’s understanding of purity, impurity, and purification and its relationship with ancient Christian texts discussing these subjects. Through this comparison, I show how modern and ancient theories of ritual can illuminate each other, and more specifically, how purification was a problematic and ambivalent concept for both ancient Christian writers and for Van Gennep, making it a fruitful one for investigating the thought of both.

Definitely dust, but also more

What does the Lutheran systematic theologian from South Africa, Klaus Nürnberger, find ‘ourselves to be’, that is, what is his viewpoint on anthropology? Nürnberger has recently taken on the task of formulating anew his anthropological viewpoint in his two-volume Faith in Christ today(2016). I will focus on this publication as well as an earlier publication on anthropology, namely ‘Dust of the ground and breath of life (Gn 2:7): The notion of “life” in ancient Israel and emergence theory’ (2012). Having discussed his rich and broadly science-theology–defined anthropological viewpoint on ‘what we find ourselves to be’, only one dimension of ‘more than dust’ is critically engaged with, namely his understanding of the ‘emotive’ or ‘affective’ dimension of being human. From contemporary neuroscientific viewpoints on emotions as well as philosophical viewpoints on the layeredness of affectivity, I critically engage with Nürnberger’s viewpoint.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The question of being human (philosophical anthropology) is addressed within the context of the contemporary science–theology dialogues on anthropology. The critical question on the undervalued role of affectivity within Klaus Nürnberger’s perspective is asked from insights from neuroscientific and philosophical viewpoints on emotions and affectivity.

W. B. Yeats’s Anti-theatricalism and Poetic Nationalism in At the Hawk’s Well

W. B. Yeats’s Anti-theatricalism and Poetic Nationalism in At the Hawk’s Well

Antitheatricality and the Body Public

<i>Antitheatricality and the Body Public</i>

Nietzschean Self-Cultivation

Interpretations of Nietzsche as a virtue theorist have proliferated in recent years as commentators have sought to read him as a modern eudaimonistic philosopher while also attempting to show what makes his contribution to this tradition valuable and distinctive.1While some commentators still contend that interpreting Nietzsche as a eudaimonist is antithetical to his overtly-stated philosophical aims,2 over the last decade there has been a upsurge of support for such readings, especially from commentators who emphasise what they claim is the pervasive influence of the Hellenistic tradition on his work. Keith Ansell-Pearson has argued that Epicurus was a key influence on Nietzsche’s middle period, for example; whereas Michael Ure has claimed that the Stoic thought of Seneca and Epictetus was also highly influential.3 Nevertheless, even those commentators who agree that Nietzsche can be informatively situated, or is even best situated, within the Hellenistic tradition cannot agree on two seemingly-intractable puzzles which any virtue-theoretical reading must solve in order to give a full account of his moral philosophy. The puzzles can be stated as follows: Puzzle 1: Which character traits does Nietzsche endorse as virtues? Puzzle 2: What is Nietzsche’s ethical ideal? This article offers an exegetical strategy to shed light on both puzzles, especially the first one regarding which character traits Nietzsche endorses as virtues which, as we shall see, is tougher to answer by a straightforward appeal to his texts. To elucidate this puzzle, I will propose that his approving comments regarding excellence-based moral philosophy indicate that his own ethics is also structured in terms of an ethical ideal with a requisite set of virtues which, following his ancient philosophical influences, he views as fundamentally connected. As Julia Annas notes, one the most distinctive ‘assumptions which ancient theories make [is] the relationship of [our] virtues to our final end’,4 and given Nietzsche’s interest in, and apparent endorsement of, ancient eudaimonism – especially compared to his invariably scathing remarks on the modern deontological and utilitarian traditions – we have reason to think that he shares this view.5 What is significant for this article, however, is that Nietzsche’s commitment to a kind of eudaimonism modelled on the ancient world offers a potential way to solve both puzzles. If his virtues and ethical ideal are connected in a similar way to ancient eudaimonistic theories, then understanding his ethical ideal allows us to infer which character traits he endorses as virtues, and vice versa. Although it might be objected that a method tackling both puzzles in tandem would be unworkable if their solutions were contained in each other, in what follows I will show that Nietzsche’s extensive comments on his ethical ideal of ‘becoming what one is’ positions us in a strong position to infer which character traits he prizes most highly. I will call these character traits ‘virtues of self-cultivation’.

Sea s(c)ent

Sea s(c)ent

Fragments of History and Science

Fragments of History and Science

Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman

Reviewed by: Antitheatricality and the Body Public by Lisa A. Freeman W. B. Worthen ANTITHEATRICALITY AND THE BODY PUBLIC. By Lisa A. Freeman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017; pp. 376. Lisa Freeman's rich study Antitheatricality and the Body Public should take a privileged place alongside the most influential work in the field, ranging from synoptic literary studies like Jonas Barish's The Antitheatrical Prejudice (1981), to broadly sociological landmarks like Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man (1976), and to historically localized studies like Martin Puchner's Stage Fright (2003). Freeman's book takes an alternative, case-study approach, as each of five detailed chapters traces a moment when some dimension of "theatre" broadly conceived provides the occasion to trace "major struggles over historical shifts in the nature and balance of discursive power and political authority" (2). While Freeman examines "the particular ways that the theater as both physical space and metaphorical realm" has been a "site of contestation for positing and projecting publics" (5), the emphasis here is largely on the latter: plays and performances, the stuff of making theatre, fall below a richly considered discursive horizon on which theatre figures as an instrument for contesting state sovereignty, for negotiating the role of religion, for tracing the legal standing of the state's patronizing of the arts. A theatrically inflected body public does emerge here, evolving practices of dissent, often dissent from the law, working along the interwoven axes of class, religious sect, race, gender, and sexuality. After a brief introduction, the first chapter treats an obligatory figure in the history of English anti-theatricalism, William Prynne, whose "vertiginous" (32) and massive Histrio-Mastix (1632) has long been regarded as an obsessive catalog of antitheatrical mania. Although it landed the author in jail when his comment "women actresses—notorious whores" was taken as a slander of Queen Henrietta Maria's performance of a speaking part in a court masque, Histrio-Mastix, in Freeman's deft reading, undertakes a searching inquiry into the theatricalized abuse of state power. Paying particular attention to Prynne's appropriation of the performative technology of print, she charts his outline of the consequences of the "growth of a theatrical body public, unmoored from either church or state and in possession of a distinct political consciousness" (43). Although the theatre images the antitype of a legitimate public, Prynne uses the "theatrical" rhetoric of acts and scenes, prologues and choruses to marshal the Calvinist community against the overweening power of the church episcopate, personified by Bishop Laud and Charles I. The centerpiece of the chapter is Freeman's meticulous reading of Prynne's trial for sedition, in which the government did not mount the charge of Puritanism (which would galvanize Prynne's low church support), appealing instead to the godliness of the sovereign's transcendent responsibility for the body politic. Freeman's brilliant analysis of trial records shows Prynne and the state vying to appeal to sovereignty over sect, claiming the same high ground of public-minded authority that gentlemen of the Inns of Court asserted in the public masque performed just prior to Prynne's trial, a performance distancing them from their sometime colleague. In the end, the charges against Prynne of libeling the king and the queen, and—more centrally—to being a "stirrer vpp of the people to disobedience" (12) were prosecuted: he was disbarred, fined, degraded at Oxford, had his ears clipped in the pillory, and was imprisoned for life; as the result of his second trial, his ears were again cropped and his cheeks branded, singed by the authority of a theatricalized state. In the second chapter, Freeman reads Jeremy Collier's A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) not as a complaint against the scurrilous wit of Restoration drama, but instead as an indictment of the church's involvement—conspiring against the claims of the Catholic James II—in the Williamite Glorious Revolution, where Collier's animus against the satirical treatment of [End Page 423] clergy in Restoration drama is part of a wider animation against "levelling," the resistance to established forms of social and moral authority. In Freeman's hands, Collier...

Persta atque obdura: Furius in Catullus 23 and at Horace, Satires 2.5.39–41

Catullus 23 describes a Furius so dry and poverty-stricken that he defecates less than ten times a year. Pretending to admire the curious economy of this constitution, Catullus declines Furius’ request for a loan, saying that he and his dry, wooden family are sufficiently ‘blessed’. In the following poem, he discourages Juventius from accepting the attentions of this impoverished fellow. At Sat. 2.5.39–41 Horace describes a Furius who, swollen with rich tripe, bespatters the wintry Alps with ‘snow’. This is contrasted, in the previous lines, with the dry heat of Canicula (the Dog-Star) which causes speechless statues to split. Scholars have identified this Furius with the turgidus Alpinus at Sat. 1.10.36–37 whose bombastic epic style Horace rejects. These references and evidence from Quintilian (Inst. 8.6.17) encouraged scholiasts to link the Furius of Horace, Sat. 2.5 with the poet Furius Bibaculus of Cremona. Scholars subsequently identified Catullus’ Furius with the same. If these Furii are the same people, why are they described in such contrasting terms? This article compares Catullus’ Furius and Horace’s Furius in terms of the ancient theory of the humours and in relation to stylistic theory. It argues that Horace deliberately alludes to Catullus and that a sophisticated network of metaphors links their Furii.

Fermented Citrus Lemon Reduces Liver Injury Induced by Carbon Tetrachloride in Rats.

Fermented lemon juice displays a variety of important biological activities, including anti-inflammatory and antioxidant capabilities. The aim of the present study is to investigate hepatic-protective effects of no-sugar-added fermented lemon juice (FLJ) for liver inflammation caused by carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) in rats. Rats are divided into six groups: H2O, CCl4 + H2O, CCl4 + silymarin, and CCl4 plus three different FLJ doses by oral administration, respectively. The results show that the contents of plasma ALT and AST, hepatic lipid peroxidation, splenomegaly, and liver water are reduced significantly in rats under FLJ treatment, and pathological examination of liver fibrosis is improved. The reduced hepatic injury by increasing liver soluble protein and glutathione and albumin is observed in FLJ treated groups, and FLJ has comparable efficacies to medicine silymarin in liver therapies. The no-sugar-added FLJ differs from traditional fermentation by adding lots of sugar and prevents any hidden sugar intake while taking it as a complimentary treatment for liver inflammation. The green color and the taste of sourness are both associated with treating and healing the liver based on the five-element theory in traditional Chinese medicine, and the green and sour FLJ may be applied to the ancient theory in preventing hepatic injury accordingly.

О национально-культурном своеобразии русских филологических дисциплин

The article analyzes the national-cultural specificity and terminology of Russian philological disciplines as a kind of scientific doctrine in different fields of knowledge, which was formed on the basis of classical theoretical guidelines and modern studies of Russian philological scientists. Russian philology goes back to ancient theories of language and speech, but the development of specific disciplines (grammar, rhetoric, logic, poetics) took on a peculiar cultural appearance in the creativity of specific authors and this appearance was significantly different from Western guidelines. The attitude to the authoritative Western leadership could be threefold: copying and comprehension, translation and processing and own additions, independent creativity in the creation of own terminology and new theories of language.Four basic terms are considered, corresponding to the four scientific theories, which are most relevant to the language practice and communication of modern society. This - actually philology, “slovesnost” (literature), rhetoric, the culture of speech. It was in the Russian scientific tradition that an understanding of general philology as a science studying the rules and laws of creation, transmission, storage, reproduction and functioning of verbal products was formed. Philology links the development of the culture of mankind both with the technology of creating speech, and with the improvement of the semantic content of the text.Russian scientific culture belongs to the creation of the term “slovesnost” (“literature”), originally understood as a gift of speech, verbal ability, but formed into a fundamental theory that studies the totality of all verbal products of the national speech culture. “Slovesnost” was also understood as the science of word in the broadest sense, and as verbal creativity, the art of speech.The article summarizes information about the national specifics of Russian rhetoric, which, of course, goes back to ancient theories, but it took shape in an original scientific concept that presupposes the following meanings: rhetoric - 1) the fundamental science of laws and rules for constructing thought and speech; 2) the doctrine of expedient and effective, convincing and appropriate speech; 3) the art of speech (eloquence), based on talent, the development of speech abilities of a person’s linguistic personality.In the Russian philological science of the twentieth century such an original direction took shape, as the culture of speech, originally understood as the teaching of the literary norm. The modern language situation requires a broader interpretation as the term culture (preservation and creative innovation in speech activity), and the term speech, which requires both a culture of thought, and the culture of the word, and the culture of the sentence, the phrase, the text as a whole, and the pronunciation culture. The author of the article confirms the uniqueness of the Russian national scientific tradition and this is the best evidence of the national contribution to the development of world scientific thought. Prospects for the study are a comparison of the existing Russian national concept of philology with foreign traditions and the current state of scientific thought both in the West and in the East, whereone develops his own vision and interpretation of the issues examined.

古代理論を近代思想に仕立て直す:ジローラモ・メーイの芸術体系論

古代理論を近代思想に仕立て直す:ジローラモ・メーイの芸術体系論

An overview on Ancient Trade Exchanges and Modern Economic Theories: Towards a New Approach?

An overview on Ancient Trade Exchanges and Modern Economic Theories: Towards a New Approach?

Collecting uncollectables: Joachim Du Bellay

Lists of wonders have circulated for millennia. Over and over, such inventories of spectacular man made constructions have been rewritten, re-edited and reimagi-ned. Both the wonders and the lists of wonders, preferably of the seven, have had a profound and long-lasting effect, and have been abundantly imitated, copied and reworked. Renaissance creative thinking was obsessed with the seven wonders of the ancient world, and early-modern Europe experienced a surge of visual and verbal depictions of wonders. This article is about a remarkable list of seven wonders, included in one of Joachim Du Bellay’s canonical poems on Roman antiquities (Antiquités de Rome), published in Paris in 1558. Du Bellay shapes his list of wonders by exploring pat-terns of both repetition and mutability. Almost imperceptibly, he starts suggesting connections between 16th-century Rome and distant civilizations. Through the eyes of a fictive traveller and collector, the poet venerates the greatness and la-ments the loss of ancient buildings, sites and works of art, slowly developing a ver-bal, visual and open-ended gallery, creating a collection of crumbling or vanished, mainly Roman, architecture. This poetic display of ruins and dust in the Eternal City is nourished by the attraction of the inevitable destruction of past splendour and beauty. In the sonnets, Du Bellay imitates classical models and patterns. Whi-le compiling powerful images and stories of destruction, he combines techniques associated with both a modern concept of copy and more ancient theories of co-pia. In this context, this article also explores whether Pliny’s Natural History might be a source for the imaginary collection of lost sites and wonders in Du Bellay’s Antiquités.

A Research on Concept of Space Aesthetic Consciousness Examined Through Chinese Ancient Painting Theory

A Research on Concept of Space Aesthetic Consciousness Examined Through Chinese Ancient Painting Theory

Biography, History and the Genre of Luke-Acts

Genre looms large in contemporary Lukan scholarship. While many scholars are content to label Luke as biography and Acts as history, others argue that both volumes must belong to a single genre. This solution preserves the generic unity of Luke-Acts by shoehorning one or both volumes into ill-fitting categories; such a move only makes sense within an understanding of genre-as-classification. By exploring recent scholarship on genre and privileging ancient practice over ancient theory, we propose reading Luke-Acts as a unified narrative influenced by and modelled after a wide range of Greek prose narratives, rather than representing one genre in particular.

Les morts subites à Versailles : une relecture du traité de Dionis (1710)

In 1710, the surgeon Pierre Dionis publishes a Dissertation on sudden death. Echoing and expanding the work of his Roman colleague Jean Marie Lancisi, he describes and analyzes dozens of cases of sudden death observed by him. A large number of cases was followed by autopsies allowing clinicopathological confrontation. Are proposed causes of death (pulmonary embolism, myocardial infarction, hemorrhagic stroke, arterial rupture, etc.), pathophysiological mechanisms based on the ancient theory of humors, and preventive actions to avoid these unexpected deaths. In this article, we oppose these old data to those of current literature.