Commentary Tradition Research Articles

Antiquarian Voices: The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid's Fasti by Angela Fritsen

BOOK REVIEWS 254 Antiquarian Voices: The Roman Academy and the Commentary Tradition on Ovid’s Fasti. By ANGELA FRITSEN. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 240; 10 illustrations. Hardcover, $69.95. ISBN: 978-0-81421284 -4. Angela Fritsen has written a wide-ranging, nicely illustrated study of the reception of Ovid’s Fasti from the 12th to the 15th century. The book concentrates on the 15th -century commentaries of Paolo Marsi (based in Rome and Venice) and Antonio Costanzi (of Fano). It does not attempt to give an impression of what each is like to use or read, nor to assess the contribution that they made to the study of the poem, but rather connects particular passages with intellectual and political movements. This is most engaging in the pages that explore how the early and recent history of Fano and its neighbors has affected Costanzi’s writing (176–86) or the suggestion in the Afterword that Mantegna’s painting The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele at Rome may owe something to the impact of Marsi’s work among the Venetian elite. When scholarly debates are examined there is rarely any attention paid to who is correct, and in no case any suggestion that their interpretation might inform or be superior to the modern vulgate: on 90–2, for example, it is not clear whether Fritsen thinks there might be a case for taking spica Cilissa at Fasti 1.76 as nard (Marsi) rather than saffron (Costanzi, followed by modern commentators). Chapter 1 considers recent scholarship, commentaries written in Orleans in the aetas Ovidiana, and the intriguing problem of the missing books 7–12: Fritsen has mined some rich material on the 12th - and 13th -century reading of the Fasti from Rieker, Engelbrecht and others. Chapter 2 brings out the importance of facts uncovered in commenting on details, whether of ritual or history (48– 50), before discussing the issue of dedicatee (Tiberius or Germanicus?): this neatly illustrates the difficulties such research posed for humanists working before the discovery of Tacitus, Annals 1–6. Chapter 3 explores the function of the Fasti as a site for professional rivalry: the breadth of historical, mythological and religious reference requires serious learning of its commentators. Lecturing brought income and experience, but it also left ideas, and even full sets of notes, open to publication by others. Publication enhanced prestige, but it also committed scholars to claims that others might show to be false. Chapter 4 includes some vivid, if not novel, material on the topographical researches of the humanists, from Petrarch BOOK REVIEWS 255 through Poggio, Ciriaco d’Ancona, Flavio Biondo to Pomponio Leto and the Academy. There is illuminating discussion of Pomponio Leto’s invention of the temple of Apollo and Clatra (138–9), of Marsi’s seeing “what he wanted to see” (141–7), and of the humanists’ desire “to find a Rome that is whole, whether it be through her visual or literary monuments” (134: this is oddly symbolized by William of Malmesbury’s 12th -century report of the supposed discovery of Pallas’ body, with a lamp still burning in the coffin beside his head). In Chapter 5 we find that even the date of Rome’s foundation, the Parilia, was uncertain (158–66): Fritsen apparently misses Lazzarrelli’s mention of the change from 20th to 21st April in the couplets quoted on 166 (hac celebrata die cessere Palilia; nunc te,/ Victor, habet dederat quae sua liba Pali). Despite the book’s attractions, there is, however, a persistent lack of precision and accuracy, especially in the translations. For example, on page 1 AD 8 (the year of exile) is described as the year Ovid began his poem; on page 16 a phrase of William of Orleans (si vero sol ingrederetur ante diem XI Kalendas Aprilis) is translated “if the sun were indeed to enter the zodiac before March 22” instead of “enter on March 22nd ”; the transmitted Palaestinas at 4.236 is taken (page 83) as Marsi’s emendation of the later conjecture palam Stygias; on page 93 Costanzi’s epigram is printed (and translated) in an unmetrical form (f. 9r in the 1502 Epigrammatum Libellus duly reads...

Dom Adalbert de Vogüé et dom Paul Delatte. Lecture parallèle pour un commentaire de la Règle de saint Benoît. Article suivi d’une intervention de D. Hervieu-Léger

The trends paralleling the work of Dom de Vogüé underline the unique place held by his contribution in the tradition of commentaries on the Rule of St Benedict. A parallel reading of the Commentaries of Dom de Vogüé and Dom Delatte on the essential themes of the definition of coenobitism, the status of the rule, and the place and the meaning of the liturgy also highlights the specificities of the two monastic programs which, two generations apart, mark Benedictine monasticism in the 20th century. The main difference seems to be each author’s attitude toward the tradition : an ancient monasticism for Dom de Vogüé, a renewed monasticism of the 19th century for Dom Delatte. Within these two moments of the tradition, there are also two different ways of thinking about the relationship between monasticism and the Church. Dom de Vogüé insists on the particularities of the vocation of the monk, this distinct member of the Church, whereas Dom Delatte describes a greater homogeneity between monasticism and the Church, in line with Dom Guéranger.

Aristophanes in the Service of Niketas Choniates – Gluttony, Drunkenness and Politics in the Χρονικὴ Διήγησις

This article discusses Aristophanic influence present in two important passages from Niketas Choniates’ Χρονικὴ διήγησις, which are related to gluttonous tax officials from the retinue of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos (John of Poutza and John Kamateros). The first part of the article examines the place of Aristophanes’ comedies within Byzantine learned culture in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and investigates possible reasons for the sudden boom in their popularity within the period. The second part analyses in details the passages in question, situating them within the comic tradition, demonstrating numerous intertextual allusions to Old Comedy (as represented by Aristophanes), and showing how consious appropriation of Aristophanic material added additional, chiefly political, meanings to Choniates’ narrative.

Lucian in Byzantium: The Intersection of the Comic Tradition and Christian Orthodoxy in the Anonymous Patriot

Scholars recognize that the Patriot, an anonymous Byzantine dialogue of uncertain date, imitates Lucianic satire, without pursuing how allusions to Lucian's work and that of his primary models, Plato and Aristophanes, function to characterize the dialogue's two main participants, Critias and Triepho. Attention to the original context of these allusions suggests that the traditional way of reading the Patriot underestimates its sophistication. This paper argues that the Patriot appropriates Lucian's comic dialogue form, as described in the Literary Prometheus and Double Indictment, to devalue Critias's nostalgic Hellenism relative to Triepho's blending of Christian orthodoxy with the Greek comic tradition.

Lifting the Veil: 2 Corinthians 3:7–18 in Light of Jewish Homiletic and Commentary Traditions by Michael Cover

Lifting the Veil: 2 Corinthians 3:7–18 in Light of Jewish Homiletic and Commentary Traditions by Michael Cover

Philosophy's Territorialism: Scientists Can Talk About Values Too

Philosophy's TerritorialismScientists Can Talk About Values Too Charlotte Blease (bio) Keywords Depression, fact–value distinction, is/ought distinction, Kuhn, psychiatric classification Tamara Browne proposes a provocative idea: She argues that philosophers, sociologists, and bioethicists should act as an independent editorial panel for future editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Her paper depends on some well-versed claims in philosophy of psychiatry: She argues that psychiatric classifications are inherently value laden and philosophers, sociologists, and ethicists are best placed to discern (i) the values are that embedded within scientific descriptions of mental disorders, and (ii) to speculate on the effects of any such classifications on individuals and the populace at large as a result of these classifications. I agree with Browne that the DSM (and indeed, medicine in general) requires outsiders—among them philosophers (including medical ethicists) and sociologists—to help influence diagnostic systems. My criticism is that Browne delimits the role of outsiders in medicine to the above academics, whom she sees as some category of elite experts in values. In what follows, I argue that the motivation for her proposal rests on a problematic interpretation of the fact–value distinction (one, I argue, that is prevalent in philosophy of psychiatry and does not see facts and values as fully entwined). Building on these comments, I conclude that although an ethics review panel composed of philosophers and sociologists might have (a few) teeth it would have a lot more bite if it also comprised a composite of academics drawn from the rest of the human sciences (including social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology). Browne (2017, p. 187) claims that, "there are certain questions that science cannot answer authoritatively where there may be clashes between different scientific groups and decisions made for non-scientific reasons." Following an established tradition of philosophical commentary on the value ladenness of psychiatry she argues that, "there are value judgements inherent in psychiatric classification which are unavoidable and cannot be answered by evaluating scientific evidence alone." In respect of this Browne echoes Sadler (2005) and Radden (1994), the latter of whom argues that "the question of where to draw the boundary between mental health and mental disorder will rest on decisions, not mere discoveries" (p. 198). First, some preliminary observations impel me to recommend that Browne be explicit about her own views in regard to the following matter: Does [End Page 231] she consider that values are a product of subjective preferences (taste, or whim)? Rejecting the fact–value dichotomy need not oblige us to side with social constructionism and the idea an objective reality (out there in the world, so to speak) is naive; by extension it ought not to compel us to construe reality as wholly socially constructed and socially determined. Is there evidence that Browne supports this extreme value-drenched perspective? Although I would emphasize that Browne does not explicitly attach her views to this framework her paper is consistent with it—and this is troubling. Browne (2017, p. 189) uncritically cites Foucault in support of the claim that "value judgments are inherent in psychiatric classification," and she endorses the view that sociologists (as well as philosophers) are uniquely equipped to discern the values that are embedded in science. Which brand of sociologist does she have in mind? Social constructionists? And, if this is not her stance, why only committee roles for sociologists among human scientists? To embrace a postmodernist agenda (or to fail to distinguish one's position from it) is a mistake. Certainly, we can agree with the standard wisdom in the philosophy of psychiatry that the fact–value dichotomy is a dogma and one to be rejected; indeed, key developments in post-positivist philosophy of science have taught us that values are deeply entwined with facts (cf. Kuhn, 1962; Polyani, 1962). Cutting to the chase, however, the epistemological problem with social constructionism is that it creates a theoretical void: as Barkow rhetorically asks, "Where do social constructions come from, what are they made of, how do we know them?" (2001, p. 129). Rejecting the fact–value distinction cannot amount to the claim that science is not, thereby, objective...

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire

Dickens, Miscellanies, and Classical Traditions of Satire John Drew (bio) Adetailed examination of Charles Dickens's influence on the genesis and development of the periodical that was originally advertised in the Autumn of 1836 as "The Wits' Miscellany" has yet to be made. Nevertheless I am going to argue that the context of its establishment was something of a watershed in the development of Dickens's approach to satirical writing as a journalist, editor and author.1 "The Wits' Miscellany" was the planned title for the new monthly magazine that the publisher was projecting in 1836, to be jointly penned by the leading humorists of the day, and edited by the intensely fashionable "Boz," creative force behind a strange monthly confection of narratives known as The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, then taking literary London by storm. At Dickens's suggestion, we are led to believe, the title soon mutated from "The Wits' Miscellany" to Bentley's Miscellany, prompting R. H. Barham's quip "but why go to the other extreme?" The joke acts as an illustration of something that will also be touched on in this article, namely the place in satirical traditions of the hit which depends for its effect upon the identification of an individual victim. This gives satire a particular kind of hold which is more of a bite than an embrace. In exploring such matters, Dickensian satire will inevitably be brought into conversation–perhaps even criminal conversation–with the central Dickensian theme of conviviality.2 With its emphasis on shared [End Page 221] enjoyment, sociability and consensus, the convivial would seem to be at odds with the properly satirical, which has to leave its sting in somebody's flesh, and which usually exposes two sides to any question, leaving some unfortunate soul–at times even its readers–uncomfortably stranded on the wrong bank, and scrambling for safety. This naturally prompts the question of what Dickens himself, as a young writer already being lionized for his wit in the mid 1830s, understood by such terms, as they affected the practice of his craft. In other words, how did Dickens orientate himself as a budding humorist against the existing satirical and comic traditions of his day? To be sure, this is not a fashionable line of enquiry.3 Following the great twentieth-century re-evaluation of Dickens as an artist, we have perhaps become conditioned to look for ways in which his works anticipated, predicted and prototyped his Modernist and postmodern successors and influenced the international current of prose fiction that was to come after. Nevertheless, it must occasionally be permissible to glance upstream as well as down, and try to understand Dickens's aesthetic and ethical development as a writer in terms of those he acknowledged and navigated amongst as forerunners: in this case well-established exponents of classical traditions of literary attack and reform. Dickens's "small Latin and less Greke" as a schoolboy is, in this respect, irrelevant, because such traditions were so widely diffused in Regency, Georgian and Victorian print culture, partly though the periodical press, but also through the warp and weft of parliamentary rhetoric, which of course, Dickens himself was as responsible as anyone for weaving into text during the 1830s (Hessell ch. 5). As George Augustus Sala would put it, in his book-length obituary of his mentor and former employer, Dickens as a young journalist "had listened to masters in every style of rhetoric: he had followed Henry Brougham the Demosthenes, Shiel the Cicero, O'Connell the Mirabeau, of their age" (36–37). A classical education was by no means a prerequisite to participation in a literary culture imbued with neoclassical tendencies, and which was thoroughly accustomed to adapting familiar stylistic formulae and imaginative reference points in the contest between conservative and radical traditions. Dickens was literally and literarily in the thick of it. [End Page 222] Party spirits, party warfare and the satirical stakes were all high during the stormy passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), the "Great Reform" Act (1832), and the implementation of the radical Whig reform agenda during the Grey and first two Melbourne ministries (1830–39)–in particular as effects of the...

READING ARISTOTLE THROUGH DANTE: THE CASE OF "METEOROLOGICA" IN FRANCESCO DA BUTI'S 'COMMENTO'

Francesco da Buti (1324?–1406), Pisan by birth and a notary from 1352, started his career as a Magister at the Pisan Studio in 1351, where, twenty years later, he was appointed to the Chair of Latin, and, for almost the rest of his life, he taught classical Latin literature at the University. This essay explores the ways in which Buti provided his audience with Aristotelian material on meteorology in his Dante commentary. The article has three principal aims: to provide a case study of Buti’s relationship with Aristotle’s Meteorologica; to assess Buti’s indebtedness to earlier sources; and to highlight some unknown features of Cristoforo Landino’s indebtedness to Buti. More generally, the study discloses the complexity of investigating sources in Dante commentary. It does this by illustrating, through this case study, the extent of the compilation and the nature of the commentary tradition, as well as the dangers of viewing similarity in expository technique as evidence of borrowing.

New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour of A. I. Doyle ed. by Richard Beadle and A. J. Piper

REVIEWS chapters on manuscript commentaries, then the chapters might mount some theoretical challenge to, or simply divergence from, the power­ fully totalizing, fixed structures of gender polarity and dynastic imper­ ative. A gesture outward from the trap of hierarchies endlessly sub­ verted but contained occurs in Baswell's own discussion of The House of Fame, where the diverse Babel of the world of tidings is that "from which new art may be made"; the eventual disorganization of the rich array of literary traditions that had provided an embarrassment of riches at the start of the poem proves a liberation, leaving Geffrey "suddenly buoyant" and the poem filled with energy (p. 248). The subversion/ containment model can't do much to account for the new, for change that brings the future, but the poem perhaps can. The Babel of tongues pervades Baswell's account of the explosive variety of versions, forms, and media of antique story after Chaucer, a variety eliciting models of analysis that supplement pairs of cultural binarisms with more compli­ cated models of reader identification-identifications that movingly underwrite Baswell's work on manuscripts. THERESA M. KRIER University of Notre Dame RICHARD BEADLE and A. J. PIPER, eds. New Science Out of Old Books: Studies in Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Honour ofA. I. Doyle. London: Scalar Press, 1995. Pp. viii, 455. $109.95. This unusually handsome volume with its sixty-nine black-and-white plates is a fitting tribute to Ian Doyle, one of the most learned students of medieval manuscripts in this century and one of the most generous of scholars in sharing that learning with colleagues. This is the second such collection to honor Doyle, the first constituted of essays delivered at the sixth York Manuscripts Conference.1 Both collections reflect the high standard of manuscript studies in England and this country as well as the beneficent effects of Doyle's scholarship in a variety of disciplines. 1 A. J. Minnis, ed., Late-Medieval Religious Texts and Their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, York Manuscripts Conferences: Proceedings Series, vol. 3 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994). 219 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The range of subjects treated in these fifteen essays is extraordinarily di­ verse, and I make no pretense of being competent to offer an opinion on many of those topics, but I shall rather attempt in a sentence or two to suggest what readers will find in these pages. The collection begins with "From Flax to Parchment: A Monastic Sermon from Twelfth-Century Durham," by Mary A.and Richard H. Rouse, an edition and translation with introduction and notes.The Rouses refer to biblical commentary traditions to account for apparent disjunctions in the structure of the sermon, which curiously allegorizes both the scribe's writing tools and the linen garment in which he is clothed. Margaret Laing and Angus McIntosh analyze the linguistic features of the two scribes who copied the Poema morale and the Trinity Homilies into Trinity College, Cambridge, MS 335.Using computerized tran­ scriptions which, because of their full lexical and grammatical markup, are more sophisticated than those available for the preparation of the Linguistic Atlas ofLate Mediaeval English, they characterize Scribe A as a careful literatim copyist, Scribe B as a dialect translator, and then pre­ sent the results of their analysis to localize both texts and scribes. Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B. 16.2 is a handsome presentation copy of Wyclif's Latin writings, the most extensive surviving in England of a mixed set of early and late works.Anne Hudson provides an account of the physical structure of the manuscript and summarizes what is known of the nature of its texts and their relations to those in other manuscripts. Done with Hudson's characteristic thoroughness and care, this study, as she warns, in many cases raises rather more oc­ casions for further research than it provides solutions. Malcolm Parkes, in an important and detailed study of the process of authorial rolling revision in the early manuscripts of John Gower's works, rejects G.C.Macaulay's and John Fisher's arguments that the poet's earliest manuscripts were produced in a scriptorium where...

The Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms: Introduction

This special issue focuses on the ‘Arabic Commentaries on the Hippocratic Aphorisms’. During a 5-year ERC-funded project, a team of researchers led by Peter E. Pormann has produced a 1.5m-word corpus of preliminary editions, and analysed it in multi-faceted ways. The team shared their digital editions with scholars from outside Manchester, and invited them to engage with the new material; these editions are now freely available to all under a Creative Commons license. In April 2015, they organised an international conference at which team members and other scholars discussed this rich commentary tradition from various vantage points. This special issue contains a selection of papers read at the conference. In this contribution, we introduce our project and its collaborators; list the texts in our corpus of preliminary editions and reflect on the scholarly analysis to which it has hitherto been subjected, ranging from Graeco-Arabic studies, textual criticism, medieval exegetical methods, medical theory and practice, and questions about the social history of medicine. We conclude with an outlook on the most pressing needs for future research, and close with acknowledgments for the manifold support that we have received.

A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan by Rebekah Clements

Reviewed by: A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan by Rebekah Clements Matthew Fraleigh A Cultural History of Translation in Early Modern Japan by Rebekah Clements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii + 275. $99.99 cloth, $80.00 e-book. Early modern Japanese read and wrote in a wide array of languages and registers: classical and contemporary Japanese, literary Sinitic, vernacular Chinese, and multiple European languages, among others. In a fine study that is rich in detail yet broad in scope, Rebekah Clements explores the range of practices employed in traversing the intralingual and interlingual borders of this textual terrain. With thoughtful analysis and clear prose, Clements analyzes the diverse ways in which various forms of linguistic difference were conceptualized during the early modern era, as well as how scholars understand them today. The book’s opening chapter explores the status of language within the cultural and social context of early modern Japan, a period that saw a marked rise in the awareness of diachronic language change. While such sinologists as Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 and Itō Jinsai 伊藤仁斎 brought philological sensitivity to bear on classical Chinese texts, their work also stimulated “national learning” scholars to apply analogous approaches to texts from Japanese antiquity. Clements identifies historical shifts that prompted novel approaches to classic texts, stimulated new conceptualizations of language as an abstract category, and afforded a more prominent role to the act of translation. Two particularly notable and intertwined developments dramatically transformed the seventeenth-century intellectual landscape: the emergence of a commercially viable publishing industry and the spread of literacy far beyond court, monastic, and warrior elites. Texts of longstanding cultural significance to those groups began to reach a broader population of readers, and they were also subjected to new scholarly approaches, including translation. Suzuki Toshiyuki 鈴木俊幸 has shown that Japan, from the latter part of the early modern period, was swept by nothing less than a “reading fever,” as the publication of newly accessible editions of abstruse classical texts enabled eager readers to study those works on their own.1 Building on this and other work, Clements [End Page 184] highlights how the shift toward more empirical approaches to scholarship, new attitudes toward the transmission of knowledge, and a widespread hunger to make use of and also contribute to a body of public information fostered the production of texts in which translation figured as an important technique of scholarship, education, and dissemination. The heart of Clements’s book lies in its central three chapters, each of which examines early modern Japanese translation as practiced with respect to a particular category of source: texts in classical Japanese, in various forms of Chinese, and in Western languages. She follows these three chapters with a chapter exploring how the context in which translation took place shifted at the end of the early modern period, as official sponsorship for translation projects expanded in response to the crises that confronted the shogunate at the turn of the nineteenth century. A concise conclusion recapitulates some of her principal findings, while offering a brief consideration of continuities and discontinuities in translation practice on either side of the Meiji Restoration. Beginning with source texts in classical Japanese, Clements notes that the late seventeenth century saw the printing of classical Heian literary texts in inexpensive editions, many of which came with glosses, headnotes, and other explanatory material. A rich commentary tradition had developed around the Heian classics during the medieval period, but such knowledge was typically conveyed by secret oral transmission or circulated only in manuscript. To satisfy the needs of a broader readership that was less well-educated but nevertheless interested in these materials, early modern commercial publishers began to produce print editions of some medieval scholarly commentaries on the classics, such as the fourteenth-century Genji kokagami 源氏小鏡 (A little mirror of [The Tale of] Genji), a digest focused on the many poems in The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari 源氏物語). New types of texts emerged at this time as well, and Clements adopts a suitably capacious understanding of “translation” to cover a range of approaches through which early modern writers presented classical Japanese literary texts. These approaches included not only digests and commentaries but also parodies and...

Modeling Citable Textual Analyses for the Homer Multitext

The Homer Multitext project ( hmt ) is documenting the language and structure of Greek epic poetry, and the ancient tradition of commentary on it. The project’s primary data consist of editions of Greek texts; automated and manually created readings analyze the texts across historical and thematic axes. This paper describes an abstract model we follow in documenting an open-ended body of diverse analyses. The analyses apply to passages of texts at different levels of granularity; they may refer to overlapping or mutually exclusive passages of text; and they may apply to non-contiguous passages of text. All are recorded in with explicit, concise, machine-actionable canonical citation of both text passage and analysis in a scheme aligning all analyses to a common notional text. We cite our texts with urns that capture a passage’s position in an Ordered Hierarchy of Citation Objects ( ohco2 ). Analyses are modeled as data-objects with five properties. We create collections of ‘analytical objects’, each uniquely identified by its own urn and each aligned to a particular edition of a text by a urn citation. We can view these analytical objects as an extension of the edition’s citation hierarchy; since they are explicitly ordered by their alignment with the edition they analyze, each collection of analyses meets satisfies the ( ohco2 ) model of a citable text. We call these texts that are derived from and aligned to an edition ‘analytical exemplars’.

Term Kinds and the Formality of Aristotelian Modal Logic

Recent formalizations of Aristotle's modal syllogistic have made use of an interpretative assumption with precedent in traditional commentary: That Aristotle implicitly relies on a distinction between two classes of terms. I argue that the way Rini (2011. Aristotle's Modal Proofs: Prior Analytics A8–22 in Predicate Logic, Dordrecht: Springer) employs this distinction undermines her attempt to show that Aristotle gives valid proofs of his modal syllogisms. Rini does not establish that Aristotle gives valid proofs of the arguments which she takes to best represent Aristotle's modal syllogisms, nor that Aristotle's modal syllogisms are instances of any other system of schemata that could be used to define an alternative notion of validity. On the other hand, I argue, Robert Kilwardby's ca. 1240 commentary on the Prior Analytics makes use of a term-kind distinction so as to provide truth conditions for Aristotle's necessity propositions which render Aristotle's conversion rules and first figure modal syllogisms formally valid. I reconstruct a suppositio semantics for syllogistic necessity propositions based on Kilwardby's text, and yield a consequence relation which validates key results in the assertoric, pure necessity and mixed necessity-assertoric syllogistics.

The “Doctrine of Love” in ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī’s Manāzil al-sāʾirīn with Critical Paraphrase of ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī’s Commentary

This article represents a preliminary inquiry into a little known and understudied commentarial tradition upon ʿAbd Allāh al-Anṣārī’s classic work on the stations of Sufism, the Manāzil al-sāʾirīn (Stations of the Wayfarers). After briefly taking stock of the considerably late commentarial tradition which this important text engendered, we will take as our case study one of the Manāzil ’s key topics, namely its sixty-first chapter on the station of love. This pivotal section on love gives profound insight into early Sufism and into the minds of two of its greatest exponents. Anṣārī discusses the station of love in detail, as he does with every chapter, in three aspects, each pertaining to the three types of wayfarers: the initiates, the elect, and the foremost of the elect. Then, we shall turn our attention to perhaps the most important Sufi commentary upon this work by an important follower of the school of Ibn al-ʿArabī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq Kāshānī, offering a guided reading of his commentary upon Anṣarī’s chapter on love in the Manāzil. A complete English translation of this chapter will be offered and appropriately contextualized.

Jesuit Figurists’ written space

As the Jesuit Figurists journeyed through the sea of commentaries on the Yijing and the trans-textual dialogue, they did not just play the role of translators and commentators by doing intralingual translation. They also sought the attention of the Kangxi Emperor and the elite literati by producing handwritten Chinese manuscripts that mimicked the format and grammatology of Chinese commentaries. Besides the commentarial tradition, and the Classical and vernacular language employed in the Chinese manuscripts of the Jesuit Figurists, their formats, writing/calligraphy, layout and other visual features had a life and history of their own. The manuscripts served as a visual medium that helped the Jesuit Figurists communicate and proselytize via a shared identity with the Chinese literati. They strove to imitate the format used in commentaries on the Yijing by earlier or contemporary literati. Thus, their Chinese manuscripts were a written space that showed the interaction among the forms of the books, their content, and their imagined readers. The Jesuit Figurists also faced mixed feelings and fluctuating support from their target audience in this translation space.

Philosophical Anti-authoritarianism

Unlike certain commentary traditions of philosophy in which deference to an authoritative author was a central feature, there are within the analytical tradition no recognised authorities to whom the reader is required to defer. This paper takes up the question of whether this anti-authoritarian position in philosophy can be sustained. Three lines of argument are considered. According to the first, there are no credible authorities in philosophy, or, even if there were, these authorities could not be identified by the non-expert reader. According to the second, since no philosopher is infallible, many readers have on many occasions epistemic grounds for non-deference to the author. According to the third, even if some readers have epistemic reason for deference to some authors, an anti-authoritarian stance can be justified in terms of distinctively philosophical values such as conceptual understanding or intellectual autonomy. Although each of these lines of argument contains an element of truth, a sufficient justification for philosophical anti-authoritarianism remains surprisingly elusive.

The Commentary Tradition on Suhrawardī

Suhrawardi (d. 1191) has been hailed as a crucial thinker in the history of Islamic philosophy. However, his actual influence remains an open question. To provide a measure for his influence, presented here is a list of all known commentaries on his works. In total, this author has found fifty-eight commentaries, of which at least thirty-one are extant, from all centuries and all corners of the Islamic world.

The Quantum Paradox of Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the Postmodern Condition

The Quantum Paradox of Truthiness: Satire, Activism, and the Postmodern Condition

Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate and the Structure of the Summa contra gentiles

In this essay, I argue that there are noteworthy textual and thematic links between Thomas’ Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate and the Summa contra gentiles that shed light on the contents and peculiarities of these two works. While it is commonly held through codicological research that these two texts are closely related, I have not found some of the precise thematic links I will be discussing announced, much less explored, in the literature or commentary tradition. I present these connections in order to account more perspicuously for Thomas’ conception of metaphysics over and against that of revealed theology, especially with respect to how those two domains figure into the odd structure of the Summa contra gentiles.

Vedāntic Commentaries on the Bhagavadgītā as a Component of Three Canonical Texts (prasthāna-trayī)

The Vedānta philosophy has its roots in scriptural sources, specifically, in three canonical texts (prasthāna-trayī), viz. the Brahmasūtra-s by Bādarāyaṇa (BCE), which is called nyāya-prasthāna or tarka-prasthāna; the Upaniṣad-s (700–600 BCE), which are called the śruti-prasthāna; and the Bhagavadgītā (400 BCE–400 CE), which is regarded as the smṛti-prasthāna. Thus, like the first two constituents of this trio (i.e. the Brahmasūtra-s, the Upaniṣad-s), the third one (i.e. the Bhagavadgītā or the Gītā) has a tangible legacy of commentarial tradition; as almost all well-known advocates of the Vedānta schools have commented on these three sourcebooks. In this paper, an attempt has been made to give a brief sketch of such commentarial tradition of the Bhagavadgītā, starting with its commentary by Śaṃkara to the other major commentaries available up to the 15th–16th centuries. While each of these commentaries finds support in the text for their respective philosophical doctrines, an impartial evaluation, with support of modern scholars, shows that none of the commentaries can claim to represent faithfully the true intent of the text (i.e. the Bhagavadgītā), and that the true import of it can only be had if the text is judged from its literary and historical point of view.