The editing of the correspondence of major figures in intellectual history is an essential scholarly activity. Yet in this country in recent years it has neither been the priority it should be, nor has it received the support that it deserves. Of course there have been exceptions to this, perhaps notably – for the early modern period – the epic one-man effort of Esmond de Beer in his later years in producing The Correspondence of John Locke (though this regrettably, and (...) frustratingly, lacks a composite index). A further exception, the edition of The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg by A. R. and M. B. Hall, was unfortunately flawed by the need to change publishers midway in the series, which has led to a marked disparity in the availability of the latter part of the set compared with its early volumes. In any case, like the Locke edition, this was conceived in the heady days of the 1960s and early 1970s, and few have ventured such enterprises since. Virtually the only exception is Noel Malcolm's edition of the manageable-sized Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (two volumes, 1994). Moreover, it is revealing of the acute need to justify the publication of such material felt by editors and publishers alike that the promotional leaflet for this edition went so far as to claim that it was ‘one of the most important scholarly publications of the twentieth century’ – a claim that is the more ironic in view of the quite significant shortcomings in its method of presenting the material that it contains. (shrink)

What lies at the foundation of our moral beliefs? If we dig down far enough do we find that our moral values have no ground at all to stand on, and so are apt to collapse upon serious philosophical investigation? This book seeks to answer these and related questions by positing an indubitable foundation for our moral beliefs – they arise from the phenomenon of ‘primary recognition’, and are fundamentally shaped by ‘basic moral certainties’. Drawing on philosophers such as Ludwig (...) Wittgenstein and Knud Ejler Løgstrup, this book draws together insights from both Analytic and Continental philosophy to provide a convincing new picture of our moral foundations. And it does so in a way that eschews moral conservativism and opens the way for a rich understanding of the variety and particularity of our human moral systems, while also keeping a significant place for those moral beliefs that occur universally, across cultures. (shrink)

Discussions of the theory and practice of systematics and evolutionary biology have heretofore revolved around the views of philosophers of science. I reexamine these issues from the different perspective of the philosophy of history. Just as philosophers of history distinguish between chronicle (non-interpretive or non-explanatory writing) and narrative history (interpretive or explanatory writing), I distinguish between evolutionary chronicle (cladograms, broadly construed) and narrative evolutionary history. Systematics is the discipline which estimates the evolutionary chronicle. ¶ Explanations of the events described in (...) the evolutionary chronicle are not of the covering-law type described by philosophers of science, but rather of the how-possibly, continuous series, and integrating types described by philosophers of history. Pre-evolutionary explanations of states (in contrast to chroniclar events) are still widespread in "evolutionary" biology, however, because evolutionary chronicles are in general poorly known. To the extent that chronicles are known, the narrative evolutionary histories based on them are structured like conventional historical narratives, in that they treat their central subjects as ontological individuals. This conventional treatment is incorrect. The central subjects of evolutionary narratives are clades, branched entities which have some of the properties of individuals and some of the properties of classes. Our unconscious treatment of the subjects of evolutionary narratives as individuals has been the cause of erroneous notions of progress in evolution, and of views that taxa "develop" ontogenetically in ways analogous to individual organisms. We must rewrite our narrative evolutionary histories so that they properly represent the branching nature of evolution, and we must reframe our evolutionary philosophies so that they properly reflect the historical nature of our subject. (shrink)

William Whewell (1794–1866), polymathic Victorian scientist, philosopher, historian, and educator, was one of the great neologists of the nineteenth century. Although Whewell's name is little remembered today except by professional historians and philosophers of science, researchers in many scientific fields work each day in a world that Whewell named. "Miocene" and "Pliocene," "uniformitarian" and "catastrophist," "anode" and "cathode," even the word "scientist" itself—all of these were Whewell coinages. Whewell is particularly important to students of the historical sciences for another word (...) he coined, one that was unfortunately not as successful as many of his others because it is difficult to pronounce. This word, "palaetiology," was the name Whewell gave to the class of sciences that are concerned with historical causation: the class we might today refer to as historical sciences. Although the disciplines Whewell included under the heading of palaetiology might seem to cut across conventional academic boundaries of his day and ours—his exemplary palaetiological sciences were geology and comparative philology—all these fields may be examined together, Whewell argued, because of their common interest in reconstructing the past. ¶ This paper is an essay in the palaetiological sciences, dedicated to Whewell on the bicentennial of his birth, an essay that examines some of the principles, maxims, and rules of procedure that these sciences have all in common. Its first purpose is to demonstrate the continuing validity of Whewell's classification of these sciences through a study of historical representation in three different palaetiological fields: systematics, historical linguistics, and textual transmission. Its second purpose is to continue the development of an extended analogy between historical representation and cartographic representation that I began in an earlier paper (O'Hara, 1993, Systematic Biology), an analogy that makes especially clear the common representational practices that are found throughout palaetiology. (shrink)

Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view (...) had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through the field since the 1960s with the development of phylogenetic systematics. Tree thinking recognizes that species are not independent replicates within a class (as earlier group thinkers had tended to see them), but are instead interconnected parts of an evolutionary tree. It lays emphasis on the explanation of evolutionary events in the context of a tree, rather than on the states exhibited by collections of species, and it sees evolutionary history as a story of divergence rather than a story of development. Just as population thinking gave rise to the new field of population biology, so tree thinking is giving rise to the new field of phylogenetic biology. (shrink)

Este ensaio analisa o conto "A menor mulher do mundo", de Clarice Lispector, à luz da filosofia da alteridade de Emmanuel Lévinas. A partir da figura da personagem Pequena Flor, discute-se como o olhar exotizante, piedoso ou indiferente revela tentativas de reduzir o Outro ao Mesmo, negando sua irredutibilidade. O estudo evidencia que a narrativa clariceana problematiza a relação ética com a diferença, expondo limites da objetificação e da curiosidade colonial. O riso de Pequena Flor surge como fissura nesse enquadramento, (...) epifani a do rosto levinasiano, convocando à responsabilidade diante do Outro. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt tree thinking, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

The species problem is one of the oldest controversies in natural history. Its persistence suggests that it is something more than a problem of fact or definition. Considerable light is shed on the species problem when it is viewed as a problem in the representation of the natural system (sensu Griffiths, 1974, Acta Biotheor. 23: 85–131; de Queiroz, 1998, Philos. Sci. 55: 238–259). Just as maps are representations of the earth, and are subject to what is called cartographic generalization, so (...) diagrams of the natural system (evolutionary trees) are representations of the evolutionary chronicle, and are subject to a temporal version of cartographic generalization which may be termed systematic generalization. Cartographic generalization is based on judgements of geographical importance, and systematic generalization is based on judgements of historical importance, judgements expressed in narrative sentences (sensu Danto, 1985, Narration and knowledge, Columbia Univ. Press, New York). At higher systematic levels these narrative sentences are conventional and retrospective, but near the "species" level they become prospective, that is, dependent upon expectations of the future. The truth of prospective narrative sentences is logically indeterminable in the present, and since all the common species concepts depend upon prospective narration, it is impossible for any of them to be applied with precision. (shrink)

Dan O'Hara; Paul A. Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 45, Issue 4, 1 June 1987.

Neither our evolutionary past, nor our pre-literate culture, has prepared humanity for the use of technology to provide records of the past, records which in many context become normative for memory. The demand that memory be true, rather than useful or pleasurable, has changed our social and psychological under-standing of ourselves and our fellows. The current vogue for lifelogging, and the rapid proliferation of digital memory-supporting technologies, may accelerate this change, and create dilemmas for policymakers, designers and social thinkers.

Classifications of animals and plants have long been represented by hierarchical lists of taxa, but occasional authors have drawn diagrammatic versions of their classifications in an attempt to better depict the "natural relationships" of their organisms. Ornithologists in 19th-century Britain produced and pioneered many types of classificatory diagrams, and these fall into three groups: (a) the quinarian systems of Vigors and Swainson (1820s and 1830s); (b) the "maps" of Strickland and Wallace (1840s and 1850s); and (c) the evolutionary diagrams of (...) the post-Darwin authors (1860 on). The quinarians distinguished between affinity and analogy and used both in their classifications, whereas Strickland rejected the quinarians' belief in numerical regularity and their use of analogy. Wallace's "maps" are easily given an evolutionary interpretation, and his approach was taken up and modified by later evolutionary anatomists. Sharpe returned to Strickland's methods and merely appended a superficial evolutionary interpretation. Contrary to common belief systematics has a rich conceptual history, and many of the conceptual developments in 19th-century systematics were made by ornithologists. (shrink)

The joy of intimacy--with yourself, with others, and with the whole universe. The long-awaited first book from a prominent modern American Zen teacher. For Roshi Pat Enkyo O'Hara, intimacy is what Zen practice is all about: the realization of the essential lack of distinction between self and other that inevitably leads to wisdom and compassionate action. She approaches the practice of intimacy beginning at its most basic level--the intimacy with ourselves that is the essential first step. She then shows (...) how to bring intimacy into our relationships with others, starting with those dearest to us and moving on to those who don't seem dear at all. She then shows how to grow in intimacy so that we include everyone around us, all of society, the whole world and all the beings it contains. Each chapter is accompanied by practices she uses with her students at the Village Zendo for manifesting intimacy in our lives. (shrink)

138 titles across a wide range of scholarly publications illustrate the conceptual affinities that connect the palaetiological sciences of biological systematics, historical linguistics, and stemmatics. These three fields all have as their central objective the reconstruction of evolutionary "trees of history" that depict phylogenetic patterns of descent with modification among species, languages, and manuscripts. All three fields flourished in the nineteenth century, underwent parallel periods of quiescence in the early twentieth century, and in recent decades have seen widespread parallel revivals. (...) "Tree thinking" (O'Hara, 1988) is now standard within evolutionary biology, and the unity of what William Whewell called palaetiology is being once again appreciated by scholars and scientists in many fields. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the name given to the underlying arrangement present in the diversity of life. Unlike a classification, which is made up of classes and members, a system or arrangement is an integrated whole made up of connected parts. In the pre-evolutionary period a variety of forms were proposed for the Natural System, including maps, circles, stars, and abstract multidimensional objects. The trees sketched by Darwin in the 1830s should probably be considered the first genuine evolutionary diagrams of (...) the Natural System—the first genuine evolutionary trees. Darwin refined his image of the Natural System in the well-known evolutionary tree published in the Origin of Species, where he also carefully distinguished between arrangements and classifications. Following the publication of the Origin, there was a great burst of evolutionary tree building, but interest in trees declined substantially after 1900, only to be revived in recent years with the development of cladistic analysis. ¶ While evolutionary trees are modern diagrams of the Natural System, they are at the same time instances of another broad class of diagrams that may be called "trees of history": branching diagrams of genealogical descent and change. During the same years that Darwin was sketching his first evolutionary trees, the earliest examples of two other trees of history also appeared: the first trees of language evolution and of manuscript genealogy. Though these were apparently independent of evolutionary trees in their origin, the similarities among all these trees of history, and among the historical processes that underlie them, were soon recognized. Darwin compared biological evolution and language evolution several times in the Origin of Species, and both Ernst Haeckel and the linguist August Schleicher made similar comparisons. Both linguists and stemmaticists (students of manuscript descent) understood the principle of apomorphy—the principle that only shared innovations provide evidence of common ancestry—more clearly than did systematists, and if there had been more cross-fertilization among these fields the cladistic revolution in systematics might well have taken place in the nineteenth century. ¶ Although historical linguists and stemmaticists have in some respects had sounder theory than have systematists, at least until recently, they have also had the practical problem of very large amounts of data, a problem not often faced by systematists until the advent of molecular sequencing. The opportunity now exists for systematists to contribute to the theory and practice of linguistics and stemmatics, their sister disciplines in historical reconstruction, through application of our commonly used computer programs for tree estimation. Preliminary results from the application of numerical cladistic analysis to a large stemmatic data set have been very encouraging, and have already generated much discussion in the stemmatics community. (shrink)

The same attitudes that allowed a significant increase in the anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations that are causing climate change are the same attitudes that are retarding an adequate ethical response to the impact that climate change is having on both human populations and the rest of the planet. The industrialized nations of the West paid little attention during the past three centuries to the impacts that their economies and cultures were having on the environment, both locally and globally. There (...) was an underlying belief that the planet could indefinitely absorb the wastes of manufacturing, and the natural resources that were fuelling industrialization were seemingly endless if not actually .. (shrink)

This brief notice records anecdotes about Wittgenstein gathered from Br. Herbert Kaden OSB.

_Transcendent Teacher Learner Relationships: The Way of the Shamanic Teacher _ explores the nature of the transcendent teacher learner relationship and precisely how such relationships of warmth, safety, mutual care, mutual respect and mutual trust are developed and maintained.

Twenty-three years ago Robert Ayers noticed several brief and intriguing comments on miracles in the Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Working with just those scraps of information from the CP, he stitched together a rough but helpful starting point for understanding this aspect of Peirce's religious and scientific thought. In the last few years several more articles on this subject have been written, each filling in a gap left by the others: Ayers' is a theological view, based solely on (...) the CP; later articles fill out Peirce's mathematics and his logic. This paper attempts to fill in a genealogical gap by showing how his thought on miracles is directly related to his dialogues with Plato, Hume, and Lutoslawski. My resources are largely unpublished manuscripts, many of which are fragmentary. I show the relationship between these manuscripts and two key published essays, "Philosophy and the Conduct of Life", and "On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents, Especially from Testimonies", and then show how Peirce, in dialogue with Plato, exposes and overcomes the nominalistic and anti- miracle prejudices of historiography in his day. The resulting view of history is fallibilistic, realistic and evolutionary, in which miracles are not violations of laws of nature but are to be expected as evolutionary variations that form part of the ongoing self-revelation of the cosmos. Miracles, like all events in history, must not be viewed prejudicially by adherents or detractors, but must be taken into careful account in the grand induction of history and science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary DiscourseJames J. O'HaraYasmin Syed. Vergil's Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2005. x + 277 pp. Cloth, $65.This book, which "began as a PhD dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley" (1997), tackles a timely, large, and difficult topic, possibly a topic too difficult to (...) be handled in a satisfactory way in a dissertation and first book. In sum, it makes a decent but flawed contribution on a topic that needs much more work, and in some ways, much more careful work.Two introductory chapters describe the importance of the Aeneid in imperial culture and the role of manipulation of the emotions in ancient theories of rhetoric. In a section called "The Reader's Subject Position," two chapters (both largely on Aeneas and Dido) treat "The Gaze" and "The Spectacle of Emotions." In the next section, on "Gender and Ethnicity," four chapters treat "Gendered Emotions" (before Allecto's visit, Amata is worried, but Turnus is calm; "frenzy, then, is female," 122), "Gendered Ethnicity" (Dido's characterization as Punic "is hard to detect because it is blended with her lover's persona," but it is still significant, 145), "Cleopatra and the Politics of Gendered Ethnicity" ("Augustan representations of Cleopatra form the birth of the Western discourse of orientalism," 177, somewhat overstated, but with interesting ideas about the connection between Cleopatra and Dido), and "Romanitas" (Greek stereotypes, and others, define Romans but are characterized by a "fundamental ambivalence," 203). A brief conclusion ends the book.The interesting argument that Syed makes in the first few chapters is "that the Aeneid used its visuality and its sublime style to appeal to the readers' emotions, and that it created a fictional space for an internal reader within the poem for [End Page 317] 316 whom the poem could articulate an identity by creating various fictional characters as figures of identification" (35). Both these and later chapters offer a mix of the new, the familiar, and, at times, the unconvincing. Two of the book's flaws are actually signaled in the surprising final paragraph, which declares that the book's "most glaring omission has been that of considering more Italian characters and generally of giving more attention to the second half of the poem" (227). Syed says that this "focus" on other aspects of the poem "has been a personal decision on my part," but it is hard to imagine thinking about "subject and nation" in the Aeneid without discussing the relationship between Rome and Italy both in the poem and in Vergil's world; see C. Ando, "Vergil's Italy: ethnography and politics in first-century Rome," pp. 123–42 in D. S. Levene and D. Nelis, eds., Clio and the Poets (Leiden, 2002), whose date is probably too close to Syed's publication date. Presumably there will be a full discussion of Rome and Italy in Alessandro Barchiesi's forthcoming The Geopoetics of Vergil's Aeneid.The lack of attention to Books 7–12 is also a problem, because often the arguments Syed makes about the parts of the Aeneid that she does treat are less convincing when we think about passages in the second half of the poem. The claims that Aeneas has a special ability "to control his emotional responses to the world" (70) and that "in contrast to Aeneas, whose emotions are carefully controlled, many characters in the poem give free rein to their emotions" (87), surely cry out for a consideration of Aeneas' rampage after the death of Pallas in Book 10 and the rage with which he kills Turnus in the poem's final lines. The discussion of Dido's wounds and of Lavinia's association, through allusive simile, with the wound of Menelaus (125–35) is fairly good. But Syed does not mention that Turnus at the start of Aeneid 12 is compared to a wounded deer, or that right before the Lavinia scene Vergil says Turnus "grows sicker with the attempt to heal" (aegrescitque medendo, 45). Lavinia is indeed associated with Menelaus by allusion, but Aeneas... (shrink)

The paper attempts to establish the importance of addressing what Chalmers calls the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness, at the expense of the ‘hard problem’. One pragmatic argument and two philosophical arguments are presented to defend this approach to consciousness, and three major theories of consciousness are criticized in this light. Finally, it is shown that concentration on the easy problems does not lead to eliminativism with respect to consciousness.

In this article, the rotational invariance of entangled quantum states is investigated as a possible cause of the Pauli exclusion principle. First, it is shown that a certain class of rotationally invariant states can only occur in pairs. This is referred to as the coupling principle. This in turn suggests a natural classification of quantum systems into those containing coupled states and those that do not. Surprisingly, it would seem that Fermi–Dirac statistics follows as a consequence of this coupling while (...) the Bose–Einstein follows by breaking it. In Sec. 5, the above approach is related to Pauli's original spin-statistics theorem and finally in the last two sections, a theoretical justification, based on Clebsch–Gordan coefficients and the experimental evidence respectively, is presented. (shrink)

This article examines the theological and ethical implications of human dignity in the digital age, grounded in the magisterial declaration Dignitas Infinita. It explores how the document articulates human dignity through its ontological, moral, social, and existential dimensions, emphasizing the immutable worth of every person as imago Dei. The study employs the See-Judge-Act framework to analyze digital-age challenges such as misinformation, digital violence, and the erosion of interpersonal relationships. Drawing from Catholic social teaching, Bernard Lonergan’s theory of common-sense bias, and (...) insights from patristic and contemporary thought, the paper critiques how digital technologies impact human dignity. The study underscores the role of the Church in fostering ethical digital environments and proposes solutions informed by theological and philosophical traditions, grounded in the method of synodality. Ultimately, it argues that safeguarding human dignity in digital spaces requires an integrative approach that combines moral responsibility, technological literacy, and a return to foundational Christian anthropology. (shrink)

Stephen Edelston Toulmin has been one of the most wide-ranging scholars of the twentieth century. He has written extensively on the history and philosophy of the physical, biological, and historical sciences, as well as on logic, ethics, and rhetoric. This listing of more than 100 publications by and about Toulmin is intended to encourage those scholars who may have come to Toulmin's work from only one direction to explore the full range of his research and writing across many different disciplines.

In recent work MacPherson argues that the standard method of modeling belief logically, as a necessity operator in a modal logic, is doomed to fail. The problem with normal modal logics as logics of belief is that they treat believers as "ideal" in unrealistic ways (i.e., as omnidoxastic); however, similar problems re-emerge for candidate non-normal logics. The authors argue that logics used to model belief in artificial intelligence (AI) are also flawed in this way. But for AI systems, omnidoxasticity is (...) impossible because of their finite nature, and this fact can be exploited to produce operational models of fallible belief. The relevance of this point to various philosophical views about belief is discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Commentary on Virgil, EcloguesJames J. O’HaraWendell Clausen. A Commentary on Virgil, Eclogues. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. xxx + 328 pp. Paper, $27.95, Cloth, $60.00.This “first full-scale scholarly commentary on the complete book of poems known as the Eclogues to appear in English,” as the dust jacket proclaims, is a deeply learned, elegant, helpful, affectionate, humane and judicious guide to the language, style, text, plain meaning, and literary (...) antecedents of what are among the most elusive of ancient works. A sixteen-page introduction discusses “Pastoral Poetry,” “The Book of Eclogues” as a collection of carefully interrelated poems, and “The Composition of a Landscape” (mostly on trees and plants in Theocritus and Vergil). C. prints Mynors’ 1972 Oxford text, but at 3.102 argues for emending his certe neque amor causa est; vix ossibus haerent to hi certe (neque amor causa est), and would delete the refrain at 8.28a and 76. The volume is dedicated to Mynors; the Preface says that it was originally intended as a companion to his Georgics, published posthumously in 1990. C. offers a concise and original Introduction to each poem, focusing on major problems or features and presenting a modest bibliography, with more references to secondary works to come line by line, but the bibliography is highly selective. The commentary’s strengths lie in the discussion of textual problems and the interpretation of difficult Latin, in the remarks on style, diction, tone, rhetoric, and structure, and in the information on Vergil’s use of models, especially Hellenistic sources like Theocritus (extensive and helpful comments), Callimachus (C. naturally has more to say than earlier commentators), and Aratus, but also Roman sources like Lucretius or Plautus (more prominent here than in earlier commentaries, to good effect). Greek is translated in the notes; thus the commentary, like C.’s Virgil’s “Aeneid” and the Tradition of Hellenistic Poetry (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1987), is at the same time both supremely learned, and accessible to highly literate non-specialists.Comments on specific poems:Eclogue 1: C. suggests that “the principal difficulty” here is that in alluding to Tityrus’ status Vergil has “deliberately confused” the private sense of libertas as freedom from slavery with its public or political sense as “the slogan of Octavian and his party.” The goal is to praise Octavian subtly and indirectly, and for more than just a personal favor, despite what the allegorical tradition has alleged. [End Page 332] On Tityrus’ planned offerings to the iuvenis in 42–43, C. champions Wissowa’s 1902 demonstration that Vergil alludes to once-monthly Hellenistic ruler cult, and points to honors decreed Octavian in 36 after the defeat of Sextus Pompey (but of course this depends on down-dating the collection; see below).Eclogues 3 and 7: The Introductions to the two amoebaean singing contests discuss the poetic problem of competitions in which neither singer may falter or fail, “for then the poem would be ruined.” C. argues that Vergil avoids this problem in 3 by having the contest end in a draw, and in 7 by having the poem describing the defeat of Thyrsis by Corydon be “dramatic—the imperfect recollection, that is, of a witness to an event and not, like the Third Eclogue, an omniscient poet’s description of it.” On 3.84 C. offers surprisingly little comment on the startling mention of Pollio; he is more helpful in the Introduction (xxi) but provides no cross-reference here; by contrast, on 9.35 he explains how “the pastoral illusion is momentarily shattered” by the mention of L. Varius Rufus.Eclogue 4: In an Introduction adapted from C.’s essay in J. L. Kugel, ed., Poetry and Prophecy (Ithaca 1990), C. focuses on a pre-collection version of the poem, which he suggests lacked the “brief pastoral apology” of 1–3 and “the emphatic—the rather too emphatic—reference to Pan and Arcadia near the end.” “To contemporary readers” of that poem, circulated during or soon after Pollio’s consulship, “the vexed question ‘Who is the boy?’ would not have occurred. They knew well enough who was meant: the expected son of Antony and Octavia and heir to... (shrink)

Institutions of higher education in the United States are remarkably diverse in their educational purposes, their organizational structure, and their architectural styles. But underlying all this diversity are two distinct historical models: the decentralized British "collegiate" model of university education, and the centralized Germanic university model. Early American higher education grew out of the British collegiate tradition and emphasized the comprehensive development of students' intellect and character, while the Germanic university tradition, introduced in the late 1800s, shifted the focus to (...) technical scholarship and research. The Germanic university model held sway for much of the twentieth century, but there is now a widespread renewal of interest in the older decentralized British collegiate model, and in universities across the United States and around the world, small "residential colleges" like those at Oxford and Cambridge are now being planned and built. These residential colleges or "houses" (as they are sometimes called) provide small, stable, faculty-led, home-like environments for a few hundred students each, and their social and architectural design seeks to counteract the impersonal bureaucratic experience that students often have in large Germanic-style universities. This revival of the collegiate model of university organization is one of the most important trends in the design of educational communities in the world today. (shrink)