Teubners online

A useful link for people on the Cambridge network (and any other subscribing institution): the De Gruyter online ebooks includes lots of Teubner editions, available to be downloaded in pdf format from this link here.  (Click the 'Series overview' tab and then the links to the various texts.  If you see a 'Read content' box like for the Sextus Empiricus volume here, then you can download away.)  They have lots of other books here too.  Search for what you want and then you will be able to access the pdfs by clicking when you see a 'Read content' button (e.g. for the recent Anaximander und Anaximenes here).

The miners' hymns

I might have gushed about Jóhann Jóhannsson here before (in particular, his wonderful IBM 1401, A user's manual: look here for 'Part I, IBM 1401: Processing Unit' (annoying ad beforehand, I'm afraid), but I've just been listening to his most recent work, the 2011 The Miners' Hymns.  You can read more about the background of the pieces here and the roots of their inspiration in trade unionism and brass bands.

Here is the final piece from the album, 'The cause of labour is the hope of the world', with accompanying film put together by Bill Morrison.  Stay with it as it builds.

 

New blog

I've been a bit slow here, but there is a blog written by the Cambridge Classics graduates.  It's over here.

Being a better person

Over at Blogistikon they are beginning a virtual reading group on Plutarch's On progress in virtue.  I'm told that they are keen to have as many interested participants as possible, so please go and join in.

Thankless futility

This link is doing the rounds on the interwebs, but it has a tangential link to things ancient philosophical, so here goes (and, anyway, my head is hurting too much from a first day back at my desk to think of anything more creative to say just now).  Click here to 'enjoy' some retro-gaming-style recreation of mythological Greek punishments and also to see whether you can complete Zeno's dichotomy paradox...

Media stuff

Here's are the two first salvos in my vain attempt to become the Professor Brian Cox of ancient philosophy:

An In Our Time episode on Heraclitus here.

And an interview for Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy with no Gaps on Epicureanism.

Coming soon: a 12 part TV series in HD on early Milesian cosmology...

Christmas music

There are some good Christmassy songs. I like the sad ones. Some of them are good bad songs. Like this one (it's a bit quiet, but it's important that you watch the excellent video):

And then there are some good good songs. Here is Galaxie 500 singing about snow.

Thanatology

I spent yesterday down at KCL for a day seminar on death organised by the Philosophy and Medicine project.  I had only to talk for a few minutes to introduce the Epicurean arguments against death being a harm, but I think it was of some interest.  But for me the highlights were listening to some of the medical practitioners there who had some profound and humane things to say about the end of people's lives - times that are often distressing, painful, unwanted, and difficult.  To spend time and to dedicate yourself to the care of people at the end of their lives, and then to be able to reflect critically and with humour and sensitivity about the proper demands of such circumstances seemed to me to be extremely impressive.  The discussion then ranged across law, anaesthetics (something I had thought very little about), literature, general practice, and palliative care, as well as philosophy.

I had some indirect experience recently of how the NHS might medicalise the end of someone's life and it did seem to me that it is something that needs attention.  Perhaps, as someone remarked yesterday, doctors have reluctantly and without all the necessary preparation assumed a role as the closest attenders of the dying that used to be filled by priests or by a more extended family.  It was sometimes difficult to turn attention away from tests and treatments and pain regimes and focus on the profound truth of someone ending a life.  But I think it can be done.

Hot topics

The Leiter blog would like to know what the 'hot topics' are in Greek and Roman philosophy these days.  Are there any?  If you have any ideas you can tell everyone about them here.

Coming to terms

This will be the last week of the Michaelmas term.  It is always very busy.  In addition to the usual week's teaching (lectures, supervisions, MPhil seminar, research seminar, B Club) and meetings (College executive body) in our wisdom we choose this as the week for the first examiners' meeting of the year to prepare for the Tripos exams in the summer and also the submission of the first MPhil essays for marking.  It is also the week to meet and talk to all my philosophy students in Corpus and my tutees, to go over the term and set work for the vacation.

It is also the week before the admissions interviews for next year's undergraduates begin.  That means that there is no slack whatsoever for things to spill over into the next week because we will be busy making decisions and interviewing candidates.

This term has been particularly punishing.  I've taken on more teaching than I should and lost a few days to an -- excellent, it has to be said -- conference in the middle.

But more than that, I have been struggling day by day since my Mum died in October.  The funeral was difficult, of course, but that was an acute sadness.  Worse than that is the fact that there has been a constant feeling of sheer exhaustion dogging me ever since we heard she was ill in September.  Perhaps I should have stopped and taken some time off.  But, strangely, I have felt better at work than at home, talking to people who aren't my family about things not to do with my family, and thinking about things that are more disconnected from the loss.  The weekends are the hardest.  And now Christmas...  I'm not the most festive of people in any case, but I really don't want Christmas this year.  It will be strange, no doubt, and sad for us all.  As will every birthday without her, and every new year, and every milestone her grand-daughters pass.  We'll all stick together and we'll get through it.  But the mince pies don't seem very appetising right now.

Cicero, De Finibus 2.105

Here’s the relevant bit: 

quid, si etiam iucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum? ut proverbia non nulla veriora sint quam vestra dogmata. vulgo enim dicitur: 'Iucundi acti labores', nec male Euripides— concludam, si potero, Latine; Graecum enim hunc versum nostis omnes—: 'Suavis laborum est praeteritorum memoria.'

 Rackham translates:

What if the memory of past evils be actually pleasant? Proving certain proverbs truer than the tenets of your school. There is a popular saying to the effect that ‘Toil is pleasant when ‘tis over’; and Euripides well writes (I will attempt a verse translation; the Greek line is known to you all): 'Sweet is the memory of sorrows past'. 

 Cicero is criticising the Epicureans’ insistence that memory of past psychic pleasures can counteract present physical pains. He notes that not everything that was painful in the past is painful to remember. He translates a line from Euripides (taken usually to be 133 Nauck 2nd edition). The Greek, found at Arist. Rhet. 1370b4 and at Plut. Quaest. Conv. 630E is: ἀλλ’ ἡδύ τοι σωθέντα μεμνῆσθαι πόνων. 

Anyway, I was checking what some commentators say about this. Madvig says (I think; the pdf is a bit blurry): 

nosti omnes Cicero dixit, oblitus videtur, quot sermoni interesse finxisset; nam ut intellegatur: vos omnes Epicurei, quemadmodum Gaius [sic?] volt, fieri non potest, quom, cur illi versum esse sententiae plane contrarium praeter ceteros memoria retinerent, nulla caussa fuerit.’ (This is the from the 1839 edition I found on the internets; I have checked later editions.) 

It seems to me that Cicero could mean ‘all you Epicureans know the line’. If he does, then he poses a dilemma: either they remember the line but seem to have ignored the sentiment or they do not remember the line, in which case their powers of and control over their memory leaves something to be desired. It might also be interesting to wonder whether Cicero has quite remembered the line himself: the σωθέντα in Aristotle’s quotations does not appear in his version. Perhaps he’s being super clever and anyone who does remember the Euripides line in the original will also note that Cicero’s memory is less than accurate here.

Corbett Lecture 2011

Yesterday was the Faculty's annual Corbett lecture.  This year's speaker was Julia Annas, and her lecture was: 'Changing from within: Plato's later political thinking'.  You should be able to listen to it here and download a handout here.

Keeling over

I was at the UCL Keeling colloquium at the beginning of the week.  It was an excellent conference and it made me think about what makes a conference good.  I think there are various possibilities, and they aren't by any means all related to the excellence of the content of the papers or talks being presented.  I certainly don't like conferences that are too big.  I like to think that I've spoken to or met everyone there, more or less, by the end.  That way it feels like a properly shared social enterprise.  And I don't like conferences that are too long.  Three days is plenty, usually, because any less isn't really long enough to feel properly immersed and much longer is too exhausting if you're thinking hard.

In the end, my thoughts about good conferences came down on other characteristics that are important to a gathering's success.  It's important to have time outside the formal bits to chat, make friends, gossip about jobs and the like (lots of all of those at the Keeling) and, perhaps most of all, to make the job a more interpersonal one.  Fortunately, my field is small enough that over time we do mostly get to meet each other properly.  And it seems to me important to remember that, alongside all the high-minded stuff about pursuing the truth and the importance of following an argument wherever it leads, it's important to remember that the article you're reading and criticising what written by a person, after all.  And putting faces and voices and personalities to the names in journals and on book-shelves is rather useful too.  We can still engage critically and robustly with one another's work, of course, but writing that footnote that begins 'Pace X...' or 'As X mistakenly claims...' feels very different once you've had dinner with X and talked about his or her kids or shared a joke.

CFP: Truth, falsehood, and deception in ancient philosophy

Here is a call for papers for a conference in Cambridge next spring.  It is organised and run by some of our excellent graduate students and will be the second such event.

CALL FOR PAPERS 

TRUTH, FALSEHOOD AND DECEPTION IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 

FACULTY OF CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 

20th-21st April, 2012

The history of logic, philosophy of language, ethics and metaphysics are suffused with the themes of truth, falsehood and deception. We welcome work focusing on said issues, broadly construed. Papers may focus on particular thinkers, individual texts, or broader traditions from the pre-Socratics up to and including Philoponus. Diachronic studies are also welcome. The conference is aimed at advanced graduate students and junior researchers (those who are within 3 years of their PhD). We invite abstracts of up to 500 words (for papers of up to 3500 words). Depending on the quality of submissions, we aim to allow for 6-8 papers. Each paper will be followed by a brief response. To submit a paper, please send an electronic abstract of 500 words to the committee by 5th January 2012. Notification will be made by 27th January. Abstracts should be in .pdf format, and prepared for blind review. Please include a one-word pseudonym (such as your mother's maiden name) in the file name of your .pdf. Please email submissions and questions to Matthew Duncombe. The conference is kindly supported by the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Classics.

More information can be found here.

Movember 2011

I shall not be repeating my brave 'tache-growing exploits this November.  In part, this is because I have to give a paper next week and I don't think the audience would appreciate being presented with a nine-day old fuzzy upper lip.  But it is still a good idea and a good cause.  If you fancy donating, perhaps donating again this year, then you can do so here.

Guthrie

I've been asked to write a (very) brief foreword to a new edition of Guthrie's The Greek Philosophers.  I should confess I hadn't really spent much time with the book before but I'm enjoying reading through it now.  It certainly rattles along.  And he is a wonderfully opinionated writer.  I like (but don't really approve of) his dislike of Parmenides and 'tiresome' Eleatic logic and some of the comments here and there are also good fun.  Here he is rejecting the idea that Anaxagoras' Nous might be material.  After all, doesn't he call it 'katharos' and 'leptos'?

‘In reply to this it is surely pertinent to ask what other epithets were available to the poor man?  It is a clear case of thought having outrun the resources of language.’ (55 n.1)

Other things are more jarring, however.  Guthrie regularly resorts to explaining deficiencies or oddities in the early philosophers by pointing out that the poor chaps were still too close to 'primitive' magical or superstitious ideas.

 ‘One idea which the Greeks at this stage found it difficult to absorb was that a word might have more than one meaning. Their difficulty no doubt had something to do with the proximity of the primitive magical stage at which a word and its object formed a single unity’ (47). 

Worse, he sometimes supports this by noting that anthropologists have found similar notions in modern 'savages'....)  For example, when wondering about Anaximander and the implication that according to him the whole cosmos is alive, Guthrie comments that this is a notion ‘to which anthropologists have found parallels among savage people all over the world’ (30–31).  Oh dear.

Pause

No posts for a bit.

ἡδὺ πανταχόθεν ἡ φίλου μνήμη τεθνηκότος.

Rude health

Leiter comments on the strength of ancient philosophy in the US here.  I'm not sure we can say the same thing about the UK, unfortunately, perhaps as a result of a decline in publicly-funded graduate places and also as part of a more general slide.  But I'd need to think about that.  

I also wondered about Leiter's comment:

It's an interesting question when the profession will come to realize that the kind of revolution in scholarship on ancient philosophy wrought by Owen and Vlastos fifty years ago has been going on in scholarship on 19th-century European philosophy for a generation now, and that the fruitful philosophical connections with many areas of contemporary interest are at least as plentiful there.

It's undeniable that Owen and Vlastos made a difference to the way ancient philosophy was perceived by philosophers and to the way it was done.  Does anyone think they still have a strong direct influence on the work being done now or are we already two generations on?

Lectures, day 1

The Cambridge peloton was much worse than this this morning, mostly because of an influx of students who don't really know where they are going and haven't ridden a bike since they were nine.

At the deep end

We start term a bit later than most UK universities, and the term only lasts for a full eight weeks of lecturing, but once it starts it gets going very quickly.  Yesterday, the new first years arrived at the college and within two hours were all gowned up and photographed.  Three hours later they were in the hall having a formal matriculation dinner (with pudding in kilner jars...  yum).

And this morning they have to run around sorting out all they need to get going with work tomorrow.  So we don't really do 'freshers' week'.  Or, if we do, we pack it into two days.  It's all a bit manic and I really don't know how anyone gets through it intact.  But perhaps because there really is no time for anyone to sit in a corner of an unfamiliar room and get lonely most people do fine.

As for me, I've seen about half my tutees, my philosophy students get going tomorrow, and the MPhil seminar begins on Wednesday.

So, I've mostly been fielding emails for the last week.  And haven't had much time for my own research.  But I've been thinking quite a lot about Philebus 41e-42d.  It all seems very complicated or perhaps I've just confused myself about something that is much more straightforward than I think.  But I have signed up to do a little talk at a new discussion group with some of the college's other fellows; we realised that we spend a lot of time together, mostly arguing in meetings about the cost of various things, but don't really have much of an idea what the others get up to in the secrecy of their own office or lab.  I'm going to introduce the argument against weakness of will at the end of the Protagoras, with marshmallows.  It's not quantum physics (that's slated for next term) but it's a start.