Subscribers to History of Political Economy will receive a copy of The Economist as Public Intellectual.
Tiago Mata is Senior Research Associate in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. Steven G. Medema is Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado at Denver.
Troubles in the transportation industries show the need for revising public policies and bringing them up to date. Neither regulatory nor managerial thinking has kept pace with technological changes that destroy many of the monopoly situations that once characterized transportation markets. The authors here assemble information concerning costs, market structures, and demand conditions for the rail, highway, pipeline, water, and air transportation industries. They take into account not only the cost of actual operations but related construction, capital, maintenance, retailing, and storage costs.
The approach is analytical rather than institutional or legalistic. In the view of the authors, the regulatory system should mainly, though not solely, seek to produce conditions ordinarily produced by competition, and should be maintained only as long as it will serve this purpose. The existing regulatory structure is often continued with no regard for its usefulness is a particular situation. Regulation has also been used as a means of perpetuating certain services that are unable to pay their costs but are considered socially desirable. In many cases, discontinuing uneconomic transportation services would unquestionably work undue hardships on innocent individuals. Yet continuance of these services under private enterprise requires higher charges on other transportation services. The question therefore arises of whether the harm done by these increased charges is greater than that which would result from abandoning the uneconomic services; the authors suspect that in a very large number of cases it is.
Insisting that transportation carriers continue to provide socially needed but uneconomic services imposes a standard that clearly conflicts with the cost minimization and efficiency criteria that are generally accepted as the proper managerial goals in a free enterprise economy. Even worse, regulation aimed at maintaining a given service often prevents the introduction of cheaper and better ways of performing certain transportation functions. The result is a net loss to both consumer and producer. The authors comment on the Motor Carrier Act of 1936, the Transportation Act of 1940 and the Weeks' Committee Report, and on the roles of the ICC and the CAB.
These writers reveal that the land is a character: sometimes a mother, sometimes a joker, never an enemy, though one must take care. The space can be refreshing or oppressive, as the paradox of openness is that it tends to control and confine as much as free us. The weather plans your day. Snowstorms don't negotiate.
The West makes people acutely aware of the absurdity of their smallness, and this feeling is the source of much of the humor in the anthology. The sensation of being tiny, that crazed adrenalin rush and the feeling of your heart beating in your throat, has to make you laugh out loud like a roller coaster. The twenty authors in this collection will take you for an interesting ride.
Contributors to the anthology include: Kirstin Abraham, Genevieve Betts, Shirley Brewer, David Coy, Elizabeth Creely, Mary Christine Delea, Jen Edwards, Thea Gavin, John Haggerty, Brad Johnson, Neal Lewing, Robert McBrearty, Margaret Ozemet, Francis Raven, Greg Robillard, Heather Sappenfield, Sam Smith, Laura Snyder, Caroline Sposto, and Scott Starbuck.
The cowboy that emerges from this collection is multifaceted, as the book juxtaposes cowboys spraying longhorns at a car wash to cowboys advertising services on Craigslist and Pepsi-drinking cowboys riding Amtrak trains. There are portraits of the old cowboys, crotchety coffee-swigging men with too many stories about how things were better four decades ago. However, the figure remains one constructed of loyalties—loyalty to work, loyalty to family, loyalty to animals, loyalty to the land.
The image of the cowboy is vivid in our imagination, insperable from Western mythology, a means to connect ourselves with the wild and rugged individuals we dream we used to be. In this age of computers and cubicles we want to touch and preserve that history, but we must allow for shifting traditions. As the thirty-five authors in this collection will remind you, even cowboys carry cell phones.
The title of this book by Perry Miller, who is world-famous as an interpreter of the American past, comes close to posing the question it has been Mr. Miller's lifelong purpose to answer: What was the underlying aim of the first colonists in coming to America? In what light did they see themselves? As men and women undertaking a mission that was its own cause and justification? Or did they consider themselves errand boys for a higher power which might, as is frequently the habit of authority, change its mind about the importance of their job before they had completed it?
These questions are by no means frivolous. They go to the roots of seventeenth-century thought and of the ever-widening and quickening flow of events since then. Disguised from twentieth-century readers first by the New Testament language and thought of the Puritans and later by the complacent transcendentalist belief in the oversoul, the related problems of purpose and reason-for-being have been central to the American experience from the very beginning. Mr. Miller makes this abundantly clear and real, and in doing so allows the reader to conclude that, whatever else America might have become, it could never have developed into a society that took itself for granted.
The title, Errand into the Wilderness, is taken from the title of a Massachusetts election sermon of 1670. Like so many jeremiads of its time, this sermon appeared to be addressed to the sinful and unregenerate whom God was about to destroy. But the original speaker's underlying concern was with the fateful ambiguity in the word errand. Whose errand?
This crucial uncertainty of the age is the starting point of Mr. Miller's engrossing account of what happened to the European mind when, in spite of itself, it began to become something other than European. For the second generation in America discovered that their heroic parents had, in fact, been sent on a fool's errand, the bitterest kind of all; that the dream of a model society to be built in purity by the elect in the new continent was now a dream that meant nothing more to Europe. The emigrants were on their own. Thus left alone with America, who were they? And what were they to do?
In this book, as in all his work, the author of The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, and The Transcendentalists, emphasizes the need for understanding the human sources from which the American mainstream has risen. In this integrated series of brilliant and witty essays which he describes as "pieces," Perry Miller invites and stimulates in the reader a new conception of his own inheritance.
One hundred and sixty invited scholars and specialists—both Protestant and Roman Catholic—and 2000 other clergy and lay people took part in the historic colloquium sponsored by the Harvard Divinity School in 1963 as a Protestant response to the Second Vatican Council. This volume includes the Stillman Lectures on the Unity of Christians given by Augustin Cardinal Bea, President of the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity as well as all the other major addresses and proceedings of the colloquium.
In the words of Richard Cardinal Cushing, “The spirit of Christian love which could be felt in every session, along with the distinguished company of scholars which the University had assembled from far and near, guaranteed that these days would be so memorable as to demand an accessible and enduring record. We now have just such a record in these pages.” Encompassing a wide range of religious convictions, this topical and exciting book provides an illuminating perspective on the problems involved in the ecumenical dialogue and helps to define the vital issues that continue to divide Christians today.
Personal narratives are one way people code their experiences and convey them to others. Given that speakers can simultaneously express information and define a social situation, analyzing how and why people structure the telling of personal narratives can provide insight into the social dimensions of language use. In Extraordinary from the Ordinary: Personal Experience Narratives in American Sign Language, Kristin Jean Mulrooney shows that accounts by Deaf persons expressed in ASL possess the same characteristics and perform the same function as oral personal narratives.
Mulrooney analyses12 personal narratives by ASL signers to determine how they “tell” their stories. She examines the ASL form of textual narration to see how signers use lexical signs to grammatically encode information, and how they also convey perceived narration. In perceived narration, the presenter depicts a past occurrence in the immediate environment that allows the audience to partially witness and interpret the event. Mulrooney determined that ASL narratives reveal a patterned structure consisting of an introduction, a main events section for identifying and describing past events, and a conclusion. They also can include background information, an explication section in which the presenter expands or clarifies an event, and a section that allows the presenter to explain his or her feelings about what happened. Liberally illustrated with photographs from videotaped narratives, Extraordinary from the Ordinary offers an engrossing, expansive view of personal narratives embodying the unique linguistic elements of ASL.
Every day, students at the University of Michigan work hard to develop their skills as writers. Every winter, we have a chance to sample the fruits of this labor as we select winners for the first-year writing prize. The English Department Writing Program and the Sweetland Center for Writing established a first-year writing prize in 2010. With generous support from the Sweetland Center for Writing, Andrew Feinberg and Stacia Smith (both of whom earned English degrees from the University of Michigan), and the Granader Family, we have developed a tradition of honoring students who produce writing of exceptional quality.
In this collection, we share the writing of prize-winning students so that other writers may learn from, and feel inspired by, their examples. The featured essays illustrate how writers formulate compelling questions, engage in dialogue with other thinkers, incorporate persuasive and illuminating evidence, express powerful and poetic insights, and participate in meaningful conversations.
We are equally grateful to the many students who submitted essays for these writing prizes and the many instructors who encouraged and supported them. As writing teachers, we relish the opportunity to learn from the challenging questions, intellectual energy, creativity, and dedication that our students and their teachers bring to our classrooms. We hope that you will gain as much pleasure as we have from reading the writing contained in this volume.
Ask any professional, business person, or employer about one of the most important qualifications for college-educated workers, and the answer will be nearly universal: the ability to write well. The Upper-Level Writing Requirement (ULWR) was established to enable undergraduates in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts to develop their capacities as writers. Originally designed in 1978 to help students “understand and communicate effectively the central concepts, approaches, and materials of their discipline,” the ULWR supports a slightly different goal in today’s more interdisciplinary context. A significant percentage of students now have more than one major or fulfill the ULWR outside of their majors. Likewise, many faculty members are increasingly concerned with preparing students to write for various professional and public audiences as well as for discipline-based ones. However, whether students fulfill the ULWR within or outside of their majors or write for audiences within or outside of the academy, they are held to the same standards of effective writing.
This collection demonstrates the continuing value of the ULWR. Courses like the ones in which students produced these essays create contexts where students meet the expectations of the ULWR and can push beyond them to an even more impressive level of accomplishment. While the specifics of what counts as evidence and how one makes a convincing argument vary across the essays included here, each one embodies qualities that mark effective writing. The authors deal with a wide variety of topics, but in every case they combine deep understanding of a specific area with excellent prose. They take risks and adhere to conventions; they synthesize complex ideas and provide rich detail; they exert intellectual independence and respect disciplinary conventions, from creative nonfiction in the humanities to empirical research in the sciences.
We have been honoring students for outstanding writing in ULWR courses since 2010, but since 2014, thanks to a generous gift from the Granader Family, the prizes are more substantial. We are grateful to the Granaders for choosing to recognize student writing in this way. This collection is another form of recognition for the award-winning students. By publishing this student writing both online and in hard copy we make it available as a model and as a source of inspiration for others.
Talented and committed as they are, these students represented here did not become award-winners entirely on their own. Each of them benefited from well-designed assignments, careful reading, and suggestions for revision from the instructors who nominated them. The instructors’ introductions for each selection provide a window into student learning as well as into the specific dimensions of each student’s achievements.
Every day, students at the University of Michigan work hard to develop their skills as writers. Every winter, we have a chance to sample the fruits of this labor as we select winners for the first-year writing prize. The English Department Writing Program and the Sweetland Center for Writing established a first-year writing prize in 2010. With generous support from the Sweetland Center for Writing, Andrew Feinberg and Stacia Smith (both of whom earned English degrees from the University of Michigan), and the Granader Family, we have developed a tradition of honoring students who produce writing of exceptional quality.
In this collection, we share the writing of prize-winning students so that other writers may learn from, and feel inspired by, their examples. The featured essays illustrate how writers formulate compelling questions, engage in dialogue with other thinkers, incorporate persuasive and illuminating evidence, express powerful and poetic insights, and participate in meaningful conversations.
We are equally grateful to the many students who submitted essays for these writing prizes and the many instructors who encouraged and supported them. As writing teachers, we relish the opportunity to learn from the challenging questions, intellectual energy, creativity, and dedication that our students and their teachers bring to our classrooms. We hope that you will gain as much pleasure as we have from reading the writing contained in this volume.
Ask any professional, business person, or employer about one of the most important qualifications for college-educated workers, and the answer will be nearly universal: the ability to write well. The Upper-Level Writing Requirement (ULWR) was established to enable undergraduates in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts to develop their capacities as writers. Originally designed in 1978 to help students "understand and communicate effectively the central concepts, approaches, and materials of their discipline," the ULWR supports a slightly different goal in today's more interdisciplinary context. A significant percentage of students now have more than one major or fulfill the ULWR outside of their majors. Likewise, many faculty members are increasingly concerned with preparing students to write for various professional and public audiences as well as for discipline-based ones. However, whether students fulfill the ULWR within or outside of their majors or write for audiences within or outside of the academy, they are held to the same standards of effective writing.
This collection demonstrates the continuing value of the ULWR. Courses like the ones in which students produced these essays create contexts where students meet the expectations of the ULWR and can push beyond them to an even more impressive level of accomplishment. While the specifics of what counts as evidence and how one makes a convincing argument vary across the essays included here, each one embodies qualities that mark effective writing. The authors deal with a wide variety of topics, but in every case they combine deep understanding of a specific area with excellent prose. They take risks and adhere to conventions; they synthesize complex ideas and provide rich detail; they exert intellectual independence and respect disciplinary conventions, from creative nonfiction in the humanities to empirical research in the sciences.
We have been honoring students for outstanding writing in ULWR courses since 2010, but since 2014, thanks to a generous gift from the Granader Family, the prizes are more substantial. We are grateful to the Granaders for choosing to recognize student writing in this way. This collection is another form of recognition for the award-winning students. By publishing this student writing both online and in hard copy we make it available as a model and as a source of inspiration for others.
Talented and committed as they are, these students represented here did not become award-winners entirely on their own. Each of them benefited from well-designed assignments, careful reading, and suggestions for revision from the instructors who nominated them. The instructors' introductions for each selection provide a window into student learning as well as into the specific dimensions of each student's achievements.
The author's aim to discover the conception of emotion that is couched in a commonsense view of the world and is reflected in ordinary discourse.
Throughout his career Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963) made unique and lasting contributions to classical scholarship and the history of religion, especially to the study of ancient religion, magic, and the relation of paganism to early Christianity and Judaism. Nock's genius showed itself early: endowed with a prodigious memory and an unerring linguistic skill, he combined speed and accuracy in reading and a delight in the discovery, ordering and establishment of facts. At the age of twenty he was made annual reviewer of Latin literature for The Year's Work in Classical Studies; and at twenty-four he produced an important edition of a fourth-century Greek text, Sallustius On the Gods and the Universe, which included a translation and a masterly introduction.
At twenty-seven, having come to the United States from England the year before, Nock was appointed Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard University. In his early thirties he wrote two books, Conversion--an imaginative and exacting study of religious currents in the Hellenistic and Roman world--and St. Paul.
Mainly, however, A. D. Nock poured his immense learning into articles and reviews, which heretofore have been scattered through many different journals. Representing a formidable range of learning, these essays deal for the most part with historical evidence (from all sources, including papyri, inscriptions, and coins) of the beliefs, superstitions, and religious practices of ordinary people. Nock saw the essence of religion not only in philosophy ortheology, but in piety and cult, in the practices and the expressions of the common man. His unusual combination of genius and common sense allowed him to treat the actual manifestations of religious sentiment without condescension.
For this edition of Arthur Darby Nock's writings, Zeph Stewart has garnered a substantial selection of Nock's most important essays and has indexed and cross-referenced them as well.
Throughout his career Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963) made unique and lasting contributions to classical scholarship and the history of religion, especially to the study of ancient religion, magic, and the relation of paganism to early Christianity and Judaism. Nock's genius showed itself early: endowed with a prodigious memory and an unerring linguistic skill, he combined speed and accuracy in reading and a delight in the discovery, ordering and establishment of facts. At the age of twenty he was made annual reviewer of Latin literature for The Year's Work in Classical Studies; and at twenty-four he produced an important edition of a fourth-century Greek text, Sallustius On the Gods and the Universe, which included a translation and a masterly introduction.
At twenty-seven, having come to the United States from England the year before, Nock was appointed Frothingham Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard University. In his early thirties he wrote two books, Conversion--an imaginative and exacting study of religious currents in the Hellenistic and Roman world--and St. Paul.
Mainly, however, A. D. Nock poured his immense learning into articles and reviews, which heretofore have been scattered through many different journals. Representing a formidable range of learning, these essays deal for the most part with historical evidence (from all sources, including papyri, inscriptions, and coins) of the beliefs, superstitions, and religious practices of ordinary people. Nock saw the essence of religion not only in philosophy ortheology, but in piety and cult, in the practices and the expressions of the common man. His unusual combination of genius and common sense allowed him to treat the actual manifestations of religious sentiment without condescension.
For this edition of Arthur Darby Nock's writings, Zeph Stewart has garnered a substantial selection of Nock's most important essays and has indexed and cross-referenced them as well.
Nobody knows how to tell a story like Bobby Norfolk, and here he tells his own life story. Norfolk grew up in hardscrabble neighborhoods of Saint Louis, Missouri, during the 1950s and 60s, sometimes walking to elementary school from an apartment his parents could not afford to heat. Lifting himself up by force of will and God-given talent, Norfolk defeated a childhood stutter to become a high school dramatist and later an exceptional college student. The path was never easy—and often frightening. With men of color being killed all-too-frequently in America, Norfolk sought a personal identity based upon talent and hard work, but also upon where safety and justice might be found. He tells these stories—some heartwarming or humorous, some frightful and treacherous—honestly, with a graceful mindfulness that all would do well to emulate.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was crucial for the development of Kurdish nationalism. It coincided with the reign of Abdulhamid II (1876-1909), who emphasized Pan-Islamic policies in order to strengthen the Ottoman Empire against European and Russian imperialism, The Pan-Islamic doctrines of the Ottoman Empire enabled sheikhs (religious leaders) from Sheikh Ubaydallah of Nehri in the 1870s and 1880s to Sheikh Said in the 1920s-to become the principal nationalist leaders of the Kurds. This represented a new development in Middle Eastern and Islamic history and began an important historical pattern in the Middle East long before the emergence of the religiousnationalist leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran.
This is the first work in any Western language dealing with the development of Kurdish nationalism during this period and is supported with documentation not previously utilized, principally from the Public Record Office in Great Britain. In addition, the author provides much new material on Turkish, Armenian, Iranian, and Arab history and new insights into Turkish-Armenian relations during the most crucial era of the history of these two peoples.
Ezra Pound - American Writers 26 was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
In this volume, scholars from philosophy, sociology, history, theology, women’s studies, and law explore the looming ethical and social implications of new biotechnologies that are rapidly making it possible to enhance an individual’s mental and physical attributes in ways previously only imagined.
To clarify the issues, the contributors grapple with the central concept of "enhancement" and probe the uses and abuses of the term. Focusing in particular on the moral issues pertaining to cosmetic surgery and cosmetic psychopharmacology (a category which includes Prozac), they also examine notions of identity, authenticity, normality, and complicity. Other essays in this collection address the social ramifications of the new technologies, including the problems of access and fairness.
Facing a transformed socio-political landscape after the An Lushan Rebellion (756–763), Tang dynasty elites questioned inherited understandings of tradition and anxiously reflected on their relations to both recent and ancient pasts. Du Fu (712–770), widely considered China’s greatest poet, presciently addressed these concerns in his late work on memory and the means by which the past survives.
In Elegies for Empire, Gregory Patterson maps out a poetics of memory in Du Fu’s poems from his prolific period of residence in Kuizhou, a remote border town in the Yangzi River Three Gorges. Patterson argues that, for Du Fu, memory held the promise of rebuilding frameworks of belonging under conditions of displacement and dynastic crisis. Remembering also led the poet to think through the material underpinnings on which cultural transmission depends; therefore, these late poems are distinguished by a highly creative, often melancholy engagement with the forms and media that preserve memory, such as monuments, paintings, and poetry. Elegies for Empire elucidates the vital roles of place, memory, and media in poems that are among the most influential in the Chinese literary tradition.
Artful descriptions.
This volume presents kindred works important for evidence relating to late Greek art. They are attributed to two men each known as Philostratus and to a third man called Callistratus, otherwise unknown. To an elder Philostratus, the Lemnian, born ca. AD 190, junior kinsman of the Philostratus who wrote the Life of Apollonius of Tyana and Lives of the Sophists, is attributed the series of sixty-five Eikones or Imagines, descriptions (in two books) ostensibly of paintings in a gallery at Naples. A younger Philostratus, apparently his grandson, is credited with seventeen similar descriptions. The fourteen Ekphraseis attributed to Callistratus are descriptions of statues in stone or bronze, written probably in the fourth century AD. It is not known to what extent the descriptions are of real works of art, but they show how artists treated their subjects, and are written with some artistic knowledge. Yet rhetorical skill dominates: these pieces were written to display the writers’ powers of description.
Piderit explores the failures of mainstream economics and proposes an alternative grounded in natural law. His assessment is grounded in the Christian higher law tradition which assumes that objective standards known to human reason should govern society and individuals.
This book demonstrates both the reasonableness of a distinguished ethical tradition and its capacity to address a wide range of ethical issues, economic as well as personal and social. Piderit emphasizes that natural law theory underlies the U.S. Constitution and informs Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish worship today.
Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BCE. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates' execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of 'advanced' democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates' mind fused with Plato's thought.
In Laches, Charmides, and Lysis, Socrates and others discuss separate ethical conceptions. Protagoras, Ion, and Meno discuss whether righteousness can be taught. In Gorgias, Socrates is estranged from his city's thought, and his fate is impending. The Apology (not a dialogue), Crito, Euthyphro, and the unforgettable Phaedo relate the trial and death of Socrates and propound the immortality of the soul. In the famous Symposium and Phaedrus, written when Socrates was still alive, we find the origin and meaning of love. Cratylus discusses the nature of language. The great masterpiece in ten books, the Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). Of the six so-called dialectical dialogues Euthydemus deals with philosophy; metaphysical Parmenides is about general concepts and absolute being; Theaetetus reasons about the theory of knowledge. Of its sequels, Sophist deals with not-being; Politicus with good and bad statesmanship and governments; Philebus with what is good. The Timaeus seeks the origin of the visible universe out of abstract geometrical elements. The unfinished Critias treats of lost Atlantis. Unfinished also is Plato's last work of the twelve books of Laws (Socrates is absent from it), a critical discussion of principles of law which Plato thought the Greeks might accept.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.
Plato’s most influential disciple and proponent.
Plotinus (AD 204/5–270), possibly of Roman descent, but certainly a Greek in education and environment, was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. Practically nothing is known of his early life, but at the age of 28 he went to Alexandria, and studied philosophy with Ammonius “Saccas” for eleven years. Wishing to learn the philosophy of the Persians and Indians, he joined the expedition of Gordian III against the Persians in 243, not without subsequent danger. Aged 40 he settled in Rome and taught philosophy there till shortly before his death. In 253 he began to write, and continued to do so till the last year of his life. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master’s death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).
Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. There is no real trace of Oriental influence on his thought, and he was passionately opposed to Gnosticism. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Muslims, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plotinus is in seven volumes.
Plato’s most influential disciple and proponent.
Plotinus (AD 204/5–270), possibly of Roman descent, but certainly a Greek in education and environment, was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. Practically nothing is known of his early life, but at the age of 28 he went to Alexandria, and studied philosophy with Ammonius “Saccas” for eleven years. Wishing to learn the philosophy of the Persians and Indians, he joined the expedition of Gordian III against the Persians in 243, not without subsequent danger. Aged 40 he settled in Rome and taught philosophy there till shortly before his death. In 253 he began to write, and continued to do so till the last year of his life. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master’s death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).
Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. There is no real trace of Oriental influence on his thought, and he was passionately opposed to Gnosticism. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Muslims, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plotinus is in seven volumes.
Plato’s most influential disciple and proponent.
Plotinus (AD 204/5–270), possibly of Roman descent, but certainly a Greek in education and environment, was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. Practically nothing is known of his early life, but at the age of 28 he went to Alexandria, and studied philosophy with Ammonius “Saccas” for eleven years. Wishing to learn the philosophy of the Persians and Indians, he joined the expedition of Gordian III against the Persians in 243, not without subsequent danger. Aged 40 he settled in Rome and taught philosophy there till shortly before his death. In 253 he began to write, and continued to do so till the last year of his life. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master’s death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).
Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. There is no real trace of Oriental influence on his thought, and he was passionately opposed to Gnosticism. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Muslims, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plotinus is in seven volumes.
Plato’s most influential disciple and proponent.
Plotinus (AD 204/5–270), possibly of Roman descent, but certainly a Greek in education and environment, was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. Practically nothing is known of his early life, but at the age of 28 he went to Alexandria, and studied philosophy with Ammonius “Saccas” for eleven years. Wishing to learn the philosophy of the Persians and Indians, he joined the expedition of Gordian III against the Persians in 243, not without subsequent danger. Aged 40 he settled in Rome and taught philosophy there till shortly before his death. In 253 he began to write, and continued to do so till the last year of his life. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master’s death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).
Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. There is no real trace of Oriental influence on his thought, and he was passionately opposed to Gnosticism. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Muslims, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plotinus is in seven volumes.
Plato’s most influential disciple and proponent.
Plotinus (AD 204/5–270), possibly of Roman descent, but certainly a Greek in education and environment, was the first and greatest of Neoplatonic philosophers. Practically nothing is known of his early life, but at the age of 28 he went to Alexandria, and studied philosophy with Ammonius “Saccas” for eleven years. Wishing to learn the philosophy of the Persians and Indians, he joined the expedition of Gordian III against the Persians in 243, not without subsequent danger. Aged 40 he settled in Rome and taught philosophy there till shortly before his death. In 253 he began to write, and continued to do so till the last year of his life. His writings were edited by his disciple Porphyry, who published them many years after his master’s death in six sets of nine treatises each (the Enneads).
Plotinus regarded Plato as his master, and his own philosophy is a profoundly original development of the Platonism of the first two centuries of the Christian era and the closely related thought of the Neopythagoreans, with some influences from Aristotle and his followers and the Stoics, whose writings he knew well but used critically. There is no real trace of Oriental influence on his thought, and he was passionately opposed to Gnosticism. He is a unique combination of mystic and Hellenic rationalist. His thought dominated later Greek philosophy and influenced both Christians and Muslims, and is still alive today because of its union of rationality and intense religious experience.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plotinus is in seven volumes.
In this book, Stephen J. Pope argues that contemporary scientifically-based theories of the evolution of altruism provide important insights into one of the fundamental moral problems of Christian ethics, the natural basis of love and its ordering. He explores the contributions evolutionary theory makes to our understanding of the biological foundations of kin preference and reciprocal care, the limits of love, and the need for an ordering of love—issues relevant to any ethic that accords a central role to the deeply natural affections found in friendship, marriage, and the family. He proposes that understanding human nature in its broader evolutionary context brings to ethics a needed balance between the personal and biological dimensions of human nature.
In the context of Catholic ethics, Pope points out functional similarities between Thomas Aquinas's use of then-available scientific theories in his interpretation of the natural basis of primary relationships and Pope's own efforts to avoid the deficiencies that characterize contemporary Catholic interpretations of love based on personalism and existentialism. He concludes with a call for a multidimensional interpretation of love, one that incorporates scientifically-based theories about human nature together with an appreciation of the significance of motives, intentions, and freedom, for the ordering of human affections and moral responsibility. This book will be of interest to moral theologians, especially those concerned with the topics of love, justice, and natural law ethics.
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