The Mind as Container

Asceticism of the Mind: Forms of Attention and Self-Transformation in Late Antique Monasticism

E. R. Curtius had a dismissive attitude toward both the literature and culture he studied in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (ELLMA). After a dissertation editing an Old French bible epic, he moved immediately to modern French, Spanish and English literature. During the Nazi period he took shelter in the Latin Middle Ages. While his work appeared harmless and unengaged to the Nazi censor, he developed his vision of a European culture held together by an embracing Latin culture. A complex psychology which undergirded his return to the Middle Ages is a main focus of the present article. He felt with near religious conviction that he was invested with a mission to restore a shattered European culture after WW II. ELLMA may have helped fulfil that mission, but it had a narrowing effect on the study of medieval literature.

Reviewed by: Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology and British Modernism by Caroline Hovanec Rachel Murray Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology and British Modernism. Caroline Hovanec. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. 232. $99.99 (cloth); $80.00 (eBook). In his 2012 study Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel asks: “What kind of explanation . . . even one that includes evolutionary theory, could account for the appearance of organisms that are not only physically adapted to the environment but also conscious subjects?”1 For Nagel, who famously wondered what it might be like to be a bat, modern science alone cannot explain the existence of “subjective individual points of view”: there must be other ways of looking at and understanding the evolution of consciousness in humans and animals (Mind and Cosmos, 44).2 In order to develop alternatives to the dominant materialist conception of mind, he concludes, it is necessary to embrace the possibilities of speculation, imagination, and even erroneous thinking. Nagel is looking to the future, but as Caroline Hovanec shows in her new book, the kind of explanation, or rather the “species of thought” he seeks, may already exist in an earlier form (Animal Subjects, 5). Animal Subjects explores the productive intersection of scientific and literary ways of knowing and describing animal consciousness in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain. Bringing together the work of four modernists (H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf) with that of contemporary zoological thinkers (including Charles Elton, Henry Eliot Howard, Julian Huxley, and C. Lloyd Morgan) Hovanec identifies a breed of scientific writing on animal subjectivity that looks a lot like modernist fiction, as well as a strain of literary experimentation that bears a striking resemblance to observational science. In doing so, she builds a compelling case for the evolution of a new way of thinking about animals in the modernist period—one that apprehends them as subjects in their own right rather than Cartesian machines, and which recognizes the possibilities as well as the limitations of language in representing nonhuman subjectivity. Hovanec defines her terms clearly from the outset, sidestepping the vexed philosophical question of what constitutes a subject by identifying a shared conception in the writing of this period of “a subject as any being capable of subjective experience” (6). Her introduction traces this more inclusive definition, which encompasses both human and nonhumans, back to Darwin, specifically his account of the mental powers of humans and animals in The Descent of Man (1871), [End Page 673] in which he argues that so-called lower animals display a capacity for emotion, contemplation, and aesthetic appreciation (6–7). The impact of Darwinian thought on modernism’s engagement with animal life has already been well documented, most notably in Margot Norris’s Beasts of the Modern Imagination (1985) and Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (2008). Yet as Hovanec rightly points out, while Darwin’s ideas have served to illuminate modernism’s preoccupation with humankind’s animal ancestry, its challenging of anthropocentrism, as well as its displacement of animality onto marginalized human groups, writers’ interest in animal subjectivity in its own right has tended to be overlooked. The four chapters that follow seek to address this oversight, drawing together examples from modernist literature and science writing that seek to observe and describe animal behaviors, and in some cases their subjective experiences, “accurately and fully” (30). Wells’s beast fables are paired with Elton’s early ecological writing to explore the ways in which animal subjects challenged human sovereignty, while Aldous Huxley’s zoological fiction and Howard’s ornithological writing are read in terms of their “respect for animals as conscious subjects whose experience is only partly knowable” (33). Lawrence’s animal poetry and Julian Huxley’s writing on avian sexual selection are considered in terms of their shared investment in empathetic forms of knowing, and Woolf’s experiments with nonhuman subjectivity are brought into conversation with the comparative psychology of Bertrand Russell, J. B. S Haldane, and C. Lloyd Morgan. Although many of these writers were familiar with one another’s work (Elton quotes Wells...

Ancient Greek herpetology is often assumed to be unrelated to the criteria and classification of modern science. The snakes have been stated to be unidentifiable from their characteristics and description as given in the ancient tradition, and therefore most of them have been declared "mythical" or "fabulous". Yet, when combined with the evidence available in modern herpetology, the ancient data from Greece both in texts and archaeological pieces are found to be more reliable than formerly expected. It is possible to identify the genera and even the species, in some well-documented cases. The examples developed in this article deal with the non-poisonous snakes (Colubrids) involved in the daily life and in the religion of the ancient Greeks. The snakes related to deities such as Asclepios, the god of medicine, are to be identified with the European Rat-snakes (Elaphe gen.), two species of which are especially involved in his cult and symbols : Elaphe quatuorlineata and Elaphe longissima.

In ancient Greek the line between direct and indirect discourse appears blurred. In this essay I examine the tendency of Greek writers to slip from indirect into direct speech. I explain the apparent difference between modern English and ancient Greek speech reporting in terms of a development from orality to literacy.

The article substantiates: the ancient Greek reciprocal (tax) law and the ancient Roman redistributive one are paradigmatic opposite phenomena. They have nothing in common but some external formal features. The ancient Greek reciprocal law was that of the citizens of the ancient Greek polises. The ancient Roman redistributive law was the law of the ancient Roman Empire as a substantial state. The most fundamental among the causes of paradigmatic distinction between the ancient Greek reciprocal law and the ancient Roman redistributive law became the late-Antique mental, in particular, and the worldview on the whole, revolution in the ancient Roman imperial society and its legal thinking compared to the ancient Greek polis mentality and consciousness. As a result of that revolution the ancient Greek polis tradition discontinued and the ancient Roman, imperical tradition arrived. It became one of the most fundamental milestones in the evolution of human societies, states and law. The idea, dominant till nowadays in the minds of the most scientists, of the organic unity and direct continuity of Hellenism and Romanizm, of the existence of a unified ancient civilization is not more than a myth, a methodological error. The roots of this myth dates back to great antiquity and are simultaneously (but at different times in varying proportions) both, the consequence of incredible complexities of the process of sociogenesis, politogenesis, genesis of the state, anthropogenesis, genesis of law and other, regular and random evolutionary changes, and ordinary human, including cognitive, errors, and to some extent the result of a profound, precily considered and handled in a masterly way disinformation. This myth is so enduring that even today it is still practically impossible to predict, more or less reasonably, the time of its collapse. By virtue of that, everybody has to consider it while seeking to cognize the Antiquity and, through it, to learn the modernity.   Keywords: the ancient Greek reciprocal law; the ancient Roman redistributive law; the ancient Greek human-centered mentality; the ancient Roman state-centered mentality; late-Antique worldview revolution. https://doi.org/10.31861/ehrlichsjournal2017.01.013

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Society of Jesus was busy changing its interpretation of the Chinese world and denying the possible existence of a society of atheists. To safeguard the Chinese mission, the Jesuit Antonio Provana claimed that European cultural models could not be used in order to interpret China, and that the voices and purported beliefs of the Chinese should be reported on their own terms. The same refusal to interpret Chinese culture through the interpretative schemes that European cultures had inherited (largely from the ancient Greeks or Romans) also filled the pages of the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux between 1701 and 1719, the period analyzed in this contribution. My article in this special issue argues that, due to the extreme rhetorical caution necessary to the Jesuits in France during the third phase (1700) of the Chinese rites controversy, the Mémoires de Trévoux pursued a cultural policy intended to deny the existence of any atheism whether in a single individual or in a whole nation. This departure from a Eurocentric perspective, as well as the denial of atheism in any form, became themes that forcefully reappeared during the Enlightenment.

Near the beginning of Plato's Charmides Socrates describes a remedy for headache that combines the application of a leaf and the singing of an incantation. Scholars have long noted how Socrates contrasts his 'Thracian' brand of healing with Greek medicine, a contrast which they connect with the sage's better known arguments in the Gorgias, but there are some equally important eschatological allusions. The 'Orphic Gold Tablets' are inscriptions on gold foil found in graves of late classical and Hellenistic date throughout the Greek world,albeitmost plentifully in Magna Graecia, Crete and Thessaly. The Thracian source for Socrates' composite leaf-and-incantation remedy gives us, moreover, insight into the texts of the Thessalian gold tablets. The Petelia tablet, containing an eschatological narrative designed to protect someone 'when he was about to die', was found in an amulet case of Roman date and probably referred to itself as 'a leaf of Memory'. Keywords: ancient Greek tradition; orphic gold leaves; Plato's Charmides Socrates; Socratic leaf charm

The historical development of art is a change of paradigms. Each paradigm contains a special understanding of art, defined bothby the act of creativity itself and by the evaluation of its results. It is especially important to identify the origins of these changes, identify their stages, and determine the direction of the evolution of artistic creativity. In this context, corporeality as an artistic paradigm of European sculpture is considered in an article in the historical dimension from classics to postmodernism. Background research driven by changes that have suffered over the past century art not only in terms of formative principles, but also in terms of being a work of art. The term "art" is not given a priori; it is inseparable from the historical conditions of its own realization and filled with different content. In ancient tradition, from which theoretical understanding of art originates, provides an understanding of art as mimetic activity. For plastic art of the ancient Greeks man was the epitome of all things, the prototype of all creation and the created. The human body in great shape was almost the only model of art aesthetic. The Greeks thought it only as a stature completeness. For the Greeks, body language was the language of soul, although Greek plastics did not know what analysis characters the cult of the individual, which is typical for the art of modern times. Plasticity, the ancient body kinetics can be regarded as some elements of the semantic structure of a particular language as a kind of mimicry. Plastic modern European sculpture shows opposite to the ancient classics, Christian traditional relationship of mind and body. Antiquity knew dualism of mind and body, and provided perception of the gods only in the body incarnation. Christianity brought a legislated dualism and brought early naive monism attitude into the historically natural decay. In the art of the Renaissance in Europe, due to rethinking of ancient Christian tradition, experience acquires the tendency of forming an image of ideal body oriented on classic examples. In the mid-nineteenth century, under the influence of a new understanding of human corporeality was an appeal to antiquity qualitatively new level due to the growing trend of "naturalization" in human culture and criticism concerning the previous historical periods. In the culture of the twentieth century, there was a quite relevant anthropological stance of negativism. Justification of individual values has led to a lack of uniform standards, because it was perceived as an encroachment on personality. The natural beauty in all its perfection, the image of which was the purpose and content of Antiquity plastics and the Renaissance art lost all its worthiness and has become a subject of neglecting within the postmodernism.

In order properly to grasp Conrad’s visual aesthetics and reader theory, it is crucial to give due consideration to the multiple literary sources that informed his writing. There is ample evidence that Conrad read extensively and that he was an avid reader of both modern and ancient authors and texts. His father Apollo Korzienowski introduced him to the Polish Romantic classics, specifically Mickiewicz and Slovacki, as well as to Shakespeare1 and Victor Hugo, which he translated into Polish.2 Later, Conrad read the ancient Greek and Latin poets, the French Humanists, and modern British, French, and Russian writers, including Dickens, Marryat, Pascal, Flaubert, Maupassant, Anatole France, Stendhal, Balzac, and Turgenev. These authors affected Conrad’s writing in various ways. Conrad himself has acknowledged his debts through direct or implicit reference in his essays, letters, and fiction. For instance, the Shakespearean notion of the world as a stage is constantly reiterated in Conrad’s fiction, notably in Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, ‘Karain: A Memory’, and Victory? He referred to Pascal in Under Western Eyes where the novel’s protagonist Razumov is associated with a ‘thinking reed’, a phrase echoing Pascal’s famous saying, ‘Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed’ (2004, 84). Dickens’s imprint can be felt in the grimy urban setting of The Secret Agent4 and the influence of Flaubert and Maupassant permeates Conrad’s writing.KeywordsReader TheoryNarrative MethodCamera ObscuraVisual AestheticsRussian WriterThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Recent experimental findings clearly suggest that classical probability theory is still not successful to explain modalities in human cognition, especially in connection to decision making. The major problem seems to be the presence of epistemic uncertainty and its effects on cognition at any time point. Moreover, the stochasticity in the model arises due to the unknown path or trajectory (the definite state of mind at each point in time) a person follows. In fact, there exists more ambiguity than clarity in some aspects of cognition, for example, regarding cognitive affective decision-making behavior and subsequent choices (George et al. in Academy of Management Review 31: 347–365, 2006). The concept of ambiguity, its typical role and its function are not only long-standing debatable concerns in the humanities but also assume a similar level of importance, and are the subject of much debate, in contemporary neurological and cognitive approaches. For example, biologist Fredrick Grinnell made an argument clarifying that ambiguity “is inherent in carrying out and reporting research” (Grinnell in Science and Engineering Ethics 5:205, 1999). Not only that, but he also pointed out some parameters of ambiguity that support his view, for instance, the difficulty of distinguishing between data and noise in research “at the edge of discovery” (ibid. 207). Interestingly, as a positive side of ambiguity, he observed “while ambiguity in method and procedure—as an aspect of data and its interpretation—is clearly a potential problem, posing the risk of distortion, it is also associated here with creative insight.” The consideration of “black box model of human mental functions” produces much ambiguity. So, as we are aware of the intertwined mathematical, neurological and cognitive mysteries of the brain, ultimately, these very characteristics are challenges faced by the human cognition and give rise to a very complicated and complex integrative system of cognitive computation and affective perception. A generalized version of probability theory, borrowing the idea from the quantum paradigm, may be a plausible approach. Quantum theory enables a person to be in an indefinite state (superposition state) in the context of neurobiology, especially in relation to central nervous system (CNS), and this allows all these states to be potentially (of course, with proper probability amplitudes) expressible at each moment. Thus, a superposition state seems to provide a better representation of the conflict, ambiguity or uncertainty that a person experiences at each moment. This situation can be described in somewhat poetic language, i.e., the dynamical laws, as demonstrated by nature, allow equations but are only sometimes posed by the Mind of the experimentalist. This way, consciousness (as expressed in his introduction to consciousness or cognition can be expressed as only a critical description of human activity and not as a theory of mind. Some critical remarks about handling the ambiguity and contradictions due to emotions within quantum probability framework are made in this chapter. Mental states and related decision making have been widely discussed in various ancient and medieval Indian traditions. The existence of an indefinite state of mind was discussed by many Indian philosophical schools, including Buddhism. The concept of the neutral mind, as well as equanimity, is discussed in this chapter, especially because it has a potential to be related to modern neuroscience, as well as to quantum theory.

The article is devoted to references to ancient history in the scientific works and university lectures of V.O. Klyuchevsky when he considered issues of a source study. Noted is the use of V.O. Klyuchevsky's experience in comparing texts accumulated by specialists in ancient history as he points out significant differences in the source base of Greco-Roman and Russian history. The main rules (techniques) for working with ancient sources identified by Klyuchevsky were restoration and interpretation of the ancient text, determination of the author's point of view, interpretation of the meaning inherent in the text. He noted that historical criticism acquired a masterful skill precisely in the analysis of the works of ancient authors. The main difference between the sources on the medieval history of Rus' and the ancient narrative tradition is according to V.O. Klyuchevsky that the written monuments of the ancient world, on which historical criticism developed its techniques, are all marked by individuality, are works of personal creativity, while the sources on Russian history before the 17th century are “impersonal works of writing”, that is, chronicles and acts. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the model for Klyuchevsky's development of source study techniques for studying medieval Russian texts was the methods of working with ancient Greek and Roman sources, methods of their criticism and interpretation, as they had developed by the second half of the 19th century. When creating the scientific history of Russia, V.O. Klyuchevsky relied not only on the works of his predecessors in Russian history, but also on the methodology of studying general, especially ancient history.

In ancient Greece, the past was preserved almost entirely by oral transmission and oral tradition. This chapter focuses on a particularly interesting group of oral traditions from the ancient Greek world, the family traditions of ancient Athens in the classical period. Family traditions start at the level of reminiscences from parent to child. The material of oral history is usually the personal reminiscences of people alive, while oral tradition is usually defined as information about the past which has been transmitted over at least one generation. The analogy of events would also affect family memory just as it did the general city traditions. As these oral traditions could not help being relevant to the present, the characteristics of the present seemed to confirm the accuracy or plausibility of the ‘history’ so passed down. Family tradition helped a man prove that he was a good citizen.

The linguistic studies in Ancient Greek and Roman traditions were concerned about themeaning and gave priority to elaborate the theory of “Parts of Speech” –morphology was the principalconcerns of linguistic studies until the 18th century. In the 19th century, the phonological facts (soundchange) began to receive attentions in linguistic studies. In the beginning of Generative Grammar,there was no autonomous component for the lexicon, which was conceived simply as a list of lexicalformatives, but in later theories it is considered as a component of complex internal structures. Inthis perspective, word formation processes (derivation, inflection, compounding, etc.) have motivateddifferent hypotheses: Transformational Hypothesis, Weak Lexicalist Hypothesis and Strong LexicalistHypothesis. The objective of this study is to show the status of morphology in linguistic traditionsand its status in linguistic studies.

Reviewed by: Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey by Riccardo Saccenti Andrew J. Cuff Riccardo Saccenti, Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2016) xiii + 155 pp. Few areas of inquiry require a road map to the secondary scholarship as desperately as the history of human rights and natural law jurisprudence. Thankfully, Riccardo Saccenti's new literature review of numerous legal historians restrains itself to a highly readable eighty pages, and maintains a careful balance among numerous historiographies. In addition, copious notes and lengthy citations from primary and secondary sources make this text extremely useful for the researcher who wishes to focus on a specific angle of medieval natural law. Saccenti is as conversant with the historical sources and their philosophical contexts as he is with the long history of their interpretation in the modern period. His excellent monograph can handily bring any scholar up to speed on all three as well. The basic question at issue in Saccenti's investigation is the following: how have scholars of jurisprudence typically connected the idea of ius in the Middle Ages to its instantiations in the enlightenment era of liberal democracy? In other words, did thinkers like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes originate the jurisprudence of human rights (like life, liberty, and property), or were they simply building on some kind of ancient and medieval tradition? Scholars conversant with this line of inquiry may note that Nicholas Wolterstorff's 2008 book Justice: Rights and Wrongs focused a great deal on this question as well, extending the history of natural law even further back, to the Byzantines, ancient Greeks, and Hebrew scriptures. Unfortunately, Saccenti's book does not interact with or even acknowledge the existence of Wolterstorff's. This is likely a result of the lack of communication between the fields of philosophy and medieval law. Wolterstorff's Justice is mainly aimed at creating a systematic apologetic for his understanding of natural law, with history serving as a backdrop. Saccenti, on the other hand, is providing a full review of secondary literature for historians. Debating Medieval Natural Law presents three major interpretations of the history of subjective rights as a conversation about ius and its various meanings. The first is that medieval canonists such as Gratian, Huguccio, Bernard of Pavia, and Raymond of Penyafort (to name some of the most famous) originated a jurisprudence that set the stage for a radical shift in the [End Page 261] modern period toward individual rights. The second, a view popular with Thomists, argues that it was William of Ockham (d. 1347) whose nominalism and divine voluntarism led to legal positivism and the modern notion of human rights as individual powers (such as habeas corpus, power of attorney, or other "constitutional protections"). The third view is almost whiggish in its outlook, namely that the entire history of ius is a slow evolution from the ancient Roman sense of dominium to the birth of inherent subjective rights in the twelfth century, to the flowering of those rights in the modern period. Saccenti gives each perspective its due and exhaustively covers the history of scholarship in support of each. The view that turns William of Ockham into the radical legal iconoclast Saccenti assigns to Michel Villey, a French legal historian of the post-war period. Villey's model, offered in his Leçons d'histoire de la philosophie du droit (1957) and several other books and articles, argued that the medieval Thomistic conception of ius sharply contrasts with that of Locke and other modernists, in the sense that medieval philosophy centered ius around the dignity of human nature and what is owed to it, rather than the faculty of individual humans to justly claim the power to act in certain ways. He identified Ockham's metaphysics as the central underpinning of this development, given that the nominalist Ockhamist school did not hold to any metaphysics of human nature, making all faculties and powers individual, and based on the subjective properties of the individual. Other historians followed Villey, such as Francis Oakley and Richard Tuck, to add that Ockham's extreme voluntarism rendered the human and divine will free from the dictates of natural...