This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolu... more This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, where...
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Rethinking Roman religion: Action, practice, and belief. by Mackey, Jacob Louis, Ph.D., PRINCETON ...
In this paper I propose an approach to Epicurean theology that avoids the stalemate of "real... more In this paper I propose an approach to Epicurean theology that avoids the stalemate of "realist" and "idealist" interpretations. I argue that Epicurean theology is more phenomenological than metaphysical, its purpose less to ground and justify dogmatic commitment to whatever form of existence the gods may enjoy than to account for a prevalent aspect of ancient religious experience, epiphany, and to assimilate that experience to Epicurean philosophical therapeia. In the process I reconstruct and reassess the equally epiphanic theology of Democritus that forms a source for Epicurus' theological thought. His theology has also been unprofitably construed by modern scholars as a reductive dismissal of the gods as mere psychological effects or manifest fictions. Instead, Democritus was at least as accommodating of the phenomena of religious experience as Epicurus: his own theology is likewise founded on epiphany and he too attempts a therapeutic analysis of its at...
This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the stu... more This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the study of ancient religion, taking Roman religion as a case in point. The anti-belief position began with Christian disparagement of traditional worship and continued with late-20 th -century cultural relativism. After dismantling arguments that belief is unique to western cultures, I introduce the cognitive theory of intentionality. On this theory, all mental states represent or are about objects and circumstances in the world. I distinguish two broad mental state types: the practical , such as desire, which represents circumstances as we would have them be, and the doxastic , such as belief, which represents circumstances as we take them to be. Insofar as the Romans represented circumstances as obtaining, they had beliefs. Three payoffs follow from this approach. First, beliefs often underlie emotions , because emotions amount to our evaluations of circumstances we take to obtain. So, when...
This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our specie... more This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tomasello seek to explain cultural evolution in humans as reliant upon processes of joint attention and shared intentionality (the development of which is largely the focus of Tomasello’s book). Heyes’ account of social learning, in which no particular role is assigned to human intersubjectivity and the same basic associative learning mechanisms of nonsocial learning are also invoked to explain social learning, stands apart. As to the relation of cultural and biological evolution, Laland offers readers a thorough account of the two with detailed analyses of social learning across various non-primate species, and uniquely, among these authors, attends to the influence of genes on social learning. For his part, Tomasello provides readers with a richly detailed experimental accounting of human-unique forms of social learning using Great Apes as points of contrast.
In his recent book "Becoming Human" Michael Tomasello delivers an updated version of his shared i... more In his recent book "Becoming Human" Michael Tomasello delivers an updated version of his shared intentionality (SI) account of uniquely human cognition. More so than in earlier writings, the author embraces the idea that SI shapes not just our social cognition but all domains of thought and emotion. In this critical essay, we center on three parts of his theory. The first is that children allegedly have to earn the status of "second persons" through the acquisition of collective intentionality at age 3. We make the case that humans take a second-personal stance toward others even as infants. The second point concerns Tomasello's claim that 3-year-olds are group-minded and think in terms of "us" vs. "them". We doubt both that children this young have a clear overview of their in-and out-groups and that they possess the "agonistic spirit" necessary for inter-group competition. Third, due to his focus on collective intentionality and how it might explain 3-year-olds' difficulties with theory of mind problems, Tomasello appears to pay less attention to the crucial conceptual change that allows 4-to 5-year-olds to master such tasks.
PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote.
To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.10... more PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote. To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000105 History of Psychology, Vol 22(2), May 2019, 113-129
A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."
This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the stu... more This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the study of ancient religion, taking Roman religion as a case in point. The anti-belief position began with Christian disparagement of traditional worship and continued with late-20th-century cultural relativism. After dismantling arguments that belief is unique to western cultures, I introduce the cognitive theory of intentionality. On this theory, all mental states represent or are about objects and circumstances in the world. I distinguish two broad mental state types: the practical, such as desire, which represents circumstances as we would have them be, and the doxastic, such as belief, which represents circumstances as we take them to be. Insofar as the Romans represented circumstances as obtaining, they had beliefs. Three payoffs follow from this approach. First, beliefs often underlie emotions, because emotions amount to our evaluations of circumstances we take to obtain. So, when Romans record emotions in connection with religious events, researchers are licensed to ask about the beliefs at the root of those emotions. Second, beliefs (along with practical states) underlie action, because in order to act, agents require a cognitive map of the space of possibilities for action. This is provided in part by belief. So, when Romans record religious action, researchers are licensed to inquire into the beliefs that demarcated the parameters of the action. Finally, in representing objects and circumstances, beliefs represent them "as," that is, represent them in this way rather than that way. This puts beliefs at the foundations of social reality, for it is only by virtue of being represented "as" a pontifex that any Roman ever counted as a pontifex, and it is only by virtue of being represented "as" a sacrificium that any act of animal slaughter ever counted as a sacrificium. Thus, far from being an irrelevant category for researchers, belief turns out to be central to Roman religious cognition, religious action, and religious reality.
The orthopraxy of Roman ritual is often remarked, by both ancient and modern observers. This chap... more The orthopraxy of Roman ritual is often remarked, by both ancient and modern observers. This chapter explores the cognitive roots of Roman orthopraxy by appeal to “overimitation,” the cross-culturally well-attested tendency of children and adults to imitate with very high fidelity. Overimitation is widely seen as crucial to the transmission of cultural practices, which often consist of action sequences that are teleologically and causally opaque, that is, directed toward no transparent end and having no transparent causal efficacy as means. No “rational” imitator, motivated by an instrumental means-ends calculus, would imitate such actions. Without overimitation, cultural practices characterized by teleological and causal opacity, lacking transparent instrumental value, would presumably not achieve wide distribution. I submit that the orthopraxy of teleologically and causally opaque Roman cult is ideally suited to explanation by way of overimitation. In addition to explaining Roman orthopraxy, the findings on overimitation help explain the Roman penchant for multiple aetiologies. For the opaque yet clearly intentional actions of cult lacked not only intuitive rationale but also authoritative explanation. In these conditions, multiple aetiologies represented a cognitively autonomous search for explanations. Finally, overimitation helps explain the paradoxical ritual change to which Roman cult was subject. For overimitation preserved opaque ritual technologies for addition, amendment, and innovation in the face of new religious exigencies. Only in a system of faithfully preserved ritual is the accumulation of new ritual forms that build upon the old possible. Finally, my cognitive study of Roman ritual allows me to offer a solution to a problem in overimitation studies. For the underlying motivation that drives overimitation is disputed. On the “causal” account, imitators encode opaque actions as non-obvious but causally indispensible components in an overall action sequence, so they imitate with precision. The “normative” account holds that imitators encode opaque actions as mandated by group norms, and thus imitate with high fidelity. The related “affiliative” account proposes that imitators copy with high fidelity in order to connect or affiliate with others or with a social group. I attempt to reconcile these competing theories by suggesting that affiliation with others, which regularly includes endorsing a group’s norms, is often causal, but the causality is psychological and social rather than physical. Roman cult represents par excellence a context of interaction among individuals, divine and human, in which only conventional actions properly performed by properly affiliated agents are capable of causing the requisite psychological and social effects, such as placating a god or creating a priest, respectively. Thus, some overimitation results not from confusion about physical causality but from accurate social-cognitive intuitions and pragmatic competence with respect to psychological and social causality.
Walking through Elysium: Vergil’s Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition , 2020
PENULTIMATE PROOFS. Cite the published version in Bill Gladhill & Micah Young Myers (eds.), Walki... more PENULTIMATE PROOFS. Cite the published version in Bill Gladhill & Micah Young Myers (eds.), Walking through Elysium: Vergil’s Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
"Throughout Augustine’s Confessions Vergil’s Aeneid is quite noisily present. In this paper, I explore its moment of silence, particularly the moment of silence of Aeneid 6. I submit that at Confessions 9.10.24-25 – which describes an anabasis or ascent of the soul experienced by Augustine and his mother – Augustine frames his narrative on the model of the catabasis of Aeneid 6. At the same time, he displaces and hence silences Aeneid 6 by substituting in place of Anchises’ cosmological, psychological, and eschatological first speech to his son (Aen. 6.724-51) direct quotation of a Neo-Platonic text, Plotinus’ Ennead 5.1.2 (On the Three Primary Hypostases). Augustine’s quotation of Plotinus at the heart of his narrative of ascent constitutes a double gesture. First, the Plotinian text interprets the cosmology, psychology, and eschatology of Anchises’ speech, hence amplifying Vergil’s words even as it displaces them in order to disclose their true, Platonic meaning. Second, the Plotinian text that displaces the Vergilian text attempts, in turn, to displace itself with a call for the silencing of all speech (Conf. 9.10.25, quoting Plotinus’ Enneads 5.1.2.14-17): “If...the tumult of the flesh should fall silent (sileat), silent (sileant) the phantoms of the earth, and of the waters and of the air, silent also the heavens, and if the soul itself should fall silent, and transcend itself by not thinking about itself; if dreams should fall silent, and imaginary revelations, every language and every sign (omnis lingua et omne signum)...” In this silence, Augustine and Monnica hear their Heavenly Father speak without the mediation of earthly signs (si...audiamus verbum eius). The silent plenitude of his Word apprises them of the celestial Heldenshau, the nature of the “vita aeterna sanctorum.” Thus does Augustine’s Confessions silence all the texts that it accumulates, or better, of which it, like Augustine’s life itself, is an accumulation: the Aeneid, from which he gained his love of language, Cicero and Plotinus, who inspired him to philosophical transcendence, and even scripture, our earthly proxy for the Word heard in its purity. Augustine has inscribed his autobiography like a palimpsest over Plotinus’ text, with its doctrine of the soul’s transcendence of the sensible cosmos, while in the same gesture inscribing Plotinus’ text over Anchises’ philosophical speech in Aeneid 6. In placing the Aeneid’s catabasis at two removes and Plotinus’ anabasis at one remove from the silence of his own climactic ascent, Augustine attempts to kick away, as it were, the textual scaffolding that brought him to the summit, the words upon which he climbed to the Word. And yet his predicament – that he can only convey this silence in language – ensures that the stubborn structure beneath his work, and indeed his work itself, retain (to transfer a Miltonic phrase from one sensory domain to another) a 'silence audible'."
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolu... more This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, where...
UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissert... more UMI, ProQuest ® Dissertations & Theses. The world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses. Learn more... ProQuest, Rethinking Roman religion: Action, practice, and belief. by Mackey, Jacob Louis, Ph.D., PRINCETON ...
In this paper I propose an approach to Epicurean theology that avoids the stalemate of "real... more In this paper I propose an approach to Epicurean theology that avoids the stalemate of "realist" and "idealist" interpretations. I argue that Epicurean theology is more phenomenological than metaphysical, its purpose less to ground and justify dogmatic commitment to whatever form of existence the gods may enjoy than to account for a prevalent aspect of ancient religious experience, epiphany, and to assimilate that experience to Epicurean philosophical therapeia. In the process I reconstruct and reassess the equally epiphanic theology of Democritus that forms a source for Epicurus' theological thought. His theology has also been unprofitably construed by modern scholars as a reductive dismissal of the gods as mere psychological effects or manifest fictions. Instead, Democritus was at least as accommodating of the phenomena of religious experience as Epicurus: his own theology is likewise founded on epiphany and he too attempts a therapeutic analysis of its at...
This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the stu... more This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the study of ancient religion, taking Roman religion as a case in point. The anti-belief position began with Christian disparagement of traditional worship and continued with late-20 th -century cultural relativism. After dismantling arguments that belief is unique to western cultures, I introduce the cognitive theory of intentionality. On this theory, all mental states represent or are about objects and circumstances in the world. I distinguish two broad mental state types: the practical , such as desire, which represents circumstances as we would have them be, and the doxastic , such as belief, which represents circumstances as we take them to be. Insofar as the Romans represented circumstances as obtaining, they had beliefs. Three payoffs follow from this approach. First, beliefs often underlie emotions , because emotions amount to our evaluations of circumstances we take to obtain. So, when...
This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our specie... more This paper summarizes, contrasts, and reviews recent accounts of cultural evolution in our species offered by Cecilia Heyes in Cognitive Gadgets, Kevin Laland in Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony, and Michael Tomasello in Becoming Human. Our critical discussion focuses on the authors’ accounts of social learning, and the relationship each hypothesizes between cultural evolutionary and biological evolutionary processes. We find that both Laland and Tomasello seek to explain cultural evolution in humans as reliant upon processes of joint attention and shared intentionality (the development of which is largely the focus of Tomasello’s book). Heyes’ account of social learning, in which no particular role is assigned to human intersubjectivity and the same basic associative learning mechanisms of nonsocial learning are also invoked to explain social learning, stands apart. As to the relation of cultural and biological evolution, Laland offers readers a thorough account of the two with detailed analyses of social learning across various non-primate species, and uniquely, among these authors, attends to the influence of genes on social learning. For his part, Tomasello provides readers with a richly detailed experimental accounting of human-unique forms of social learning using Great Apes as points of contrast.
In his recent book "Becoming Human" Michael Tomasello delivers an updated version of his shared i... more In his recent book "Becoming Human" Michael Tomasello delivers an updated version of his shared intentionality (SI) account of uniquely human cognition. More so than in earlier writings, the author embraces the idea that SI shapes not just our social cognition but all domains of thought and emotion. In this critical essay, we center on three parts of his theory. The first is that children allegedly have to earn the status of "second persons" through the acquisition of collective intentionality at age 3. We make the case that humans take a second-personal stance toward others even as infants. The second point concerns Tomasello's claim that 3-year-olds are group-minded and think in terms of "us" vs. "them". We doubt both that children this young have a clear overview of their in-and out-groups and that they possess the "agonistic spirit" necessary for inter-group competition. Third, due to his focus on collective intentionality and how it might explain 3-year-olds' difficulties with theory of mind problems, Tomasello appears to pay less attention to the crucial conceptual change that allows 4-to 5-year-olds to master such tasks.
PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote.
To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.10... more PENULTIMATE PROOFS: please do not quote. To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000105 History of Psychology, Vol 22(2), May 2019, 113-129
A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."
This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the stu... more This essay traces the development of a consensus against belief as a category relevant to the study of ancient religion, taking Roman religion as a case in point. The anti-belief position began with Christian disparagement of traditional worship and continued with late-20th-century cultural relativism. After dismantling arguments that belief is unique to western cultures, I introduce the cognitive theory of intentionality. On this theory, all mental states represent or are about objects and circumstances in the world. I distinguish two broad mental state types: the practical, such as desire, which represents circumstances as we would have them be, and the doxastic, such as belief, which represents circumstances as we take them to be. Insofar as the Romans represented circumstances as obtaining, they had beliefs. Three payoffs follow from this approach. First, beliefs often underlie emotions, because emotions amount to our evaluations of circumstances we take to obtain. So, when Romans record emotions in connection with religious events, researchers are licensed to ask about the beliefs at the root of those emotions. Second, beliefs (along with practical states) underlie action, because in order to act, agents require a cognitive map of the space of possibilities for action. This is provided in part by belief. So, when Romans record religious action, researchers are licensed to inquire into the beliefs that demarcated the parameters of the action. Finally, in representing objects and circumstances, beliefs represent them "as," that is, represent them in this way rather than that way. This puts beliefs at the foundations of social reality, for it is only by virtue of being represented "as" a pontifex that any Roman ever counted as a pontifex, and it is only by virtue of being represented "as" a sacrificium that any act of animal slaughter ever counted as a sacrificium. Thus, far from being an irrelevant category for researchers, belief turns out to be central to Roman religious cognition, religious action, and religious reality.
The orthopraxy of Roman ritual is often remarked, by both ancient and modern observers. This chap... more The orthopraxy of Roman ritual is often remarked, by both ancient and modern observers. This chapter explores the cognitive roots of Roman orthopraxy by appeal to “overimitation,” the cross-culturally well-attested tendency of children and adults to imitate with very high fidelity. Overimitation is widely seen as crucial to the transmission of cultural practices, which often consist of action sequences that are teleologically and causally opaque, that is, directed toward no transparent end and having no transparent causal efficacy as means. No “rational” imitator, motivated by an instrumental means-ends calculus, would imitate such actions. Without overimitation, cultural practices characterized by teleological and causal opacity, lacking transparent instrumental value, would presumably not achieve wide distribution. I submit that the orthopraxy of teleologically and causally opaque Roman cult is ideally suited to explanation by way of overimitation. In addition to explaining Roman orthopraxy, the findings on overimitation help explain the Roman penchant for multiple aetiologies. For the opaque yet clearly intentional actions of cult lacked not only intuitive rationale but also authoritative explanation. In these conditions, multiple aetiologies represented a cognitively autonomous search for explanations. Finally, overimitation helps explain the paradoxical ritual change to which Roman cult was subject. For overimitation preserved opaque ritual technologies for addition, amendment, and innovation in the face of new religious exigencies. Only in a system of faithfully preserved ritual is the accumulation of new ritual forms that build upon the old possible. Finally, my cognitive study of Roman ritual allows me to offer a solution to a problem in overimitation studies. For the underlying motivation that drives overimitation is disputed. On the “causal” account, imitators encode opaque actions as non-obvious but causally indispensible components in an overall action sequence, so they imitate with precision. The “normative” account holds that imitators encode opaque actions as mandated by group norms, and thus imitate with high fidelity. The related “affiliative” account proposes that imitators copy with high fidelity in order to connect or affiliate with others or with a social group. I attempt to reconcile these competing theories by suggesting that affiliation with others, which regularly includes endorsing a group’s norms, is often causal, but the causality is psychological and social rather than physical. Roman cult represents par excellence a context of interaction among individuals, divine and human, in which only conventional actions properly performed by properly affiliated agents are capable of causing the requisite psychological and social effects, such as placating a god or creating a priest, respectively. Thus, some overimitation results not from confusion about physical causality but from accurate social-cognitive intuitions and pragmatic competence with respect to psychological and social causality.
Walking through Elysium: Vergil’s Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition , 2020
PENULTIMATE PROOFS. Cite the published version in Bill Gladhill & Micah Young Myers (eds.), Walki... more PENULTIMATE PROOFS. Cite the published version in Bill Gladhill & Micah Young Myers (eds.), Walking through Elysium: Vergil’s Underworld and the Poetics of Tradition. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
"Throughout Augustine’s Confessions Vergil’s Aeneid is quite noisily present. In this paper, I explore its moment of silence, particularly the moment of silence of Aeneid 6. I submit that at Confessions 9.10.24-25 – which describes an anabasis or ascent of the soul experienced by Augustine and his mother – Augustine frames his narrative on the model of the catabasis of Aeneid 6. At the same time, he displaces and hence silences Aeneid 6 by substituting in place of Anchises’ cosmological, psychological, and eschatological first speech to his son (Aen. 6.724-51) direct quotation of a Neo-Platonic text, Plotinus’ Ennead 5.1.2 (On the Three Primary Hypostases). Augustine’s quotation of Plotinus at the heart of his narrative of ascent constitutes a double gesture. First, the Plotinian text interprets the cosmology, psychology, and eschatology of Anchises’ speech, hence amplifying Vergil’s words even as it displaces them in order to disclose their true, Platonic meaning. Second, the Plotinian text that displaces the Vergilian text attempts, in turn, to displace itself with a call for the silencing of all speech (Conf. 9.10.25, quoting Plotinus’ Enneads 5.1.2.14-17): “If...the tumult of the flesh should fall silent (sileat), silent (sileant) the phantoms of the earth, and of the waters and of the air, silent also the heavens, and if the soul itself should fall silent, and transcend itself by not thinking about itself; if dreams should fall silent, and imaginary revelations, every language and every sign (omnis lingua et omne signum)...” In this silence, Augustine and Monnica hear their Heavenly Father speak without the mediation of earthly signs (si...audiamus verbum eius). The silent plenitude of his Word apprises them of the celestial Heldenshau, the nature of the “vita aeterna sanctorum.” Thus does Augustine’s Confessions silence all the texts that it accumulates, or better, of which it, like Augustine’s life itself, is an accumulation: the Aeneid, from which he gained his love of language, Cicero and Plotinus, who inspired him to philosophical transcendence, and even scripture, our earthly proxy for the Word heard in its purity. Augustine has inscribed his autobiography like a palimpsest over Plotinus’ text, with its doctrine of the soul’s transcendence of the sensible cosmos, while in the same gesture inscribing Plotinus’ text over Anchises’ philosophical speech in Aeneid 6. In placing the Aeneid’s catabasis at two removes and Plotinus’ anabasis at one remove from the silence of his own climactic ascent, Augustine attempts to kick away, as it were, the textual scaffolding that brought him to the summit, the words upon which he climbed to the Word. And yet his predicament – that he can only convey this silence in language – ensures that the stubborn structure beneath his work, and indeed his work itself, retain (to transfer a Miltonic phrase from one sensory domain to another) a 'silence audible'."
SYLLABUS Defending the Republic: Roman Constitutionalism from Cicero to the American Revolution, 2024
The assassination of Pompey the Great in September of 48 BCE sealed the fate of the Roman republi... more The assassination of Pompey the Great in September of 48 BCE sealed the fate of the Roman republic. Pompey's military leadership had been the republicans' last hope of preserving Rome's constitutional order in the face of the dictatorial ambitions of Julius Caesar, who had in effect declared war on his own country in 49 BCE when he brought his army across the Rubicon river into Italy from Gaul.
Some Romans—including the statesman, orator, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero—resisted Caesar with the pen, not the sword. In works such as On the Republic, Cicero articulated and urged upon his fellow citizens the merits of republican government, its basis in popular sovereignty, and the moral and political virtues of the rule of laws not men. A group of republican conspirators seeking to restore the old order assassinated Caesar in 44 BCE. They were in turn destroyed by Caesar’s would-be heirs. Cicero himself was assassinated by the Caesarian faction for his political speech and activism.
Cicero's writings and their influence survived his assassination and have inspired opponents of tyranny and proponents of self-government for over 2000 years. In this course, we engage the legacy of Roman republicanism, and its historically unprecedented regime of rights, laws, and constitutional norms. We read foundational texts by Cicero, the Roman historian Livy, and others. We also read later authors who drew inspiration from them, such as Joseph Addison, whose 1713 play Cato George Washington staged for his troops in 1778 at Valley Forge, abolitionist writers like William Wells Brown, James Bell, and Frances Ellen Watkins, the feminist writer Abigail Adams, who argued against patriarchy in her letters to her husband John Adams, and John Adams himself (the “American Cicero”), whose 1787 work A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America drew on Cicero, Polybius, and other classical authors, and finally the Constitution itself—the oldest still-operating constitution in the world, and one that many perceive as now under threat.
This course explores some ways that people have historically confronted the sort of ressentiment—... more This course explores some ways that people have historically confronted the sort of ressentiment—“a generalized feeling of resentment and often hostility harbored by one individual or group against another”—that pervades our cultural discourse, wracks our political life, and makes us miserable as individuals. In the first part of the course, we closely read the Roman playwright Terence, the poets Catullus, Horace, and Sulpicia, and the philosophers Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. The second part focuses on the classically-influenced cultural critic Albert Murray (1916-2013) and his intellectual milieu, including his friend Ralph Ellison (1913-1994), and two of his literary predecessors, Frederick Douglass (1817/18-1895) and Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). We investigate the programs that these authors, all of whom lived through times of social and personal turmoil, proposed for avoiding ressentiment and affirming life, thereby remaining centered in a sense of their own dignity despite the world’s insults and injuries, and cultivating a feeling of gratitude for the blessings that were intermingled with their tribulations.
We start with Nietzsche, whose stance of life-affirmation as an alternative to ressentiment and other life-denying emotions frames the course. We then explore, self-reflectively, the culture of the modern campus, in which we are all enmeshed. We look critically at cancel culture, safetyism, microaggressions, victimhood, and related phenomena, and the possible roles these things play in the mental health crisis that plagues young people.
Through our Roman authors, we explore the nature of the emotions and techniques for not letting negative ones dominate you, human finitude and how embracing it can deepen our appreciation of life, social interactions and how to approach them so that we feel increased kinship with and compassion for others, instead of resentment and alienation, and, through two “dramas of reconciliation,” the importance of forgiveness in personal and civic life.
The second part of the course explores Albert Murray’s theory of the African-American Blues tradition, particularly his thesis that the Blues idiom represented not “the anguished outcry of a victim” but both a “survival technique [and] esthetic equipment for living” and “an exercise in heroic action” through which Blues-oriented individuals made “an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response” to both the suffering particular to their historically conditioned forms of oppression as well as to the absurdity of the human condition in general. We also examine Murray’s and Frederick Douglass’s conception of American culture as “omni-American,” or inherently “composite,” Ralph Ellison’s theory of American democracy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s rejection of pity and affirmation of joy.
Passages: African-American Writers and Greco-Roman Literature, 2022
This course investigates select African American engagements with the literatures produced by anc... more This course investigates select African American engagements with the literatures produced by ancient Greeks and Romans. It is motivated by the conviction that we do interpretive justice to the accomplishments of African American writers when we attempt to understand the tradition(s) they conceive their work to be intervening in.
African American literature was born with the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. The book evinces a deep knowledge of Latin and Latin literature, which it turns to its own emancipatory end. Indeed, Wheatley secured her freedom on the strength of the book.
Engagement with classical texts offered Wheatley and other African American writers of every era an opportunity to access, deploy, and transform a widely shared treasury of meanings, ideas, images, tropes, genres, and styles in order to create unique works of great artistic power, capable of opening up newly imagined ways of being for themselves and their readers. In addition to Wheatley, we shall explore some classical interactions of the poet Rita Dove and the fiction writer Ralph Ellison.
To experience the artistic power of these works as their authors intended, we must understand the aesthetic and literary contexts and tradition(s) in which they worked, for context and tradition are the foundation of a work’s meaning. To this end, we shall read alongside African American literary creations some of the Greek and Roman literary works to which they respond. For when we see clearly how a poem by, for example, Phillis Wheatley, responds to an ode by the Roman poet Horace—himself the son of a freedman—we grasp more fully the unique aesthetic, moral, and intellectual power of her poem. To see how Horace’s poetry could communicate to Wheatley is to see how Wheatley’s poetry can communicate its emancipatory power and promise to us in our own time.
Syllabus for a class on Cognitive Science approaches to Roman culture.
I would not recommend doin... more Syllabus for a class on Cognitive Science approaches to Roman culture. I would not recommend doing the course as outlined on this syllabus. It was a whirlwind tour of cognitive theory and Roman culture, and we didn't really get a chance to dig deep into any of the cognitive science, or spend enough time seeing what the theories could contribute to our understanding of Roman culture. If I do it again, I will focus on just two topics in cognitive science and do deep readings in Roman cultural materials in light of the cognitive science. For example, I might assign Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction and then spend half the semester reading Roman plays and, say, the Aeneid in light of its theory of cognitive narratology. Then in the second half of the semester we might read Norenzayan, et al. "Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions," and use it as a jumping off point to delve into both the theories upon which it is based (e.g., Boyer's MCI theory) and Roman materials relevant to religion.
Advanced Latin course planned for Fall 2016 (comments and suggestions welcomed!). This course exa... more Advanced Latin course planned for Fall 2016 (comments and suggestions welcomed!). This course examines Roman prose on the topic of what we would call mental health. We will see how Cicero, Seneca, and Augustine define psychological well-being and how they respond to problems of mental suffering and emotional trauma. We will also consider the broader philosophical contexts in which these texts were situated. As we translate these authors' unadulterated Latin prose, we will review the fundamentals of Latin grammar and vocabulary.
In this paper, I explore a passage from the first book of Cicero’s De officiis (1.50-58) that pos... more In this paper, I explore a passage from the first book of Cicero’s De officiis (1.50-58) that posits layers of collective intentionality. These layers correspond, in Cicero’s account, to different levels of social association, ranging from the natural association among all members of the human species, to institutional associations created by consensus, to the affective associations of kinship. Cicero refers to all of these forms of association metaphorically, with the term societas. This metaphor is significant, for in Roman law, societas literally denotes a “contractual partnership,” which was created by the consensus of partners and which created in turn mutual obligations, a deontology. I submit that the Roman institution of societas afforded Cicero a flexible model for thinking about social ontology in terms of shared mental capacities and shared attitudes, the various forms of social association created by such sharing, and their concomitant normative commitments and obligations. The distinctively Roman legal concept of societas structures his multi-layered social ontology. Every layer of his social ontology, that is, every societas in the nested set of societates that he identifies, is created by a different form of collective intentionality and entails a different deontology.
Title: "Infancy, Imitation, and the Ontogeny of Culture in Ancient Rome"
Speaker: Jacob L. Mackey... more Title: "Infancy, Imitation, and the Ontogeny of Culture in Ancient Rome" Speaker: Jacob L. Mackey, Queens College, CUNY Date: Thursday, March 10, 2016, 4:30pm Location: Rutgers Classics, Ruth Adams Building, Room 003 DC 131 George St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901
This paper aims to introduce intentionality (in Brentano's sense of the term) into the arsenal of... more This paper aims to introduce intentionality (in Brentano's sense of the term) into the arsenal of cognitive theory available to Classicists and scholars in related disciplines. What you see here is a draft written for The Routledge Companion to Classics & Cognitive Theory (P. Meineck & J. Devereaux, eds.). All suggestions for improvement are welcomed!
Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities, to be held 5-7 June ... more Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Futures in the Arts and Humanities, to be held 5-7 June 2017 at Stony Brook University
Stephen Turner (University of South Florida) Jacob Mackey (Queens College, CUNY) Georg Theiner & Nikolaus Fogle (Villanova University) Evelyn B. Tribble (Otago University) & John Sutton (Macquarie University)
“On the whole, what is familiar is precisely not understood because it is familiar” (Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit)
In his recent book "Becoming Human" Michael Tomasello delivers an updated version of his shared i... more In his recent book "Becoming Human" Michael Tomasello delivers an updated version of his shared intentionality (SI) account of uniquely human cognition. More so than in earlier writings, the author embraces the idea that SI shapes not just our social cognition but all domains of thought and emotion. In this critical essay, we center on three parts of his theory. The first is that children allegedly have to earn the status of "second persons" through the acquisition of collective intentionality at age 3. We make the case that humans take a second-personal stance toward others even as infants. The second point concerns Tomasello's claim that 3-year-olds are group-minded and think in terms of "us" vs. "them". We doubt both that children this young have a clear overview of their in-and out-groups and that they possess the "agonistic spirit" necessary for inter-group competition. Third, due to his focus on collective intentionality and how it might explain 3-year-olds' difficulties with theory of mind problems, Tomasello appears to pay less attention to the crucial conceptual change that allows 4-to 5-year-olds to master such tasks.
Ryan Nichols, Henrike Moll, and Jacob L. Mackey.
Review of Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive Gadgets: T... more Ryan Nichols, Henrike Moll, and Jacob L. Mackey. Review of Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets. Heyes’s point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character.
The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that exami... more The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Cognitive Theory is an interdisciplinary volume that examines the application of cognitive theory to the study of the classical world, across several interrelated areas including linguistics, literary theory, social practices, performance, artificial intelligence and archaeology. With contributions from a diverse group of international scholars working in this exciting new area, the volume explores the processes of the mind drawing from research in psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology, and interrogates the implications of these new approaches for the study of the ancient world.
Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.
This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.
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To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000105
History of Psychology, Vol 22(2), May 2019, 113-129
A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."
I submit that the orthopraxy of teleologically and causally opaque Roman cult is ideally suited to explanation by way of overimitation. In addition to explaining Roman orthopraxy, the findings on overimitation help explain the Roman penchant for multiple aetiologies. For the opaque yet clearly intentional actions of cult lacked not only intuitive rationale but also authoritative explanation. In these conditions, multiple aetiologies represented a cognitively autonomous search for explanations. Finally, overimitation helps explain the paradoxical ritual change to which Roman cult was subject. For overimitation preserved opaque ritual technologies for addition, amendment, and innovation in the face of new religious exigencies. Only in a system of faithfully preserved ritual is the accumulation of new ritual forms that build upon the old possible.
Finally, my cognitive study of Roman ritual allows me to offer a solution to a problem in overimitation studies. For the underlying motivation that drives overimitation is disputed. On the “causal” account, imitators encode opaque actions as non-obvious but causally indispensible components in an overall action sequence, so they imitate with precision. The “normative” account holds that imitators encode opaque actions as mandated by group norms, and thus imitate with high fidelity. The related “affiliative” account proposes that imitators copy with high fidelity in order to connect or affiliate with others or with a social group.
I attempt to reconcile these competing theories by suggesting that affiliation with others, which regularly includes endorsing a group’s norms, is often causal, but the causality is psychological and social rather than physical. Roman cult represents par excellence a context of interaction among individuals, divine and human, in which only conventional actions properly performed by properly affiliated agents are capable of causing the requisite psychological and social effects, such as placating a god or creating a priest, respectively. Thus, some overimitation results not from confusion about physical causality but from accurate social-cognitive intuitions and pragmatic competence with respect to psychological and social causality.
"Throughout Augustine’s Confessions Vergil’s Aeneid is quite noisily present. In this paper, I explore its moment of silence, particularly the moment of silence of Aeneid 6. I submit that at Confessions 9.10.24-25 – which describes an anabasis or ascent of the soul experienced by Augustine and his mother – Augustine frames his narrative on the
model of the catabasis of Aeneid 6. At the same time, he displaces and hence silences Aeneid 6 by substituting in place of Anchises’ cosmological, psychological, and eschatological first speech to his son (Aen. 6.724-51) direct quotation of a Neo-Platonic text, Plotinus’ Ennead 5.1.2 (On the Three Primary Hypostases).
Augustine’s quotation of Plotinus at the heart of his narrative of ascent constitutes a double gesture. First, the Plotinian text interprets the cosmology, psychology, and eschatology of Anchises’ speech, hence amplifying Vergil’s words even as it displaces them in order to disclose their true, Platonic meaning. Second, the Plotinian text that displaces the Vergilian text attempts, in turn, to displace itself with a call for the silencing
of all speech (Conf. 9.10.25, quoting Plotinus’ Enneads 5.1.2.14-17): “If...the tumult of the flesh should fall silent (sileat), silent (sileant) the phantoms of the earth, and of the waters and of the air, silent also the heavens, and if the soul itself should fall silent, and transcend itself by not thinking about itself; if dreams should fall silent, and imaginary revelations, every language and every sign (omnis lingua et omne signum)...”
In this silence, Augustine and Monnica hear their Heavenly Father speak without the mediation of earthly signs (si...audiamus verbum eius). The silent plenitude of his Word apprises them of the celestial Heldenshau, the nature of the “vita aeterna sanctorum.”
Thus does Augustine’s Confessions silence all the texts that it accumulates, or better, of which it, like Augustine’s life itself, is an accumulation: the Aeneid, from which he gained his love of language, Cicero and Plotinus, who inspired him to philosophical transcendence, and even scripture, our earthly proxy for the Word heard in its purity.
Augustine has inscribed his autobiography like a palimpsest over Plotinus’ text, with its doctrine of the soul’s transcendence of the sensible cosmos, while in the same gesture inscribing Plotinus’ text over Anchises’ philosophical speech in Aeneid 6. In placing the Aeneid’s catabasis at two removes and Plotinus’ anabasis at one remove from the silence of his own climactic ascent, Augustine attempts to kick away, as it were, the textual scaffolding that brought him to the summit, the words upon which he climbed to the Word. And yet his predicament – that he can only convey this silence in language – ensures that the stubborn structure beneath his work, and indeed his work itself, retain (to transfer a Miltonic phrase from one sensory domain to another) a 'silence audible'."
To quote or cite, please see to http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/hop0000105
History of Psychology, Vol 22(2), May 2019, 113-129
A common view among ancient historians about Roman attentiveness to children's psychological development needs reconsideration. The view holds that Romans ignored children's cognitive ontogeny, perceiving early childhood as a largely undifferentiated life stage. A separate but related issue is the problematic claim that Roman childhood was entirely a matter of social construction. I present evidence from over four hundred years of Roman writing to make three points against Roman neglect of children and radical social construction. First, a consensus (granted our limited number of sources) about "developmental psychology" prevailed from the late republic to late antiquity. Second, this consensus is consistent with modern findings and theories. In particular, the Roman material maps onto a developmental timeline featuring a "2-month revolution," when the infant engages in dyadic protoconversations with adults, and a "9-month revolution," when the infant shares attention triadically with adults toward third objects. In the Roman consensus, both dyadic protoconversations and triadic joint attention were central to cultural learning. Third, when the Roman consensus about children's minds did change, it was because of the Christian doctrine of original sin, according to which even newborns were psychologically corrupt. Nonetheless , I argue, this rupture in the Roman consensus does not entail that we should suppose childhood to have been entirely a social construction or merely a projection of a religious or other ideology. Rather, any construction of childhood-even the late-antique Christian one-will necessarily rest upon a foundation of, and thus be constrained by, certain inescapable biological and psychological "givens."
I submit that the orthopraxy of teleologically and causally opaque Roman cult is ideally suited to explanation by way of overimitation. In addition to explaining Roman orthopraxy, the findings on overimitation help explain the Roman penchant for multiple aetiologies. For the opaque yet clearly intentional actions of cult lacked not only intuitive rationale but also authoritative explanation. In these conditions, multiple aetiologies represented a cognitively autonomous search for explanations. Finally, overimitation helps explain the paradoxical ritual change to which Roman cult was subject. For overimitation preserved opaque ritual technologies for addition, amendment, and innovation in the face of new religious exigencies. Only in a system of faithfully preserved ritual is the accumulation of new ritual forms that build upon the old possible.
Finally, my cognitive study of Roman ritual allows me to offer a solution to a problem in overimitation studies. For the underlying motivation that drives overimitation is disputed. On the “causal” account, imitators encode opaque actions as non-obvious but causally indispensible components in an overall action sequence, so they imitate with precision. The “normative” account holds that imitators encode opaque actions as mandated by group norms, and thus imitate with high fidelity. The related “affiliative” account proposes that imitators copy with high fidelity in order to connect or affiliate with others or with a social group.
I attempt to reconcile these competing theories by suggesting that affiliation with others, which regularly includes endorsing a group’s norms, is often causal, but the causality is psychological and social rather than physical. Roman cult represents par excellence a context of interaction among individuals, divine and human, in which only conventional actions properly performed by properly affiliated agents are capable of causing the requisite psychological and social effects, such as placating a god or creating a priest, respectively. Thus, some overimitation results not from confusion about physical causality but from accurate social-cognitive intuitions and pragmatic competence with respect to psychological and social causality.
"Throughout Augustine’s Confessions Vergil’s Aeneid is quite noisily present. In this paper, I explore its moment of silence, particularly the moment of silence of Aeneid 6. I submit that at Confessions 9.10.24-25 – which describes an anabasis or ascent of the soul experienced by Augustine and his mother – Augustine frames his narrative on the
model of the catabasis of Aeneid 6. At the same time, he displaces and hence silences Aeneid 6 by substituting in place of Anchises’ cosmological, psychological, and eschatological first speech to his son (Aen. 6.724-51) direct quotation of a Neo-Platonic text, Plotinus’ Ennead 5.1.2 (On the Three Primary Hypostases).
Augustine’s quotation of Plotinus at the heart of his narrative of ascent constitutes a double gesture. First, the Plotinian text interprets the cosmology, psychology, and eschatology of Anchises’ speech, hence amplifying Vergil’s words even as it displaces them in order to disclose their true, Platonic meaning. Second, the Plotinian text that displaces the Vergilian text attempts, in turn, to displace itself with a call for the silencing
of all speech (Conf. 9.10.25, quoting Plotinus’ Enneads 5.1.2.14-17): “If...the tumult of the flesh should fall silent (sileat), silent (sileant) the phantoms of the earth, and of the waters and of the air, silent also the heavens, and if the soul itself should fall silent, and transcend itself by not thinking about itself; if dreams should fall silent, and imaginary revelations, every language and every sign (omnis lingua et omne signum)...”
In this silence, Augustine and Monnica hear their Heavenly Father speak without the mediation of earthly signs (si...audiamus verbum eius). The silent plenitude of his Word apprises them of the celestial Heldenshau, the nature of the “vita aeterna sanctorum.”
Thus does Augustine’s Confessions silence all the texts that it accumulates, or better, of which it, like Augustine’s life itself, is an accumulation: the Aeneid, from which he gained his love of language, Cicero and Plotinus, who inspired him to philosophical transcendence, and even scripture, our earthly proxy for the Word heard in its purity.
Augustine has inscribed his autobiography like a palimpsest over Plotinus’ text, with its doctrine of the soul’s transcendence of the sensible cosmos, while in the same gesture inscribing Plotinus’ text over Anchises’ philosophical speech in Aeneid 6. In placing the Aeneid’s catabasis at two removes and Plotinus’ anabasis at one remove from the silence of his own climactic ascent, Augustine attempts to kick away, as it were, the textual scaffolding that brought him to the summit, the words upon which he climbed to the Word. And yet his predicament – that he can only convey this silence in language – ensures that the stubborn structure beneath his work, and indeed his work itself, retain (to transfer a Miltonic phrase from one sensory domain to another) a 'silence audible'."
Some Romans—including the statesman, orator, and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero—resisted Caesar with the pen, not the sword. In works such as On the Republic, Cicero articulated and urged upon his fellow citizens the merits of republican government, its basis in popular sovereignty, and the moral and political virtues of the rule of laws not men. A group of republican conspirators seeking to restore the old order assassinated Caesar in 44 BCE. They were in turn destroyed by Caesar’s would-be heirs. Cicero himself was assassinated by the Caesarian faction for his political speech and activism.
Cicero's writings and their influence survived his assassination and have inspired opponents of tyranny and proponents of self-government for over 2000 years. In this course, we engage the legacy of Roman republicanism, and its historically unprecedented regime of rights, laws, and constitutional norms. We read foundational texts by Cicero, the Roman historian Livy, and others. We also read later authors who drew inspiration from them, such as Joseph Addison, whose 1713 play Cato George Washington staged for his troops in 1778 at Valley Forge, abolitionist writers like William Wells Brown, James Bell, and Frances Ellen Watkins, the feminist writer Abigail Adams, who argued against patriarchy in her letters to her husband John Adams, and John Adams himself (the “American Cicero”), whose 1787 work A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America drew on Cicero, Polybius, and other classical authors, and finally the Constitution itself—the oldest still-operating constitution in the world, and one that many perceive as now under threat.
We start with Nietzsche, whose stance of life-affirmation as an alternative to ressentiment and other life-denying emotions frames the course. We then explore, self-reflectively, the culture of the modern campus, in which we are all enmeshed. We look critically at cancel culture, safetyism, microaggressions, victimhood, and related phenomena, and the possible
roles these things play in the mental health crisis that plagues young people.
Through our Roman authors, we explore the nature of the emotions and techniques for not letting negative ones dominate you, human finitude and how embracing it can deepen our appreciation of life, social interactions and how to approach them so that we feel increased kinship with and compassion for others, instead of resentment and alienation, and, through
two “dramas of reconciliation,” the importance of forgiveness in personal and civic life.
The second part of the course explores Albert Murray’s theory of the African-American Blues tradition, particularly his thesis that the Blues idiom represented not “the anguished outcry of a victim” but both a “survival technique [and] esthetic equipment for living” and “an exercise in heroic action” through which Blues-oriented individuals made “an affirmative and hence exemplary and heroic response” to both the suffering particular to their historically conditioned forms of oppression as well as to the absurdity of the human condition in general. We also examine Murray’s and Frederick Douglass’s conception of American culture as “omni-American,” or inherently “composite,” Ralph Ellison’s theory of American democracy, and Zora Neale Hurston’s rejection of pity and affirmation of joy.
African American literature was born with the publication of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. The book evinces a deep knowledge of Latin and Latin literature, which it turns to its own emancipatory end. Indeed, Wheatley secured her freedom on the strength of the book.
Engagement with classical texts offered Wheatley and other African American writers of every era an opportunity to access, deploy, and transform a widely shared treasury of meanings, ideas, images, tropes, genres, and styles in order to create unique works of great artistic power, capable of opening up newly imagined ways of being for themselves and their readers. In addition to Wheatley, we shall explore some classical interactions of the poet Rita Dove and the fiction writer Ralph Ellison.
To experience the artistic power of these works as their authors intended, we must understand the aesthetic and literary contexts and tradition(s) in which they worked, for context and tradition are the foundation of a work’s meaning. To this end, we shall read alongside African American literary creations some of the Greek and Roman literary works to which they respond. For when we see clearly how a poem by, for example, Phillis Wheatley, responds to an ode by the Roman poet Horace—himself the son of a freedman—we grasp more fully the unique aesthetic, moral, and intellectual power of her poem. To see how Horace’s poetry could communicate to Wheatley is to see how Wheatley’s poetry can communicate its emancipatory power and promise to us in our own time.
I would not recommend doing the course as outlined on this syllabus. It was a whirlwind tour of cognitive theory and Roman culture, and we didn't really get a chance to dig deep into any of the cognitive science, or spend enough time seeing what the theories could contribute to our understanding of Roman culture.
If I do it again, I will focus on just two topics in cognitive science and do deep readings in Roman cultural materials in light of the cognitive science. For example, I might assign Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction and then spend half the semester reading Roman plays and, say, the Aeneid in light of its theory of cognitive narratology. Then in the second half of the semester we might read Norenzayan, et al. "Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions," and use it as a jumping off point to delve into both the theories upon which it is based (e.g., Boyer's MCI theory) and Roman materials relevant to religion.
I submit that the Roman institution of societas afforded Cicero a flexible model for thinking about social ontology in terms of shared mental capacities and shared attitudes, the various forms of social association created by such sharing, and their concomitant normative commitments and obligations. The distinctively Roman legal concept of societas structures his multi-layered social ontology. Every layer of his social ontology, that is, every societas in the nested set of societates that he identifies, is created by a different form of collective intentionality and entails a different deontology.
Speaker: Jacob L. Mackey, Queens College, CUNY
Date: Thursday, March 10, 2016, 4:30pm
Location: Rutgers Classics, Ruth Adams Building, Room 003 DC
131 George St., New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Web: http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cognitivefutures/CFP.html
Panel Participants:
Stephen Turner (University of South Florida)
Jacob Mackey (Queens College, CUNY)
Georg Theiner & Nikolaus Fogle (Villanova University)
Evelyn B. Tribble (Otago University) & John Sutton (Macquarie University)
“On the whole, what is familiar is precisely not understood because it is familiar” (Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit)
Review of Heyes, C. (2018). Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets. Heyes’s point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character.
Topics covered in this wide-ranging collection include: cognitive linguistics applied to Homeric and early Greek texts, Roman cultural semantics, linguistic embodiment in Latin literature, group identities in Greek lyric, cognitive dissonance in historiography, kinesthetic empathy in Sappho, artificial intelligence in Hesiod and Greek drama, the enactivism of Roman statues and memory and art in the Roman Empire.
This ground-breaking work is the first to organize the field, allowing both scholars and students access to the methodologies, bibliographies and techniques of the cognitive sciences and how they have been applied to classics.