Leviticus 5 prescribes a trespass offering for various sins in which a person violates God’s holy things or His holy name. But then there is also a requirement of a trespass offering when someone steals from a fellow Israelite. Many follow Jacob Milgrom in claiming that there is a violation . . . . Continue Reading »
Plato excludes poets, yet he is a poet. It’s an old problem. Schindler ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 304ff) argues that it’s a mistake to see it as a contradiction. Rather, there is an ambivalence (two-sidedness) to Plato’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Analyzing Plato’s critique of poetry, Schindler ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 295) notes that the critique in the last book of the Republic is “not in the first place a moral one . . . but primarily ontological.” Schindler . . . . Continue Reading »
Skepticism is, DC Schindler argues, self-refuting ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic ). Pointing that out, though, doesn’t convince the skeptic, who is not so much a hater of reason but someone who “has simply grown numb to the claims of . . . . Continue Reading »
In his contribution to Perspectives on Purity and Purification in the Bible , Roy Gane examines the anomaly of the concluding purification rite performed by a Nazirite at the completion of his vow. Why would purification be needed? Some have suggested that the purification ( hatt’at ) . . . . Continue Reading »
According to D.C. Schindler’s account ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 42-3), Plato is not an idealist searching for a “pure” starting point. On the contrary, he knows that the search for such a standpoint is chimerical. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Sheehan ends his Representations (2009) by noting the cost of privatizing sacrifice, and with it religion: “The modern ethic of sacrifice denuded of utility, unhinged from exchange and divorced from law, bears virtually no resemblance to its early modern incarnations. Now sacrifice stands . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Discourses on Livy , Machiavelli pointed to the place of sacrifice in the establishment of Roman order. Sheehan ( Representations , 2009) summarizes the argument: “The Samnites knew that ‘it was necessary to induce obstinacy in the spirits of the soldiers, and that to induce it . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2009 article on “sacrifice before the secular” in Representations , Jonathan Sheehan summarizes Wellhausen’s account of the history of sacrifice. In its original forms, sacrifice was both spiritual and secular, a seamless union of “spiritual solemnity and secular . . . . Continue Reading »
Pat Rogers reviews what sounds like a fascinating new study, Wolfram Schmidgen’s Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England . In Schmidgen’s view “mixture is at the heart of everything, a constitutive part of meaning in all cultural activity. Far from . . . . Continue Reading »
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