Author: David Chart
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Foundations of Ethics
There’s an interesting article in this week’s Nature (well, strictly last week’s now, but still the most recent one I have here), on research into the neural basis of disgust, and its links to ethical judgements. (Nature 447 (2007), 768-771) It would seem that, when people judge things to be ethically disgusting, they are using…
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The Cults of the Roman Empire
The title of this book is a little misleading; there is almost no coverage of the state cults of the Roman empire, the cult of the emperor, or the indigenous cults of western Europe. The original French title (it’s a translation) referred to the “oriental cults”, which is more accurate, but still not completely so,…
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Author’s Vicissitudes
I had another big job to do to a very short deadline through the latter part of May and the beginning of June. I developed an outline, got it approved, and wrote 40,000 words, in four weeks. At the end of last week, I had an email discussion with the editor which went, paraphrased, like…
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Storage Space
Today, we rented some storage space. One disadvantage of flats is that they don’t have lofts or cellars that can be filled to bursting with junk, er, items of great sentimental value. Or, in my case, books. However, because there are a lot of flats around here, there are also a lot of companies that…
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The Satyricon
The Satyricon is another Roman novel, this one written in the first century, by Petronius, who was the emperor Nero’s arbiter of good taste. Which, to be honest, sounds like the ultimate nightmare job, and Petronius was forced to commit suicide in 66 AD. The Satyricon is not complete. We have maybe a fifth of…
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Perils of Japan
We had an earthquake about an hour ago. Level 3 on the Japanese scale, here, which means that the windows rattled quite decisively and a couple of books fell over, but no real damage. It was magnitude 4.6, according to the current reports, and the epicentre was quite some way north of here. There was…
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The Golden Ass
The Golden Ass is the only novel from classical antiquity to survive complete. It was written in the late second century by one Apuleius, and deals with the tragi-comic misadventures of a man who has been turned into a donkey as a result of a little too much interest in magic. It also includes the…
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Problems for Egalitarianism
Today, I read an article in an ethics journal (called Ethics, simply enough) that defended egalitarianism. This is the view that it is, in general, a good thing to make a society more equal. It’s quite a popular view; it gets defended a lot. I, however, find it very unpleasant; its defenses almost always feel…
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Signs of Progress
A couple of recent events that suggest my Japanese may be making progress. First, while we were on the Tohoku trip, a woman mistook me for a Japanese person. Admittedly, it was dark and I suspect her eyesight isn’t too good, but we did have a very brief conversation, and it was only a bit…