Using several examples, I discuss the features of Byzantine icons as a form of representational art. In addition to tensions which can occur within the image itself, I point out tensions between the expression of a glory which surpasses the limitations of the aesthetics alone (through the use of gold, perspective, and the mandorla) as well as an impoverishment which falls well beneath what images are capable of (the submission of the painting to prescribed word, in content, style, and name). This paradoxical inclusion of highs and lows, straining against the limits of representation on both sides, hints that the icon is aiming to express a meaning greater than the image alone.

This chapter picks up on the puzzle raised in the previous chapter and attempts in detail to vindicate the unity of the dialogue as a Platonic vehicle for critical engagment by the reader. Focussing on the Charmides section, it lays out and discusses a series of key themes and contrasts which, it is argued, both prepare the reader for Socrates’ discussion with Critias to come and are illuminated on subsequent reading by that discussion. It argues that the way these themes and contrasts are presented is designed to induce readers into occupying a stance of enquiry that orients us towards critical engagement with the Critias section. The chapter ends with an analysis of how the final section of the dialogue, in which Charmides reappears, plays a role in sustaining this critical stance on the reader’s part.

Story of escaping the Holocaust and concentration camps. Becoming refugees. Lessons of adaptation. As we age, change is inevitable. Those who are successful are willing to make the necessary alterations to their current lifestyle. It’s all about adaptability. Two types of people as they age: Denialists and Realists. Anticipating and planning adjustments to your everyday way of doing things can make a tremendous difference in well-being. Ultimately, happiness comes from the inside, not the outside. It is understanding that each of us is a precious human life. If we can learn to adapt as we grow old, and be grateful, it allows us to find a new fullness of joy.

The history of the English Dominicans has been too little studied, in part because much documentary evidence has been lost. The present book is the first comprehensive history of the Province for a century. Its value lies not only in covering developments that have taken place since 1921, and in drawing on recent research for its account of earlier periods, but in offering a critical re-evaluation of the evidence from a fresh perspective. The book adopts an inclusive approach where earlier studies were often weakened through being limited to a particular region or individual, or by focussing more on the earliest growth of the Province than on later developments, by inattention to opponents of the friars, or by neglect of their relations to lay supporters.

This paper offers a provocative re-reading of the passage about the sizes of the sun, moon, and stars late in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (5.564-613). Attention to not only details of argumentation but also shades of meaning and contorted syntax shows a more complex, ambiguous presentation than generally acknowledged. This paper suggests that Lucretius' narrator—rather than merely parroting wrong, ridiculed doctrines—pulls student-readers into the process of inquiry. It becomes the didactic audience’s task to receive data from sense-perception and use lessons learned earlier in the poem in making correct judgments based upon that data. In Epicurean and Lucretian accounts of reality, the senses themselves are infallible; so the Lucretius-ego’s assertion that the sun as big as perceived by our senses must also be infallible. But our interpretation of what that assertion entails about the sun’s actual size is a matter of judgment, and thus fallible and uncertain indeed.

This chapter continues the discussion of Second Style paintings, concentrating on prominent examples at Pompeii and in Rome on the Palatine Hill. Paintings from the ‘House of Augustus’ and the adjacent House of Livia are examined and analysed in detail. The focus is upon examples of theatricalism and more overt theatricality evident in such works. Particular attention is drawn to stage-like structures and the suggestion of scenic facades (including depictions of townscapes) which feature prominently in several of the frescoes. There is also a close analysis of the systems of perspectival depiction deployed in these works.

In Chapter 3, Herbert’s verse is read in the context of another collaborative enterprise, the Stuart court masque. These playful and extravagant secular entertainments are an unusual context against which to set Herbert’s often modest devotional poetic, though Herbert can hardly have been ignorant of the genre: members of Herbert’s family – including the Earls of Pembroke, their wives and children, and Herbert’s own brother Sir Henry Herbert (c.1594–1673), sometime Master of the Revels – were involved in their performance and production. This chapter offers the court masque as a particularly vivid contemporary genre that engages with the possibilities of interdisciplinary expression. These entertainments alert us not only to the interplay between words and music, but also to the ways in which musical ideas of harmonious proportion might be expressed visually through the stage’s elaborate perspectival sets, and through the moving human medium of dance.

We examine a previously undiscussed interaction between tense and predicates of personal taste (PPTs). While disagreements involving delicious or fun are generally considered faultless – they have no clear fact of the matter – we observe that, in joint oral narratives, this faultlessness varies with tense: if the narrative is told in the historical present, disagreements involving a PPT are not faultless. Drawing on narrative research in psychology and discourse analysis, we propose that this contrast reflects a pragmatic convention of the narrative genre that participants construct a consensus version of what happened from a unitary perspective. To link this pragmatics with the semantics, we adopt a bicontextual semantics, where the perspectival parameters for both PPTs and tense are located in a context of assessment (and not context of utterance). We show that when these contextual parameters are constrained by the unitary perspective of narratives, the present tense leads to nonfaultless disagreements, as its semantics tightly binds the temporal location of an event to the parameter relevant for appraisal. The past tense, by contrast, enables both faultless and nonfaultless disagreements. We derive this flexibility by revising the existing semantics for past tense, engendering a new perspective on crosslinguistic variation in tense usage.

This chapter defines the gaze of modernity, a way of seeing and understanding the world that began during the Renaissance and continued during the Cold War in Latin America. It presents three key moments in the development of this gaze: Brunelleschi's invention of perspectiva artificialis in the 1400s, and its multifaceted consequences in the arts and sciences. Bentham's notion of panopticon in 1787, and its connection to the concept of surveillance. Robert Barker's creation also in 1787, the panorama. Finally, the chapter examines the relevance of the archive in theoretical terms, highlighting the connections to the panopticon and panorama, and discussing some of the archive's fundamental contradictions.

Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, wrote of the importance of what he called practical wisdom (phronesis) as a key guide to human action. Practical wisdom is the will to do the right thing in a given situation, and the skill to figure out what the right thing is. This chapter discusses what practical wisdom is, and illustrates why it is needed for successful practice in almost all professions. Will is essential because it keeps professionals on track to pursue the proper aims of a profession (eg., healing the sick and easing suffering, in medicine), and skill is important because every situation is different and professionals need empathy, improvisation, good listening, imagination, and perspective taking to find the actions that each situation requires.

In medicine, the goals are different based on the individual group; thus, establishing the vision and goals for your group is essential, so that they know the scope, steps, and potential obstacles. All too often, teams are left to make assumptions as to what the goals are; this leads to uncertainty, questioning, and a lack of faith or trust in you as a leader. Setting the goals, and reminding people of them periodically, will help keep your group oriented and focused. This chapter focuses on how to assemble a well-running team, whether you need to get to know who is on it already or if you’re assembling it from scratch. It dives into how to gain a better understanding of your team members, what motivates them, and their potential strengths and weaknesses. It also goes into how to identify the personality traits that may make them a more or less effective team member. We describe the great importance of diversity for your team, as it is a key source for innovation, creativity, and perspective. It discusses the importance of midlevel leadership and when it is necessary. Mentorship is discussed in detail, as a key component to the development of your group members. Principles of recruiting and retaining good group members are reviewed, as well as operating principles for your team.

Why would a fourth-century BC Atomist – Anaxarchus – express his scepticism about knowing the truth of things by imaging these as scene-painting? The comparison seems already to have been made by Democritus and Anaxagoras, who according to Vitruvius had been impressed by something an Athenian painter named Agatharchus had written on perspective. This chapter offers a detailed scrutiny of a range of texts that have a bearing on the interpretation of Vitruvius’ claim. It argues that Agatharchus was probably author of a pioneering treatise on stage-building, which included a section on scene-painting lauding its power to create the illusion of a whole three-dimensional world. Anaxagoras will have taken this claim as cue for his dictum: ‘Appearances are a sight of things unseen’ – in the sense that there is no break between the macroscopic world of ordinary observation and the microscopic world which explains it. The Atomist Democritus will no doubt have imparted a quite different spin to Anaxagoras’ slogan in praising it. But it is unlikely that either Presocratic was prompted to a mathematical interest in perspective by reading Agatharchus. It is only with the Hellenistic philosophers, and especially Epicurus, that optics begins to leave its trace on general epistemology.

Who is telling the story and how are they telling it? The difference between the author and the narrator. Respective advantages and disadvantages of first- and third-person narrative voices. Varieties of first-person narrative. Unreliable narrators. Varieties of third-person narrative. Multiple narrative viewpoints. Direct address to the reader. ‘Other world’ narrative voices.

‘Most stories pivot on the question of which character knows what and – crucially – what your reader knows and when you let them know it. The choice of narrative voice and point of view defines how much the reader can know.’

This paper offers a provocative re-reading of the passage about the sizes of the sun, moon, and stars late in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (5.564-613). Attention to not only details of argumentation but also shades of meaning and contorted syntax shows a more complex, ambiguous presentation than generally acknowledged. This paper suggests that Lucretius' narrator—rather than merely parroting wrong, ridiculed doctrines—pulls student-readers into the process of inquiry. It becomes the didactic audience’s task to receive data from sense-perception and use lessons learned earlier in the poem in making correct judgments based upon that data. In Epicurean and Lucretian accounts of reality, the senses themselves are infallible; so the Lucretius-ego’s assertion that the sun as big as perceived by our senses must also be infallible. But our interpretation of what that assertion entails about the sun’s actual size is a matter of judgment, and thus fallible and uncertain indeed.

This chapter shows that the management of perspective in narrative fiction is a matter of technique at the level of the sentence, involving diction, syntax and punctuation. Ruth Bernard Yeazell distinguishes different varieties of perspective available in fiction (third person, first person, free indirect style) and shows how they work in practice. Her suggestion that the familiar but misleading concept of the ‘omniscient narrator’ emerges from ‘confusing the power theoretically open to novelists from the actual behavior of novelists’ indicates the benefits of attending to examples of prose in practice.

Roslyn Jolly’s chapter discusses the particular burden carried by the prose of the travel writer. Travel writing faces such potentially opposing tasks as to render a foreign scene strange and exotic while bestowing it with an air of authenticity and verisimilitude, and in doing so makes it appeal to the senses and exercises telling control or choice of narrative perspective. These various pressures and strategies appear fairly consistently throughout the long history of travel writing, which takes in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell and Jonathan Raban. They also cross into prose fiction, where it is influenced by the travel memoir or tourist guide.

What are the different ways in which we compare? Or to rephrase the query more precisely: What are the different ways in which we ordinarily use the word “compare”? This chapter distinguishes two ways of comparing, two uses of the word “compare,” to bring into clearer view a way of comparing that, despite being common to political science, often goes unnoticed. What are the two ways to compare? To compare juxtapositionally is to place similar kinds of things side by side to catalog their similarities and differences. To compare perspectivally is to draw an analogy between different kinds of things as a way to establish a vantage point from which to view one thing in terms of the other. Political science scholars who write about comparing usually focus their attention on comparing juxtapositinally – how to describe (and explain) patterns of similarity and difference across like kinds of things, events, processes, meanings, and so on. Yet political scientists routinely compare perspectivally as well. However, perspectival comparison has been the subject of far less methodological reflection in political science than has its juxtapositional cousin. By drawing attention to perspectival comparison, this chapter provides a set of starting points that political scientists may use to think more clearly about something that they would otherwise do unreflectively.

This chapter further examines the ambivalent position that wonder occupies in Athenian culture in the late fifth and early fourth century BCE. It explores the place of wonder in Plato’s dialogues and offers a new reading of the Republic’s famous Cave Allegory through the specific lens of wonder to open up new perspectives on both the dialogue itself and on Plato’s broader conception of what philosophy is and what it does. Moreover, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the evidence for thaumatopoiia/thaumatourgia (marvel-making/wonder-working), a form of Greek performance tradition, and examines the uses of marvel-making in Xenophon’s Symposium to examine more fully the relationship between wonder and philosophy in this period.