STILLPOINT Archive: last updated 11/22/2010
Graeme Bird, associate professor of linguistics and classics, examines early papyrus manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad in Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad: The Witness of the Ptolemaic Papyri (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2010). These manuscripts are the oldest surviving evidence of the text of the Iliad. This book shows how they present authentic variations on the Homeric text, based on the variability that is characteristic of oral performance.
Environmental Science: Toward a Sustainable Future, 11th edition (Addison-Wesley, 2010), focuses on three major themes—sound science, stewardship and sustainability. Written by Dick Wright, emeritus professor of biology, and Dorothy Boorse, associate professor of biology, it covers energy, loss of species, and population trends in which scientific literacy is a must to understand the world.
Gadamer’s Dialectical Hermeneutics (Lexington Books, 2009) contributes to the literature on the significance of Plato for Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Lauren Swayne Barthold, associate professor of philosophy, argues for a dialectic central to Gadamer’s hermeneutics—one recalling the Platonic separation between the transcendent and sensory realms. Barthold shows that Gadamer too insisted on the “in-between” nature of human understanding. We are finite beings always striving for infinity—that which lies beyond being.
