‘Oral law’ and the Emergence of Written Legislation in Archaic and Classical Greece

This thesis aims to understand the social structures and normative language that underpinned the concept of law in the Greek poleis of the 7th and 8th centuries BCE, and the ways their legal cultures evolved as they began to produce written legislation. It will begin by identifying the social structures recognised in the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, and the areas of dispute that appear to have triggered formal resolution processes, and use these to examine the mechanisms for regulating issues of violence, sexual access, property and inheritance before written law, and consider the concerns that may have driven poleis to seek new solutions to social problems. Since law is as much a phenomenon of language as of behaviour, it will then proceed to analyse the syntactical structures and diction for articulating norms in the oaths and gnōmai of Homeric and Hesiodic verse and will show that the capacity to produce complex, prescriptive, structured rules which expressed the consequences of actions was already in use in Hesiodic collections of normative principles and Homeric promissory oaths. It will also seek to compare these features with societies in the Near East which suggest that the Greeks’ normative culture did not develop in isolation but was also likely to have engaged with the customs and legal systems of their neighbours. This will then inform a comparison of the syntax and beliefs evident in written laws with the use of similar structures in our earliest poetic sources. It will argue that laws drew on key sources of cultural authority through their sense of both divine and community justice, while the language of written laws made use of existing diction for expressing consequences of actions and constructing formalised procedures. Finally it will examine how written laws became embedded in the polis’ wider normative culture, the changes they brought about and the ways they used or left space for existing legal behaviours. It will argue that the links between legal text and ‘oral law’ were a fundamental part of this evolution, using similar language and methods of dispute resolution to the areas of conflict identified earlier, and even using oral means of communication to be more widely propagated and understood. However, it will also consider the ways that written law changed the relationship between the citizens of Greek poleis and their laws, through their monumental presence and distinctive organisation. It will argue that, while the language for articulating law was rooted in earlier normative diction, the act of writing such rules down could have functioned as a means to channel the process of adjudication and maintain its consistency. It will also examine the cultural impact of written law as it changed the Greeks’ understanding of how rules could be created, with traditions of stories growing up around written law, and examples of laws being used alongside other norms both as sources of evidence, but also as a kind of moral education in philosophical and forensic discourse

Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue

In Enthymemes and Topoi in Dialogue, Ellen Breitholtz presents a novel and precise account of reasoning from an interactional perspective. The account draws on the concepts of enthymemes and topoi, originating in Aristotelian rhetoric and dialectic, and integrates these in a formal dialogue semantic account using TTR, a type theory with records. Argumentation analysis and formal approaches to reasoning often focus the logical validity of arguments on inferences made in discourse from a god’s-eye perspective. In contrast, Breitholtz’s account emphasises the individual perspectives of interlocutors and the function and acceptability of their reasoning in context. This provides an analysis of interactions where interlocutors have access to different topoi and therefore make different inferences. Readership: All interested in the pragmatics-rhetoric interface and in theories of meaning and coherence in dialogue and discourse

Aesthetic antirealism

A puzzle is generated by two intuitions about artworks: 1. There is no prima facie reason to take artworks to be mind-independent objects; 2. Aesthetic judgments are objective. These intuitions seem to be in tension, for if artworks or their aesthetic properties are mind-dependent, how can aesthetic judgments be objective? The common solution to the puzzle lies in rejecting or revising one of the two intuitions. Typically, realists reject 1, and many antirealists reject 2. I develop an antirealist aesthetic theory that accommodates both intuitions, focusing on critical disagreement between epistemically optimal judges, realist difficulties with supervenience and response-dependence, the role of imagination in the experience of artworks, and the metaphorical quality of aesthetic discourse. The hallmark of realism, namely the mind-independence of aesthetic qualities, is an untenable commitment that yields an impoverished view of artworks. A cognitivist anti-realism is available which preserves the objectivity of aesthetic discourse and yields a richer conception of artworks and our interaction with them