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This chapter argues that the Dialogue on the Life of St. John Chrysostom should be understood as a legal argument in defense of John composed in accordance with the principles of late antique judicial rhetoric found in the Art of Political Speech (Anonymous Seguerianus) and Art of Rhetoric, attributed to Apsines of Gadara. This chapter analyzes the Dialogue in terms of its four constitutive parts, namely, the introduction [proemion], narration [diegesis], argumentation [kataskeue or pistis], and conclusion [epilogos] and explains the purpose and historical value of each. This chapter reveals that Palladius used the dialogue form to mimic courtroom debate and that he subordinated all narrative elements to the argumentation. It is the argumentation that is at the very heart of the Dialogue, even though its significance has been ignored or even dismissed by most scholarship which has long viewed the dialogue as a historical or biographical narrative.

This chapter explores the relationship between Socrates and his predecessors, and gives a significant philosophical role to all the speeches of the dialogue. It argues that Socrates' speech is continuous with his predecessors, and completes and resolves some of the issues raised in the previous speeches. In this way, the previous speeches can be compared to Aristotelian endoxa. The contrast between Socrates and his predecessors also exemplifies the contrast between the two sorts of lovers described in the lower and higher mysteries of Socrates' speech. Reading the speeches in light of this contrast provides a further reason to think that the previous speeches are for the sake of our philosophical education, in much the same way as the lower mysteries were taught to Socrates for the sake of the higher. The philosophy of the Symposium, in other words, is extended throughout the dialogue and is not limited to Socrates'speech.

This essay takes a broad look at the concept and the exercise of authority in the Catholic tradition and then focuses on the process of decision making during the Council, leading to the Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) and to the Decree on bishops (Christus Dominus). While these documents mark a definitive shift to a more collegial and less monarchical structure of authority, the postconciliar implementation has been difficult and inconclusive. Fifty years after the Council the Church still does not have a system in place that fully honors episcopal collegiality. In his first statements and initiatives Pope Francis has shown his commitment to redressing an overly centralized mode of church governance and to creating more room for decision making on the level of national and regional conferences of bishops.

The concluding chapter addresses question of relationality in the context of Cunningham's relationship to Cage. Beginning with an analysis of Cage's Water Walk (1959) and the Zen Buddhist principles that inspired it, I offer a fresh account of the difference between Cage's and Cunningham's appropriations of Zen Buddhism through a close reading of Cunningham's unpublished lectures and workshop notes. Cunningham taught his students how to create encounters via the chance sequencing of movements, then asked them to explore how such encounters "affected" and "altered" the movements involved. Finally, I study the Dialogue, a genre that Cunningham and Cage performed together throughout their careers. Never seriously treated by scholars, the Dialogue offers an important example of how the two artists managed to theatricalize and queer their intimate relationship.

During the first decade of his career, Pushkin often represented poetic composition as a matter of craft and imitation rather than visionary inspiration. By addressing other writers, including prominent figures with whom he discussed the meaning of a poetic career, and by means of imaginary conversations with dead poets in which he debunked predecessors while imitating them, Pushkin subsumed numerous voices in his work. The result is that at times Pushkin cultivated an anonymous lyric, and intermittently wrote his poetic persona out of the centre of his creative text. The chapter addresses questions about Pushkin's view of originality and poetic identity. It argues that he read his predecessors with a sense of superiority free from anxiety about literary influence and informed by aspiration.

War memory, especially the one fought under the name of nation-states, serve to the foundation of national memory that binds a nation of people together. With this chapter's interlocutor, Buddhist phiilosopher Sueki Fumihiko, this chapter compares the commemoration of the two institutions—a museum affiliated with the Yasukuni Shinto shrine and a museum affiliated with the city of Hiroshima. Both extending and critiquing Sueki's argument, I contend that the Hiroshima commemoration, as opposed to that of Yasukuni, embodies a “dialogue with the dead”—not a monologue that glorifies death for the sake of affirming nationalistic sentiments, but rather a practice of interpretation of the bombing that crosses nation-state boundaries.

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes turned the conception of sovereignty toward the generality of lawgiving rather than the singularity of judgment, a displacement that paved the path for the transfer of sovereignty from king to Parliament. Hobbes’s conception of equity and critique of the common law played an important role in this alteration. The Act of Oblivion passed by Parliament after the Restoration, which Hobbes himself analyzed in his Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Lawes, provides a particularly striking example of how the change unfolded on a conceptual level; in this instance, something like the pardon, which represented the act of sovereignty most closely linked with the singularity of the monarch, was itself generalized and transferred to Parliament instead of being exercised exclusively by the king.

Strauss’s call for a return to the ancients was above all a call for return to the Socratics, most especially Plato. He came to a new way of reading and understanding Plato through his earlier studies of the Arabic philosopher Alfarabi. This chapter presents Strauss’s novel understanding of “Platonic political philosophy.” He wrote extensively but not exhaustively on Plato with studies of the Republic, Statesman, and Laws, Plato’s main political dialogues, as well as the Apology and Crito, the Euthydemus and the Euthyphro. The dominant understanding of the Platonic dialogues in the Western philosophical tradition emphasized the centrality of Plato’s doctrines—the theories of the “ideas” and the immortality of the soul. Strauss reads Plato entirely differently, emphasizing the dramatic and ad hominem character of much in the dialogues.

Thomas Hoccleve emerged in the 1380s and early 1390s as a public bureaucrat exposed to the literary oeuvres of both Chaucer and Gower as they composed their reengagements with and reinventions of prosimetrum. This spirit of revision of prosimetrum and protrepsis reaches its apogee in the late works of Hoccleve. His two poems, “The Complaint” and “The Dialogue”, are often read “straight” by critics, as a means through which Hoccleve desired to justify and vindicate his mental health before his peers and imagined detractors. This chapter suggests that together the two poems enact a literary meditation whose formal execution is anything but “straight.” Both these poems constitute a practice of mixed-form protreptic writing, and also engage literary theory in a supple and comical manner. The chapter then goes through the process of finding and expounding on the protreptic form that each poem seemingly possesses.

In this paper I investigate the influence of the Homeric Hymns on Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods with a particular focus on those dialogues which seem to be based on episodes or dialogues in the four longer Homeric Hymns. I argue that Lucian crafts a hybrid genre influenced by the Homeric Hymns and describe the process of his adaptation of original material through the techniques of ‘transposition’ and ‘literalization’. By identifying common themes and stylistic features between the Hymns and the Dialogues I suggest that Lucian parodies not only the gods themselves but also the praise rhetoric that is echoed in the major Homeric Hymns. Besides this obvious case of Gattungsmischung, Lucian’s engagement with the Hymns raises the intriguing question of how he perceived the generic affiliations of these Hymns and how he conveyed the incongruity of their representation of anthropomorphic, flawed gods.

This chapter discusses ownership, succession, bailment, and sale and grant. By the late twelfth century the distinction between movables and immovables, familiar in later English law, is clear. The Dialogue of the Exchequer says of the fugitive convicted ‘through the set law of the assize’ that ‘all his movables [mobilia] fall to the treasury, but immovables to his lords’. The movables here are the chattels [catalla] of the Pipe Rolls, as the Dialogue itself indicates. The distinction between movables and immovables was made partly under the influence of the learned laws, and Glanvill distinguishes res mobiles and res immobiles in his treatment of debt, where his language shows particular Roman influence. In the thirteenth century, chattels came to include other rights such as leases for terms of years, wardships, and control of marriages, what would come to be known as ‘chattels real’. This change leaves some marks on Bracton but not, it seems, on Glanvill.

Much of western philosophy, especially ancient Greek philosophy, addresses the problems posed by embodiment. This chapter argues that to grasp the early history of embodiment is to see the category of the body itself as historically emergent. Bruno Snell argued that Homer lacked a concept of the body (sōma), but it is the emergence of body in the fifth century BCE rather than the appearance of mind or soul that is most consequential for the shape of ancient dualisms. The body takes shape in Hippocratic medical writing as largely hidden and unconscious interior space governed by impersonal forces. But Plato’s corpus demonstrates that while Plato’s reputation as a somatophobe is well grounded and may arise in part from the way the body takes shape in medical and other physiological writing, the Dialogues represent a more complex position on the relationship between body and soul than Plato’s reputation suggests.

This chapter focuses on William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat and William Bullein’s Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence, arguing that their glossing reflects both the contemporary controversy over the translation, printing, and glossing of the Bible, and a wider curiosity about the impact of print on what a text means. It shows that, although both works reflect Protestant insistence on the plain word of God as sole spiritual authority, their glosses do not simply underwrite the Reformist message of their works, but instead call into question the assumption that the printed word has an authority distinct from that of its contents. Provoking their readers into independent interpretation, they bear witness to the development of diverting glossing as an identifiable genre, characterized by studied unpredictability and play.

The English crown's predominant interest in shrieval accountability as seen through an Exchequer optic prevented it from properly gauging the seriousness of other aspects of sheriffs' conduct. Before Edward I, this mentality of accountability precluded the fuller development of counterbalancing views, except when the crown was under duress from barons and knights. The basic liability of the sheriff to both county and Exchequer guaranteed that this would be problematic. The ways in which the crown did and did not stress sheriffs' accountability contributed in basic ways to the period's civil wars. Attention is given to Richard of Ely's distinctively 'utilitarian' account of shrieval accountability in his Dialogue of the Exchequer. The analysis also looks at how counties sought accountability from sheriffs at eyres and special inquests and makes numerous comparisons with the different dynamics operative in France and elsewhere in order to explain why shrieval accountability was pressurized in the way that it was in England.

This chapter delves behind the literary figure of Sagredo created by Galileo as an interlocutor in his two final masterpieces, the Dialogo (1632) and Discorsi (1638), to explore the historical reality visible through traces in archives and museums. Although most of the correspondence between Galileo and Sagredo is lost, three portraits of Sagredo by Leandro and Gerolamo Bassano, and much personal and official archival material has here been located. One of these portraits, now in the Ashmolean Museum, is particularly rich iconographically, featuring the Pharos of Alexandria, a Persian kilim presented to Sagredo by Shah Abbas, and a Venetian commissione dogale. These discoveries, it is argued, are important as much for their testimony of the dissolution of a historical persona as their ability to reconstruct a faded aura.

This chapter looks back over the previous seven chapters, drawing together a synoptic account of the nature and significance of Heywood’s distinct and coherent body of dramatic compositions. It argues for the formal innovation of the Heywoodian interlude, which draws its inspiration equally from the humanist dialogue, the Erasmian colloquy, Chaucerian satire, and farce, creating in the process a form like no drama before or since. It offers a nuanced account of the cultural work to which Heywood put these plays in troubled times, suggesting that they allowed him, in the spirit of the classical satirist Lucian, to talk about a number of otherwise taboo subjects before audiences in the royal court, the More–Rastell family circle, and the Inns of Court, who would otherwise not have had the licence to acknowledge the novelty, internal contradictions, and frequent absurdities of developments in Church and State.

In 1956, W. S. Graham moved to the St Ives area of Cornwall where he would spend the remaining years of his life. This was where he had made contact with several artists connected to the St Ives school, including Bryan Wynter, Ben Nicholson, Sven Berlin, Roger Hilton, John Minton, and Peter Lanyon. Critics such as Tony Lopez and Neil Corcoran have suggested that Graham's poetry after his move back to Cornwall reflects the interests of modernist painting in St Ives. This chapter examines Graham's relations with the St Ives painters, notably Hilton, Lanyon, and Wynter. It then considers the impact on Graham of his decision to live permanently in Cornwall from 1954 onwards and the influential presence of his artist friends on two of his poems: ‘The Dark Dialogues’ (1958) and ‘Malcom Mooney's Land’ (1966).

Ørsted's lifelong dedication to working out aesthetics of nature is resumed. Ørsted is convinced that the correspondence between laws of nature and aesthetical enjoyment endows the arts with a dimension of objectivity. This conviction was already confirmed by the sonorous figures, and is now amplified by geometrical rules in general and by symmetry in particular. Examples of symmetrical patterns are worked out by Ørsted and Andersen. Ørsted's dialogue ‘The Fountain’ and his circle of colours are further examples. The beauty/ ugliness of certain animals and plants, and the close relationship between Ørsted's aesthetical ideas and a selection of Andersen's fairy tales are discussed. Erik Paulsen's painting of the Sarps Force is used to illuminate Ørsted's view of natura naturans.—The cooperation between Eckersberg and Ørsted to teach natural philosophy to young artists. Ørsted's 17 lectures on the aesthetics of nature are introduced.