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Although Shan Tao, Ruan Ji, Xiang Xiu, Liu Ling, Ji Kang, Ruan Xian, and Wang Rong were historical figures, their identity as a group of like-minded iconoclasts who flouted Confucian ideology and norms of behavior has been questioned in modern scholarship. Even their epithet Zhulin qixian (The Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove), as some scholars argued, was retrospectively coined. This chapter argues that not only were the Seven Worthies historical figures in the third century, but they were also famously known by their epithet in their own time. Further, the political significance of their domicile in Shanyang District is explained. Yet the Seven Worthies were not a homogenous group because their political aspirations and philosophical inclinations were quite diverse and dissimilar, as the analysis of the philosophical thinking of Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, and Xiang Xiu in this chapter demonstrates.

True creativity sits in stark contrast with global trends to standardise education systems. It is, though, an attractive semantic and conjures up all sorts of positives. However none of the positive potentials of the creativity push are likely to materialise while process-oriented bureaucratic understandings of creativity dominate curriculum policy and development. Creativity requires pedagogy to forego substantial levels of control. It also requires ethical content because “creative” is an empty epithet, applying equally to the creation of beautiful music as it does to the creation of a nuclear weapon. In responding to Kapitzke and Hay, this chapter outlines the stark contradictions embedded in the creativity push.

‘Biotherapy’ is as old as the hills, in that man has learnt, over the millennia, mostly by trial and error, what the natural world around him has to offer, to alleviate or enhance his condition. By interacting with things, working with them, eating them, or rubbing them on, certain effects will follow, sometimes with dramatic results, including of course, death. As scientists, we divide the natural living world, somewhat arbitrarily, into the plant and animal kingdoms, but these have a massively ‘fuzzy’ interface. The biological world is diverse, complex, sophisticated and mysterious, changing inexorably over time, so that, whatever we might study or utilise, it is the end result of literally millions, even billions, of years of natural ‘research and development’. The ‘Bio’- epithet thus is open to a wide range of connotations. A glance at the World Wide Web confirms this diversity of use.

It has become common to use “positivist” and “positivism” as words of opprobrium. Positivists are rigid, unimaginative, committed to an unrealistic separation of fact and value. So understood, the epithet may fit some scientists, both past and present. And one might justly think of positivism’s legacy as a bad philosophical hangover. But this understanding mischaracterizes the original positivists. First I sketch what the original positivists were about and indicate both strengths and shortcomings of the views they advocated. Then, I suggest an alternative approach to thinking about the nature of knowledge in science that retains some of positivism’s original aspirations without the overreach that was its downfall.

“Hills rose around us on every side, and, for that country, the scene was picturesque, but all waste and silent. The stillness of the grave rested upon the ruins, and the little notes of a flycatcher were the only sounds we heard” (Stephens 1843, p. 113). So wrote the American explorer John L. Stephens of his visit to the ruins of Xculoc, Campeche, Mexico in 1842. Through the works of Stephens, Waldeck, Maler, Maudsley, and other nineteenth century adventurers and scholars the ruins of ancient Maya Civilization were brought to the attention of the outside world (Wauchope 1965). It is perhaps these glimpses of forest-draped ruins that gave rise to the over-used epithet ‘the mysterious Maya’. While such scenes of ancient cities moldering in the forest still exist in parts of the Maya Lowlands (Fig. 23.1), rapid repopulation and deforestation is transforming forest to fields and pastures and laying bare the relicts of the ancient Maya and a once densely populated landscape. This is not the first time that the Maya forest has been in retreat. In its multifarious forms, the forest has waxed and waned many times over the past several millennia, largely at the hands of the ancient Maya, though climate changes may also have contributed to changes in vegetative cover. In this light, the Maya are hardly mysterious. Over the centuries, like people everywhere they strove to wrest a living from their environment, adapted often with great success to the rhythms of the region’s tropical wet-dry climate, and sometimes failed—episodes that were marked by human population decline and forest resurgence.

While studying the Homeric text, is noted an enigmatic epithet given to Minos called "Eneoros" (Od. 19.178-179) with the oldest and general meaning of hour as a time period, re- peating itself based on the number nine (9). The above epithet is possibly related with the Minoan Calendrical Abacus which is based in the number 9 (9 days a "week", 4×9 = 36 days a month ×10 months = 360 days a year + 5.25 epagomenal). This Abacus is kept today in the Herakleon Mu- seum in Crete and it is the oldest calendar working even today. All the Ancient Calendars co-align themselves every 9 years as it is proved by the following study.

Book 1, part 4, Section 5 of David Hume’s Treatise of human nature attacks the belief in an immaterial soul.1 (It also attacks the belief in a material soul, though that further project is not advertised in the title Hume chose to give to the section, and appears to have been largely incidental to his main purpose.) In the process, it considers and challenges what Hume described as a ‘remarkable’ argument for the immateriality of the soul. This ‘remarkable’ argument has some affinity with an argument that was given by predecessors, such as Ralph Cudworth, Pierre Bayle, and Samuel Clarke; contemporaries such as Etienne de Condillac; and later contemporaries, such as Moses Mendelssohn. It was subsequently described by Immanuel Kant as the ‘Achilles’ of all the purely a priori arguments concerning the soul, an epithet Kant applied because, like the legendary Greek warrior, the argument appears to withstand all opposition.2 (I borrow that name for the argument here.)

It has become classical to oppose two conceptions of health, in relation to two types of medical practices, or even two approaches to the human body. Simplifying, I shall call the first conception objectivist and the second one naturalist,2 epithets that will become clear later. The different terms available in English to designate a state of unhealth allow me to give a hint at this distinction. The English language has three different terms whose meanings are quite distinct and which can be contrasted with the poverty of French’s single term maladie.3 In English, disease refers to the malady as it is apprehended by medicine; illness signifies the malady as experienced by the patient; sickness suggests a state of malaise rather than of malady or, more precisely, a social representation of the malady, if one follows Jean Benoist’s analysis of the American contributions to the anthropology of health and disease.4

Meaning, Habermas warns us, should not be allowed to consume validity. For once we let meaning exhaust validity, the further exhaustion of the project of modernity and the loss of its normative content are bound to follow, as becomes clear from the writings of those Habermas calls “the theorists of the counter-enlightment”, — an epithet wide enough to include authors as diverse as Heidegger, Nietzsche and Foucault. One way or another these philosophers are all undoing the intrinsic connection between meaning and validity and, we are told, the political mesalliance of some of them only goes to show how catastrophic indeed the replacement of critical theory’s commitment to “the philosophical discourse of modernity” by some blend of post-modernism and post-structuralism is bound to be. For, according to Habermas, only a theory that respects the internal relation between meaning and validity, without at the same time eliminating the difference between the two, only such a theory can be entrusted with the delicate task of defending the legacy of modernity, whilst retaining a critical perspective on the way it is materialized in society. And Habermas is sufficiently confident in the results of his Theory of Communicative Action to claim the title for his own theory and to counterpose it to a host of other attempts which are, successively, shown to be mistaken or to have missed the opportunity of taking “the alternative paths” (PDM 295) implicit in their own problematics.

We are engaged in an inquiry in the history of philosophy. Specifically, we are inquiring into the historical origins of the New Theory of Reference. Relevant to this inquiry are arguments about the meaning of texts by Marcus, Kripke and others. I do not believe it is relevant or helpful to adopt the sort of language that Soames uses in his reply, when he sees fit to call my work “careless, incompetent, grotesquely inaccurate, shameful, scandalous, and irresponsible”. Philosophical disagreements are not solved by the disputants labelling each other’s work with a variety of negative and emotive epithets; they are solved by presenting sound arguments, and I shall confine myself to presenting arguments in my reply to Soames.

After a tranquil and prosperous reign [Emperor Constantine I] bequeathed to his family the inheritance of the Roman empire; a new capital, a new policy, and a new religion…. At the festival of the dedication [of the new capital], an edict, engraved on a column of marble, bestowed the title of SECOND or NEW ROME on the city of Constantine. But the name of Constantinople has prevailed over that honorable epithet, and after the revolution of fourteen centuries still perpetuates the fame of its author. —Edward Gibbon, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire

At the end of its first chapter, the Final Report of UNISIST, three years ago, defined the “ultimate target” of this new international system as follows: “to find new means for reducing the irrationalities and injustice which vitiate the processing of scientific information throughout the world.”1 “Irrational”, “injust” — such deprecatory epithets would appear rather severe in the eyes of many experts, whose natural bent of character is an indomitable optimism. Some other people, inclined to consider contemporary events with that dispassionate, cold (their adversaries would say “cynical”) outlook which Machiavelli used for describing the beginnings of our modern civilization, would uphold the opinion that irrationality and injustice are essential, intrinsic characteristics of present societies (the most pessimistic, or most lucid, among them would add “of all societies”), and that the activities of international organizations like Unesco are no more than an alibi with which the Great Powers (or Superpowers) cover their attempt to control social evolution with a view to achieving their own, selfish (or even imperialistic) interests.

It cannot be denied that in this age of uncertainty anyone who organises a meeting between the research world and that of day-to-day politics — the latter being a particularly precarious sphere — is demonstrating considerable courage. If they then attach the epithet ‘World Conference’ to it they might even be accused of being audacious.

The reign of Louis XIV is well known as an era of contrasts. The monarch called himself the “Sun-King”, and his support of Moliere, Racine, Lully, and others continued the cultural flowering that earned for the seventeenth century the epithet “le grand siecle”. But Louis’s war policy damaged the finances of the kingdom and the French statist economy never equaled either its English or Dutch competitors. In one respect, however, the French kingdom admitted no rivals. In a time when wealth was measured by manpower, France had the largest population in Europe. His twenty million subjects made Louis the wealthiest ruler on the continent. Even this resource was jeopardized by inequitable taxation, inefficient agriculture, and an unusually inclement climate. The majority of French were peasants whose poverty rivaled that of the urban poor, and whose condition deteriorated during the reign.

While Tom Brown would not, Oliver Twist certainly would have been surprised to learn he attended a type of boarding school; Holden Caulfield not only knew it but loathed it and ran away. All three fictional characters lived in the special subdivision of the educational system known as boarding school and by such less flattering epithets as “foster home for unwanted rich kids,” “prison,” and “glorious residential setting for the birth and growth of the ole boy network.” Before discussing the process of psychiatric consultation in these institutions, we might briefly examine their history.

While Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner were the most well known and the most prolific authors of materialism, the title “materialist” was frequently attached to others as well. Some of these were well known for their work in other connections, but their pronouncements on the significance of science for society were sufficient to earn them the epithet materialist. Such was the case with David Friedrich Strauss, the Tubingen Biblical critic, and Moses Hess, the Jewish socialist. Strauss, although he never forsook his Hegelian training,1 found nevertheless that his Der Alte und der Neue Glaube of 1872 was denounced as a materialistic book. Hess turned aside after 1848 from his devotion to the socialist movement and began studying science. From 1852 to 1855 he attended lectures of Parisian scientists and read the works of Vogt, Moleschott and Buchner, whereupon he took up his pen and began writing about the materialistic implications of science in the popular journals.2

The eighteenth century has a bad name in Dutch history, and it is unlikely that anyone has ever been tempted to award it the epithet of ‘golden’. It was a period, it is often said, which was resting at leisure on the laurels won in the preceding century, an age of stagnation and decline, of false values, corruption and sham, when powdered wigs concealed more than bald heads and bad smells were drowned in perfume. The terms used to describe it are usually of a derogatory nature like inertia, inactivity, complacency, decadence, or worse. True, there is much in the eighteenth century that looks weak in comparison with the energies displayed during the seventeenth century, yet those evaluations are too sweepingly negative and would seem to stem from moral indignation rather than from a dispassionate assessment.

The primary literature of reverse discrimination would furnish that style of philosophising which places language at the centre of concern with a treasure trove of instances. Even the definition of the phrase provides sufficient material for those whose interest, like Bentham’s, is in dyslogistic or eulogistic terms, in what he called, in somewhat less jaw-breaking terminology, “passion-kindling epithets”; and Stevenson’s notion of “persuasive definition”, too, is well illustrated by the range of phrases used to refer to the central phenomenon. Thus the phrases “reverse discrimination”, “positive discrimination”, “preferential treatment” and “affirmative action” are widely, even undiscriminatingly, used. In general, it seems that those opposing the practice tend to use harsher phrases such as “reverse discrimination” or “positive discrimination” and those supportive in principle tend to use the softer phrases such as “affirmative action”.

Sentimental cliches were parodied from the 1790’s on. V. L. Pushkin’s Letter to I. I. Dmitriev (1796) is a good example of a parody of sentimental motifs. Pushkin ridiculed the motifs of the graveyard school of poetry, idyllic landscape scenes, and the sentimentalist’s exaggerated sensibility that led to an almost constant “stream of tears.” He criticized the fashionable trend to succeed in poetry with “a tearful lyre.” The central sentimental motif which was widely used in the practice of evoking tears was identified as loneliness, resulting from the death of a beloved friend or mistress. Pushkin jokingly applied all the well-worn epithets in descriptions of this kind,—the pale moon, the gray and mossy gravestone under the oak tree, the despondent cry of the owl, the howling wind... In contrast to the graveyard scene, he spoke also of the tears elicited by the sentimental motif of playful love, expressing itself in different cliche-like phrases such as the doves that fly to bring a message to the beloved one, the swallows that rise exuberantly into the air, and the soft rhyming of exquisite verses. Pushkin’s parody was printed in Karamzin’s almanac Aonides (1796)!1 V. Pushkin leaned towards neoclassicism which makes his critical attitude understandable. Yet he was not the only critic. Even N. M. Karamzin himself, the acknowledged leader of sentimentalism, complained of hypocritical tearfulness in the foreword of Aonides (book II, 1797).

Bartolome de Las Casas, who fought so stoutly for the Indians from his conversion in 1514 in Cuba until his death in 1566 in Spain, has usually been considered a noble humanitarian or a saintly fanatic, when harsher epithets have not been applied to him. Few of his friends or enemies have realized that under the fire and brimstone of his invective there existed a closely reasoned structure of political thought based upon the most fundamental concepts of medieval Europe.