Rewriting Julian’s Legacy: John Chrysostom’s On Babylas and Libanius’ Oration 24
Libanius’ Oration 24 and John Chrysostom’s On Babylas represent contemporaneous and competing efforts to reshape narrations of the emperor Julian and thus influence local and imperial politics fifteen years after his death. Following the emperor Valens’ death at the battle of Adrianople in 378, which echoed Julian’s death in battle in 363, Libanius and Chrysostom revived the memory of Julian in order to address the strength of the gods and define ideal imperial behavior as Theodosius I came to power. Reading these two texts in light of each other highlights the renewed importance that Julian’s legacy carried immediately following Valens’ death, and the late fourth-century implications of that legacy for Antiochene and imperial politics.
Was Theodosius I A Usurper?
This is the publisher's verison, also available electronically from http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/klio.1996.78.issue-1/klio.1996.78.1.198/klio.1996.78.1.198.xml.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.