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C. Taylor and S. Buckle (Eds.) Hume and the Enlightenment, 2011, 131-142
Abstract
Abstract: In Book III, Part 2 of the Treatise, Hume presents a natural history of justice. Self-interest clearly plays a central role in his account; our ancestors invented justice conventions, he maintains, for the sake of reciprocal advantage. But this is not what makes his approach so novel and attractive. Hume recognizes that prudential considerations are not sufficient to explain how human beings – with our propensities towards temporal discounting and free-riding – could have established conventions for social exchange and collective action in commercial societies. This leads him to develop an innovative account of the role that emotional aversions play in establishing trust between strategically rational agents.
Bulletin of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies/Le société canadienne des études bibliques 64 (2004–5) 5–32; Manu secunda, Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 34/3-4 (2005) 307–36,
Aimar Ventsel, 2007, Pride, honour, individual and collective violence: order in a ‘lawless’ village, in Edited F.Pirie and K.Benda-Beckman, Order and Disorder. Anthropological Perspectives. Oxford, New York: Berghahn, 34-53.
2003 •
. Vallástudományi Szemle XV. (2019/1) 9–30.
A pogány Pilátus-akta. Ideológiai harc az iskolákban a diocletianusi üldözés folyamán. (Acts of Pilate. Ideological Struggle in the Schools during the Great Persecution)2019 •
According to the report of Eusebius a text called the Acts of Pilate was forged as a part of the anti-Christian propaganda war under the reign of Maximinus Daia. The text was intended to be taught in schools. These pagan acts were in circulation only for a few years, their text did not survive, unlike the Christian Acts that were later incorporated into the Gospel of Nicodemus. In my paper I argue that there is no evidence that the Christian Acts reflect to the content of the pagan Acts. I suggest that in the pagan Acts Christ was presented as a criminal, probably a brigand. I emphasise that these Acts were unique in anti-Christian polemic literature, regarding that they were narrative texts and not a philosophical treatise like the works of Porphyry or Sossianus Hierocles. I suggest that the genre of the text was not a letter, e.g. not a letter written by Pilate to the emperor, but it was a real acta, a legal document in a dialogue form, and so the original title may have been Acta Iesu Christi or Acta Christi et Pilati and not simply Acta Pilati. In the narrative of the text Christ probably made a full confession of his alleged crimes and this was the cause why contemporary Christians felt it as an offensive blasphemy.
I argue here that the equation between homage words and the hand-having lordship ritual may not have happened much before 1100, and that the major influence on this was the Gregorian Reformers' horror at pollution of the Eucharist caused by bloody lay hands (the so-called abolition of 'clerical homage'). I also suggest that the ritual's origins do not necessarily lie simply in the spread of a popular lordship ritual. The hand-having ritual is perhaps as likely to have begun as a way of bringing peace to feuds, and be the way of ending an enmity relationship initiated by the breaking off of the old amity (lordship) one with the so-called 'feudal' defiance.
Mark Collier