Original manuscript for "Elegy for Theory" (book version)

2016

Teaching Philosophy, 2011

The editors of this collection point out at the start that not enough has been thought and said about the variety of literary genres used in philosophical writing. Nor do most philosophers regard themselves as writers, even if they have authored multiple books. So the volume under review is a welcome addition to an underappreciated field.

2013

This is the original introduction to my edition of Aenesidemus' testimonia. It addresses crucial methodological questions concerning: 1) collecting philosophical fragments/testimonia 2) collecting fragments/testimonia for recovering the doctrines of a school which claims not to have any doctrine. The scepticism (with lowercase 's') which I argue for concerning the utility of collecting fragments/testimonia did not receive a favourable feedback from the CUP referees (perhaps unsurprisingly considering the book has been published in a series of editions of fragments) and therefore I was prevented from incorporating it in the book. I believe it is an essential part of the book.

Explanation Points, 2019

New College Notes (ISSN 2517-6935), 2021

Centennial olive trees on red-coloured earth-short drywalls divide lands and properties, casting a white net over the landscape. At midday the sun will have no mercy on these ploughed fields: there is no vegetation beyond old trees and dry bushes. Cacti offer prickly pears to the passers-by protruding along the many bends of the road; it leads downhill to the crystalline sea. Two miles on the right, after the dunes covered by beach-grass, waves roll gently on the sandy shore. Tiny fish dash around my feet while the water barely reaches my calves. I do not know how effectively these childhood memories describe the Terra d' Otranto of the thirteenth or fourteenth century; however, that landscape did not differ much-I think-from what the wide eyes of an eight-year-old saw in the now-called Salento. It is there that the manuscripts forming New College MS 298 were written and composed. In the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, it was not uncommon that different manuscripts were bound together in larger volumes: binding was an expensive process, and leather which eventually covered the result was expensive too. Therefore, texts travelled in separate quires for some time until they found themselves in the hands of a bookbinder. But there is something more to the story of MS 298; the main strands of it can roughly be recalled, while the deepest causes and details still lay under the unploughed red soil. What is now kept in a protective blue box in New College Library, at shelfmark MS 298, is actually two manuscripts in one, plus later additions. Opening the manuscripts, after four flyleaves, Tzetzes's Allegories of the Iliad start from line 129 of the prologue; the folio is made of western paper with a watermark. 1 At f. 9, everything changes completely: there is lower-quality oriental paper, the colour is browner than previous folios, and the margins are withering away, 2 even the text is different, as well as the hand who wrote it. It is the first book of the Iliad. The poem continues in the same hand and on the same kind of paper until the end of the twentyfourth book at f. 109v. At f. 110, the Allegories of the Iliad resume on the same kind of western paper of the first folios written by the same hand. The manuscript continues with the Allegories of the Iliad until book twelve (f. 121), and then there are the scholia to the first two books of the Iliad (ff. 122-28) 3 , Homeric epimerisms (ff. 130-143), the Homeric Allegories by Heraclitus (ff. 143-49), Alphabetical Epimerisms 4 (ff. 149-250), and finally two glossaries, the first from A to E, the second from E to Ω. 5 What happened to the manuscript and the reason why there are two different kinds of paper seems straightforward: the folios with the Iliad come from one manuscript (manuscript A) which was later merged with a second manuscript (manuscript B) made of different paper and written by a different scribe. When the two manuscripts merged, ten folios of manuscript B were placed at the front to protect the Iliadic text of manuscript A; that is why MS 298 starts with one work which is then interrupted and resumes at the end of the older manuscript. According to

2013

An indispensable approach to New Testament studies.

Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 2015

The National Library of Finland (NLF) and the Von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki (WWA) keep the collected correspondence of Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein’s friend and successor at Cambridge and one of the three literary executors of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. Among von Wright’s correspondence partners, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees are of special interest to Wittgenstein scholars as the two other trustees of the Wittgenstein papers. Thus, von Wright’s collections held in Finland promise to shed light on the context of decades of editorial work that made Wittgenstein’s later philosophy available to all interested readers. In this text, we present the letters which von Wright received from Anscombe and Rhees during the first nine months after Wittgenstein’s death. This correspondence provides a vivid picture of the literary executors as persons and of their developing relationships. The presented letters are beautiful examples of what the correspondence as a whole has to offer; it depicts – besides facts of editing – the story of three philosophers, whose conversing voices unfold the human aspects of inheriting Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. Their story does not only deal with editing the papers of an eminent philosopher, but with the attempt to do justice to the man they knew, to his philosophy and to his wishes for publication.