Jens Bircherod’s In Timaeum exercitatio historico-philologico-philosophica (1682): Platonic cosmology in seventeenth-century Denmark

ABSTRACT

This article examines a previously unstudied dissertation on Plato’s Timaeus presumably authored by the Danish bishop Jens Bircherod (1658–1708). By means of a study of Bircherod’s sources and interpretative method, it assesses the place of his In Timaeum exercitatio historico-philologico-philosophica (1682) in the history of philology and philosophy, and in the context of seventeenth-century Lutheran pedagogy. It shows how Bircherod makes use of Plato’s dialogue against the background of early modern religious debates, and how his method largely follows the historicist approach that had begun to characterise the reception history of the Timaeus since the late sixteenth century. It argues that Bircherod wrote his historical-philological-philosophical exercise on the Timaeus to demonstrate the existence of divine providence and monotheistic tendencies in antiquity, and to harness Plato’s cosmological treatise to the cause of Christian apologetics.     

The pilgrimage economy of Early Roman Jerusalem (1st century BCE–70 CE) reconstructed from the δN and δC values of goat and sheep remains

Religious and historical sources suggest that pilgrimage formed a major source of Jerusalem's economy during the Early Roman period due to the Temple's role as a religious and judicial center for the Jewish diaspora. Until now, this assertion has been supported by little material evidence. In this study, the carbon and nitrogen isotope values of local arcahaeological and, modern wild herbivores from known environments were used to determine the environmental origins of domesticated sheep and goat that were traded and consumed in Early Roman Jerusalem. Pinpointing the environmental origins of these herd animals can determine if they were raised in specialized farms in the vicinity of Jerusalem, brought to the city by local pilgrims, or were part of organized importation of sacrifice animals from desert regions that lie beyond the boundaries of the province of Judea. The results indicate that at minimum 37% of the goat and sheep consumed in Jerusalem during the Early Roman period were brought from desert regions. The inter-provincial importation of animals to Jerusalem to meet high demands for sacrifice by pilgrims is the first material evidence for large scale economic specialization in the city. Furthermore, the results imply that desert animals were further marketed for domestic use in contemporaneous farm sites out of Jerusalem.     

After the Deep Freeze: Confronting “Magdalenian” Realities in Cantabrian Spain And Beyond

The Magdalenian culture-stratigraphic unit in Western Europe, despite being a construct of nineteenth-century prehistoric archeologists, does have reality as a continuous network of human inter-relationships, whose ecologically transcendent range expanded through the course of the Late Last Glacial, in many ways reminiscent of Braudel’s histoire de la longue durée—in this case lasting some 9,000 calendar years. At the scale of the moyenne durée, the Magdalenian underwent several reorganizations [represented by its Initial, Lower, Middle, Upper, Final, and Epi-Magdalenian (i.e., Azilian, Federmesser) stages]—with distinctly regional manifestations and inter-regional connections—that in part can be understood in light of environmental/resource changes and variations at the scales of millennia and natural regions. At the scale of the courte durée, we are dealing with the adaptations of local and regional hunter-gatherer bands and the peculiarities and vicissitudes of their circumstances measured by forager group territories and centuries. Numerous, diverse concrete archaeological manifestations of territories and inter-group contacts support the growing consensus about the social reality of the Magdalenian phenomenon and the changes and variations that characterized it within a range that ultimately stretched from Portugal to Poland during the last millennia of the Pleistocene. Here, the focus is on Cantabrian Spain as one of the core or source areas of the Magdalenian cultural tradition that arose out of the Solutrean experience some 20,000 calendar years ago (about a millennium later than in France) and that was intimately linked to the process of human recolonization of upland and northerly regions of western and ultimately central Europe during the course of Greenland Stadial 2 and early Greenland Interstadial 1. Finally, archaeological and paleobiological indicators clearly point to major breaks in human adaptations and ways of understanding the human place in the universe a few centuries after the onset of Holocene conditions in Vasco-Cantabria, i.e., the development of Mesolithic cultures about 11,000 calendar years ago.     

The ILO: An Agency for Globalization?

The International Labour Organization, set up in 1919 to develop and promote labour standards, is at a crucial point. It has preached that labour is not a commodity and in 1969 received the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then it has run into trouble. This article considers how the ILO has failed to come to terms with the Global Transformation, seeing it as trying to play three roles — a standard‐setter, a technical assistance agency and a knowledge generator — without developing the professional capacity to do so. The big question is whether the ILO could become an effective development agency given the changing character of work and labour in globalizing labour markets and its antiquated governance structure.     

The Statistical Modeling of Flow Data When the Poisson Assumption Is Violated

The Poisson model typically provides a poor fit to flow data but more complex models are difficult to operationalize, especially with production or attraction constraints. Quasi- and pseudo-likelihood approaches retain the attractive computational features of the Poisson model. A shopping model example suggests the latter approach to be preferable.