Peter Adamson
speaker
1,322 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2d ago
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Another hypothetical objection considered in his essay Introducing the Dictionary Project in fact has to do with religion.
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Much of the material he would be including, goes the complaint, would serve no purpose and be of merely antiquarian interest.
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To this, Bale replies that we would, if we were purely rational, concern ourselves solely with salvation in the afterlife.
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But we're not purely rational, so Bale is happy to cater to what he calls a taste long established for delving into the details of history for its own sake.
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It was no doubt in this spirit of giving the public what they wanted that he unhesitatingly included scandalous narratives in his dictionary.
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Among them is the infamous story about the ancient cynic couple, Crites and Hipparchia, unashamedly enjoying sex in public.
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Bell not only mentions this in his main entry on Hipparchia, but includes a lengthy and learned remark on the tale.
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He says that there is no convincing argument to show that people shouldn't have sex in public.
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The only really good reason not to do so is religious prohibition.
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Bale is taking the opportunity to allude to the central theme of his dictionary.
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Human reason is so weak that it often needs faith to settle questions it cannot handle.
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Isn't it a good idea, he says, to recount the outrageous sins of the pagans, the better to humiliate and mortify our reason and convince us of the infinite corruption of the human heart?
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By this logic, censorious readers should in fact applaud the inclusion of this salacious material.
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Here in the article on Hipparchia and again in the clarification devoted to the inclusion of such squalid material in the dictionary, Bale offers a second justification, one that is in some tension with this supposedly pious defense.
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His project is a historical one, and as a historian his job is simply to report the facts without concealment or euphemism.
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Not that avoiding frank speech does any good anyway.
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Everyone knows what is meant by a phrase like the parts that shall remain nameless.
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And there's nothing wrong with calling those parts to mind.
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If there were, it would never be acceptable to make people think about sex or the sexual organs.
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So we shouldn't even mention marriage or childbirth in public.
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Showing 781–800 of 1,322 · page 40 of 67
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