Join us for a lecture by our own Burcu Erciyes. Here is her abstract:

Developing opinions about important social and political issues requires open discussion. However, more and more people tend to find engaging in discussion of political issues with people with whom we disagree to be “stressful” rather than “interesting or informative” (Pew Research, 2021). One possible explanation for this is that people tend to understand their own beliefs as fairly certain and obvious, and any opposing views as obviously wrong merely in virtue of being different. If we understand our own opinions as obvious, we have little reason question their validity or consider the validity of other views. The certainty with which opinions about social and political issues are expressed undercuts any attempt at open and productive public discourse. There seems, then, to be a crisis of over-confidence in public discourse.
I argue that we may gain a sort of antidote for this crisis of over-confidence by looking to ancient philosophy, specifically Plato’s understanding of Socratic self-knowledge and the Socratic virtue of epimeleia (care) regarding the well-being of one’s own soul. By taking on a commitment to examine our own beliefs (especially in conversation with others) and become more aware of what we know and do not know, we will be less likely to be over-confident in our opinions and instead more open to considering other’s views. Encouraging awareness of the complexities, difficulties, and fallibility of our own opinions could help loosen the insecure yet resolved grip on our own beliefs and allow us to deliberately develop our views, rather than stagnating or becoming more extreme through self-gratifying reinforcement.

The Department of Greek and Roman Studies presents a lecture by Dr. Conor Whately (University of Winnipeg), the 2024 Classical Association of Canada (CAC) Central Tour Speaker.

Topic: “Hopes, Fears, and Raids in Roman Arabia”

One of the most incredible bodies of evidence for any region and period of antiquity across the wider Mediterranean world is the mass of Safaitic graffiti found across the Black Desert in southern Syria and Jordan. Numbering in the many tens of thousands (at least so far) and widely available thanks to a fantastic database based out of the University of Oxford (OCIANA), the graffiti provide invaluable insight into the lives, both inner and outer, of the nomadic people who lived on the fringes of the settled, urbanized Roman world. Although many record little more than the names of the inscribers, some record datable historical events, and specialists have dated the collection to between the first century BCE and the fourth CE. Besides assorted references to political events and occasional conflicts, there are many references to the world of raiding, both the good and the bad (from the perspective of the inscribers), from the target and even the locations of raids, to the emotional impact on its victims. In this presentation, Conor Whately surveys the graffiti as a whole, with a focus on the evidence for raiding, especially what it reveals of the psychological impact on its practitioners and its victims.

Date: Thursday, September 26, 2024

Time: 10:30am-11:30am

Location: West Room, Alumni Memorial Hall

Space is limited. For more information, please email gkromst@mcmaster.ca

Photo by Conor Whately.

The Cognitive Science of Language lecture series first talk of 2024-25 academic year will take place on Tuesday October 1, 2:30-4:20 p.m. location TBD. The lecture will be delivered by Dr. Ileana Paul. Dr. Paul is a Canada Research Chair in Linguistics and a Professor in the Department of French Studies at Western University. She works on the structure of Malagasy, the language spoken in Madagascar. She has looked at a range of topics in syntax, including clefts, topicalization and the role of determiners.

Please email lingdept@mcmaster.ca if you are interested to attend.

Title: Malagasy presentatives: Here’s what we know and what we don’t

Abstract: Presentatives (Here comes the bride!) have received on minor attention in the syntactic literature (Morin 1985; Lakoff 1987; Thoms et al. 2019; Wood and Zanuttini 2023).In this context, I examine Malagasy presentative utterances. I first provide a description of the morphology of the presentative word, which encodes distance and number, among other distinctions. Turning to the syntax of presentative utterances, I compare presentatives to superficially similar structures (locatives, exclamatives, imperatives) and argue that they are syntactically distinct. I then look more closely at their internal clause structure and show that they initially appear to follow the standard unmarked VOS structure of the language: the presentative word is the clause-initial predicate and the following DP is the subject. I conclude with some remaining puzzles around word order and definiteness effects.

Centre for Peace Studies, McMaster University