According totransmissiontheories of testimony, a listener's belief in a speaker's testimony can be supported by the speaker's justification for what she says. The most powerful objection to transmission theories is Jennifer Lackey'spersistent believercase. I argue that important features about the epistemology of testimony reveal how transmission theories can account for Lackey's case. Specifically, I argue that transmission theorists should hold that transmission happens only if a listener believes a speaker's testimony based on the presumption that the speaker has justification for (...) what she says. If this does not happen in thepersistent believercase, then the case is no counterexample to transmission. If this does happen in thepersistent believercase, then there is an available framework for rejecting the idea that the listener's belief is in fact justified. (shrink)

Tacitus' claim that history should inspire good deeds and deter bad ones should be taken seriously: his exempla are supposed to help his readers think through their own moral difficulties. This approach to history is found in historians with clear connections to Stoicism, and in Stoic philosophers like Seneca. It is no coincidence that Tacitus is particularly interested in the behavior of Stoics like Thrasea Paetus, Barea Soranus, and Seneca himself. They, and even non-Stoic characters like Epicharis and Petronius, exemplify (...) the behavior necessary if Roman freedom was to survive the monarchy. (shrink)

According to the Transmission View of Testimony : TVT: If a speaker testifies to a hearer that p, and if the hearer is justified in believing that p on the basis of that speaker's testimony, then the hearer's belief is justified by whatever justification the speaker has for believing that p. The aim of this paper is to develop and defend a novel objection to the TVT.

Historians, writers and artists who wanted to pay homage to Cleopatra once again, referred to and still refer to Plutarch’s Life of Antony, first and foremost. It can seem that this main, if not the only ancient work, being quite a compact story about the Egyptian queen, has been ultimately interpreted in numerous review editions and biographies of Cleopatra. However, Plutarch’s Cleopatra has not been analysed as a separate work — excerpts from Life of Antony have always been combined with (...) other sources in order to obtain a single picture. And in belles-lettres, the work of this ancient moralist have been exploited for centuries in such a way that it is no longer Plutarch’s property. Literary works from different epochs, in the form of interpretations, with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the head of the list, have distorted the ancient moralist’s message. It turns out that when we reject Shakespeare’s prism that we usually use when examining Plutarch’s Cleopatra and we start to analyse Antony’s biography only in the context of other works written by the moralist of Chaeronea, considering them to be a peculiar comment on Life of Antony, we are able to see a completely different picture to the one we are used to. Divine powers, present on the pages of the ancient work and implicating gods and people in love and desire do not have access to the queen. However, everything suggests that in the case of “the romance of all time” we can see in the moralist’s work something he did not write at all. We refer to Life of Antony and we envisage the character of Cleopatra described by Shakespeare and his successors. (shrink)