David Mark Kovacs
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1223976 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | David Mark Kovacs |
| NOMBRES | David Mark |
| APELLIDO | Kovacs |
| FIRMA | KOVACS D M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9890-8089 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1983 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
The Epistemology Of Ordinary Objects
Property dualists shouldn’t be nominalists about properties
Substance dualism is the view that there are two fundamentally different kinds of substances: physical and mental. By contrast, according to property dualism there is only one kind of substance (physical) but two fundamentally different kinds of properties: physical and mental. Property nominalism is the view that there are neither repeatable nor non-repeatable fundamentally predicable entities (i.e. neither universals nor tropes) and that things…
The problem of too many mental tokens reconsidered
The Problem of Too Many Thinkers is the result, implied by several “permissive” ontologies, that we spatiotemporally overlap with a number of intrinsically person-like entities. The problem, as usually formulated, leaves open a much-neglected question: do we literally share our mental lives, i.e. each of our mental states, with these person-like entities, or do we instead enjoy mental lives that are qualitatively indistinguishable but numerically…
Pregnant Thinkers
Do pregnant mothers have foetuses as parts? According to the ‘parthood view’, they do, while according to the ‘containment view’, they don’t. This paper raises a novel puzzle about pregnancy: If mothers have their foetuses as parts, then wherever there is a pregnant mother, there is also a smaller thinking being that has every part of the mother except for those that overlap with the foetus. This problem resembles a familiar overpopulation puzzle…
Euripides, Troades 95–7
This paper raises objections to the constitution of these lines in the OCT. The lines are gnomic but they generalize based on an actual sequence of events just described and should contain an allusion to the offence that will cause the Greeks to perish, the outrage against Athena's temple. This, it is argued, stood in a lacuna best marked after 95. The article has three theses: (1) sacking ‘cities, temples, and tombs’ is implausible because the l…
Conventionalist Accounts of Personal Identity Over Time
Conventionalism about personal identity over time is the view that personal identity is in some sense dependent on our beliefs, desires, social practices, or language use (collectively: on our "conventions"). This paper provides an opinionated survey of the state of the art about personal identity conventionalism. First, it offers a taxonomy of possible types of conventionalism along four different axes and discusses weak vs. strong, private vs. …
An explanatory idealist theory of grounding
How is grounding related to metaphysical explanation? The standard view is that the former somehow “backs”, “undergirds” or “underlies” the latter. This view fits into a general picture of explanation, according to which explanations in general hold in virtue of a certain elite group of “explanatory relations” or “determinative relations” that back them. This paper turns the standard view on its head: grounding doesn't “back” metaphysical explana…
Self-Making and Subpeople
On many currently popular ontologies of material objects, we share our place with numerous shorter-lived things ("subpeople," to borrow a term from Eric Olson) that came into existence after we did or will go out of existence before we will. Subpeople are intrinsically indistinguishable from possible people, and as several authors (Eric Olson, Mark Johnston, A. P. Taylor) pointed out, this raises grave ethical concerns: it threatens to make any s…
Against the status response to the argument from Vagueness
Horace, Odes 1.30
This brief poem (Hor. Carm. 1.30) is by turns enigmatic (what is the purpose of Horace's prayer to Venus?) and slightly incoherent (why should both Horace and Glycera be praying to Venus? Are they praying for the same thing or for different things? Either has its problems). A further problem is that, if Horace intended uocantis in line 2 for a genitive, the text as it stands misleads the first-time reader, contrary to Horace's normal practice of …
What Harbour Will There Not Be for Your Cries?’ (420) and Other Textual Problems in Sophocles’ Oedipvs Tyrannvs
These four textual notes attempt (1) to demonstrate that OT 420 as transmitted is unlikely to impossible, and to show the desirability of Blaydes's conjecture ποῖος οὐκ ἔςται ̓λικών , that is, Ἑλικών ; (2) to argue for the necessity of reading ἄν for εἰ at line 121 and of making the line a complete sentence; (3) to argue for a lacuna before line 530; and (4) to propose τίς ἄταις μᾶλλον ἢ τίς ἀγρίαι ξύνοικος ἁλλαγᾶι βίου; in lines 1205–6
There Is No Distinctively Semantic Circularity Objection to Humean Laws
Humeans identify the laws of nature with universal generalizations that systematize rather than govern the particular matters of fact. Humeanism is frequently accused of circularity: laws explain their instances, but Humean laws are, in turn, grounded by those instances. Unfortunately, this argument trades on controversial assumptions about grounding and explanation that Humeans routinely reject. However, recently an ostensibly semantic circulari…
What is priority monism
How to be an uncompromising revisionary ontologist
The oldest solution to the circularity problem for Humeanism about the laws of nature
The Question of Iterated Causation
This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c 1 ...c k cause effect e, what are the causes of c 1 ...c k ’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings‐on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings‐on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting seve…
Constitution and Dependence
Constitution is the relation that holds between an object and what it is made of: statues are constituted by the lumps of matter they coincide with; flags, one may think, are constituted by colored pieces of cloth; and perhaps human persons are constituted by biological organisms. Constitution is often thought to be a "dependence relation." In this paper, I argue that given some plausible theses about ontological dependence, most definitions of c…
Four Questions of Iterated Grounding
The Question of Iterated Grounding ( QIG ) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we ca…
On Not Misunderstanding Oedipus Tyrannos
How are we to understand what happens to Oedipus? What or who is the cause of the terrible deeds—predicted by oracles to both Laius and Oedipus—that he has already committed before the play begins and that are revealed in its course? The purpose of the present essay, whose title alludes to a well-known article by E.R. Dodds, is to draw attention to aspects of the play that have been ignored or explained away. To give them their due it will be nec…
The Deflationary Theory of Ontological Dependence
When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive (roughly: mereological in the broadest possible sense) and modal relatio…
Pindar as Lavdator Eqvorvm in Horace, Carmina 4.2.17–20 and Ars Poetica 83–5
At Carm . ( Odes ) 4.2.17–20 Horace's catalogue of Pindar's poetry reaches his victory odes: siue quos Elea domum reducit palma caelestis pugilemue equumue dicit et centum potiore signis munere donat; 20 The text, transmitted without variants in our manuscripts, means ‘(Pindar deserves the laurel wreath whether he writes bold dithyrambs or sings of gods and heroes) or tells of those escorted home as gods by the Elean palm-branch, whether boxer or…
Horace, Odes 4.1
Odes 4.1 is difficult to understand on a literal level. At its beginning Horace is complaining that Venus, after leaving him alone for many years, is attacking him, that is, he is feeling a reawakening of sexual desire. But after suggesting that the goddess go off to visit Paullus Fabius Maximus and describing the rewards the young man will give her, he returns to himself. Now, he says, he is delighted by neither woman nor boy nor by the prospect…
Iliad 1.282-284
Phyllis’s High-born Parents
Aeolic and Italian at Horace, Odes 3.30.13–14
dicar, qua uiolens obstrepit Aufidus et qua pauper aquae Daunus agrestium regnauit populorum ex humili potens princeps Aeolium carmen ad Italos 13 deduxisse modos . Surely there is something puzzling about 13–14? What Horace was the first to do was to write Latin poetry using the metrical schemes of the Greek lyricists, principally Alcaeus and Sappho, who wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Lesbos. There can be no reasonable doubt that Aeolium carmen …
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.2
The purpose of this paper is, first, to demonstrate to future editors of the Metamorphoses , whether conservative or sceptical, just how improbable is the reading of the majority of MSS, illas , and how strong are the claims of the variant ilia , first recommended by P.Lejay in 1894 and vigorously championed by E.J.Kenney in 1976; and, second, to suggest an interpretation of this reading that is open to fewer objections than the one proposed by K…
On Medea's Great Monologue (E. Med. 1021–80)
In his new text of Euripides (Oxford, 1984) James Diggle shows that he has the courage of his convictions: he deletes the last twenty-five lines of Medea's great monologue. He is to be applauded for following ratio et res ipsa where it leads him and being undaunted by the sight of so much blood. No editor of Euripides before him, as far as I am aware, has ever been courageous enough to put these lines in square brackets, although their deletion h…
How to be an uncompromising revisionary ontologist
On Not Misunderstanding Oedipus Tyrannos
How are we to understand what happens to Oedipus? What or who is the cause of the terrible deeds—predicted by oracles to both Laius and Oedipus—that he has already committed before the play begins and that are revealed in its course? The purpose of the present essay, whose title alludes to a well-known article by E.R. Dodds, is to draw attention to aspects of the play that have been ignored or explained away. To give them their due it will be nec…
Castor in Euripides' Electra ( El. 307–13 and 1292–1307)
This paper presents evidence, in the form of two passages from the Electra , that the editor of Euripides will do well not to resign himself too easily to pointless illogicality or violations of the formal regularities of tragedy or to comfort himself with the idea that illogic and meandering are ‘human’ touches, while formal incongruities are Euripides' incipient verismo
Virgil, Eclogue 4.53–4
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Conventionalist Accounts of Personal Identity Over Time
Conventionalism about personal identity over time is the view that personal identity is in some sense dependent on our beliefs, desires, social practices, or language use (collectively: on our "conventions"). This paper provides an opinionated survey of the state of the art about personal identity conventionalism. First, it offers a taxonomy of possible types of conventionalism along four different axes and discusses weak vs. strong, private vs. …
The Question of Iterated Causation
This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c 1 ...c k cause effect e, what are the causes of c 1 ...c k ’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings‐on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings‐on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting seve…
Four Questions of Iterated Grounding
The Question of Iterated Grounding ( QIG ) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we ca…
Two Conjectures in Horace
Most of the above text is straightforward. Horace is explaining that wrath – the reader may think at this stage either of Horace's own wrath expressed in the scurrilous iambi mentioned in 2–3 or that of the woman he addresses – resembles various other things. Thus in 5a wrath's effect is compared to that of the Magna Mater on her priests, the Galli (they were driven so far from their senses that they castrated themselves), and in 5b–6 to that of …
Virgil, Eclogues 4.28
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Euripides, Troades 95–7
Rem tene , the elder Cato advised the aspiring orator, verba sequentur . The advice applies equally to the textual critic. Of those who have attempted to emend, repunctuate, or defend this passage, few seem to have been troubled by any doubts about the firmness of their grip on the res , the precise point Poseidon is making. The usual view of what Poseidon means is that those who sack cities are foolish because such an act results in their own su…
Euripides, Troades 95–7
Rem tene , the elder Cato advised the aspiring orator, verba sequentur . The advice applies equally to the textual critic. Of those who have attempted to emend, repunctuate, or defend this passage, few seem to have been troubled by any doubts about the firmness of their grip on the res , the precise point Poseidon is making. The usual view of what Poseidon means is that those who sack cities are foolish because such an act results in their own su…
Castor in Euripides' Electra ( El. 307–13 and 1292–1307)
This paper presents evidence, in the form of two passages from the Electra , that the editor of Euripides will do well not to resign himself too easily to pointless illogicality or violations of the formal regularities of tragedy or to comfort himself with the idea that illogic and meandering are ‘human’ touches, while formal incongruities are Euripides' incipient verismo
On Medea's Great Monologue (E. Med. 1021–80)
In his new text of Euripides (Oxford, 1984) James Diggle shows that he has the courage of his convictions: he deletes the last twenty-five lines of Medea's great monologue. He is to be applauded for following ratio et res ipsa where it leads him and being undaunted by the sight of so much blood. No editor of Euripides before him, as far as I am aware, has ever been courageous enough to put these lines in square brackets, although their deletion h…
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.2
The purpose of this paper is, first, to demonstrate to future editors of the Metamorphoses , whether conservative or sceptical, just how improbable is the reading of the majority of MSS, illas , and how strong are the claims of the variant ilia , first recommended by P.Lejay in 1894 and vigorously championed by E.J.Kenney in 1976; and, second, to suggest an interpretation of this reading that is open to fewer objections than the one proposed by K…
"The Way of a God with a Maid in Aeschylus' "Agamemnon
Pindar's Mythmaking
Euripides, Electra 518–44
Journal Article EURIPIDES, ELECTRA 518–44: FURTHER DOUBTS ABOUT GENUINENESS Get access David Kovacs David Kovacs University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Volume 36, Issue 1, December 1989, Pages 67–78, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.1989.tb00562.x Published: 12 March 2010
The Heroic Muse
A Commentary on the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar
Euripides, Medea 1–17
The text and apparatus below are Diggle's. At the end of the article I give, for the sake of the curious, an expanded version, for 11ff., of Wecklein's ‘Appendix coniecturas minus probabiles continens’, with references where they are known to me
Notes on the Bacchae
In 246 we should, as Dodds suggests, get rid of the feeble δεινς and adopt Mau's δειν κγχνης. (Dodds suggests that K was misread as IC and the resulting δειναῖς was ‘corrected’ to δεινς.) Verdenius, Mnemos . 41 (1988), 254, defends the reading of the MSS., saying that δεινς serves to distinguish the noose of punishment from that of suicide, but this is untenable: why is one noose more ‘terrible’ than the other, and who on hearing ‘worthy of the t…
ΔEΔΥKe Men a ΣEΛAnna
Narrative Drama
Paralipomena Euripidea
Euripides, Troades 1050
Menelaus' question in 1050 has puzzled interpreters. Why would Euripides put a joke at the end of this scene? It is true that of all the scenes in this play, the Helen scene is the only one that could admit a joke without terrible discomfort. And there is already humour in it. Hecuba employs scornful laughter (983) and an amusing reductio ad absurdum (976–81) in her arguments against Helen. So a joke here is not as utterly ruinous as it would be,…
Euripides
Rationalism, Naive and Malign, in Euripides’ Orestes
Tragic Interpolation and Philip II
This chapter argues that several passages in Orestes that have hitherto escaped suspicion are spurious, and further that in two of them (and perhaps in a third) there are allusions to 4th-century history, particularly to the Third Sacred War. It will be suggested that for once these interpolations are not anonymous: the chief suspect is the actor Neoptolemus.
Stranger and symbolon at Sophocles, ot 216–23
The meaning of σύμβολον (221) is “point of connection,” as Lloyd-Jones and Wilson have argued: “I would not be tracking it over a great distance unless I had some connection.” Hence in the following sentence Oedipus emphasizes his connection to the Thebans. But as transmitted, the immediately preceding sentence denies any connection between Oedipus and the matter at hand. Sense suggests that the second ξένος is corrupt and the meaning of the unco…
Envy and Akrasia in Seneca's Thyestes
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The Role Of Apollo In Oedipus Tyrannus
In Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus , a man who has received an authoritative prediction that he will kill his father and marry his mother learns in course of the play that in spite of his best efforts to avoid doing so this is precisely what he has done. Dodds claim that in Sophocles' plays the gods send misery on mortals and his claim that the gods merely predict but do not cause Oedipus' misery are contradictory. This chapter argues that both of Do…
Horace, Pindar and the Censorini in Odes 4.8
Odes 4.8 is anomalous: its thirty-four lines are not a multiple of four. Most editors delete two or six lines, but this involves deleting at least one blameless line and disturbing the stanzaic structure of the poem. Instead mark a lacuna of two or six lines before the final couplet. The missing lines will have contained a prayer for Censorinus' immortality and some words of praise, thereby fulfilling the expectations raised earlier in the poem. …
Virgil, Eclogue 4.53–4
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Two Notes on Xenophon
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Virgil, Eclogues 4.28
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