Day: May 2, 2010

Another Bulgarian Bust

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Bulgarian police have captured a number of invaluable archaeological finds in a police operation in Sofia and the eastern town of Stara Zagora.

The operation was carried out by the Unit for Combating the Traffic of Cultural and Historical Items of the main directorate for fighting organized crime (GDBOP), the police directorate in the city of Sliven announced.

In Sofia, the police searched about several addresses where they seized two ancient ceramic vessels, 9 silver Roman coins, an ancient bronze application with a silver image of Medusa, and a metal detector.

Simultaneously, the police searched two locations in Nova Zagora where they found over 500 ancient coins, jewelry, medallions, ceramic figurines and vessels, horns encrusted with horns, a bronze head – all from the period of Ancient Greece, Thrace and Rome.

In addition, the police discovered several artifacts dated back to the Middle Ages, “of high historical and artistic value” which are not described in detail by the police.

One man who is known to be a treasure hunter and dealer of antiques has been detained in Nova Zagora.

via Bulgaria Police Capture Archaeology Treasures in Crackdown | Sofia News Agency.

Citanda: Plato and the Postmoderns

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

A bit from the end:

Plato’s Socrates accepts with Protagoras the relativity of sense perception – but sense perception that yields appearances, only; he will not, however, affirm a universal relativism that does no justice to the totality of the knowing process; one that is self-contradictory and unable to account for universal truth, which some judgments, especially but not exclusively mathematical ones, affirm.

The post-modernist critical enterprise is related to Protagorean relativism in its refusal to acknowledge the possibility of universal truth, and in its denial of language’s abilty to grasp what is real. Ontologically, it acknowledges only what is becoming, not being in itself; it refuses language status beyond expressing flux, asserting there is no fixed, universally shared meaning to words. That we are able to, and do, distinguish between things in process of becoming and being itself indicates the diminution in post-modernists’ grasp of relationship between the word and reality. A phobia, almost, of affirming the real?

And yet, as one contemporary critic of post-modernism remarks, post-modernists – he names Derrida – are assured of an intrinsic connecton between the words specifying their lecture fee and the actual sum they expect to receive in payment. Curious, that.

via CathBlog – Plato and the postmoderns – CathNews.