The Introduction discusses the importance of public protest even in a digital era. It uses the mass demonstrations that followed George Floyd’s murder to highlight both a desire to participate in public dissent and the challenges that restrict that participation. Those challenges include police aggression and violence, enforcement of vague public order laws, restrictions on the place where protests can occur, and attitudes about public contention. The idea of a body of protest law and the concept of “managed dissent” are introduced and explained.

This introduction has three goals: to locate this book’s arguments in contemporary scholarship on Parmenides, to outline its methodology and structure, and to establish the stakes of the project as a whole. The first considers Parmenides’ invention of extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration – the central topic of this book – as a relic of the ‘Greek Miracle’ paradigm; it also addresses discussions of Parmenides’ use of poetry and his relationship to Homer. The second addresses distinctions between actors’ and observers’ categories and between reasoning and discourse, and explores the Foucauldian discourse analysis that anchors the book’s treatment of the relationship between Parmenides and Homer. The third requires setting out what this book does not intend to do in order to specify its main contribution: providing an account of how Parmenides’ use of the image of the hodos helps him invent extended deductive argumentation and the practice of demonstration. The Introduction sketches out the three axes of the book’s argument: an exploration of the physical reality of archaic and classical Greek roads, a discussion of the semantics of the word hodos, and an articulation of the relationship between Parmenides’ and Homer’s poems.

This chapter pivots to Parmenides’ poem by examining at a more general level the close intertextual connections with Odyssey 12. I then examine in close detail how the krisis or exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in Parmenides’ Fragment 2 bears a close resemblance to the exclusive, exhaustive disjunction in the hodos that Circe spells out in Odyssey 12; I also detail important differences between Parmenides’ and Homer’s uses of this disjunction. Finally, I explore the importance of this disjunction for Parmenides’ groundbreaking extended deductive argument and, especially, its role in the practice of demonstration.

This chapter is in many ways the culmination of the book. It applies the analysis of chapters 3 and 4 to the structure of Parmenides’ Fragment 8, and shows how Parmenides uses the blueprint of Circe’s hodos in Odyssey 12 to craft what we would call an extended deductive argument; in this, it develops the discussion of Chapter 5. It cashes out the implications of Chapter 1 by showing how Parmenides takes advantage of rut road imagery to articulate what we would call a notion of logical necessity, and by showing how the durative and telic components of the word hodos define the teleological shape of his arguments. Building on Chapter 2, I set out the traditions Parmenides developed by creating a discursive structure that is both systematic and argumentatively rigorous. I also examine how the poem’s complex relationships between story, plot, and the time of narration plays a crucial role in bestowing on Parmenides’ arguments, and on demonstration more generally, an ostensibly timeless quality. Finally, I assess my conclusions about Parmenides’ invention of deductive argumentation in relation to other scholars’ discussions of his arguments, and clarify what my argument does not claim to offer – and what it insists on.

The chapter discusses the first of the fourteen books of Galens De Methodo Medendi in its Arabic summary (Jawami'), the summary's epistemological approach and its parallels and differences in comparision to the original Galenic work. Its ultimate source is placed within the Late Antique Alexandrian tradition of teaching philosophy and medicine, especially the introductions to philosophy and medicine, the so-called Prolegomena.

This chapter proposes a contextual approach to the history of early modern logic and method from the perspective of the late seventeenth-century debate over the relative worth of ancient and modern learning. Reflections on a modern “art of thinking” by authors on both sides of the debate contributed to the construction of an image of philosophical modernity at the high point of the Scientific Revolution, which would subsequently help fashion the self-understanding of the Enlightenment. This image was inherently polemical and pluralistic, as shown by analyzing the variety of canons of authors and by identifying the diversity of positions on the ingredients of the modern “art of thinking” in their writings. And yet the points of disagreement also reveal an underlying consensus about the core features a logic required: that an art of thinking would have to express the natural operations of the human mind, would ground the pursuit of the sciences, and would be capable of leading the mind to the discovery of genuinely novel and valuable truths about the natural world. This chapter also provides a reevaluation of the traditional canon of important thinkers who are thought to have spearheaded modernity.

translation across different natural languages and conceptual systems. While there is no totally neutral vocabulary in which this can be effected, this does not mean that mutual understanding is quite beyond reach, although that will depend on allowing for the revisability of some of the initial preconceptions in play. Comparing divergent schemata is indeed an important means of expanding the horizons of the history of science.

This chapter examines protest in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Prior to 1991, street protests in Iraqi Kurdistan played important roles in perpetuating local claims and broadcasting popular perspectives in a series of regimes that gave ordinary people few avenues for exercising influence. Attention to such protests highlights the fact that the Kurdish struggle under the Ba’ath was waged not only by peshmerga in the mountains but by civilians in towns and cities whose public manifestations of discontent continually pushed the limits of Iraqi authority and validated collective action as a legitimate form of political expression. Since 1991 and especially after 2003, street demonstrations have played an increasingly significant role in Iraqi Kurdish political life. The chapter divides such protests into three main phases, each differentiated primarily by shifts in state society relations, resources and mobilization capacity. Initially focused on improving service provision and infrastructure in specific locales, popular protests soon broadened in geographic and political scope to encompass systemic reforms calling for the redistribution of resources and the rule of law. Expanded meso-level mobilization capacity combined with newly potent master frames and forms of mobilization helped build and sustain a significant level of popular challenge to Kurdish authorities.