No one reading the last chapters of Eduard Zeller’s monumental Philosophie der Griechen, first published between 1844 and 1852, will fail to notice the barely veiled contempt that pervades his account of the final period of ancient Greek philosophy. Summarily treating the fifth and sixth centuries, he concludes that around this time Greek philosophy collapses not on account of external circumstances, but due to internal exhaustion. Zeller’s almost wholesale condemnation of the period no longer stands, yet it would be foolish wholly to disagree with him. The sixth century is a period in which the philosophical glory that was Greece is wearing thin; philosophers, and especially pagan ones, are rare birds indeed, flocking together for shelter and survival in various parts of the empire. What they have to say is, in a sense, derivative and remains largely unintelligible today unless it is understood against the backdrop of the great philosophical past.

Judged from a different perspective, however, Zeller’s view becomes problematic. One only has to take note of the sheer quantity of philosophical writing produced in this late period: it is staggering, and this is particularly true of the time of Justinian. To give but one example: of the roughly sixty different works printed in the Berlin edition of the Greek commentaries on Aristotle (CAG), some twenty belong to the decades discussed in this volume. These also happen to be some of the most substantial and valuable works in the series, rivaling the great commentaries of a luminary such as Alexander of Aphrodisias of the second and third centuries CE. To this output we may add a considerable number of commentaries on Plato as well as other works of different genres, only some of which have survived.

In the course of Justinian’s reign, the apparatus of government dealt with continuing changes in social and economic relationships throughout the empire, altered relations between the imperial court and the church, and a series of reconquests of former imperial territory that were remarkably successful but expensive in manpower and cash. In this context of rapid change at home and abroad, flaws in the machinery of government came to the fore and must have been very clear to those who gave thought to the issue. In the early years of his reign, Justinian addressed problems in the administration of justice, finance, and the armies with a series of major administrative reforms intended to strengthen imperial power over the bureaucracy and the social elite. The institutional stasis that afflicted this bureaucracy, however, nullified all but the most persistent efforts at reform. This chapter investigates the economic and administrative structures of Justinian’s empire to see how they worked and how they changed under his influence.

Economic Resources and Infrastructure

The sophisticated bureaucracy and administrative machinery that enabled the Roman state to function and to defend itself was not a monolith, but rather a constantly evolving set of institutional relationships and established social and economic structures. These changed in response to economic fluctuations and government demands as well as to tensions within late Roman society. This meant in practice that the government at Constantinople had to take account of several different levels of change: in the assessment, collection, and distribution of resources in kind, in manpower, and in cash; in the ambitions, vested interests, and economic situation of provincial and Constantinopolitan elites; in the demands for maintenance and recruitment of soldiers; and in the need to maintain a balance between the interests of those who managed the state’s many different functions in the provinces and the capital and of the producing population.

The reign of Justinian witnessed extraordinary levels of artistic activity, with the emperor himself an energetic patron of the arts. The court and clerical elites followed his lead, as did others throughout the empire and even beyond its borders in regions where the heritage of imperial Rome was still strong, especially in the former Roman provinces of western Europe. By Justinian’s time, Constantinople had become a major center for the arts, rivaling and even surpassing much older cities like Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome. In this chapter we will see how Justinian helped to shape artistic and architectural production in the capital and how this art is reflected in other regions of the empire and of the larger Mediterranean world.

Depictions of the emperor himself illustrate certain essential themes and concepts that characterized Justinianic art and are related to many developments observed in other chapters. Justinian appears as a triumphant conqueror, in accordance with conventions even older than the empire. He is often shown with features derived from the classical past, as ancient iconographic traditions continue to signal the age-old message of authority. Through such images, Justinian makes universal claims to sovereignty and control, aspects of imperial rule particularly emphasized during his reign. Perhaps most importantly, he is pictured as supported by Christ and supporting Christ. In the art of Justinian’s age, many strands of old Roman ideology and new religious expression are woven together in a way that is at once imperial and Christian to an extent never before realized. This Christian-imperial artistic matrix, characteristic of the Justinianic age, is fully in keeping with developments in law, political theory, philosophy, and military affairs.

Perhaps the most astonishing failure of the Age of Justinian was the disintegration of the one Christian Church of the one Christian Empire into two distinct churches - what we now call Eastern Orthodoxy, on one hand, and the Oriental Orthodox (notably the Jacobite and the Coptic churches) on the other, a division only beginning to be healed in our own time. Remarkably, it seems that this division happened not, as a modern might think, because of nationalistic struggles against the empire, or any desire for autonomy by regional churches, but simply because church leaders, emperors, theologians, and monks, most of them devoted to the ideal of one church and one empire, were unable to resolve a longstanding theological dispute over how one was to understand and talk about Christ’s divine-human reality, the debate over Christology. In the end, the dispute left behind it not only divided churches, a weakened empire, and a redefined role for the emperor, but also new ways of thinking and believing that mark the beginning of Byzantium proper and the end of late antiquity.

The Background

Doctrinal Foundations and Founding Legends (100–400)

The kind of Christianity that won the right to call itself the apostolic faith in the first two centuries CE established as authoritative the first three gospels and the teachings of Paul, all of which assumed the genuine humanity of Jesus. That was to be a foundation of mainline Christology. It is significant, however, that heirs of the original Jewish Christians, who seem to have said that Jesus was only a human being, were by 180 being dismissed as heretics, and that in 268 Paul of Samosata was condemned as a heretic for, among other things, saying that Jesus was a man inspired in essentially the same way as a prophet was inspired.

According to Edward Gibbon, writing in the late eighteenth century, the most important legacy of the Age of Justinian and indeed the most important legacy of the emperor himself lay in the field of law. Gibbon’s assessment still rings true. Though the physical boundaries of medieval Europe were recast repeatedly on battlefields long after the Age of Justinian had ended, the law issued in his name still shapes legal culture today.

The “fair and everlasting monument” Justinian bequeathed to posterity is known today as the Corpus iuris civilis: three codices or books of law, promulgated between the years 529 and 534. The Justinianic Codex, the Digest (or Pandects), and the Institutes sought to harmonize 1,000 years of complex and checkered development in the citizen law of the Romans. Justinian’s new law books contained old wine in new skins; each book utilized and incorporated different types of legal source material from the Roman past, but each also reshaped that material, harmonizing disparate texts with each other, mapping the outline of a system of law in a single body (corpus) of interlocking texts.

Very occasionally the emperor Justinian deserves our sympathy. Epidemics are usually named after their victims: the biblical plague of the Philistines, for example, or the plague of Athens famously described by Thucydides. Yet the pandemic (worldwide epidemic) that struck the empire on an unprecedented scale during Justinian’s reign, spreading to northern and western Europe, many parts of the Middle East, and possibly China, has always been treated differently. In the Secret History Procopius blamed the emperor’s demonic machinations for all the natural disasters of his reign. Even though Justinian himself contracted the disease and its ravages long outlasted him, historians of the sixth century, following Procopius’s lead, have written of “the plague of Justinian.” This is unfair. In what follows attention will be confined for the most part to plague in sixth-century Byzantium. But the phenomenon is far larger, and to convey its “global” impact, extensive chronology, and questionable biological identity, I shall refer to it more neutrally as the early medieval pandemic (EMP).

Itineraries

There had doubtless been localized epidemics aplenty in the later Roman and the early Byzantine empires. Yet, when the EMP arrived in 541, there had apparently not been a major one since the 520s. Looking back to approximately a century before his own time, the author of the Paschal (Easter) Chronicle recorded a Great Death under the year 529, which may well be a mistaken reference to the EMP. Much later on, though more plausibly, the tenth-century universal chronicler Agapius of Hierapolis mentions a “terrible epidemic” that broke out in 525–526 and lasted for six years.

Most of the action in linguistic theory under Chomsky’s aegis has focused on questions of how words are put together into sentences rather than on the words themselves. Fair enough: the universal hallmark of human language is its parametrically organized combinatorial structure. In linguistic systems, the individual word classes (for instance, the nouns, the verbs, the complementizers) play particular and crucial structural roles; rules and parameters directly implicate these classes. But what about the items that comprise these classes? It has been widely maintained that these individual atoms or particles of language play no central role in its core, or, to use recent terminology, in “language narrowly conceived” (Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch 2002). No distributional property of English worth its salt is dependent on whether some particular noun - let us say elephant rather than rhinoceros or gnu - appears in it. Rather, what words seem to be relevant to is the conceptual system that interfaces with language. In this latter domain, relevant to “language broadly conceived,” the difference between an elephant and a gnu really matters.

Similarly, the linguistic-theoretical study of language acquisition has focused primarily on the nature and setting of syntactic parameters rather than on the evolving character of the lexicon (e.g. Manzini & Wexler; 1987; Lightfoot 1999; Baker 2001). Again, this is no surprise. Acquisition of the combinatorial features of a language poses a classical poverty-of-the-stimulus problem, requiring the learner to extract abstract organizing principles from input structured only (or almost only) as morpheme sequences (see, particularly, Chomsky 1986).

Plato’s Problem

Plato’s Problem was expressed generally by Bertrand Russell: “How comes it that human beings, whose contacts with the world are brief and personal and limited, are nevertheless able to know as much as they do know?” The problem arises in the domain of language acquisition in that children attain infinitely more than they experience. Literally so, we shall see: they attain a productive system, a grammar, on the basis of very little experience. So there is more, much more, to language acquisition than mimicking what we hear in childhood, and there is more to it than the simple transmission of a set of words and sentences from one generation of speakers to the next. There is more to it than a reproduction of experience and, in maturity, our capacity goes well beyond what we have experienced.

Consider some subtleties that people are not consciously aware of. The verb is may be used in its full form or its reduced form: people say Kim is happy or Kim’s happy. However, certain instances of is never reduce, for example, the underlined items in Kim is happier than Tim is or I wonder what the problem is in Washington. Most people are not aware of this, but we all know subconsciously not to use the reduced form here. How did we come to this? The question arises because the eventual knowledge is richer than relevant experience. As children, we heard instances of the full form and the reduced form, but we were not instructed to avoid the reduced form in certain places; we had no access to “negative data,” information about what does not occur.

Many observers have been fascinated by the puzzle of tracing connections between Noam Chomsky’s extraordinary contributions to two quite distinct domains of modern culture. Ronald Lunsford points out that some of these parallels would exist whatever area of inquiry Chomsky had chosen for his life’s work - parallels that “arise from Chomsky’s way of thinking, rather than from the disciplines themselves” (Haley & Lunsford; 1994: 172). One critical element in his “way of thinking” manifest in both his professional and non-professional work is his commitment to rationality (a commitment summed up in the observation, “There are no arguments that I know of for irrationality” [Chomsky 1987a:22]). On a more abstract level, one finds in both his political and his non-political work a quality that Chomsky has sometimes referred to as “psychic distance.” In linguistics, “if we can establish a kind of psychic distance from the object and try to see how similar normal common characteristics really are, against the background of a possible variety that can be imagined,” we discover that “language structures really are uniform” (1988a: 151f). In politics, once we have extricated ourselves from conventional thought, we discover underlying similarities between apparent polarities - an underlying commitment to US power shared by, for example, Joseph Alsop (a Vietnam War “hawk”), and Arthur Schlesinger (a Kennedy liberal and a “dove”). The ability to achieve “psychic distance ” is actually an essential element of the ability to inquire, and to achieve scientific progress.

Introduction

Language is an immensely rich phenomenon, presenting vast challenges for the linguist, the scientist of this phenomenon. Among the most central, and most difficult, questions are ones concerning the nature of the capacity we all have to speak a language. Just what is this capacity, and how does it arise in the individual? We thus have (among many others) the two following related questions:

1. - What is the correct characterization of someone who “knows a language” (in general terms, who has command of a systematic connection between sound and meaning)?

2. - How does that systematic connection arise in the individual?

For the first of these questions, the linguist hopes to account, in an explicit way, for the speaker’s ability to put together and understand sentences, including ones new to the speaker (and often new to all speakers), and for the speaker’s ability to judge potential sentences as “acceptable” (John left) or “unacceptable” (Left John). For the second question, a particularly difficult one given how complex the capacity seems to be and how quickly it is acquired, the linguist seeks to discover what aspects of the capacity are determined by the child’s experience, and how this determination (“language learning”) takes place. For a half century, Noam Chomsky has been developing a theory of language that deals with these two questions, by positing explicit formulations of human language capacity in terms of a productive “computational” system, most of whose properties are present in advance of experience, “wired in” in the structure of the human brain. Thus, Chomsky conceives of his enterprise as part of psychology, ultimately biology.

Introduction

A major influence on Chomsky’s approach to the study of mind has come from rationalist philosophers such as Descartes. Like these thinkers, Chomsky’s work can be usefully seen in opposition to empiricist approaches to mind articulated by thinkers such as Locke. The aim of this chapter is to provide a conceptual backdrop against which one can locate some of Chomsky’s claims. I try to do this by outlining the different ways that the empiricist and rationalist traditions (actually, idealized versions of each) try to reconcile an apparent tension in epistemology (the theory of knowledge). The tension comes in trying to combine a theory of mind with a theory of truth to yield an account of how it is possible for humans to know anything, i.e. have true beliefs in some domain, especially true beliefs about the “outside world.” The two traditions endorse very different conceptions of the relation of minds to the world. However, it is possible to construct a shared conception of what the epistemological project amounts to that plausibly animates the details of the particular proposals that have been advanced. Doing this, I believe, allows for a better evaluation of the intuitions that drive these programs and thereby permits one to more fully appreciate some of Chomsky’s main philosophical proposals. In what follows, I will try to outline these general conceptions. I will then try to relate them to some of the concerns that Chomsky has raised in his linguistic and philosophical writing.

This chapter explores a very general philosophical and methodological theme in Noam Chomsky’s work - the scope and limit of scientific inquiry in the study of mind and language. It is a conspicuous fact about Chomsky that accompanying the vast and driving intellectual ambition of his program in what he conceives as the science of linguistics is a notable and explicit modesty about the extent to which he thinks he has given, indeed the extent to which one can give, scientific answers to fundamental questions. This modesty in terms of breadth of coverage is in a sense the other side of, and therefore indispensable to, the depth of what he has achieved in the area he has covered.

In his work, he seems to offer at least two different sorts of reasons for us to be made modest about ourselves as inquirers. First there is a modesty implicit in his guardedness about claiming for semantics what some other philosophers have claimed for it, and what he himself has claimed only for syntax understood in a broad sense viz., that there is in some interesting sense an explanatory theory to be offered which can be incorporated into the science of linguistics. Second, there are reasons for modesty having to do with the fact that either because of our conceptual limitations or because of faulty formulations of questions, we are in no position to give serious and detailed answers to them. The next two sections will take up each of these in turn.

Introduction

Often, philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists aiming to construct a theory of meaning for languages focus on how words are used by people to deal with the world. They might assume there is a regular way in which the word dolphin is used - that people regularly use dolphin to refer to or denote a class of aquatic beasts. And they might assume that there is a central, core use of words - using She has a pet dolphin to correctly describe some state of affairs, perhaps. If these assumptions were correct, dolphin might then be defined in terms of some regular function(s) it serves in a community of individuals who “speak the same language,” understood as “use words in the same way” (cp. Davidson 1967, Sellars 1974; contrast Chomsky 1996a, b, 2000a, Fodor 1998). These assumptions are built into technical terms: “truth (or correctness) conditions,” “functional (or conceptual) role,” etc. Because these attempts focus on communities, circumstances, things, and so on, I call them “externalist” approaches.

Externalist assumptions are wrong. Chomsky (1959, 1966, 1975, 1980, 1981a, 1986, 1995b, 1996a,b, 2000a), recalling observations that go back to Descartes (see below), repeatedly points this out. Words do sometimes get used by people in similar ways; and they do sometimes come to be related to the world. But they do neither by themselves. Similar uses and relations to the world are products of human actions, of words' free and typically creative use by humans. Because people use words for all sorts of purposes, because the use of language is a form of free action, and because there is little reason to think that there can be a science of free action, there is little reason to think that there can be a naturalistic externalist theory of meaning.

Introduction

When the South African freedom fighter Steve Biko said that “the most powerful tool in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed,” he was expressing an idea very similar to that of David Hume who observed: “'Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and the most military governments, as well as to the most free and the most popular” (quoted in Chomsky 1991: 352). From the fall of the Shah of Iran to the changes in Eastern Europe or South Africa, examples abound that illustrate this thesis: a powerful group may have at its disposal all the military might that it wants, if the soldiers and officers, or even the vast majority of the population, are not willing to follow orders, it is effectively powerless. Hence, the importance of the battle of ideas and the necessity for any ruling class who wants to maintain its privileges in the long run of “regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.”