In 1895 three major figures in the history of British theatre came centre stage in revealing ways. Henry Irving, master of theatrical illusion and the most famous performer of the age, knelt before Queen Victoria and rose as the first actor in history to be knighted. Oscar Wilde, that Dubliner brilliant in his plays and impudent in society, had two productions running simultaneously in London: An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. G. B. Shaw, virtually unknown as a playwright, began a three-year mission of modernity and socialism as theatre critic for the Saturday Review. Shaw complained frequently that Irving, whom he greatly admired, wasted his talents on weak and insignificant work, and he was disturbed to find himself laughing mechanically at Wilde’s masterpiece. Shortly after The Importance of Being Earnest’s brilliant opening, Wilde was in grave trouble with the law over his homosexuality. Just as his play marks the high point of Victorian comedy, so Wilde’s trial signals a turn in the history of Victorian righteousness. Irving’s knighthood and Wilde’s disgrace: the poles of late Victorian attitudes to the theatre demonstrated within a single year, with Shaw as touchstone commentator.

Despite such anecdotal charm, 1895 does not distinguish the beginning of a new era for theatre in Britain. Yet in some ways it is fortunate that this volume on the twentieth century begins at a date not historiographically remarkable, for what most characterised the theatre in the 1890s was a determined insistence on security and continuity.

The production of plays throughout this period was fundamentally affected by the duopoly established by royal command in 1660 and by the regulatory apparatus that controlled theatre companies and imposed censorship. The establishment of patent companies, shares of which could be sold to outside investors, tended to remove power from the hands of the actors. The patents also made the founding of additional companies almost impossible. Such companies did spring up between 1695 and 1705 and again after 1728, but for the most part they were suppressed by the Licensing Act of 1737. The passage of that act had dire consequences for British theatre not fully undone until the abolition of censorship in 1968. There is an enormous irony here. Theatres had been regulated by the Lord Chamberlain and all scripts censored by the Master of the Revels since back in the sixteenth century. Opposition to censorship was essentially non-existent: writers and actors alike accepted its propriety. The collapse of censorship early in the eighteenth century came about by accident, not because of a change in policy, and could not have been predicted. The ultimate result was reimposition of government control in much more drastic and damaging form in 1737.

The Carolean establishment

When the English monarchy was restored in 1660, concerted attempts were made in and around the court to return to the status quo ante as far as possible. Many such reinstatements were superficial and temporary, but theatre proved especially resilient, even though it too was ‘the same, only different’. Scholars have made much of the contrast between the flourishing free enterprise theatre system under Elizabeth I and the narrow, exclusive design inscribed into law when Charles II, upon his return, granted a joint patent monopoly to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant.

A chapter on logic in an introductory book on Islamic philosophy could legitimately be expected to cover a range of topics, from the argument techniques used by ninth-century theologians and jurists to the semantical analyses of the fourteenth-century grammarians. But by the late tenth century, the Arabic word commonly translated as “logic,” mantiq, had come to refer almost exclusively to Peripatetic traditions of distinguishing a good from a bad argument, and those are the traditions to which this chapter is limited. This means that the Arabic logical writings examined here are, like their medieval Latin counterparts, concerned with a problematic arising from the Aristotelian texts; more than medieval Latin logic, however, the dominant tradition of Arabic logic is mainly at one remove from those texts, as will be exemplified below.

Even with this limitation, the writings which fall under the chapter’s remit stretch from 750 to the present day, covering the whole course of subjects developed in the Organon. For practical purposes, I impose the further limitation of referring the material covered back to al-Risāla al-shamsiyya, the Logic for Shams al-Dīn by Najm al-Dīn al-Kātibī (d. 1276). I do so because down to the twentieth century it was commonly the first substantial text on logic which a Sunnī Muslim would study in the course of a madrasa education. Because the problematic considered by the Shamsiyya acquired its precise form in Avicenna’s writings, and acquired its commonly accepted resolution by the late thirteenth century, I will not consider any logical work written after this time. This should not be taken to imply that original work in logic came to an end in 1300, but rather that other problems had taken center stage.

As Michael Billington indicates here, some of the main developments in British theatre since 1979 did not originate with aesthetics but rather with ideology and economics. Theatre has been a business for centuries, of course, even if its institutional and financial basis was often invisible in the discussion of performances, but it is unlikely that Billington could have written this any earlier in the post-World War Two period. He registers a process of commodification, in which the relationships between plays, practitioners, writers and audiences have become defined by the terms of free-market economics. As a result, from about the early 1980s justifications for theatre as a cultural practice became increasingly determined by its value as a commercial activity, with profound consequences for the kinds of theatre that were produced in the final decades of the twentieth century.

The processes considered here are complex, and to discuss them will involve looking first at the political context for the changing relationship of theatre to commerce and the state, in a climate dominated by government intervention to introduce monetarism and major structural changes to the British economy. This included the forging of a new partnership between ‘public’ and ‘private’ sources of funding. The kind of theatre that was produced as a result will then be considered, as will some of the most significant political and cultural consequences of commodification.

For a good part of the last hundred years theatre in Wales has been prejudiced by the dominance of one imported model – ‘good quality mainstream theatre in the literary tradition from Shakespeare through Ibsen and Shaw to our contemporary writers’ – and by the widespread assumption that no indigenous theatre existed until the Arts Council assumed the responsibility for creating it. This is the more ironic because Wales had produced in the relatively recent past an indigenous theatre which demonstrates that it can flourish without the advantages of wealth and cultural continuity, on the basis of a distinctive and particularly vibrant compact between audience and performer. This was the theatre of the Anterliwt, which flourished in rural Wales during the later eighteenth and the earlier nineteenth centuries. Satirical and celebratory, moralistic and indecent, the texts produced in this theatre projected the immediate realities of contemporary rural life against the background of traditional moral teaching. Written or adapted for particular occasions, they were presented in improvised spaces by two or three performers, amongst whose performative skills the ability to turn an appropriate song to a popular tune, Welsh or English, clearly ranked highly. Because the society it served lacked the wealth needed to create permanent structures and practices, this indigenous folk theatre disappeared completely when its social base was under-mined. The example of the Anterliwt reminds us that the fundamental condition of theatre is the existence of a social group or groups within a cultural community who see it as in their interests to function as an audience.

The theatrical year 1895 would, no doubt, have been characterized by Lady Bracknell, its most enduring contribution, as crowded with both incident and premature experience. Its greatest sensation was, to be sure, the meteoric fall of Lady Bracknell’s creator. In mid-February Oscar Wilde had two highly successful works playing opposite one another at two of the West End’s principal playhouses. An Ideal Husband had opened at the Haymarket in early January, with matinée idol Lewis Waller in the role of Sir Robert Chiltern. It was still performing to packed houses when, the following month, George Alexander opened The Importance of Being Earnest to enthusiastic notices at the St James’s. Wilde, now at the peak of his powers, was applauded alike by actor-managers, play-goers and progressive critics who counted him among the reformers of the British stage. Weeks later his career lay in ruins. The libel charges he had pressed against the Marquess of Queensberry triggered the succession of trials that in a matter of months brought him to Reading Gaol, convicted of ‘gross indecency’. Wilde’s name disappeared from programmes and playbills, and by late spring both works had been taken off by their respective managements. Clement Scott, doyen of London’s critical fraternity, responded in predictable (and personal) fashion:‘ Open the windows! Let in the fresh air!’An exasperated William Archer, translator and general champion of Ibsen in England, read the event as a serious blow for the development of a home-grown avant-garde: ‘Really the luck is against the poor British drama.’

Most Arabic philosophers took the general inspiration for their discussions of soul (al-nafs) and intellect (al-'aql) from the Arabic translations of Aristotle’s De Anima and Parva Naturalia and later Greek commentaries on Aristotle, although a few philosophers, such as al-Razi, were of a more Platonic bent. In addition to assimilating Greek sources into their own philosophical psychology, Arabic philosophers were also sensitive to the need to address the competing views of the Islamic theologians (mutakallimun), who upheld an atomistic metaphysics in which all created beings were understood to be mere aggregates of atoms and accidents held together by God’s absolute power. This yielded a bundle theory of personal identity which left no room for an immaterial soul. Such a view of human nature was vehemently denied by the philosophers, although it was attractive to the theologians since it allowed them to offer an account of the revealed doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

THE NATURE OF THE SOUL AND ITS RELATION TO THE BODY

Unlike their theological adversaries, all the Arabic philosophers accepted some conception of the soul derived from the Greek tradition. In most cases it was Aristotle’s definition of the soul in De Anima, II.1, as the first “form” or “actuality” of a body which is potentially alive, that held sway. Under this conception, the soul is simply the animating and organizing principle of a body and is therefore “inseparable from the body.” Most of the Arabic philosophers also accepted Aristotle’s division of the parts and powers of the soul, according to which “soul” is an ordered genus divided into three species, corresponding to the division of living things into plants, animals, and humans.

In February 1948 nearly 500 delegates gathered in London for an unprecedented four-day meeting designed to tackle no less a task than the complete regeneration of British theatre. The British Theatre Conference attracted a broad sweep of interests: London and regional theatres, drama schools and training colleges, plus national institutions, such as the actors’ union Equity and the umbrella body for amateur theatre, the British Drama League. Some were present as individuals, among them leading West End theatre managers, who collectively had refused to send a representative when they learned that theatre ownership was on the agenda.

Here was an historic opportunity for the British theatre to redefine itself and its relationship to society. The upsurge of interest in culture during World War Two had survived into peacetime, and Labour’s nationalisation programme offered the promise of significant state funding for the arts. The conference, chaired by the writer J. B. Priestley, passed an astonishing array of far-sighted resolutions: on strengthening the Arts Council, establishing a national theatre, reducing and controlling theatre rents and costs through a public authority entertainment tax, renovating theatre buildings, reforming safety and licensing regulations – including a call for Sunday opening and an end to censorship – expanding drama in education, increasing co-operation between amateur and professional theatre, improving professional training and – most contentious of all – regulating entry and re-entry into ‘the profession’ through training or apprenticeship.

Although this impressive roll-call of concerns prefigured the major debates that defined British theatre during the following half-century, the moment of radical change was lost. National economic stringency and the reassertion of conservatism within the theatre itself pushed the profession of theatre down a different path.

P. P. Howe’s description of the state of British theatre in the last years of the Edwardian era is, with hindsight, both true and misleading. What is missing from his view is the later perception that this was both a luxuriant, golden era for theatre and a period of ideological and aesthetic ‘revolution’. Critics and chroniclers, born in the late nineteenth century and growing up in the British provinces, often write with passion of their early experiences of the actor-managers who visited their towns and cities. But they also decry the commercial ‘revolution’ that mostly destroyed the actor-manager system after World War One, as well as championing the fragmented experiments that brought about another type of ‘revolutionary change in the character of the theatre’ in Britain. Allardyce Nicoll describes this new theatre as ‘possessed of an animating spirit the like of which the nineteenth century … had never known.’

SALIENT FEATURES OF LATE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

Plotinus: a new reading of Plato

During the imperial age, in many centers of the Roman world, philosophy was taught in close connection to the doctrines of the great philosophers of the past: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Zeno. Not only in Rome, Athens, Alexandria, but also in Pergamon, Smyrna, Apamea, Tarsus, Ege, Aphrodisias in the east of the empire, Naples and Marseille in the west, a “school” of philosophy disseminated either Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism. Against this background, the thought of Plotinus represented a turning point in the history of philosophical ideas which was to play a decisive role in the creation of falsafa and to influence indirectly philosophy in the Middle Ages, in both Latin and Arabic.

Coming from Alexandria, where he studied Platonism under the guidance of Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus arrived in Rome (244 C.E.) and opened a school. From his explicit claims, as well as the content of his treatises, we know that he was a Platonist and taught Platonism, but also took into account the doctrines of the other philosophers, especially Aristotle. As we learn from the biography that Porphyry prefaced to the edition of Plotinus’ works, in the daily meetings of the school the treatises of Aristotle, accompanied by their commentaries – especially those by Alexander of Aphrodisias – were read before Plotinus presented his lecture.

INTRODUCTION

When contemporary philosophers probe the relation between faith and reason, their focus is on the propositional content of religious belief. They ask whether doctrinal propositions can be proved by sound arguments from premises acceptable to unbelievers, or, failing that, whether adherence to such theses can be rationally justified. Christian philosophers often see themselves as responding to pressure from the outside to defend the rationality of Christian faith. In the waning years of the Roman empire, St. Augustine, too, was preoccupied with defending the faith, first externally, against its pagan competitors (not only but principally the Manichaeans); then against heretics (Donatists and Pelagians) within.

St. Anselm’s eleventh-century situation was different from both of these. He spent most of his life in the Benedictine Monastery at Bec. Most of his works were penned for and at the behest of his monastic brother-students. Their overarching common aim was to become persons who could see and enjoy God’s face. Their intellectual pursuits were integrated into that project. Anselm’s written investigations of non-theological subjects were all occasioned by the exigencies of their doctrinal inquiries. These facts about Anselm’s career have left deep imprints on his philosophical theology, not least on his method. If he was eventually drawn into polemical contexts and confronted with real non-Christians, Anselm continued to see the drive to understand Christian faith by reason alone (sola ratione) as predominantly internal, arising not simply from his own monastic vocation, but from the natural teleology built into human nature itself.

Why, still today, do we find the name of Ferdinand de Saussure featuring prominently in volumes published not only on linguistics, but on a multitude of topics, volumes with titles such as Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies (Lee and Poynton, 2000), or the intriguing Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers (Kronenfeld, 1996)? It is to this question that the present volume attempts to bring at least a partial answer, by looking afresh at the intellectual background to Saussure's work, the work itself, its impact on European structuralism in general and linguistics in particular, and its changed but continuing influence today.

The titles above, then, are enough to showthat nearly a century and a half after his birth, the ideas of this Swiss linguist and thinker still excite interest. He is best known for his Cours de linguistique générale, edited after his premature death from the notes of students who had attended his lectures and first published in 1916. This ‘Course in general linguistics’ has gone through numerous editions in France, has been translated into numerous languages, and has had an influence far beyond the area of linguistics. This book, however, is far from being the sole reason for his importance as a thinker, the recognition of which has gone through various phases since his death. In his own lifetime, he was regarded – and regarded himself – primarily as a historical linguist who had made his mark with a brilliant and precocious study in Indo-European linguistics.

This chapter will look at various aspects of the relationship between Saussurean linguistics and debates within twentieth-century philosophy of science. After all it was Saussure's chief aim to see linguistics placed on a properly 'scientific' footing, that is, to reconfigure the field in accordance with certain well-defined principles that would constitute an adequate, rigorously theorised account of language and signifying systems in general. The first task was to elaborate those various distinctions that would henceforth provide its working methodology, among them the cardinal oppositions between langue and parole, synchrony and diachrony, the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, and the orders of signifier and signified. This would open the way to a structuralist account that left no room for naive (pre-scientific) ideas about the one-to-one 'correspondence' between words and ideas or words and objects. Rather it would show how the systematic character of language - its differential structures of sound and sense - can only be described by means of a theory which itself breaks free of such delusive 'commonsense' beliefs and acquires the full range of conceptual resources whereby to articulate its own grasp of those same signifying structures.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) claimed that there are only three possible ways of proving the existence of God by means of “speculative reason.”He called one of them “the ontological proof,” and it is often said that this (or “the ontological argument”as it is now commonly called) was first advanced by Anselm in Chapters 2 and 3 of his Proslogion. Anselm's collected works run to many pages, but nothing he wrote has commanded so much attention as these short texts. Yet what was he arguing in them? And how should we evaluate his reasoning? These are questions which have been answered in a bewildering variety of ways. In this chapter I aim only to present a brief introduction to the reasoning of Proslogion 2 and 3 together with some tentative suggestions as to how we might reflect on it.

FAITH, REASON, AND THE PROSLOGION

Anselm’s writings are not what some would regard as typical works of philosophy. Philosophers cannot, of course, avoid speaking from some viewpoint or other, but they often foster the impression that they seek only to follow “where reason leads,” and they encourage us to suppose that they have no serious beliefs to start with, especially religious ones. Anselm, however, rarely does this. Almost all of his writings are presented as the work of a committed Christian, and such is the case with the Proslogion. This text is conceived as a religious treatise from start to finish. It is even written in the form of a prayer.

On the history of the Cours, the task which faced its 'author-editors' Bally and Sechehaye in 1913, and how they acquitted themselves, the reader can consult Godel (1957), Engler (1959, 1968b, 1987b), Vallini (1979) and Linda (2001).

Let us make a few points clear. The Cours (or CLG) does not contain Saussure's 'actual words' but a subsequent digest of three courses (based on lecture notes kept by a few conscientious students) and of certain handwritten observations which testify to a longstanding reflection on the 'essence' of linguistics. Saussure had always said that he would never publish any of these reflections. Without the bold and assiduous determination of Bally and Sechehaye, Saussure's thought would probably have never reached the reading public, any more than did that of his contemporary Marty.Without the CLG, the interest shown today in the discovery of any new Saussurean document would not exist

Hence the existence of the CLG is in itself a fact of historical significance. The publication of the first ‘authentic’ texts associated with the linguist (Godel, 1957; Saussure, 1968 and 1974 (CLG/E, vols. 1 and 2)), is the second event of importance and it has allowed for a two-way evaluation. It led to new interpretations, valuable but provisional, as has been shown by the 1996 appearance of a Saussurean manuscript dating from 1891, and containing in essence the whole of Saussure’s ‘general and semiological linguistics’, as well as totally unexpected thoughts on ‘semantics’ (Saussure, 2002 (ELG)).