We are pleased to announce the 2015 Ciceronian Society Conference at Mount Saint Mary’s University (Emmitsburg, Maryland), March 12th – 14th.

When scholars rediscovered the Puritans in the twentieth century, many of them took cues from the century before. Following the lead of Alexis de Tocqueville, Lyman Beecher, and Rufus Choate, they cast the Puritans as central players in Whig histories of liberty and democracy. Some dissented by casting the Puritan legacy as one of authoritarianism. . . . Others dissented by asserting that Anglo-American republicanism traced its lineage from ancient or early modern secular sources and not from early modern English churchmen. . . . Such disagreement has had the salutary effect of encouraging more scholars to reexamine their assumptions about who read what, when, why, and how. . . . Michael Winship has boldly entered this controversy by titling his study of Puritans and Pilgrims Godly Republicanism. As you can probably figure out from the title, Winship asserts an important heritage for what he calls the “applied sacred political theory” articulated by Puritans and separatists in particular.

More than a thousand years before Descartes and Hume, Sextus Empiricus challenged the premises of everything. In a world dominated by dogmatic belief systems (especially Stoicism, Platonism in all its varieties, and, increasingly, Christianity), the skeptic thinkers continually demanded a reexamination of the basic assumptions at the root of existing political, cultural, moral, and philosophical beliefs. This article surveys that demand for reexamination in its political context through the writing of Sextus Empiricus and his contributions for the search for individual autonomy and peace (ataraxia) in an increasingly hostile, distant, and fragmented political system. Ancient skepticism offered an alternative view of the world which is worthy of attention today as we face renewed economic, political, and cultural challenges. While Sextus Empiricus does not offer solutions to these contemporary problems, his skepticism presents both a useful pattern for formulating the correct questions and a fascinating guide to living in a world which seems to abound with wrong questions and wrong answers alike.

Unlike many other well-known medieval thinkers, Ockham was not a theologian; he remained throughout his career a teacher of “arts,” which is to say, of philosophy, and he is known primarily as a logician. It is in this area that Ockham can truly be said to be an innovator, and it is here that we need to turn to grasp what is meant by his “nominalism.”

This essay argues that thumos uncovers the nature and character of “the political.” Many essential and constitutive aspects of the political realm have their roots in the thumotic element of human nature. Specifically, thumos guides how the political realm inevitably emerges from individual interaction, how the political is sustained, and what dangers the political faces. Thumos is the basis for patriotism, for developing a common good or standard for a community, and for preserving law and order, all of which are essential to political life. However, thumos’ momentum eventually drives it out of control in an aggressive “snowball effect:” when given an inch, thumos takes a foot. Patriotism becomes jingoism, religious solidarity leads to religious persecution, and the preservation of justice becomes an excuse to punish diversity. At this point, it becomes a political liability and must be controlled.