James Calvin Taylor is Assistant Professor of Classics at Colby College, where he also teaches courses in the Environmental Humanities. He received his PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard in 2020 with a dissertation on the conceptualization of deep time, geological processes, and environmental change in classical texts. His research interests span a wide variety of genres and time periods in classical antiquity, embracing texts as diverse as Aristotle’s Meteorologica and Ovid’s Metamorphoses,and drawing upon interpretative frameworks from the history of science, environmental criticism, and the philosophy of history. He has written articles on topics as diverse as Lucan’s description of the Syrtes, Herodotus’ integration of Egypt’s geological and human histories, and the significance of tides in Stoic meteorology.

After the grand exodus from academia.edu, I finally figured out how to build an acceptable site where everything displays correctly (or, at least, so I think) on HCommons: jamescalvintaylor.hcommons.org.

02.10.2025 20:06 — 👍 1    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0

Page of Barnes' book, in which he talks of "modern atomism" and "modern science" only to then say that "there is, alas, no such thing as 'modern science', and the theory I have called 'modern atomism is a myth."

Jonathan Barnes has a strange rhetorical habit of leading you along one interpretative route, only to then contradict himself as though you were a fool to trust him all along... (Here on atomism in The Presocratic Philosophers (1979) 2.41).

08.09.2025 22:47 — 👍 3    🔁 0    💬 0    📌 0