Tom Davies

A motif in the Cypria is sometimes explained as borrowed in the seventh century from the Akkadian epic Atra-ḫasīs, sometimes as inherited from a third-millennium Indo-European poetic tradition surviving also in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. These explanations seem incompatible, but they are not. Narrative traditions often cross linguistic boundaries through multilinguals, and linguistic and archaeological evidence suggests that some speakers of Proto-Indo-European were also speakers of Semitic languages. Indo-European and Ancient Near Eastern comparative approaches are therefore halves of a single enterprise: the Cypria, Mahābhārata and Atra-ḫasīs belong to a Eurasian-Steppe tradition, and must be read together.

Shane Glackin's 2019 Philosophical Quarterly article aims to offer a framework for understanding the philosophical debate about the nature of disease and utilise this framework to reply to several standard objections to normativist theories of disease. Specifically, Glackin claims his model avoids three central challenges to normativism, which we term the ‘Flippancy Problem’, ‘Repugnancy Problem’, and the ‘Explanatory Problem’. Although we find Glackin's framework helpful in clarifying the terrain of the debate, we argue these three challenges continue to afflict his preferred construal of the normativist/social constructivist position.