ἰδίοις vs. ἑαυτοῦ

Semantic Range, Lexicography, and other approaches to word meaning - in general, or for particular words.
Thomas Dolhanty
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Joined: May 20th, 2014, 10:13 am
Location: west coast of Canada

Re: ἰδίοις vs. ἑαυτοῦ

Post by Thomas Dolhanty »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
Stephen Carlson wrote:There's a third option, which I mentioned in my original reply: admit one's ignorance and not make stuff up.
I'm not so keen to stick my nose in, but perhaps I coud share some observations of colleagues and students iver the years.

Autodidacts often seem to be making things up. Looked at it a little obliquely progress withun a developed field of knowledge is a kind of guided making up knowledge. Without guidance some misunderstandings and misorientations can easily happen. Those type of things straighten themselves out to a large degree given time, exposure to a breadth of material that established the field in the first place or the discipline of structured education. Any one teaching, after the first 2 or 3 autobiographical / egoistic self-discovery tend to come to focus on the material, and the needs of the students require even the autodidact to go beyond their own interaction and discovery - sometimes looking like it's made up - and develop ways to bring others to the subject. It usually follows its own path.

Admission of ignorance requires an appreciation of the limits of ones own knowledge, and when the awareness of ignorance depends on the self-referential body of knowledge that one has oneself, that can be very difficult.
Thank you for that comment, Stephen. I think it is true and well said. When you are learning an area on your own, you can easily feel that you are "boldly going where no man has gone before", only to find out that you're actually on a tricycle, and the discipline masters are in jets!

Still, that's not what happened here. I responded neither to the question asked, nor to Runge's work, but simply to the idea that "change has meaning" (as it was originally stated). I was reflecting on whether that statement can really be put forward as a general principle. And so I was quite surprised by Stephen's initial comment. When I thought about it a bit more though, I saw that he was right- not that I was pretending to know what I did not know, but that I was not addressing the question asked at all, nor was I intelligently commenting on Runge. It was a careless and undisciplined comment - especially as the first comment in response to a topic. Thus.as I said, I accepted the correction - and so I do. At least early in a thread one should not distract from the question with rambling reveries.
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Stephen Hughes
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Re: ἰδίοις vs. ἑαυτοῦ

Post by Stephen Hughes »

that's not what happened here.
I was making a general comment.
Γελᾷ δ' ὁ μωρός, κἄν τι μὴ γέλοιον ᾖ
(Menander, Γνῶμαι μονόστιχοι 108)
Thomas Dolhanty
Posts: 401
Joined: May 20th, 2014, 10:13 am
Location: west coast of Canada

Re: ἰδίοις vs. ἑαυτοῦ

Post by Thomas Dolhanty »

Stephen Hughes wrote:
that's not what happened here.
I was making a general comment.
And a very helpful one, in my opinion. We are at very different stages of mastery here and operating in very different contexts. For all of us it is good to keep that in mind before hitting the "Submit" button. For myself, this means being more disciplined in responding to a question.
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Stephen Carlson
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Re: ἰδίοις vs. ἑαυτοῦ

Post by Stephen Carlson »

Tobey wrote:Just interesting that when Paul speaks of the woman's relationship to the man, it is ἴδιον yet when he speaks of the man's relationship to the wife, it is ἑαυτοῦ (as in the OP). I agree with you Thomas in the error of trying to discern meaning where none is intended, but again, while it may not be theologically significant, there is a reason Paul used the two terms (so closely together to convey a similar meaning) that the question is begged, "Why?"
If it is indeed the case (I haven't checked) that Paul uses ἴδιον with one sex and ἑαυτοῦ with the other, then we don't really have the "choice" part in the "choice implies meaning" heuristic. There is a tendency in language for apparent synonyms to sort themselves into their own domains of usage, like "handsome" for men and "beautiful" for women, and the only real meaning to speak of is the confirmation of which domain is operative.
Stephen C. Carlson, Ph.D.
Melbourne, Australia
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