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Logos in Greek culture is language that stakes a claim on the attention of its addressee. It therefore implies a question as to the authority of the utterer. This article investigates how the basis of that authority was distributed between utterer, audience, and the sense that the utterance makes, as well as how that distribution changed over time. The basic development from archaic to classical culture in the sphere of logos is this: whereas in archaic culture the speaking-position and the position of authority are united in the same person or group, in classical culture they become separated. This occurs in the context both of the lawcourts and of political assemblies. The judging, articulate, authoritative kings and elders of Homer and Hesiod are replaced in court by the silent Athenian jury and in the Assembly by a popular audience, who are spectators of others' speeches. When authority rests with the judges or voters, but these constitute the audience rather than the speakers, speaking becomes the principal means by which the ambitious could obtain authority for themselves — in effect, taking it over from those in whom it ultimately resided. Skillful public speaking was no longer primarily a professional calling with a special group definition and social place (e.g. that of poetry), but the all-purpose tool by which a man could make something of himself in society. A man's logos had become, quite generally, his virtue; nevertheless, logos had maintained its traditional affiliation with deception. Paradoxically, the practice by which a man gained virtue and status in the eyes of its arbiters came itself to seem dangerously amoral, as shown both by hostile witnesses such as Aristophanes and Plato, and the efforts of friendly reformers such as Isocrates. The article concludes by extending this pattern to two further contexts: resistance to the new technology of writing, which was seen as embodying the disconnection of logos from authority; and the attempt made by philosophers to transcend the pattern by becoming their own judges, thereby occupying the position both of speaker and of audience.

G.R.F. Ferrari offers a new framework for understanding ways in which we communicate with each other. He explores the idea of 'intimations': social interactions that approach outright communication but do not quite reach it. He considers poetry, storytelling, and fashion as examples of different levels of communication

The diverse range of resources which underlie the utility of quantum states in practical tasks motivates the development of universally applicable methods to measure and compare resources of different types. However, many of such approaches were hitherto limited to the finite-dimensional setting or were not connected with operational tasks. We overcome this by introducing a general method of quantifying resources for continuous-variable quantum systems based on the robustness measure, applicable to a plethora of physically relevant resources such as optical nonclassicality, entanglement, genuine non-Gaussianity, and coherence. We demonstrate in particular that the measure has a direct operational interpretation as the advantage enabled by a given state in a class of channel discrimination tasks. We show that the robustness constitutes a well-behaved, bona fide resource quantifier in any convex resource theory, contrary to a related negativity-based measure known as the standard robustness. Furthermore, we show the robustness to be directly observable-it can be computed as the expectation value of a single witness operator-and establish general methods for evaluating the measure. Explicitly applying our results to the relevant resources, we demonstrate the exact computability of the robustness for several classes of states. ; Ministry of Education (MOE) ; Nanyang Technological University ; National Research Foundation (NRF) ; Published version ; B. R. is supported by the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. L. L. is supported by the ERC Synergy Grant BIOQ (Grant No. 319130) and by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. G. F. acknowledges the support received from the EU through the ERASMUS þ Traineeship program and from the Scuola Galileiana di Studi Superiori. R. T. acknowledges the support of NSF, ARO, IARPA, AFOSR, the Takenaka Scholarship Foundation, and the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore, under its NRFF Fellow programme (Grant No. NRF-NRFF2016-02) and the Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 1 Grant No. 2019-T1-002-015. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of National Research Foundation, Singapore.