This chapter contains sections titled: Socrates Café Café Philosophique Philosophy for Everyone Sophistry The Examined Life Oblivion Conclusion (Who is Ben's Mom?).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Rhetoric of Parody in Plato's MenexenusFranco V. TrivignoIn Plato's Menexenus, Socrates spends nearly the entire dialogue reciting an epitaphios logos, or funeral oration, that he claims was taught to him by Aspasia, Pericles' mistress. Three difficulties confront the interpreter of this dialogue. First, commentators have puzzled over how to understand the intention of Socrates' funeral oration (see Clavaud 1980, 17–77).1 Some insist that it (...) is parodic, performing an essentially critical function (e.g., Loraux 1986); while others claim that it is serious, in particular as an expression of Plato's political ideal (e.g., Kahn 1963).2 Adherents on both sides seem to think that the options are mutually exclusive.3 Second, commentators have had difficulty understanding why Plato would have Socrates attribute his entire oration to Aspasia (e.g., Coventry 1989, 3; Pownall 2004, 60). Most agree that this move is ironic and that it has something to do with the alleged target of the dialogue's criticism. But scholars have differed over whether the Aspasia reference is meant to implicate Pericles' funeral oration (Monoson 1998), rhetoric in general (Pownall 2004), Athens (Loraux 1986), or even Aeschines (Clavaud 1980).4 Third, scholars have struggled to make sense of the dialogue's "deliberate and fantastic anachronism" (Dodds 1990, 24). In the funeral oration, Socrates relates the history of Athens up to the King's Peace in 386 B.C., a full thirteen years after he has died. This problem has generated the least consensus, with some scholars restricting their analysis [End Page 29] to dating considerations (e.g., Dodds 1990) and at least one speculating that Socrates speaks in this dialogue as a ghost (Rosenstock 1994).5It is the contention of this article that, by understanding the rhetoric of parody in the Menexenus, one can resolve these difficulties and come to a coherent and unified understanding of the philosophical intentions of the dialogue.6 More specifically, I will show that the anachronism is a consequence of a particular parodic strategy, that of amplification; that the dialogue's parody targets not only Pericles' funeral oration in particular but funeral oratory, rhetoric, and Athens as well; and that the parody has serious philosophical implications.7 Further, I claim that the serious philosophical content is both critical and constructive. Plato subverts the civic identity and understanding of virtue encouraged by the genre of funeral oration, and he challenges its praise-based model of political discourse. At the same time, Plato's parodic criticism is not entirely negative, for it relies on alternative paradigms of civic identity, virtue, and political discourse.I. The Rhetoric of ParodyBefore turning to the Menexenus itself, I want to clarify what I mean by parody. For a working definition, I suggest that parody is "an imitation that distorts a target text, author, or genre."8 In order to make some general observations about the rhetoric of parody, I will look briefly at an exemplar of parody from Aristophanes' Frogs. I do so for three reasons: to display two strategies of parodic distortion, to show that parody can have multiple targets, and to argue that parody can have both serious and complex intentions.9In the Frogs (1331–63), Aristophanes uses at least two techniques of parodic distortion, inversion and amplification, in his extended parody of Euripides' monodies or single-actor odes.10 Parodic inversion, broadly speaking, upsets or overturns the target text by distorting the original in a way that reverses the stylistic effect or semantic intention. Parodic amplification hones in on one aspect of the target text and amplifies it to absurdity, often exposing its artificiality as a literary trope.The parodic scene features a woman who awakens, hysterical and terrified, from a god-sent dream, which has conveyed disturbing news. We find in this passage a particular kind of parodic inversion: bathos, the unexpected introduction of the vulgar, ordinary, or mundane, which undermines an otherwise somber tone.11 Consider the following excerpt:Attendants, set alight a lamp for me,Collect the dew of rivers in pitchers [End Page 30] And heat the water,So that I may wash away the god-sent dream.Oh god of the sea... (shrink)

Gregory Vlastos claims that in the Gorgias Socrates is confident that the elenchos is the only and the final arbiter of moral truth. Traditionally, the object of elenchos has been viewed as not one of moral truth, but one of simply revealing to Socratic interlocutors confusions and muddles within themselves, thereby jarring their unquestioning adherence to some moral dogma. On Vlastos' view, however, Socrates claims that he proves by elenchos that an interlocutor's thesis is false. How can he, (...) when in point of logic all he has proved is that the thesis is inconsistent with the agreed-upon premises in that argument whose truth Socrates does not undertake to establish? While Vlastos attempts to solve what he calls "the problem of elenchos" with all the ingenuity that we have come to expect from him, I argue that there are two major obstacles in his way. First, elenchos is not the only arbiter of moral truth in the Gorgias Socrates has a number of other reasons for believing certain things, but according to Vlastos, Socrates looks to elenchos, and to nothing but that, for the truth of his beliefs. I argue that, first, Vlastos' characterization of elenchos is unsatisfactory, for on his criteria it is difficult to distinguish it from other kinds of arguments. This in turn seriously hampers a proper evaluation of elenctic arguments. I then show that at least in this dialogue Socrates has certain religious beliefs that he holds without relying on elenchos, and so elenchos is not the only avenue for acquiring moral knowledge. ;Under Vlastos' correcting lenses, Socrates emerges also as a morally upright philosopher who would never knowingly conduct fallacious arguments. I argue that Socrates cheats at elenchos, and he does so in order to win over his interlocutors. I conclude that because of certain assumptions Vlastos makes about the character of the model philosopher and the model method, he exaggerates the strength of elenchos. If I am right, the Gorgias is witness to, not the power of elenchos as Vlastos would have us believe, but its limitations. (shrink)

Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference in there. The main goal of this article is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early and (...) middle period dialogues. Though this is a kind of strengthening the developmentalistic approach corresponding the relation of the early and middle period dialogues, based on the fact that what is to be proved here is a essential development in Plato’ ontology and his epistemology, by expanding the grounds of development to the ontological and epistemological principles, it hints to a more profound development. The fact that the bipolar and split knowledge and being of the early period dialogues give way to the tripartite and bound knowledge and benig of the middle period dialogues indicates the development of the notions of being and knowledge in Plato’s philosophy before the dialogues of the middle period. -/- Keywords Plato; early dialogues; middle dialogues; being; knowledge; development -/- Introduction The differences between two groups of the early and middle period dialogues have always been a matter of dispute. Whereas the developmentalists like Vlastos, Silverman (2002), Teloh (1981), Dancy (2004) and Rickless (2007) think that from the early to the middle dialogues Plato’s philosophy changes, at least in some essential points, the unitarists like Kahn, Cherniss and Shorey believe that there happens no development and the differences must be taken as natural, ignorable and even pedagogic. In his well-known article, Socrates contra Socrates in PLATO, Vlastos lists ten theses of difference between two groups of dialogues. The first group which includes Plato’s early dialogues he divides to 'elenctic' (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras and Republic I) and 'transitional' (Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus and Meno) dialogues. These transitional come after all the elenctic dialogues and before all the dialogues of the second group which compose Plato’s middle period dialogues, including (with Vlastos' chronological order) Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides and Theaetetus (1991, 46-49). Vlastos asserts strictly that his list of differences are 'so diverse in content and method that they contrast as sharply with one another as with any third philosophy you care to mention, beginning with Aristotole’s' (ibid, 46). Vlastos’ list of differences between two Socrateses is considered a view breaking sharply between the early and the middle dialogues. Besides all ten differences between the two Socrateses in Vlastos’ list that can be supportive for our doctrine here, we intend to focus on some ontological as well as epistemological distinctions that have not completely been discussed hitherto. Contrary to the developmentalist theory of Vlastos, unitarian theory of Charles Kahn wishes to eliminate any substantial difference between the early and the middle dialogues. He distinguishes seven 'pre-middle' or 'threshold' dialogues including Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis and Euthydemus from the other Socratic dialogues which he calls 'earliest group' (1996, 41). The threshold dialogues, Kahn thinks, 'embarke upon a sustained project' that is to reach to its climax in the middle period dialogues, namely Phaedo, Symposium and Republic. Believing in that there is no 'fundamental shift'between the early and middle dialogues (ibid, 40), Kahn thinks the Socratic dialogues are just the 'first stage' with a 'deliberate silence' towards the theories of later periods (ibid, 339). One of the reasons of the surprising fact that Plato gives no hint of the metaphysics and epistemology of the Forms in the early dialogues, he thinks, is the pedagogical advantages of aporia. He thinks that Plato 'obscurely', and mostly because of education, hinted to some doctrines and conceptions in his early dialogues and with the aim of clarifying them only in the later ones (ibid, 66). The seven threshold dialogues, Kahn asserts, 'had been designed from the first' to prepare the pupils and readers for the views expounded in the middle period dialogues (ibid, 59-60). To show that the differences of the two Socrateses of the early and middle period dialogue are in their onto-epistemological grounds and thence cannot be explained by a unitaristic view, we try to draw the ontological and epistemological principles of the early dialogues in the first part below in order to show, in the second part, that those principles have been developed in the middle period dialogues. -/- A. The Onto-Epistemologic Principles of the Early Dialogues Socratic dialogues are paradoxical about knowledge because while being knowledge-oriented always searching for knowledge, they deny it and even never discuss it directly. Three elements of Socrates’ way of searching Knowledge throughout the early dialogues, i.e. Socratic 'what is X?' question, his disavowal of knowledge and his elenctic method combined together produce something like a circle which works, more or less, in the same way in these dialogues. Though this circle is an embaressing inquiry always resulting in ignorance instead of knowledge, its motivation is surprisingly Socrates’ passionate enthusiasm for knowledge, an intensive love of wisdom. The starting point of this circle is Socrates’ confession of having no knowledge which might be explicitly asserted or presupposed, maybe because it was one of the famous characteristics of Socrates; a confession always paradoxically accompanied with his intense longing for knowledge (e.g., Gorgias 505e4-5). Every time Socrates encounters with someone who thinks he knows something (οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι) (Apology 21d5) and tries to examine him. This examination seems to be the simplest one asking just what it is that he knows. Socrates’ elenchus, therefore, is always connected with 'what is X?' (τίς ποτέ ἐστιν) question, a question that most of the early dialogues of Plato are concerned with; 'what is courage?' in the Laches, 'what is piety?' in Euthydemus, 'what is temperance?' in Charmides and 'what is beauty?' in Hippias Major. This question we call here 'Socratic question' and probably is the very question the historical Socrates used to employ, is tightly interrelated with both his disavowal and his elenchus. He disclaims knowledge because he cannot find the answer to the question himself and he rejects others’ since they cannot offer the correct answer too. Every interlocutor can claim he knows X, if and only if he can answer the Socratic question. Otherwise, he is more of an ignorant than of a knower of τί ποτέ ἐστι X. Knowing the answer to this question is, thus, knowledge’s criterion for Socrates. Having found out that he cannot answer what it is which he would claim to know, the interlocutor comes to the point Socrates was there at the beginning. The least advantage of this circle is that he becomes as wise as Socrates does about the subject, becoming aware that he does not know it. At the end of the circle they are both still at the beginning, not knowing what X is. So let us first take a glance at these three elements. Socratic disavowal of knowledge is strictly asserted in some passages. At Apology 21b4-5, Socrates says: -/- I do not know of myself being wise at all (οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν) -/- Moreover, at 21d4-6: -/- None of us knows anything worthwhile (καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι) …. I do not know (οἶδα) neither do I think I know. -/- In Charmides Socrates speaks about a fear about his probable mistake of thinking that he knows (εἰδέναι) something when he does not (166d1-2). The somehow generalization of this disavowal can be seen in Gorgias. After calling his disavowal 'an account that is always the same' (509a4-5), Socrates continues (a5-7): -/- I say that I do not know (οἶδα) how these things are, but no one I have ever met, like now, who can say anything else without being absurd. -/- At the end of Hippias Major (304d7-8), Socrates affirms his disavowal of knowledge of 'what is X?' this time about the fine: -/- I do not know (οἶδα) what that is itself (αὐτὸ τοῦτο ὅτι ποτέ ἐστιν). Some other passages, however, made a number of scholars dubious about Socrates’ disavowal. Vlastos mentions Apology 29b6-7 as an evidence : 'that to do wrong and to disobey one’s master, both god and men, I know (οἶδα) to be evil and shameful'. He thinks that if we give this single text 'its full weight' it can suffice to show that Socrates does claim knowledge of a moral truth (1985, 7). Vlastos’ claim is not admittable since it would be too strange, I think, for a man like Socrates to violate his disavowal claim just after emphasizing it. We can see his claim just before the already mentioned passage: -/- And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. It is perhaps on this point and in this respect, gentlemen, that I differ from the majority of men and if I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything it world be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge (οὐκ εἰδὼς ἱκανῶς) of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have (οὐκ εἰδέναι) (Apology 29b1-6) Vlastos tries to solve what he calls the 'paradox' of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge distinguishing the 'certain' knowledge from 'elenctic' knowledge (1985, 11) and thinking that when Socrates avows knowledge, we must perceive it as an elenctic knowledge, a knowledge its content 'must be propositions he thinks elenctically justifiable' (ibid, 18). Irwin’s solution is the distinction of knowledge and belief. He approves that Socrates does not 'explicitly' make such a distinction, but still thinks that Socrates’ 'test for knowledge would make it reasonable for him to recognize true belief without knowledge, and his own claims are easily understood if they are claims to true belief alone' (1977, 40). While I agree with Vlastos up to a point, I strongly disagree with Irwin about the early dialogues. As I will try to show below, we are not permitted to consider any kind of distinction within knowledge in Socratic dialogues because only one category of knowledge is alluded to there and the distinction of knowledge and belief thoroughly belongs to the second Sorcates. Although no kind of distinction can be admittable here, I think Vlastos’ distinction can be accepted only if we regard it as a distinction between knowledge, which is unique and without any, even incomparable, rival, and a semi-idiomatic and ordinary one that is a necessary requirement for any argument, and thus, unavoidable even for someone who does not claim any kind of knowledge. An apparent evidence of this is Gorgias 505e6-506a4: -/- I go through the discussion as I think it is (ὡς ἄν μοι δοκῇ ἔχειν), if any of you do not agree with admissions I am making to myself, you must object and refute me. For I do not say what I say as I know (οὐδὲ γάρ τοι ἔγωγε εἰδὼς λέγω ἃ λέγω) but as searching jointly with you (ζητῶ κοινῇ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν). -/- The minimal degree of knowledge everyone must have to take part in an argument, conduct it and use the phrase "I know" when it is necessary is what Socrates cannot deny. We can call it elenctic knowledge only if we agree that it is not the kind of knowledge that Socrates has always been searching, the one that can be accepted as the answer of Socratic 'what is X?' question. His disavowal of knowledge is applied only to the knowledge which can truly be the answer of Socratic question and pass the elenctic exam; a knowledge that, I believe, is never claimed by first Socrates. Socrates conducts his method of examining his interlocutors’ knowledge, our second element here, by almost the same method repeated in Socratic dialogues. That whether we are allowed to regard all the examinations of Socrates in the early dialogues as based on the same or not has been a matter of dispute. Vlastos himself (1994, 31) distinguished Euthydemas, Lysis, Menexenns and Hippias Major from the other Socratic dialogues because he thinks Socrates has lost his faith to elenchus in there. Irwin (1977, 38) distinguishes Apology and Crito where Socrates’ own convictions is present. Contrary to some scholars like Benson (2002, 107) who take elenchus in all the Socratic dialogues as a unique method, Michelle Carpenter and Ronald M. Polansky (2002, 89-100) argue pro the variety of methods of elenchus. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith (2002, 145-160) even reject such a thing as Socratic elenchus which can gather all of the Socrates’ various arguments under such a heading. There can be no solution for the problem of elenchus, they think, is due to 'the simple reason that there is no such thing as 'the Socratic elenchos"'(p.147). Though we consider elenchus a somehow determined process and a part of Socratic circle in the early dialogues, all we assume is that whatever differences it might have in different dialogues, it has the same onto-epistemological principles and, thus, we are not going to take it necessarily as a unique method. This method sets out to prove that the interlocutors are as ignorant as Socrates himself is. That whether elenchus is constructive, capable of establishing doctrines as Vlastos (1994) or Brickhouse and Smith (1994, 20-21) believe or not is another issue to which this paper is not to claim anything. What is crucial for our discussion here is that elenchus does not reach to the very knowledge Socrates is looking for. This is strictly against Irwin who thinks that not only elenchus leads to positive results, 'it should even yield knowledge to match Socrates’ conditions'(1977, 68, cf. 48). He does not explain where and how they really yield to that kind of knowledge. He explains his elenctic method in his apology in the court (Apology 21-22), that how he used to examine wise men, politicians, poets and all those who had the highest reputation for their knowledge and every time found that they have no knowledge. If we accept, as I strongly do, that Socrates’ disavowal of his knowledge is not irony, it might seem more reasonable to agree that the process that has that disavowal as its first step cannot be irony as well. The key of the circle which can explain why Socrates disclaims knowledge and how he can reject others’ claim of having any kind of knowledge lies in the third element, Socratic question. In Hippias Major (287c1-2), Socrates asks: 'Is it not by Justice that just people are Just? (ἆρ᾽ οὐ δικαιοσύνῃ δίκαιοί εἰσιν οἱ δίκαιοι). He insists at 294b1 that they were searching for that by which (ᾧ) all beautiful things are beautiful (cf. b4-5, 8). At Euthyphro 6d10-11 it is said that the Socratic question is waiting for 'the form itself (αὐτὸ τὸ εἶδος) by which (ᾧ) all the pious actions are pious; and at 6d11-e1: -/- Through one form (που μιᾷ ἰδέᾳ) impious actions are impious and pious actions pious. -/- Since the X itself is that by which X is X, knowing 'X itself' is the only way of knowing X. It is probably because of this that Socrates makes the distinction between the ousia as a right answer to the question and effect as a wrong one: -/- I am afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is (τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ποτ᾽ ἐστίν) you did not wish to make clear its nature itself (οὐσίαν … αὐτοῦ) to me, but you said some effect (πάθος) about it. (Euthp. 11a6-9) -/- 1. Knowledge of what X is Now it is time to look for the onto-epistemological principles of Socratic circle and its three elements. It cannot reasonably be expected from the first Socrates to present us explicitly and clearly formulated principles of his onto-epistemology when such explications cannot be found even in the second Socrates who has some obviously positive theoris. Since there must be some principles underlying this first systematic inqury of knowledge, we must seek to them and be satisfied with elicitation of the first Socratas’ principle. What will be drawn out as his principles cannot and must not, thus, be taken as very fix and dogmatic principles. Some very slightest principles and grounds suffice for our purposes here. The first principle that is the prima facie significance of the Socratic question and his implementation of all those elenctic arguments I call the principle of 'Knowledge of What X is' (KWX): -/- KWX To know X, it is required to know what X is. -/- Aristotle (Metaphysics 1078b23-25, 27-29, 987b4-8) takes Plato’s τί ἐστι question as seeking the definition of a thing that is the same as historical Socrates’ search but applying to a different field. That Plato’s 'what is X?' question was a search for definition became the prevailed understanding of this question up to now. I am going neither to discuss the answer of Socratic question nor to challenge taking it as definition. What I am to insist is that knowledge is attached firmly to the answer of the question: Knowledge of X is not anything but the knowledge of what X is. It entails, certainly, the priority of this knowledge to any other kind of knowledge about X but it also has something more fundamental about the relation of knowledge and Socratic question. Socrates’ exclusive focus on the answer of his question can authorize the consideration of such an essential role for KWX in his epistemolgoy. The total rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are unable to answer the question can be regarded as a strong evidence for it. Socrates’ elenctic method and his rejection of others’ knowledge in the early dialogues, which all end aporetically with no one accepted as knower and nothing as knowledge, prevent us from finding any positive evidence for this. We have to be content, therefore, of negative evidences which, I think, can be found wherever Socrates rejects his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are not able to give an acceptable answer to his 'what is X?' question. 2. Bipolar Epistemology Socrates’ rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge has another epistemological principle as its basis. Let me call this principle Bipolar Epistemology' (BE): BE There is no third way besides knowledge and Ignorance. -/- BE says that about every object of knowledge there are only two subjective statuses: knowledge and Ignorance. Socrates’ disavowal, however, says nothing but that he is ignorant of knowledge of X because he does not know what X is. This means that BE is presupposed here. Socrates’ elenchus and his rejection of interlocutors’ having any kind of knowledge are the necessary results of the fact that he does not let any third way besides knowledge and ignorance. The first Socrates never let anyone partly know X or have a true opinion about it, as he would not let anyone know anything about X when he did not know what X is. -/- 3. Bipolar Ontology The principle of BE in first Socrates’ epistemology is parallel to another principle in his ontology. Plato’s bipolar distinction between being and not being is as strict and perfect as his distinction between knowledge and ignorance. This principle I shall call the principle of 'Bipolar Ontology' (BO): BO Being is and not being is not. BO is apparently the same with the well-known Parmenidean Principle of being and not being (cf. Diels-Kranz (DK) Fr. 2.2-5). Euthydemus’ statement against the possibility of false knowledge can be good evidence for this principle: -/- The things which are not surely do not exist (τὰ δὲ μὴ ὄντα … ἄλλο τι ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν). (Euthydemus 284b3-4) -/- He continues (b4-5): -/- There is nowhere for not being to be there (οὖν οὐδαμοῦ τά γε μὴ ὄντα ὄντα ἐστίν). -/- That BE does not let true opinion as a third option besides knowledge and ignorance seems to be related to BO’s rejecting a third option besides being and not being, which is itself the basis of the impossibility of false belief. Socrates’ elaborate discussion of the problem of false belief in Theatetus that leads to a more decisive discussion and finally to some solutions in Sophist can make our consideration of BO for the first group of dialogues authentive. -/- 4. &5. Split Knowledge and Split Being The fourth principle I shall call the principle of 'Split Knowledge' (SK): -/- SK Knowledge of X is separated from any other knowledge (of anything else) as if the whole knowledge is split to various parts. -/- This Principle is hinted and criticized as Socrates’ way of treating with knowledge in Hippias Major: -/- But Socrates, you do not contemplate the entireties of things, nor do people you have used to talk with (τὰ μὲν ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων οὐ σκοπεῖς, οὐδ᾽ ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). (301b2-4) -/- Contrary to Rankin who regards the passage as 'antilogical, almost eristic in tone rather than presenting a serious philosophy of being' (1983, 54), I think it can be taken as serious. Hippias criticizes Sorcates that he does not contemplate (σκοπεῖς) the entireties of things (ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων), a critique which Socrates is not its only subject but all those whom Socrates accustomed to talk with (ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). This last phrase, I think, extends this critic beyond this dialogue to other Socratic dialogues. Hippias’ use of the perfect tense of the verb ἔθω (to be accustomed) is a good evidence of this extension. We can get, thus, these ἐκεῖνοι as Socrates’ interlocutors in his other dialogues that hints that this criticism has the epistemological groundings of the previous dialogues as its subject. What ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι points to is that Hippias does not have in mind Socrates’ way of treating things only in this dialogue, but he is also criticizing Socrates’ way throughout his dialogues. At 301b4-5, Socrates and his interlocutors’ way of beholding things is described as such: -/- You people knock (κρούετε) at the fine and each of the beings (ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων) by taking each being cut up in pieces (κατατέμνοντες) in words (ἐν τοῖς λόγοις). This leads us to our next principle that is parallel to, and the ontological side of, SK, the principle of 'Split Being'(SB): -/- SB Everything (being) is separated from any other thing as if the whole being is split to many beings. -/- Socrates and his interlocutors and thus, as we saw, the Socratic dialogues are accused to regard everything as it is separated from all other things. This separation is en tois logois that, I think, can reasonably be taken as saying that Socratic dialogues (it refers of course to the dialogues before Hippias Major) cut up all things which have the same name/definition from all other things and try to understand them separately, without considering other things that are not in their logos. They, for example in Hippias Major, are cutting up to kalon and try to understand what it and all others inside this logos are by separating it from all other things. This is directed straightly against Socratic question and the way Socratic dialogues follow to find its answer, every time separating one logos. As Meyer (1995, 85) points out, every question 'presupposes that the X in question in a logos is something' and 'every answer to every question aims at unity' (84). The critique of Hippias Major is, therefore, at the same time a critique of SK and SB. It is also a critique of KWX because it is only based on KWX that Socratic dialogues could search for the answer of 'what is X' question supposing that knowing what X is is enough for the knowledge of X. SK and KWX are absolutely interdependent. What Socrates and all his previous interlocutors have neglected in Socratic dialogues, Hippias says, was 'continuous bodies of being' (διανεκῆ σώματα τῆς οὐσίας) (301b6). Either this theory actually belongs to the historical Hippias as it is being said or not, it is strictly criticizing SB. We have the same phrase with changing sūma to logos some lines later at 301e3-4: διανεκεῖ λόγῳ τῆς οὐσίας. Although this theory that can be observed as both an ontological and an epistemological theory is rejected by Socrates (301cff.), it is still against first Socrates’ onto-epistemological principles and might let us look at what is rejected as Socratic prineple. -/- 6. Knowledge is of Being The sixth principle that I think is presupposed by the first Socrates, is the 'Knowledge of Being' Principle (KB): -/- KB Knowledge is of Being. -/- This principle is obviously the source of the problem of false knowledge, a very important problem throughout Plato’s philosophy. We face this problem maybe for the first time in Euthydemus. In less than 20 Stephanus’ pages, 276-295, we are encountered with different interwoven problems about knowledge , all grounded in the problem of false opinion. Having challenged the obvious possibility of telling lies at 283e, at 284 Euthydemus discusses it saying that the man who speaks is speaking about 'one of those things that are (ἓν μὴν κἀκεῖνό γ᾽ ἐστὶν τῶν ὄντων)' (284a3) and thus speaks what is (λέγων τὸ ὄν) (a5). He must necessarily be saying truth when he is speaking what is because he who speaks what is (τὸ ὄν) and the things that are (τὰ ὄντα) speaks truth (τἀληθῆ λέγει) (a5-6). This is based on Parmenidean principle of the impossibility of being of not being which Euthydemus restates (284b3-4) and we mentioned discussing BO principle above. The things that are not are nowhere (οὐδαμοῦ) and there is no possibility for anyone to do (πράξειεν) anything with them because they must be made as being before anything else can be done, which is impossible (b5-7). The words, then, are of things that exist (εἰσὶν ἑκάστῳ τῶν ὄντων λόγοι) (285e9) and as they are (ὡς ἔστιν) (e10). The result is that no one can speak of things as they are not. It is this impossibility of false speach that is extended to thinking (δοξάζειν) at 286d1 and leads to the impossibility of false opinion (ψευδής … δόξα) (286d4). The general conclusion is asserted at 287a extending this impossibility to actions and making any kind of mistake. Not only knowledge is of being but speech, thought and action are of being simply because of the fact that nothing can be of not being. -/- B. First Socrates’ Principles in the Middle Period Dialogues Out of what were presupposed or criticized mostly in five dialogues, Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Laches and Charmides, we tried to draw the first Socrates’ principles. Our inquiry here is directed to find out the fate of these principles in the three dialogues of the middle period, Meno, Phaedo and Republic. To do this, first we ought to check the situation of Socratic circle in these dialogues. The Socratic circle that was predominant in the early dialogues, does not look like a circle here anymore though they certainly have some features in common. Meno, Phaedo and Republic II-X are not committed to the principles of the circle and the whole circle in disrupted in them. The difference of the two Socrateses towards acquiring knowledge is obvious. The Socrates of Meno, Phaedo and Republic is evidently more self-confident that he can get to some truths during his arguments as he does. They are in their first appearance, as almost all other dialogues, committed to Socrates’ disavowal. All of them try to keep the shape of the Socratikoi Logoi genre, which is committed to the historical Socrates’ way of discussion; a dramatic personage who is to challenge his interlocutors, ask them and refuse the answers. Nevertheless, the fact is that what we have in common between two groups of dialogues is mostly a dramatic structure. Whereas the first group’s arguments are based on Socrates’ disavowal and lead to no positive results, the second group is decisively going to achieve some positive results. The aim of the first Socrates was to show others that they are ignorant of what they thought they knew. The new Socrates of Meno, on the opposite, makes so much efforts to show that the slave boy has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the things that he does not know (οἶδε) (85c6-7). Despite his lack of knowledge, he has true opinions nevertheless. The way from these true opinions to knowledge, as Socrates states, is not so long. These true opinions are now like a dream but 'can become knowledge of the same things not less accurate than anyone’s' (οὐδενὸς ἧττον ἀκριβῶς ἐπιστήσεται περὶ τούτων) (c11-d1), if they be repeated by asking the same questions. The most outstanding text regarding Socrates’ disavowal is Meno 98b where he explicitly claims knowledge: -/- And indeed I also speak as (ὡς) one who does not know (εἰδὼς) but is guessing (εἰκάζων). However, [about the fact] that true opinion and knowledge are different, I do not altogether expect (δοκῶ) myself to be guessing (εἰκάζειν), but if I say about anything that I know (εἰδέναι) -which about few things I say- this is one of the things that I know (οἶδα). (98b1-5) This passage is very significant about Plato’s disavowal of knowledge. There can hardly be found, I think, anywhere else in Plato’s corpus where Socrates speaks about his knowledge of something as such. He says first that he speaks as someone who does not know. This ὡς οὐκ εἰδὼς λέγω comparing with what he used to say in the first group, οὐκ οἶδα, has this added ὡς. Socrates does not claim strongly anymore that he does not know anything but speaks only as someone who does not know. He needs this ὡς not only because he is going to accept that he does know some, though few, things immediately after this sentence, but also because he needs his previous disavowal to be loosened from Meno on. He does not merely say here that he knows something. It is then different from the examples mentioned before which could be taken as idiomatic or at least not emphatic. Socrates’ remarkable emphasis on distinguishing εἰδέναι from εἰκάζειν departs it from all other passages where he says only he knows something. Moreover, he claims definitely that he has knowledge about few (ὀλίγα) things. From the early to the middle dialogues, Socrates’ attitude to knowledge has totally renewed its face. He brings forth a new concept, true opinion, and he does not speak of knowledge as he used to before; the rough, perfect and unachievable knowledge of the first group has turned to something more smooth, realistic and achievable. Comparing with the early dialogues that did not set out from the first to reach positive results, the middle ones are extraordinarily and surprisingly positive and hence destroy the basis of the Socratic circle. The questions and answers are purposely directed to some specific new theories; most of them are not directly related to the topics or the main questions of the dialogues. They are suggested when Socrates draws the attention of the interlocutor away from the main question because of the necessity of another discussion. Even if the main question remains unanswered, we have still many positive theories, prominently of metaphysical type. These theories are so abundant and dominant in these dialogues, especially Phaedo and Republic, that one might think that they may appear to be arbitrarily sandwiched in there. This helps dialogues to keep their original Socratic structure while they are suggesting new theories. Hence, the Socratic question of 'what is X?', though is still used to launch the discussion, is loosened and is forgotten for most part of the dialogues. Meno that has first a differently formulated question, 'can virtue be taught?', leads finally to the Socratic question of 'What is virtue?'. Phaedo is dedicated to the demonstration of the immortality of soul and the life after death without having a central Socratic question. The case of Republic is more complicated. The first book, on the one hand, has all the criteria of a Socratic circle: its 'what is justice?' question, Socrates’ strong disavowal (e.g. 337d-e), his rejection of all answers and coming back to the first point without finding out any answer. This Book, considered alone, is a perfect Socratic dialogue, as many scholars regard it as early and separated from other books. The books II-X are, on the other hand, far from implementing a Socratic circle. They have still the 'what is justice?' question as their incentive leading question, but they are, in most of the positive doctrines and methods that encompass the main parts, ignoring the question. Even these books that, I believe, are the farthest discussions from the Socratic circle are so cautious not to break the Socratic structure of the dialogue as long as it is possible. What is changed is not the structure of the dialogue but the ontological and epistemological grounds based on which new theories are suggested. -/- 1. Knowledge of the Good We can clearly see in the second group of dialogues that the KWX principle loses the place it had before in our first group. It is not, of course, rejected, but still we cannot say that it has the same situation. KWX that was based on Socratic question, as we discussed before, was the leading principle of the first Socrates’ epistemology and of the highest position. Other epistemological principles, SK directly and BE indirectly, were relying on Socratic question and therefore on KWX. Such a position does not belong to KWX from Meno on. What makes it different in the second Socrates is another principle that is needed it not only as its complementary principle but also as what is more fundamental. Plato, then, does not reject KWX in this period, but, it seems, he transcends to another more basic principle; a principle we shall call the principle of 'Knowledge of the Good' (KG): -/- KG Knowledge of X requires knowledge of the Good. -/- Whereas all the dialogues of our first group are free from any discuscon about KG, it bears a very important role in the second group so as becomes the superior principle of knowledge in Republic. Trying to solve the problem of teachability of virtue, Socrates says that it can be teachable only if it is a kind of knowledge because nothing can be taught to human beings but knowledge (ἐπιστήμην) (Meno 87c2). The dilemma will be, then, whether virtue is knowledge or not (c11-12) and since virtue is good, we can change the question to: whether is there anything good separate from knowledge (εἰ μέν τί ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἄλλο χωριζόμενον ἐπιστήμης) (d4-5). Therefore, the conclusion will be that if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, virtue can be nothing but knowledge (d6-8). What let us discuss KG as an epistemological principle for the second Secrates is the relation he tries to establish between knowledge and the Good which, though is alongside with the mentioned thesis and the idea of virtue as knowledge, goes much deeper inside epistemology asking to regard the Good as the basis of knowledge. The effort of Phaedo cannot succeed in establishing the Good as the criterion of explanation and knowledge since, I think, it needs a far more complicated ontology of Republic where Socrates can finally announce KG. What is said in Republic is totally compatible with Phaedo 99d–e and the metaphor of watching an eclipse of the sun. In spite of the fact that we do not have adequate knowledge of the Idea of the Good, it is necessary for every kind of knowledge: 'If we do not know it, even if we know all other things, it is of no benefit to us without it' (505a6-7). The problem of our not having sufficient knowledge of the Idea of Good is tried to be solved by the same method of Phaedo 99d-e, that is to say, by looking at what is like instead of looking at thing itself (506d8-e4). It is this solution that leads to the comparison of the Good with sun in the allegory of Sun (508b12-13). What the Good is in the intelligible realm corresponds to what the sun is in the visible realm; as sun is not sight, but is its cause and is seen by it (b9-10), the Good is so regarding knowledge. It has, then, the same role for knowledge that the sun has for sight. Socrates draws our attention to the function of sun in our seeing. The eyes can see everything only in the light of the day being unable to see the same things in the gloom of night (508c4-6). Without the sun, our eyes are dimmed and blind as if they do not have clear vision any longer (c6-7). That the Good must have the same role about knowledge based on the analogy means that it must be considered as a required condition of any kind of knowledge: -/- The soul, then, thinks (νόει) in the same way: whenever it focuses on what is shined upon by truth and being, understands (ἐνόησέν), knows (ἔγνω) and apparently possesses understanding (νοῦν ἔχειν). (508d4-6) -/- Socrates does not use agathon in this paragraph and substitutes it with both aletheia and to on. He links them with the Idea of the Good when he is to assert the conclusion of the analogy: -/- That which gives truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say, is the Idea of the Good: being the cause of knowledge and truth (αἰτίαν δ᾽ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας) so far as it is known (ὡς γιγνωσκομένης μὲν διανοοῦ). (508e1-4) Knowledge and truth are called goodlike (ἀγαθοειδῆ) since they are not the same as the Good but more honoured (508e6-509a5). KG, which had been implicitly contemplated and searched in Phaedo, is now explicitly being asserted in Republic. As what was quoted clearly proves, this principle is the very one which we can observe as the most fundamental principle of the second Socrates in Republic, corresponding to the role KWX had in the first Socrates. The Form of the Good in Republic, of which Santas speaks as 'the centerpiece of the canonical Platonism of the middle dialogues, the centerpiece of Plato’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and …' (1983, 256) much more can be said. Plato’s Cave allegory in Book VIII dedicates a similar role to the Idea of the Good. The Idea of the Good is there as the last thing to be seen in the knowable realm, something so important that its seeing equals to understanding the fact that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful (517b). Producing both light and its source in visible realm, it controls and provides truth and understanding in the intelligible realm (517c). -/- 2. Tripartite Epistemology BE is thoroughy rejected in the second Socrates and substituted by its opposite, the principle of 'Tripartite Epistemolgy' (TE): -/- TE Opinion is an epistemological status between knowledge and ignorance. BE of the first Socrates was denying any third way besides knowledge and ignorance which was the foundation of Socratic circle without which Socrates could not reject his interlocutors’ possessing any kind of knowledge. We cannot say, however, that the first Socrates had a third epistemological status in mind but rejected it. Such a status was unacceptable for him so that one can say that he would reject any kind of such status if suggested. There were only two possibilities about knowledge: either one knows something or he does not know it. TE, thus, was not the first Socrates’ discovery and, I think it is not the second Socrates’discovery. All we can see in our second group of dialouges is that he uses this principle as an already demonstrated one. Having examined the slave boy in Meno for the prupose of showing the working of recollection, it truns out that he has some opinions in him while he still does not know. Without trying to prove it, Socrates takes this as the distinction between knowledge and opinion: -/- So, he who does not know (οὐκ εἰδότι) about what he does not know (περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ) has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the same things he did not know (περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε) (85c6-7). -/- The same distinction is set between ὀρθὴν δόξαν and ἐπιστήμην at 97b5-6 ff. (also cf. 97b1-2: ὀρθῶς μὲν δοξάζων … ἐπιστάμενος). He connects then their difference to the myth of Daedalus, the statue that would run away and escape. So are true opinions, not willing to remain long in mind and thus not worthy until one ties them down by αἰτίας λογισμῷ (98a3-4). Socrates says that this tying down is anamnesis. We face, in Phaedo, the same relation is settled between knowledge as the process of being tied down and getting the capability to give an account, on the one hand, and anamnesis, on the other hand. When a man knows, he must be able to give an account of what he knows (Phaedo 76b5-6) and since not all people are able to give such an account, those who recollect, recollect what once they learned (76c4). Although the distinction between knowledge and opinion is not explicitly used in Phaedo, referring to the parallel link between knowledge plus account and anamnesis in Phaedo and Meno, one can say that those who cannot recollect are not able to give account and, thus, are in a state of opinion. What is said at Phaedo 84a, though not yet a definite distinction between knowledge and opinion, makes a distinction between their objects so as we can agree that it is presupposed. The soul of the philosopher, Socrates says, follows reason, stays with it forever and contemplates the divine, which is not the object of opinoin (ἀδόξαστον) (84a8, cf. Meno 98b2-5). The distinction of knowledge and belief in Republic has a significant difference with what we discussed in Meno and Phaedo since the distinction of Meno was based on anamnesis and thus more an epistemological distinction. Even in Phaedo that we do not have any elaborate discussion about the distinction, the only hint to the matter at 76 is bound to the theory of anamnesis. In addition to the relation of the distinction with this theory, there is another evidence that does not permit us to consider the distinction as an ontological distinction. Let’s see Meno 85c6-7: -/- So, he who does not know about what he does not know has within himself true opinions about the same things he did not know (τῷ οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ ἔνεισιν ἀληθεῖς δόξαι περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε). (85c6-7) -/- This last sentence persists that the objects of knowledge and true opinion are the same. What Socrates is to say here is that whereas he does not know X he has true opinion about the same X. I think Socrates’ sentence that the slave boy οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ and his restatement of it by saying περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε is because he wants to emphasize that the slave boy who does not know, has true opinion about the same thing. Socrates could say this just with using τούτων and there would be no necessity to bring περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ for οὐκ εἰδότι if he did not want to emphasize. -/- 3. Tripartite Ontology The distinction between knowledge and true opinion in Republic, on other side, has nothing to do with recollection, but is based on an ontological principle, 'Tripartite Ontology' (TO): -/- TO There are things that both are and are not. -/- This principle I confine, among our three dialogues of the second group, to Republic not extended to Meno and Phaedo, is obviously the opposite of BO. Speaking about the lovers of sights and sounds in the fifth book, Socrates distinguishes them from philosophers because their thought is unable to understand the nature of beautiful itself besides beautiful things (476a6-8) and hence they can only have opinions. The philosopher who, on the contrary, believes in beautiful itself and can distinguish it from beautiful things (476c9-d3), has knowledge because he knows, contrasting others who have opinion because they only opine (d5-6). Since those whose knowledge were degraded as opinion will complain about Socrates’ such calling their thought, he provides them the following argument (476e7-477b1): -/- - Does the person who knows, knows (γιγνώσκει) something (τὶ) or nothing (οὐδέν)? - He knows something (τί). - Something that is (ὂν) or is not (οὐκ ὄν)? - Something that is (ὂν) for how could something that is not be known (πῶς γὰρ ἂν μὴ ὄν γέ τι γνωσθείη)? - Then we have an adequate grasp of this: No matter how many ways we examine it, what completely is (παντελῶς ὂν) is completely knowable (παντελῶς γνωστόν) and what is in no way (μὴ ὂν δὲ μηδαμῇ) is in every way unknowable (πάντῃ ἄγνωστον). - A most adequate one. - Good. Now, if anything is such as to be and also not to be (ὡς εἶναί τε καὶ μὴ εἶναι), won’t it be intermediate (μεταξὺ) between what purely is (εἰλικρινῶς ὄντος) and what in no way is (μηδαμῇ ὄντος)? - Yes, it’s intermediate. - Then as knowledge (γνῶσις) is set over what is (τῷ ὄντι), while ignorance (ἀγνωσία) is of necessity set over what is not (μὴ ὄντι) mustn’t we find an intermediate between ignorance (ἀγνοίας) and knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) to be set over the intermediate, if there is such a thing? -/- From the third status of being we must reach to the third status of knowledge. The simple reading of this text can be an existential reading, taking the "is" of the mentioned sentences as existence. The problem is that when it is said that there is something that both is and is not reading "is" existentially, it sounds too bizarre to be acceptable. It cannot easily be understandable to have something as both existent and non-existent at the same time. This problem arose so many debates and led many scholars to reject the existential reading of "is" and suggest some other readings like predicative or veridical readings. I think though Plato’s complicated ontology of Republic cannot be correctly understood by a simple existential reading, this "is" cannot be free from existential sense of being and, thus, cannot be reduced to just a predicative or veridical sense of being. -/- 4. Bound Knowledges In addition to KG, the Good is also the basis of another principle in the second Socrates, namely the principle of 'Bound Knowledge' (BK): -/- BK Knowledge of everything is bound to the knowledge of the Good. -/- We distinguished BK from KG because we want to insist, in BK, on what had not been insisted upon in KG, that is, the binding role that the Good plays in the second Socrates, contrasting the absence of such a role in the first Socrates. Socrates remembers, in Phaedo, his wonderful keen on natural philosophers' wisdom when he was young. The origin of this enthusiasm was Socrates’ hope to know the cause of everything as they used to claim. When he was searching the matters of his interest on their basis, Socrates says, he became convinced he can get no acceptable answer from them and found himself blind even to the things he thought he knew before. One day he hears Anaxagoras’ theory that 'it is Mind that arranges and is the cause of everything (ὡς ἄρα νοῦς ἐστιν ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος)' (Phd. 97c1-2 cf. DK, Fr.15.8-9, 11-12, 12-14) and thinks that he can finally find what he has always expected, i.e. something which can explain all things. What I intend to show here is that what makes Socrates hopeful is that Anaxagoras’ theory tries 1) to explain all things by one thing and 2) this explanation is understood by Socrates as if it is based on the concept of the Good. That Socrates was searching for one explanation for all things can be proved even from what he has been expecting from natural philosophers. The case is, nonetheless, more clearly asserted when he speaks about Anaxagoras’ theory. In addition to διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος of 97c2 mentioned above, we have τὸ τὸν νοῦν εἶναι πάντων αἴτιον (c3-4) and τόν γε νοῦν κοσμοῦντα πάντα κοσμεῖν (c4-5) all emphasizing on the cause of all things (πάντα) which can clearly prove that one of the reasons which caused Socrates to embrace it delightfully was its claim to provide the cause of all things by one thing. Another reason was that Anaxagoras’ Mind, at least in Socrates’ view, was attempting to explain everything by the concept of the Good. This connection between Mind and Good belongs more to the essential relation they have in Socrates’ thinking than Anaxagoras’ theory because there are almost nothing about such a relation in Anaxagoras. The reason for Socrates’ reading can be that Mind is substantially compatible with Socrates’ idea of the relation between good and knowledge. Both the thesis 'no one does wrong willingly' and the theory of virtue as knowledge we pointed to above are evidences of this essential relation. Nobody who knows that something is bad can choose or do it as bad. The reason, when it is reason, that means when it is as it should be, when it is wise or when it knows, works only based on good-choosing. In this context, when Socrates hears that Mind is considered as the cause of everything, it sounds to him like this: good should be regarded as the basis of the explanation of all things. We see him, thus, passing from the former to the latter without any proof. This is done in the second sentence after introducing Mind: -/- I thought that if this were so, the arranging Mind would arrange all things and put each thing in the way that was Best (ὅπῃ ἂν βέλτιστα ἔχῃ). If one then wished to find the cause of each thing by which it either perishes or exists, one needs to find what is the best way (βέλτιστον αὐτῷ ἐστιν) for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, about this and other things, what is the most excellent (ἄριστον) and best (βέλτιστον). The same man must inevitably also know what is worse (χεῖρον), for that is part of the same knowledge. (97c4-d5) This passage is a good evidence of Socrates’ leap from Anaxagoras’ Mind to his own concept of the Good that can explain why Socrates found Anaxagoras theory after his own heart (97d7). Mind is welcomed because of its capability for explanation on the basis of good to 'explain why it is so of necessity, saying which is better (ἄμεινον), and that it was better (ἄμεινον) to be so' (97e1-3). What Socrates thought he had found in Anaxagoras can indicate what he had been expecting from natural scientists before. Socrates could not be satisfied with their explanations because they were unable to explain how it is the best for everything to be as it is. It can probably be said, then, that it was the lack of the unifying Good in their explanation that had disappointed him. We must insist that we are discussing what Socrates thought that Anaxagoras’ theory of Mind should have been, not about Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. Phaedo 97c-98b, is not about what Socrates found in Anaxagoras but what he thought he could find in it. On the contrary, it should also be noted that it was not this that was dashed at 98b, but Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. It was Anaxagoras’ fault not to find out how to use such an excellent thesis (98b8-c2, cf. 98e-99b). Socrates gives an example to show how not believing in 'good' as the basis of explanation makes people be wanderers between different unreal explanations of a thing. His words δέον συνδεῖν (binding that binds together) as a description for the Good we chose as the name of BK principle: They do not believe that the truly good and binding binds and holds them together (ὡς ἀληθῶς τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ δέον συνδεῖν καὶ συνέχειν οὐδὲν οἴονται). (99c5-6) -/- Having in mind Plato’s well-known analogy of the sun and the Good at Republic 508-509, we can dare to say that his warning of the danger of seeing the truth directly like one watching an eclipse of the sun in Phaedo (99d-e) is more about the difficulty of so-called good-based explanation than its insufficiency, a difficulty which is precisely confirmed in Republic (504e-505a, 506d-e). Moreover, BK is asserted in a more explicit way in the Republic, where the Good is considered not only as a condition for the knowledge of X, as was noted above discussing KG, but also as what binds all the objects of knowledge and also the soul in its knowing them. At Republic VI, 508e1-3, when Socrates says that the Form of the Good 'gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower (τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ τὴν ἀλήθειαν παρέχον τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις καὶ τῷ γιγνώσκοντι τὴν δύναμιν ἀποδιδὸν)', he wants to set the Good at the highest point of his epistemological structure by which all the elements of this structure are bound. This binding aspect of the Good is by no means a simple binding of all knowledges or all the objects of knowledge, but the most complicated kind of binding as it is expected from the author of the Republic. The kind of unity the Good gives to the different knowledges of different things is comparable with the unity which each Form gives to its participants in Republic: as all the participants of a Form are united by referring to the ideas, all different kinds of knowledge are united by referring to the Good. If we observe Aristotle's assertion that for Plato and the believers of Forms, the causative relation of the One with the Forms is the same as that of the Forms with particulars (e.g. Metaphysics 988a10-11, 988b4), that is to say the One is the essence (e.g., ibid, 988a10-11: τοῦ τί ἐστὶν, 988b4-6: τὸ τί ἢν εἶναί) of the Forms besides his statement that for them One is the Good (e.g., ibid, 988b11-13) the relation between the Good and unity may become more understandable. Since the quiddity of the Good (τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ τἀγαθὸν) is more than discussion (506d8-e2), we cannot await Socrates to tell us how this binding role is played. All we can expect is to hear from him an analogy by which this unifying role is envisaged, the sun. The kind of unity that the Good gives to the knowledge and its objects in the intelligible realm is comparable to the unity that the sun gives to the sight and its objects in the visible realm (508b-c). The allegory of Line (Republic VI, 509d-511), like that of the Sun, tries to bind all various kinds of knowledges. The hierarchical model of the Line which encompasses all kinds of knowledge from imagination to understanding can clearly be considered as Plato’s effort to bind all kinds of knowledges by a certain unhypothetical principle. The method of hypothesis starts, in the first subsection of the intelligible realm, with a hypothesis that is not directed firstly to a principle but a conclusion (510b4-6). It proceeds, in the other subsection, to a 'principle which is not a hypothesis' (b7) and is called the 'unhypothetical principle of all things' (ἀνυποθέτου ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ἀρχὴν) (511b6-7). This παντὸς must refer not only to the objects of the intelligible realm but to the sensible objects as well. Plato does posit, therefore, an epistemological principle for all things, a principle that all things are, epistemologically, bound and, thus, unified by. -/- 5. Bound Beings The ontological aspect of BK we shall call the principle of 'Bound Beings' (BB): -/- BB Being of all things are bound by the Good. -/- We saw in our principle of Split Being (SB) how the first Socrates was criticized because of his approach to split being and separate each thing from other things. The principle of Bound Beings intends to make the things more related, a duty which is done again by the Good. In the allegory of Sun, there are two paragraphs that evidently and deliberately extend the binding role of the Good to the ontological scene: -/- You will say that the sun not only makes the visible things have the ability of being seen but also coming to be, growth and nourishment. (509b2-4) -/- This clearly intends to remind the ontological role the sun plays in bringing to being all the sensible things in order to display how its counterpart has the same role in the intelligible realm (b6-10): -/- Not only the objects of knowledge (γιγνωσκομένοις) owe their being known (γιγνώσκεσθαι) to the Good, but also their existence (τὸ εἶναί) and their being (οὐσίαν) are due to it, though the Good is not being but superior to it in rank and power. That the Good is here represented as responsible for being of things in addition to their being known means, in my opinion, that Plato wants to posit BB in addition to BK. The allegory of Cave at the very beginning of the seventh Book (514aff.) can be taken as another evidence. The role of the Good, one might say, is confined to the intelligible realm because it is asserted that the role the Good plays in this realm is corresponding to that of the sun in the visible realm. The fact that Plato wants to observe the Good also as the ontological cause of the sensible things is obvious from his saying, in the allegory of Cave, that the Form of the Good 'produces light and its source (τὸν τούτου κύριον) [i.e. the sun] in the visible realm' (517c3). We can conclude, then, that the ontological function of the Good is not confined to the intelligible realm in which it is the lord and provides truth and understanding (c3-4) because it is also responsible to produce τὸν κύριον of light. 6. Proportionality of Being and Knowledge Insofaras BE and BO principles of the first Socrates gave way to TE and TO principles of the second Socrates, we cannot expect him to preserve KB in the same way as it was in the first Socrates. The new tripartite ontology and epistemology necessitates some modifications in KB which results in the principle of 'Proportionality of Being and Knowledge' (PBK): -/- PBK To every class of being there is a proportionate category of knowledge. -/- This principle, of course, does not entail the refutation of KB and thus is not kind of rejecting PBK but only a more complicated version of it. Based on PBK, we can still agree that knowledge is of being (KB) but the issue is that since none of the concepts of knowledge and being in the second Socrates are as simple as they were for the first Socrates, we need a more complicated principle for their relation here. Although from Meno 97a where the distinction of knowledge and true opinion is drawn out in the second group of the dialogues, we can expect a new relation, it is articulated in its most complete way in Republic and specifically in the allegory of Line. All the beings are divided there hierarchically to four classes, to each of them belongs a class of knowledge: imagination to images, belief to the sensible things (more correctly: the things of which they[in previous class] were images (ᾧ τοῦτο ἔοικεν)), thought to mathematical objects (?) and understanding to the Forms and the first principle. The degree of clarity that each of the classes of knowledge shares in (σαφηνείας ἡγησάμενος μετέχειν) is proportionate to the degree that its object shares in truth (ἀληθείας μετέχει). (511e2-4) -/- Conclusion From the six onto-epistemilogical principles of the first Socrates, four principles turn to their opposite in the middle period dialogues. While bipolar epistemology and ontology of the early dialogues give place to tripartite epistemology in the middle period dialogues and tripartite ontology in Republic, the split knowledge and being of the first Socrates are inclined to be substituted by bound knowledges and bound beings in the second Socrates and specifically in Republic. Not all our system of principles in this article is necessarily determinative. Either they are rightly formulated or not, our result would not be vulnerable if we accept that 1) making the distinction of knowledge and belief, 2) accepting the being of not being and 3) trying to bind both being and knowledge by the concept of the Good happens only in middle period dialogues, having been absent in the early ones. These are the favourite results all those somehow arbitrary and even oversimplified principles were to illustrate; that there is kind of a development in the epistemological as well as the ontological grounds of Plato’s philosophy. -/- Notes . (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each (...) of these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions HEDONISM IN THE PROTAGORAS SOME INSOLUBLEPROBLEMSOf historical scholarship are posed by the fact that the hero of Plato's dialogues was also an historical figure. Commentators are prone to identify the Socrates of the dialogues with the man who drank the hemlock and walked the streets of Athens. This is perhaps unexceptionable 9 But beyond this they are often tempted (even when they know better) (...) to speak of the dialogues as if they were reports or descriptions of actual events in the life of the historical Socrates. Even so astute a scholar as Gregory Vlastos, in his recent lucid Introduction to the Protagoras, falls into this pit. The dramatic date of the Protagoras is no later than 433, five years before the birth of Plato. It would require clear and strong evidence (of which there is none) to convince us that a verbatim report of this encounter was preserved for thirty years or more, to be handed on to Plato at the appropriate moment. Vlastos, of course, would laugh at this suggestion, but hear him talking about the logic of Socrates' argument: I trust I have made it clear that Socrates' performance in this argument is much better than would appear from the fact, which it would be folly to hush up, that he has made a definite error. For the error he does make is one that he could easily have detected when he got the chance to think out his moves in a more leisurely moment. He would then have seen that he could have produced a valid deductive argument for his immediate objective, and did not have to revoke a single inference he had made.... This is not to deny that he occasionally makes grave errors. 9 It is only to insist that as a practitioner of logical inference, and one who practices on his feet, in the stress of live debate, and with no calculus or any formal patterns of valid inference to guide him, Socrates is not a bungler, but a master? This is all very well, except that the argument Vlastos is discussing was not constructed in the stress of live debate but rather, as it were, in the cool of Plato's study. Plato was not practicing on his feet, and, we may presume, had ample time to think through and revise the arguments in question. Are we to interpret Vlastos as claiming that in later, real encounters witnessed by Plato, Socrates did argue in this way? And that Plato here has Socrates commit logical errors (which he, Plato, knows are errors; for he has Protagoras object to them) in order to portray Socrates as a man who makes frequent mistakes but thinks pretty well on his feet? 1Plato's Protagoras, edited, with an Introduction, by Gregory Vlastos (New York, Liberal Arts Press, 1956), pp. xxxv-xxxvi. [7s] 74 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In fact, we tend to think of the dialogues as having two authors, Plato and Socrates, and we frequently cannot choose between them. In the Protagoras it is even worse; for many scholars have assumed the existence of a third author, Protagoras, who is credited with having written at least part of his role in the dialogue. I offer here the radical thesis that the Protagoras has but one author, Plato, and that everything in the dialogue is to be laid to him.2 My assumptions are that from beginning to end the Protagoras is a product of Plato's imagination, and that Plato is primarily a philosopher and only secondarily a biographer--or perhaps we might say he is a biographer of ideas, not of persons. The philosophical stances assumed by the disputants may or may not resemble those of the historical figures, but we have no reason to attribute the words spoken or the turns taken in the argument to anyone but Plato. The question, why does Socrates say this at this point, must, if it is to be sensible, mean why does Plato have Socrates say this at this point. The answers, if there are answers, will be found within the dialogues and not in speculative history. In the final argument in the Protagoras (351b... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What's Wrong with These Cities?The Social Dimension of sophrosune in Plato's CharmidesThomas M. TuozzoThe Dramatic Setting and the dramatis personae of the Charmides strongly evoke the world of late fifth-century Athenian politics. The discussion Socrates narrates takes place the day after his return from a battle at Potidaea at the very start of the Peloponnesian War;1 his two main interlocutors in that discussion, Critias and Charmides, (...) will play leading roles in the bloody oligarchic regime that rose to power after Athens' defeat nearly three decades later.2 Furthermore, the virtue the three of them discuss, sophrosune (temperance, moderation, sound-mindedness), also has strong political associations: it was a central element in the self-understanding and propaganda of the oligarchic faction to which Critias and Charmides belonged.3 The philosophical discussion of the various definitions proposed of sophrosune in the course of the dialogue, however, for the most part avoids explicitly addressing the social and political dimensions of this virtue. Much of the discussion seems, rather, to concern epistemological issues at some remove from the public sphere.4 [End Page 32l]At two critical moments in the dialogue, however, the social dimension of sophrosune does irrupt into the discussion. At the culmination of his discussion with Charmides, and again at the culmination of his discussion with Critias (which forms the culmination of the dialogue as a whole), Socrates abruptly shifts to the social level in order to evaluate a proposed definition of sophrosune. These definitions are put to the test by considering a city governed by sophrosune (as in either case defined). In both cases the examination of Socrates' hypothetical city has the effect of discrediting the associated definition of sophrosune—in the first case, because the city governed by it would not be "well governed"; in the second, because, although the citizens of the hypothetical city may be happy, their happiness would not result from the city's sophrosune as such. In both cases, then, it is the failure of sophrosune (as defined) to conduce to the well-being of the city, in a way that both parties to the discussion agree that it should, that leads to the rejection of the proposed definition.The social context in which Socrates places the most important definitions offered by his two interlocutors does more than allow Socrates to consider, on a social scale, the benefits of sophrosune as so defined. It also enables him to raise the question of the proper social relationship between sophrosune and the other crafts or kinds of knowledge practiced in a city. This question is first raised in Socrates' discussion of the first hypothetical city with Charmides. When Critias takes over as interlocutor, Socrates continues the investigation into the relationship between sophrosune and other kinds of knowledge, but for the most part in purely epistemological terms that abstract both from social context and from all considerations of benefit. The discussion of the second hypothetical city at the end of that conversation returns the question to its social context: the relations between the different sorts of knowledge are investigated via their reflection in the social relations existing between the persons that practice them. The two hypothetical cities thus allow Socrates to consider, within a social context, both questions concerning the benefit sophrosune produces (and for whom) and questions concerning its relation to other sorts of knowledge. It is in these discussions, then, that we find the dialogue's most direct contribution to some of the most important questions of Plato's earlier dialogues.It is my purpose in this essay to examine the treatment of the social dimension of sophrosune in the Charmides in order to sketch the answers to these questions that, I hope to show, the dialogue provides. This sketch will necessarily be incomplete; a more nearly complete account of this dialogue's contribution to these questions would need to integrate the present study's results with [End Page 322] an interpretation of the abstract epistemological and metaphysical arguments that loom so large in the dialogue. Indeed, it is my hope that the results of this study may provide a useful orientation for the study of these famously perplexing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 553-554 [Access article in PDF] Ruby Blondell. The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 452. Cloth, $75.00. Plato's dialogues were written before audiences distinguished philosophy from literature. Recently scholars have argued that the dialogues should be read as philosophy that is literature, and no one makes the case better than Blondell (...) does in this splendid work. Her argument compels by focusing on character in the relevant senses: as the dramatis personae of the dialogues, as that which individuates them and prompts them to act in ways that affect their very souls, and as "the effects of literary characterization on the moral character of the audience" (2). Character connects the dialogues as "literature," "philosophy," and paideia.In Plato's careful delineation of the characters of his dramatis personae, Blondell finds a tension between the existence of human particularity and the search for generic types. Socrates is a prime example of the dialectical movement between particularity and its attempted transcendence. Plato's choice to write dialogues is also "an assertion of human plurality" (49) that exhibits the pathos of trying to transcend human experience. "Dramatic form... becomes a medium for exploring the limits of transcendence, and the multiple tensions—between ideal and particular, mind and body, original and image, one and many, being and becoming, divine and human, deduction and persuasion, reason and emotion—which pervade the works of Plato" (50). Blondell's discussions of how dramatic form serves epistemological and pedagogical aims in Hippias Minor, Republic, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman are so rich in insight and nuance that one hesitates to suggest they could be improved upon. Still, greater emphasis on the historical and cultural contexts shared by characters, author, and audience might add to our understanding of Plato's preoccupation with these specific philosophical tensions as well as his choice to address them through dramatic form.Blondell's discussion of Theaetetus is especially good in showing how "abstract epistemological issues... play themselves out in the world of specific, particularized human beings.... [I]t is this personal dimension of epistemology—the fact that we are particular, embodied individuals—that generates most of the problems in this dialogue (especially the reliability and subjectivity of sense perception)" (252). That philosophy, epistemology, and pedagogy come to be identified with Socrates also generates problems. Can there be philosophy without Socrates? To become a philosopher, must one resemble Socrates? If philosophy cannot go on without Socrates, how can it realize its aim of transcending human particularity? If philosophy can go on without him, will its practice and pedagogy nonetheless require dialectical discussion among embodied inquirers?No character in the dialogues appears a more likely successor to Socrates than Theaetetus. He resembles Socrates in appearance and character, and Blondell notes that repeated references to the younger man's gentleness and courage, and to his training in geometry, recall nothing so much as the guardians of the Republic. Theaetetus is the right kind of interlocutor, and one that allows Plato to portray—and defend—the elenchic Socrates, who merges with the "productive" Socrates in this dialogue. Before meeting Socrates, Theaetetus's attempts at philosophy were unsuccessful because he needed someone like himself to help him realize his philosophical potential. Socrates offers himself as [End Page 553] an intellectual midwife, yet Blondell observes that, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, he sometimes assumes the position and privileges of a father, and at other times is identified with philosophy as the object of desire. As an intellectual parent, Socrates demonstrates his superiority to Theodorus as the orphan's guardian. That Theodorus was Protagoras's pupil suggests one line of descent for Theaetetus: Protagoras—Theodorus—Theaetetus. Socrates' invocation of Parmenides suggests another: Parmenides—Socrates—Theaetetus. Different lines of descent bring different kinds of pedagogy: passive transference from Sophist to pupil versus active learning through dialectical discussion.But there is more to being a philosopher than what is found in Socrates or Theaetetus, for the ideal philosopher as Socrates describes him lacks... (shrink)

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each (...) of these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

We present results from a single case study based on semi-structured interviews with a student (a boy in school year 3) diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and his school staff after participating in a short and small-scale intervention carried out in a socio-economically disadvantaged Swedish elementary school in 2019. The student participated in a seven week long intervention with a total of 12 philosophical dialogues (ranging from 45 to 60 minutes). Two facilitators, both (...) class='Hi'>with years of facilitation experience and teacher degree and at least BA in philosophy, facilitated the majority of the dialogues and mainly followed a ”routine” procedure. The student was interviewed in direct connection to the end of the intervention about his experiences from the dialogues and his perceptions about whether and how the dialogues had influenced him. The student’s two teachers, who had participated in the dialogues as participants, were interviewed as a pair, also in direct connection to the end of the intervention, while the school principal was interviewed two years after the study. These staff interviews concerned the staff’s experiences of the influence of the dialogues on the students within the intervention as well as transfer effects to other contexts in school. The data from the study include detailed elaborations from a student perspective of different effects on the student’s communicative and cognitive development, which are in several respects supported also by staff reports. The results show that the student was able, interested, and willing to participate in philosophical dialogues, and our data point to several positive outcomes for the student in the communicative and cognitive domains. (shrink)

As far as we know, the 5th-century B.C. Greek philosopher Socrates himself wrote nothing. We discover his thoughts and deeds entirely through the writings of his followers, disciples who accompanied him on his walks through the Athenian Agora and engaged in dialogue with him in the Stoa Basileios. Rather than examining his ideas in abstract, this stimulating little book aims to place Socrates in his physical setting, using textual references to follow his progress through the (...) material remains that have been uncovered by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens since 1931. The author not only sheds new light on the great philosopher's life, but also provides a vivid reconstruction, through following the career of one of its most famous citizens, of daily life at the center of classical Athens. (shrink)

In this article, the subject of the study is the philosophical ideas of traditionalism, which were considered by writers-villagers and, in particular, by the writer A. Onegov. Russian people have these values, such as the cult of the family, the idea of a collective beginning in Russian society, the priority of the general over the private, a special attitude to work. These cultural values sharply distinguish the Russian civilization from the Western one, which is built largely on other (...) grounds opposite to these. Unfortunately, those value foundations inherent in the Russian civilization and which were described by A. Onegov are largely lost. However, it is time to study and revive them. The main conclusions drawn by the authors should be considered that it is time to return to their Russian traditional values, especially since this is being talked about today from the highest tribunes in Russia. Summing up, we can confidently state the fact that the traditionalist ideas of A. Onegova, expressed by him in his work "Dialogue with Conscience" will be in demand today. He managed to grasp the necessary factors, the conditions without which modern Russian society cannot develop. The study of A. Onegov's literary heritage is important not only from an artistic but also from a philosophical point of view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob DylanPeter CheyneThe Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan; 422 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2022.Bob Dylan, like Dante's Virgil, takes us on an odyssey through sixty-six levels, not of the Underworld but of Songworld, in The Philosophy of Modern Song. With playful prose rhythms measured for pleasure and effect, these vistas are almost all seen through second-person portrayals. His (...) gorgeous write-up on Uncle Dave Macon's "Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy" (1924), for instance, conveys the "happy wanderer, the chicken thief," embodying the flagrant aristocracy of freedom: "You're the Dalai Lama, the Black Monk … The Thief of Baghdad … prowling and shoplifting … Multiracial, bisexual, celibate … freethinking … fucking and farting … Long John Silver … a pastry chef … hash slinger" (pp. 237–38). In Dylan's telling, this great song shimmies through a Whitmanesque catalogue of types united in aesthetic thrill.Invented characters inhabit this book, as they do Dylan's songs. Most prominent are the personae he extemporizes from others' songs in barnstorming flights of fancy. Upheld by writerly performance rather than argument, they act out his view that "it's what a song makes you feel about your own life that's important" (p. 9).The standout weird turn is the antihero he conjures from Webb Pierce's "There Stands the Glass" (1953). This is a country song about alcoholic consolation after a breakup, the toper hoping his love still thinks of him, in his misery. Simple, clichéd even, but Dylan invents a backstory hell of a Vietnam vet who "doesn't recall ever having a soul" and is "betrayed by politicians back home." Standard old-drunk fare, but then comes the nightmare of having "stuck a bayonet into babies' bellies and gouged out old men's eyes," "assassinated priests," and a concatenation of sins. "He rounds up the elderly, women and children, torches their huts" (p. 21). No bar-time happy hours for him; all those become "zero hour," "surrounded by the enemy" (p. 22). Dylan still protests the empire grotesque. Following each dark dive or wild fantasia is a straighter section that zooms out to more objective viewpoints, factoids, and historical analysis."You," ubiquitous and protean. "You," Dylan's projected center of subjective meaning. "You," his device, as he brings you along to reinvent a mood and mind frame, a world for each song. A thesis on mimesis, the second-person fantasies urge the reader to identify with the original first-person narrative, then fly it sky high. Dylan maintains that a successful song sings the listener into an alternative existence, a temporary self, through imagery and rhyme. This is just what Plato warned against, and what Dylan values: the art of making the listener mimetically become, for a few timeless minutes, what the writer and performer sing into being. In the ancient tussle between philosophers and poets, Dylan holds the agora through the harp. [End Page 254]Popular song as fiction is nothing unusual, but criticism as fiction? Is this critical license in extremis or is Dylan stressing the idea that music is always subjective? According to Dylan, songs earn their wings not just in the hearing but in how far and wide hearers can take them. While Dylan fabricates characters that weren't even dreamt of by the song performers, this book is also autobiographical throughout. The commentary relates as much of himself as the records he highlights. The book sustains a mood where the host impishly swaps masks all the while (as when he reveals, in a tiny chapter, that "Long Tall Sally" [1956] is about a one-story-tall woman from the Nephilim tribe in antediluvian Samaria). On Bobby Bare's "Detroit City" (1963), he writes, "Everybody assumes you're a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they're not." Here, many readers will flash back to young Zimmerman in Greenwich Village, desperate to pull off his move to the big city, "and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming" (p. 1). Through songs by selected others, Dylan recounts Dylan.Channeling small-hour talk radio, pulp Westerns, and hardboiled prose, the bourbon-scented mood evokes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Socrates' Trial and Conviction of the Jurors in Plato's ApologyDougal BlythI am going to argue in this paper that, in the three speeches constituting his Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the judicial proceedings that led to Socrates' execution as having precisely the opposite significance to their superficial legal meaning. This re-evaluation will lead to some reflections on the politics of Socrates' defence, and, similarly, on (...) Plato's own aims in writing the Apology. I want to show not only that the trial as portrayed demonstrates an inevitable dereliction of duty by the democratic jury, but also, more interestingly, that throughout the proceedings Socrates understands the meaning of the trial precisely in terms of his anticipation of the jurors' judicial incapacity.In the prooimion to his defence speech, Socrates requests that the jurors ignore his manner of speaking and concentrate on whether his case is just, "since this is a judge's virtue (), while that of a rhêtôr is to speak the truth" (18a5-6, cf. 35c2-5). We can gloss the expression "a judge's aretê" in this context as his function, or responsibility.1 Socrates claims that he, himself, fulfills his own responsibility as a defendant to tell the truth (17b4-c4, 33c1-2, cf. 34b5, 35b9-c2) in a speech that asserts his exemplary piety in Apollo's service and his beneficial influence on the Athenian youth. But if, in claiming that he is innocent of the charge, Socrates does tell the truth, then those jurors who thereupon convict him of impiety and corruption, and subsequently sentence him to death, have failed in their duty to judge rightly.My claim is that Socrates sees the trial as a test of the jurors' abilities. It is characteristic of Socrates to test people regarding their concern for virtue and justice, a habit to which he devotes extended discussion during his defence, even dramatising it provocatively in a central passage (29d7-e5) that I aim shortly to analyse in detail. Moreover, Socrates specifically withholds from the jury the title of dikastai or judges; he does finally award the title in his address following the sentence, but only to those who have voted [End Page 1] to acquit him (40a2-3).2 The possibility thus emerges that Socrates has treated the legal proceedings all along as a moral (and intellectual) test, or trial, of the empanelled jurors themselves, to see whether they are capable of the legal function to which they have been allotted. In that case, Socrates is putting on trial, not just those individual citizens, but the very legal system of democratic Athens.Socratic irony and truthfulnessBefore considering Socrates' own explicit judgement during those final remarks on the jurors' moral offence and punishment, I should first address briefly the issue of Socrates' irony. In the past, some writers have asserted that this irony involves him in not telling the truth about himself during his defence, in which case the jury might well have been justified in convicting him. Actually, there does seem to be a consensus among the more extended treatments of the Apology that have emerged during the last decade, at least on the point that Plato presents Socrates as committed to making as sincere an attempt at a defence of his case as is consistent with his philosophical commitment to virtue, and so to telling the truth.3I shall not re-argue this point in detail, but shall take it to be secured by two basic considerations: consistency with the Crito would require Socrates to recognise a legal obligation to make a sincere attempt at defence while his obligation to Apollo to continue his mission in Athens if possible would motivate that attempt with the goal of acquittal.4 Instead, I want to show what role irony does have in Socrates' defence, given that his principled law-abidingness requires him to attempt to persuade the jury, in accordance with truth and justice, that he is innocent (cf. 19a6-7, 18a7-b1, 18e5).Where Socrates acknowledges the obligation to defend himself, he remarks on the difficulty he faces, a difficulty that has resulted from the slander to which he has long... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Of Dialogues and SeedsKenneth SeeskinPlato’s Literary Garden: How to Read a Platonic Dialogue, by Kenneth M. Sayre; xxiii & 292 pp. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995, $34.95.One of the best known paradoxes in the Platonic corpus occurs in the Seventh Letter (341), when Plato says that he has never written about the problems which concern him and never will. His reason: “This knowledge can never (...) be put into words like other subjects; but is generated by living with the matter itself and from many conversations (ek polle\s sunousias). Then like a flashing light when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and nourishes itself.” Why would the most gifted philosophical writer in history say that when it comes to goodness, beauty, or justice, language is an inadequate medium in which to convey truth?One answer is that Plato had an esoteric doctrine that he divulged to a few close associates but did not express in the dialogues. 1 The crux of the esotericist position is that Plato’s objection is not to language as such but to written language in particular. A more satisfying answer is offered by Kenneth M. Sayre in this recent book. According to Sayre, Plato wrote dialogues to allow the reader to have conversation (sunousia) with the author “in an indirect manner” and to facilitate the reader’s own discovery of truth. In other words, the dialogues are surrogates for the sort of discussions Plato shared with Socrates “in hopes of producing a similar effect in the mind of the reader.” [End Page 167]If Sayre is right, the problem discussed in the Seventh Letter is not limited to written communication but involves “logoi in whatever form we might identify them today” (p. 159). Sayre enlarges on this insight by claiming (p. 18) that for Plato “philosophic knowledge is not awareness of the truth of propositions” but “discernment of some aspect of reality.” 2 Nor is this view limited to the Seventh Letter; Sayre finds it expressed in dialogues ranging from the Meno to the Statesman. Although I have problems with some of the details of this interpretation, it is noteworthy that the Seventh Letter (342a) does claim its epistemology is not new and “has been expounded many times before.” 3The title of Sayre’s book is taken from a famous passage in the Phaedrus (276), where Socrates says that while written language gives the appearance of finality and inviolability, it is an image (eido\lon) of living speech, by which he means words that can defend themselves and are accompanied by knowledge. But as Sayre points out, the passage also carves out a role for written speech by claiming that it is legitimate for the dialectician to plant seeds in “a literary garden” to assist memory in later years and to help others who “wish to walk in the same path.” In fact, the passage tells us that the dialectician will select a soul of the right type and take pleasure in watching the seeds grow and mature. In keeping with Plato’s metaphor, Sayre organizes his chapters into functions associated with gardening: some dialogues prepare the ground, others sow the seeds, train the shoots, or allow us to reap the fruit. The book ends with an appendix on how to read a specific dialogue, the Theaetetus, in a way that emphasizes indirect or imagined conversation. As one might expect, Sayre takes the Theaetetus to imply that knowledge cannot be defined as true belief with a logos.Although not a highly technical work, Plato’s Literary Garden is a thoughtful and thought-provoking one designed for someone who wants students to see that Plato is not just another philosopher with another doctrine to peddle. So the first step in reading a Platonic dialogue is to recognize with Sayre that the dialogues are not “proto-essays” and that the decision to write dialogues is tied up with important features of Plato’s epistemology. But does that mean, as Sayre claims (p. 12), that “Plato’s dialogues were not conceived by their author as contexts in which to develop and to display positive arguments for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PLOTINUS AND THE APEIRON OF PLATO'S PARMENIDES JOHN H. HEISER Niagara Unwersity Niagara University, New York WE USE THE TERM "infinite" so freely to designate what supposedly transcends something called ' the finite " that one might imagine the concept to be entirely unproblematic. Greek philosophy's difficulty even entertaining such an idea then appears as a sort of myopia, which we in our superior enlightenment have escaped. I propose (...) to examine the way in which one Greek mind, that of Hotinus, came to entertain rthe idea. There may be no better wiay to bring out the difficulties, as well as the possibilities, inherent in a concept than to observe a first class philosophical mind wrestling with it. I also hope rto show that we have a lot to learn from Plotinus. Plotinus's doctrine of the infinite has of course been examined before, on more than one occasion.1 But those who have done so, judging from what they say or do not say, appear to find nothing puzzling in the concept of " infinite perfection " or" infinite being." "We" have come to understand exactly what it means (or at least we bandy the term about 1 For instance: A. H. Armstrong, "Plotinus' Doctrine of the Infinite and its Significance for Christian Thought," Downside Review 73 (1955) : 47-58; Leo J. Sweeney, S.J., "Infinity in Plotinus," Gregorianum 38 (1957) : 515535 ; 713-732; W. Norris Clarke, S.J., "Infinity in Plotinus: a Reply,'' Gregorianum 40 (1959): 75-98; John Whittaker, "Philological Comments on the Neoplatonic Notion of Infinity,'' in The Significance of Neoplatonism, ed. R. Baine Harris (Norfolk, Va.: International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, 1976), pp. 155-172. John M. Rist devotes the third chapter, "The Plotinian One," of his Plotinus: The Road to Reality (New York: Cambridge Uninrsity Press, 1967) largely to the infinity of the One. 58 54 JOHN H. HEISER as if we did). Greek difficulties are understandable (ailthough it is hal'd not to be patronizing about them), but once we have taken note of these difficulties the only question of interest would seem to be whether Plotinus learned to discount them and to talk as we do. In my view, the only way to appreciate Plotinus's aichievement, and to learn from him, is to take these difficulties with great seriousness and to stmggle through them with Plotinus. Another point most commentators overlook is something I take to be both a frucit and a clue to much of what Plotinus says about the Infinite Source of the universe. This is that, in explaining why the One should be called " infinite," Plotinu!! is presenting his e:xiegesis of a perplexing passage in Plato's Parmenides.2 Rather than following his own 1ine of thought to the conc1usion that the One must be infinite, we see Plotinus casting about for some meaning he can assign to a term he is confronted with. I happen to think that his exegesis of Plato is mistaken. This raises the interesting possibility that Plotinus 's breakthrough, if it is a breakthrough and not an aberration, resulted by accident from a mis.take. Before examining Greek views on the infinite, I should like to play Socrates for a moment and examine the concept itself of " infinite perfection." A bit of dialectic might help dispel some of the complacency that surrounds it. As it stands, "infinitely perfect" is at least verbally self-contradictory, as if one were to say " endlessly finished." This may explain why even Plotinus never put it quite thaJt way. But even if we can get around that, what could it mean for something to be 2 :M:ost commentators simply ignore the point, but Professor Armstrong, who is usually so alert to sources, makes the surprising statement that "there is no clear evidence that Plato ever thought or spoke of the One or Good as in any sense apeiron" ("Doctrine of the Infinite," p. 48). Professor Rist goes further and claims that "the 'beyond Being' of Plato must mean a finite Being in some way beyond other finite beings" (Road to Reality, p. 24). But Rist appears to assume he and his readers share a common understanding of what it... (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with (...) syphilis. Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In Dialogue:The Principle of Civility in Academic DiscourseForest HansenSeveral months ago New York Times columnist David Brooks addressed the lack of civility in recent public discourse. "So... you get narcissists who believe they or members of their party possess direct access to the truth.... You get people who prefer monologues to dialogue.... You get people who... loathe their political opponents."1One might think that by contrast academia, and (...) especially academic publications, would provide a bastion of civil discourse. Alas, even academia has been infiltrated. At least it so appears to me when I read some of what has been recently published in the name of the philosophy of music education.I find that disheartening.However one defines "philosophy," it minimally entails raising questions whose answers are reasonably debatable. The key word here is "reasonably." Those who are committed to philosophical activity criticize positions they oppose by formulating arguments, giving examples, calling on accepted facts, clarifying the meaning of terms, and bringing to bear the principles of formal and informal logic. And thus they open themselves to counter-criticism of the same [End Page 198] sort. Nowhere in this enterprise is there need—or room—for invective, sarcasm, name-calling, ad hominems, or any other kind of personal abuse. One might call this The Principle of Civility in Academic Discourse.Philosophy differs in this respect from polemics. In one of its senses "polemics" means "the art or practice of disputation or controversy," and so seems a close cousin to philosophy. However, while "philosophy" traces its etymological roots to "love" and "wisdom," "polemics" is derived from "war." Polemics is a kind of verbal warfare. Typically polemicists are willing to use any tool at their disposal—even underhanded ones—to "win" the war of ideas. Polemics in this usual sense dispenses with objectivity and fairness (though it may make such a pretense). In fact, people who mount personal attacks thereby reveal their lack of philosophical tools and diminish their argument.Distinguishing philosophy from polemics does not mean that all philosophical claims are equal. Some positions are stronger than others, some weaker. Some can be dismissed relatively out of hand if they are illogical or do not square with normal experience. But even when positions are inadequate, the persons who advance the positions deserve to be treated with courtesy, respect, and collegiality.Typically, people trained in philosophy assimilate this principle as a matter of course. They have learned that over the centuries great minds have disagreed about every philosophical issue—whether the make-up of ultimate reality, the nature and sources of knowledge, the existence of god, the justification of morality. So too with what the nature of music is, what music should be taught and how, what is the purpose of music education.No one has a corner on the answers to such questions. The floor should always be open to debate—to consideration of new proposals and reconsideration of old ones. In disciplines where some matters are more or less settled (as in natural science and mathematics), such arguments disappear and new quests hope to find new settled answers. But in philosophy, more fundamentally than in any other traditional academic discipline, the discussion, the reasoned argumentation, is ongoing.Many years ago Douglas Morgan, in his essay "Must Art Tell the Truth"2 eloquently captured this spirit of philosophy:Philosophy is itself to be conceived as an invitational, dialectical activity rather than as any system of dicta. A philosopher can be thought of as [one] who, far from commanding assent with any thunderous barrage of argumentative artillery, invites you to think [about] the world or some aspect of it in a somewhat different way. "Come in," [the philosopher] says cordially, "and welcome. Sit down. Let me mix you an idea. Sip this thought, and tell me how your own experience looks. If you should find my way of construing our [End Page 199] world unappetizing or unpromising, pray show me your way. Let us once again in the good old Greek way, dia-lego, talk it through together."Finally, The Principle of Civility in Academic Discourse ought to be conveyed in our classrooms, as we foster new generations in... (shrink)

This philosophical meditation, which deals with death as question, presence, and even teacher, begins with Ramchandra Gandhi’s penetrating essay ‘On Meriting Death.’ What does it mean ‘to merit’ death? To provide an answer, I travel through RCG’s corpus, in dialog with contemporary theorists such as Sri Aurobindo, Daya Krishna, and Mukund Lath. RCG implies that the question about ‘meriting’ death, and life, is not and cannot be ‘personal’ or ‘isolated’. For X to die, is for his (...) close and distant samāj a matter of losing him and living without him. Hence meriting death, as also life, is a joint venture which involves deep understanding regarding non-isolation as the heart of the human situation. RCG’s creative thinking, or svarāj in ideas, reaches its peak when he dares to offer an answer of his own to the piercing question kim āścaryam, ‘what is amazing?’ raised in the Yakṣa-praśna episode of the Mahābhārata. For RCG, the heart of the matter is not the ‘ungraspability’ of one’s unavoidable death, or the perennial search for ‘permanence’ in vain, but our failure to perceive ‘that in the martyā which is amṛta,’ i.e., a sense of solidarity in the face of death, connecting ‘I and Thou,’ which he derives from the icchā mṛtyu of his grandfather, the famous Mahatma. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 84-106 [Access article in PDF] Irony in the Platonic Dialogues Charles L. Griswold, Jr. I INTERPRETERS OF PLATO have arrived at a general consensus to the effect that there exists a problem of interpretation when we read Plato, and that the solution to the problem must in some way incorporate what has tendentiously been called the "literary" and the "philosophical" sides of Plato's (...) writing. The problem is created by the fact that Plato wrote in dialogue form, indeed a specific type of dialogue form. The solution must somehow combine into a coherent theory of the "meaning" of the dialogues, the ways in which these texts work (such as the use of imagery, metaphor, myth, allusion, irony, as well as argument). At the same time, there exists enormous disagreement about how one ought to move from these general observations to interpretation of a particular text. 1The problem of interpretation lies not merely in the fact that Plato wrote dialogues. That alone would not necessarily present any hermeneutical issues of unusual difficulty. Plato's distinctive use of the dialogue form creates the difficulties. The genre that we might call "the Platonic dialogue" is distinguished by several relevant characteristics.First, there is no character called "Plato" who speaks in any of the dialogues; indeed, "Plato" is mentioned twice in the entire corpus, once as being absent (Pho. 59b10), and once as being present (Apol. 38b6). Authorial anonymity is thus an important feature of the dialogues. 2 At least ab initio, we are not justified in identifying Plato with any one of his characters. Indeed, there are positive reasons why he cannot be identified even with Socrates, as I will discuss below. 3 Plato is absent from his own texts; no simple act of reading them will allow us to ascertain what his views are. 4 It does not follow that Plato's views are [End Page 84] entirely absent from the dialogues—say, in the form of some mysterious "esoteric teaching"—and that they cannot be elicited by a complex act of reading. Just how Plato's views are to be extracted has been, again, the subject of a very long debate. 5 I myself think that Plato's views can be so elicited. 6 But the fact of his anonymity as author means that "Plato's meaning" is not ascertainable in the way that, say, "Kant's meaning" may be ascertainable in the Critique of Pure Reason.A second feature of Plato's dialogues contributes to the interpretive puzzle. The dialogues are clearly fictional in character. They are not—they could not be—transcriptions of conversations which took place. Some dialogues could not have taken place even when the interlocutors were historical figures (for example, at the Phaedrus' ostensible dramatic date the real Phaedrus was not in Athens). Not only are many of the characters entirely fictional, there is clear evidence that even "Socrates" is very much a fictionalized version of the historical character. I am referring not just to the famous statement in the (possibly inauthentic) Second Letter, 7 but to the fact that the Socrates of Plato's dialogues is presented as being a super-human character. This is evident from Alcibiades' description of him in the Symposium as well as from a number of subtle fictions. For example, Plato has Socrates narrate the entirety of the Republic from memory, without a single moment of hesitation or (so far as the reader can tell) any lapse of memory. This fantastic feat is complemented by Socrates' equally fantastic stamina in conversation. The lengthy Protagoras, for example, is narrated in its entirety by Socrates immediately after the dialogue itself has occurred. Socrates never shows any fatigue of any sort. It is not just hyperbole to say that Plato's Socrates is heroic; he is carefully compared, in passages I cannot examine here, to both Achilles and Odysseus. Socrates' absolute calm and self-control before death also evidence his superhuman character. The relation between the historical Socrates and the Platonic Socrates is the source of much fruitful controversy. It suffices for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 137-139 [Access article in PDF] Gareth B. Matthews. Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 137. Cloth, $29.95 Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith. The Philosophy of Socrates. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Pp. x + 290. Paper $22.00. Matthews' little book tracks the course of Socrates' perplexity, which, Matthews contends, (...) starts out as an obstacle to successful inquiry, but becomes, eventually, itself the target of inquiry. Matthews regards as quite genuine the perplexity that Socrates professes in certain of the early dialogues—Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro—largely, however, because Matthews himself finds Socrates' questions so stubbornly persistent. Yet, couldn't Socrates, at least with respect to some of his questions, experience no state of confusion, no perplexity, but, nevertheless, profess perplexity? Perhaps Socrates' confessions of perplexity signal only his awareness that he lacks knowledge of virtue; perhaps they are but rhetorical devices for encouraging Socrates' interlocutors to admit to their own ignorance.As the book continues, Matthews, following a line fairly standard by now, thinks that, in the "transitional" Meno, Socrates discovers two ways out of the perplexity: recollection, and the method of hypothesis; and that, in the "middle" dialogues—the Republic and Phaedo—the Theory of Forms comes to his rescue. In the Parmenides and, perhaps later, Matthews maintains, the Theory of Forms becomes itself the object of inquiry, as Socrates recognizes the perplexities with which it is fraught. Matthews mentions, but takes no stand on, the controversies surrounding the late dialogues, moving on at last to Aristotle and the different kind of perplexity one encounters there.For the briefest moment it looks as if Matthews might resist the standard line, when, in discussing the Meno, he notices not only that the geometrical problem of the Meno's slave-boy passage causes no perplexity comparable to that caused by Socrates' philosophical problems, but that Socrates is fully in charge in the geometrical demonstration, stinging another without simultaneously stinging himself. Yet, not only does Matthews fail to pursue his insight that moral or philosophical questions are, for Socrates, not like mathematical ones; on the contrary, he suggests that, in the Phaedo, philosophical problems are viewed by Socrates as mathematical ones.In The Philosophy of Socrates, Brickhouse and Smith undertake the ambitious task of expounding and defending a coherent and cohesive Socratic philosophy, one that encompasses Socrates' method, his wisdom and ignorance, his understanding of the nature of knowledge, his moral philosophy, psychology, politics, and religion. For a book meant to be a popular introduction, it is remarkably comprehensive—even [End Page 137] exhaustive—and serves to acquaint the reader with the current scholarly controversies surrounding Socratic philosophy as it is debated in the analytic tradition associated most frequently with the late and great Gregory Vlastos.In many respects, The Philosophy of Socrates is but an updated version of Brickhouse and Smith's earlier book, Plato's Socrates (Oxford University Press, 1994)—though without the rich and copious notes. The earlier book is the better one. The new book, although it purports to discuss the philosophy of the historical Socrates, is, from Chapter 2 on, a book about the Socrates of Plato's "early" dialogues. Yet, it is precisely this Socrates who is largely absent from its pages. The Socrates of the early dialogues is a character: both in the sense that he is a protagonist in the dramas that are Plato's dialogues, and in the sense that he is sarcastic, funny, makes bad puns, strikes at his interlocutors where they are most vulnerable, teases, baits, and annoys. But, most importantly, this Socrates is no solitary thinker. He talks to people; and what he says and how he says it is influenced both by his interlocutor and by the context of their conversation. Brickhouse and Smith, however, take such factors into account but rarely—and then only to save their own take on a particular Socratic doctrine.The two interpretive principles that Brickhouse and Smith invoke most often... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.2 (2001) 151-176 [Access article in PDF] Beyond the Comedy and Tragedy of Authority: The Invisible Father in Plato's Republic Claudia Baracchi They say that, when asked who the noble are, Simonides answered: those with ancestral wealth. --Aristotle, fr. 92 Rose When the victor of the mule-race offered him only a small recompense, Simonides would not compose a poem, for he could not endure (...) poetizing in honor of half-asses; but on being offered an adequate amount he wrote, "Greetings, daughters of storm-footed horses!" Yet, they were daughters of the asses also. --Aristotle, Rhet. 1405b Socrates was driving them to agree that the same man could know how to compose both comedy and tragedy and that a skillful tragic poet could also be a comic poet. They were thus driven, though hardly following and getting drowsy; Aristophanes fell asleep first and, as day was breaking, Agathon also. --Plato, Symp. 223d Introductory remarks What follows is a reading of Plato's Republic in the light of Aristophanes' Clouds. More precisely, what is here offered is the bare outline of such a reading--a set of preliminary notes that, by illuminating the inceptive stages of the Republic (especially book 1), constitutes a propaedeutic to the interpretation of the Platonic dialogue as a whole. Questions that one would typically be expected to raise in this context, questions regarding the relation of philosophy to poetry, the nexus between the Aristophanean and the Platonic Socrates, or Aristophanes' comedy in connection with the fate of the historical Socrates, will here remain unaddressed or will be touched upon only marginally (and obliquely). Far from accidental, this qualified [End Page 151] silence reflects a certain reluctance simply to take up these issues in their time-honored formulations and to speak under the force of their dictation. In this way, perhaps (and only perhaps), motifs of the Platonic discourse that would otherwise remain almost imperceptible if not altogether inaccessible--despite their pervasiveness--may come to show themselves.Leo Strauss wrote that Plato's Socrates may be seen, at least in part, as "a reaction or response to the Aristophanean Socrates" (1966, 316 n 20). The present study articulates the suggestion that the dialogue on the Republic may be understood as a response to Aristophanes' Clouds. Indeed, we shall see how the dialogue makes its own the problems delineated in the comedy, how it rewrites them, and how it unfolds in an attempt to address them. In spite of its remoteness from the tone and mode of the comedy, the Platonic text offers a meticulously punctual, even contrapuntal transcription of the main thematic features of the Clouds--as if an infinitely compelling provocation were to be found there, calling for thinking. The philosophical venture seems to be called forth and stem from such ground--as if comedy were the matter (indeed, the subject matter) of philosophy.Emerging from this interpretive approach to the Republic is the centrality of the figure of paternity, namely, of authority and instituted power. The Clouds depicts fatherhood in its dejection and loss of credibility. What this caricatured remnant of paternity signals is the simultaneous collapse of the orders of the divine, of ancestral authority, and of legality. This is the plexus of problems taken up in the Platonic dialogue.But the question of decay and the dying of the city mark the opening of the dialogue in a rather inconspicuous, even unapparent way. In the Republic, all terms are reversed. Indeed, the rendition of paternity one finds in the Republic is virtually opposite to the risible father of the comedy. Here, a dignified old man commanding respect seems to safeguard the integrity of the family, and hence the stability of the polis, both in its intrapolitical-juridical structures (regulating communal interaction) and in its relation to the gods, to its beyond. Yet, in spite of this inversion, it will become apparent that paternal authority has become an empty simulacrum. Simultaneously, the relation to the gods has become mere commerce, ancestral authority is invoked as a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:196 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in 1943, was to write an Epilogue to Julian Marias' History o] Philosophy. In early 1944, the Epilogue was conceived as a volume of 400 pages, and later of 700. In 1945 a part of the Epilogue was to be detached and given the title The Origin ol Philosophy. Then one completed part of that was published in 1953 as an essay in a Festschrift (...) for Karl Jaspers. That, and other sections, have been put together here. The first part of the book treats philosophy as a cumulative enterprise in which each man rethinks and thinks further what other men have thought. Even when past thought has reached an end, or taken a direction we will not follow, it is only for the reason that it has already happened that we do not have to do it ourselves. This is not because history is rational but because thought is historical, rooted in ideas we did not ourselves create and based on methods we have acquired and sometimes altered. The second part of the book deals with the origin of philosophy--and the origin of "philosophy" for Ortega is concerned throughout with language and etymology. The word "philosophy" is not one Ortega likes; he prefers the word "aletheia," which was used by Parmenides and his contemporaries. In popular language, aletheia meant discovery, exposure, denudation, revelation. For the thinker, "aletheia" is "truth" as a verb, the activity of uncovering reality, which is concealed under the robes of appearance or falsehood. Philosophy, for Ortega, begins with Parmenides and Heraclitus; "proto-philosophers" he calls them. The Ionians had been scientists; their attempts at natural explanation upset religion and tradition, and prepared the way for philosophy. In a remarkably subtle and complex analysis for so short a space, Ortega argues that skepticism, atheism, wealth, and knowledge of nature created a freedom based on a need to create or choose one's own beliefs in a world in which relative abundance demands choice, since in poverty "an individual is never in the position of being able to choose; for choice assumes that the circle of one's possibilities is notably greater than that of one's needs" (p. 98). The social need to define the thinker and so grant him professional status that might minimize the hostility of the tradition-ridden and reactionary populace, especially in Athens, led to the name "sophist," which became disreputable to a hostile citizenry, and then to "philosopher." Socrates was, unfortunately, the only philosopher, the man who liked, had a taste for, or loved wisdom, but made no pretense that he had any, saying only he sought it. But the name persisted, and helped institutionalize the new profession. I haven't even intimated the delight of Ortega's incidental insights. He was probably justified in believing that his stature as a thinker was much greater than his reputation. A first-rate, full-scale study of Ortega in English would help, but what we need most is a collection and translation of his complete works. RSLPH ROSS ~cripps College Discourse on Thinking. By Martin Heidegger. Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Pp. 93. $3.50.) This is a translation of a speech and conversation originally published under the thematic title Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Giinther Neske, 1959). Heidegger uses this unusual German word to remind us that there is another way of thinking than the calculative and dialectical modes made prominent by the mathematical sciences and modem cultural philosophy respectively. We have forgotten a less busy mode of thinking, a thinking released from all desire to control reality. Gelassenheit is rendered throughout as "releasement" in this translation. But Gelassenheit does not just mean letting go, or freedom from, as "releasement" may suggest. It also has the more positive sense of composure and a patient letting things be. In the context of Heidegger's attempts to define a mode of thinking not concerned with dominating reality, Gelassenheit comes to mean the freedom to be open to reality. BOOK REVIEWS 197 Heidegger stresses the ability to wait for insight, which is not, however, a mere passive waiting for something fixed. It would be... (shrink)

Professor Sallis has read the Apology, Meno, Phaedrus, Cratylus, Republic, and Sophist with the intention of elucidating Platonic responses to three questions: what is philosophy? what is logos? and what is being? His task, as he states it, is not to collect Plato’s opinions on these matters, as though such were either possible or interesting, but rather to elicit "an understanding of the manifold way in which a Platonic dialogue, by virtue of its character as a dialogue, (...) lets whatever is at issue in it become manifest." The actions described in the dialogues embody the results of the discourses recounted therein. The first part of the book, "Socratic Logos," attempts to clarify Plato’s answer to the first question by answering the far from obvious question "who was Socrates." The answer involves three points. First, the philosopher Socrates was aware of his own ignorance as well as the implicit limits of human wisdom; this "innate distance from a total and immediate revelation of beings" is, though, what motivates and makes possible the "second sailing" in logos described in the Phaedo. Athens’ obliviousness to the Apollonian origin of Socrates’ elenchtic [[sic]] activities led to its condemnation of him as a sophist. Second, the Meno’s myth of recollection "is founded on the capacity of man, with his peculiar mixture of knowledge and ignorance, to apprehend an image as an image, i.e., to apprehend the original that shows through it." The original, though, is the whole, of which the "manys" are images; the activity proper to the philosopher is recollection of the whole and mediation between whole and part. Third, Sallis’ work on the Phaedrus links Socrates’ divine mania and philosophic eros for the beautiful to his apprehension of eide. Sallis claims that the eidos of beauty is the most proper beginning for philosophic recollection of the eide because "the beautiful is that eidos which is most manifest to man in his embodied condition." The second half of the work poses the problem of the relation of being and logos. His excellently wrought study of the Republic accomplishes what several others in his exegetic tradition have failed to deliver: Sallis shows the actual engagement in what he calls "upward-moving dianoia" which Socrates compels Glaucon to undertake. Following Klein, Sallis stresses the unity of the "divided" line, though with this novel thesis: the distinction between "opinable" and "knowable" "is not fundamentally a distinction between two kinds of things, between which some relation would subsist, but rather between two ways in which an eidos can show itself... in both cases what shows itself is the same thing." He arrives at this by not wholly satisfying analyses of the mixture of beauty and ugliness in sensible things, and by reflection on the finger-example Socrates offers, at Rep. 523, ff. Concerning the good, Sallis’ judgment is that Socrates’ inexact analogy of it to the light of the sun means that it "makes possible that sort of showing in which something can show itself as one." The course of his exegesis and argument must be studied in detail, but whatever its lacunae, it does allow a good explanation of the unity of logoi and erga in this long dialogue, of its apparent abstraction from eros, and of its central images of sun, line, and cave. Sallis’ section on the Sophist lacks the precision and sureness of his work on the Republic. He continues, though, with his emphasis on the central importance of the study of the structure of images. Image-making raises the problem of non-being, which raises the problem of being, which is resolved into a dyadic structure unsusceptible of a dianoetic or arithmetical account. This problem leads beyond counting to dialectic as the required means of showing that both true and false logos, and hence non-being itself, are within being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:FROM SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE TO RESPONSIBILITY: THE EDUCATION OF MOSES IN EXODUS 2-4 Sandor Goodhart Purdue University When toward the end of his life Moses tried to stave off death, God said to him: "Did I tell you to slay the Egyptian?" (Midrash in Plaut 383) I. Education in Plato and Judaism The word "education", of course, comes from the Latin, educare, meaning "to lead out" or "to (...) bring up," and both its Latinate morphology and the semantic value it assumes in English reflect its peculiar history. To "lead out" implies in the first place leadership, which is to say a relationship between one designated as a "leader" and another (or others) designated as the "led." The notion of leadership also entails a movement through which the leader propels the led, namely from a region designated as "inside," to another designated as "outside." Within the Western context, which is to say, within the Western European historical experience which traces itselfback through the romance language speaking countries to Rome and ultimately to Greece, the primary articulator ofthe notion of education we have inherited is, of course, Plato. Although Plato's Republic is nominally about justice, and even more specifically the "just" state, commentators have long pointed out that it is really about education (see, for example, Havelock). How shall the guardians ofthe state that we shall term "just" be educated?, Plato's interlocutors ask themselves. In this regard, of course, Plato was challenging the educational system already in place at the time at the head of which was Homer and the Homeric epics, and substituting for an older oral culture founded on an elaborate system of mnemonics another founded more decisively upon writing and the alphabet. Some have argued that in place of a aural or Sandor Goodhart1 3 hearing-centered culture Plato was inaugurating a visual or video-centric cultural organization, and much work is currently being done in this area (see, for example, Ong). What was Plato's educational solution? It was an appeal, in short, to the true, to the language of reason, and to the realm of the ontological as the context in which the true could be defined. The true, as the phenomenological tradition has taught us, may be regarded as the separation of that which has being from that which does not have being, that which only appears or seems to be from that which truly is. Reason in this context is the method or modality ofthinking by which such difference or distinction between the true and the false becomes articulated. Education may then be said to be the process by which all of this occurs, by which one learns to separate appearances from reality, the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable, and thereby the process by which one avoids slavery. For at bottom the enemy for Plato remains slavery and the goal remains freedom from its ravages. Plato, for one, defines his program in specific opposition to Greek tragedy, which he takes among the species ofmimesis or of mimetic poesis that he cites to be the worst threat to his program of absolute difference. The tragic poets leave us without an antidote, he tells us, to its irresistible seductions. Even the best of us—by which he would certainly include Socrates, who has been educating these young men about the processes of education—go to the theater, follow the theatrical performance with enthusiasm, beat their breasts along with the players, and finally praise as most worthy those playwrights who most enable this enthusiasm to take place. The distinction between the true and the mimetic, between the true and the imitational or representational, between that which has being and that which only shadows being, is always on the verge of collapsing in this context. And as a consequence the only safe state, Plato tells us, is the one that excludes theatrical performance from its premises. There is no place in the present context to develop any further the complicated relationship Plato has with his predecessors, and I have hinted at this relationship elsewhere (see Goodhart 261). Suffice it to say that Plato remains in this regard the master in Western circles ofall... (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience (...) the drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . 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A literary and historical analysis of the structure and meaning of recurrent symbols, images, and actions employed in Plato’s dialogues. In this book, Clinton DeBevoise Corcoran examines the use of place in Plato’s dialogues. Corcoran argues that spatial representations, such as walls, caves, and roads, as well as the creation of eternal patterns and chaotic images in the particular spaces, times, characterizations, and actions of the dialogues, provide clues to Plato’s philosophic project. Throughout the dialogues, the Good serves as an (...) overarching ordering principle for the construction of place and the proper limit of spaces, whether they be here in the world, deep in the underworld, or in the nonspatial ideal realm of the Forms. The Good, since it escapes the limits of space and time, equips Plato with a powerful mythopoetic tool to create settings, frames, and arguments that superimpose different dimensions of reality, allowing worlds to overlap that would otherwise be incommensurable. The Good also serves as a powerful ethical tool for evaluating the order of different spaces. Corcoran explores how Plato uses wrestling and war as metaphors for the mixing of the nonspatial, eternal forms in the world and history, and how he uses spatial images throughout the dialogues to critique Athens’s tragic overreach in the Peloponnesian War. Far from merely an incidental backdrop in the dialogues, place etches the tragic intersection of the mortal and the immortal, good and evil, and Athens’s past, present, and future. (shrink)

From Socrates To Satre presents a rousing and readable introduction to the lives, and times of the great philosophers. This thought-provoking book takes us from the inception of Western society Plato's Athens to today when the commanding power of Marxism has captured one third of the world. T.Z. Lavine, Elton Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University, makes philosophy come alive with astonishing clarity to give us a deeper, more meaningful understanding of ourselves and our times. (...) From Socrates To Satire discusses Western philosophers in terms of the historical and intellectual environment which influenced them, and it connects their lasting ideas to the public and private choices we face in America today From Socrates To Satre formed the basis for the PBS television series of the same name. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 138-152 [Access article in PDF] Respecting the Rupture: Not Solving the Problem of Unity in Plato's Phaedrus James L. Kastely Plato's Phaedrus is a particularly instructive example of the double nature and status of rhetoric, for it embodies a tension at the heart of rhetoric. The first half of the dialogue presents three examples of rhetorical practice, while the second develops a theoretical (...) justification of rhetoric as an art. Thus, the dialogue would seem to offer a productive negotiation of the practice/theory tension. What makes the dialogue interesting, however, is the fact that this negotiation does not occur. The dialogue does not bring theory and practice into a harmonious relation, for there is a troubling discontinuity between its two halves, and rhetorical practice feels fractured. The exploration of eros that had occupied the first half of the dialogue is abandoned before the beginning of the second half, and then, following a logic that is at best associational, Socrates and Phaedrus explore the standards that should govern the practice of rhetoric. The infelicity of this transition raises a question: why did Plato structure the Phaedrus in such a way that it emphasized the dissonance between the two halves of the dialogue? To pose the question this way, however, is to go in a direction different from many of the best contemporary interpretations of the dialogue, which either argue that the dialogue is unified (Griswold 164) or suggest that the dissonance between its two halves reflects a shift in Plato's approach to philosophy (Kahn 373; Nehamas 352). In contrast, I will argue that the rupture in the dialogue is thematically purposive, for it points to an inescapable schism within rhetoric that makes rhetoric philosophically interesting.Socrates' second speech, his palinode to Eros, is a rhetorical tour de force that closes the first half of the dialogue. The importance of the palinode, however, is not limited to its role as an exemplary rhetorical performance, [End Page 138] for it also plays a crucial role in resolving the problem of erotic madness that organizes the intellectual drama of the first half. It would seem reasonable to expect that such an important and powerful moment in the dialogue would, at the very least, play a significant role in the philosophical discussion that composes the dialogue's second half. But that doesn't happen. While Socrates does refer to the palinode in his theoretical discussion of rhetoric, he makes little use of it, and, more important, he is silent on the subject of eros. Both the dramatic organization of the second half of the dialogue and its theoretical discussion cooperate to turn the rhetorical triumph of the palinode into a problem. Why has eros been abandoned as a philosophic topic, and what does this abandoning imply about the erotically grounded rhetoric that Socrates practiced and defended?To make matters worse, Socrates himself dismisses the palinode as a serious effort. He characterizes the speech as little more than a pleasant game, one that is not without value only because "these two certain forms (of gathering and dividing) were stated by chance" (265c). Far from viewing the palinode as possessing philosophical significance, Socrates appears to value it principally for its being a so-so example of a work of rhetoric that has been shaped by dialectic. While it is hard not to take Socrates' dismissal of the seriousness of the speech as partially disingenuous (just prior to his dismissal, he refers to the palinode as serious and reverent [265b]), he also does seem to mean what he says. Whether he is being straightforward or ironic does not finally matter because in either case the problem that occupies him and Phaedrus in the first half has disappeared from the dialogue. And that creates a problem: for if the philosophic issues of the first half of the dialogue drop out, then the dialogue is not coherent.This incoherence is especially troubling given Socrates' explicit endorsement of coherence as an important rhetorical value. In fact, when he begins his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Socrates' Trial and Conviction of the Jurors in Plato's ApologyDougal BlythI am going to argue in this paper that, in the three speeches constituting his Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the judicial proceedings that led to Socrates' execution as having precisely the opposite significance to their superficial legal meaning. This re-evaluation will lead to some reflections on the politics of Socrates' defence, and, similarly, on (...) Plato's own aims in writing the Apology. I want to show not only that the trial as portrayed demonstrates an inevitable dereliction of duty by the democratic jury, but also, more interestingly, that throughout the proceedings Socrates understands the meaning of the trial precisely in terms of his anticipation of the jurors' judicial incapacity.In the prooimion to his defence speech, Socrates requests that the jurors ignore his manner of speaking and concentrate on whether his case is just, "since this is a judge's virtue (), while that of a rhêtôr is to speak the truth" (18a5-6, cf. 35c2-5). We can gloss the expression "a judge's aretê" in this context as his function, or responsibility.1 Socrates claims that he, himself, fulfills his own responsibility as a defendant to tell the truth (17b4-c4, 33c1-2, cf. 34b5, 35b9-c2) in a speech that asserts his exemplary piety in Apollo's service and his beneficial influence on the Athenian youth. But if, in claiming that he is innocent of the charge, Socrates does tell the truth, then those jurors who thereupon convict him of impiety and corruption, and subsequently sentence him to death, have failed in their duty to judge rightly.My claim is that Socrates sees the trial as a test of the jurors' abilities. It is characteristic of Socrates to test people regarding their concern for virtue and justice, a habit to which he devotes extended discussion during his defence, even dramatising it provocatively in a central passage (29d7-e5) that I aim shortly to analyse in detail. Moreover, Socrates specifically withholds from the jury the title of dikastai or judges; he does finally award the title in his address following the sentence, but only to those who have voted [End Page 1] to acquit him (40a2-3).2 The possibility thus emerges that Socrates has treated the legal proceedings all along as a moral (and intellectual) test, or trial, of the empanelled jurors themselves, to see whether they are capable of the legal function to which they have been allotted. In that case, Socrates is putting on trial, not just those individual citizens, but the very legal system of democratic Athens.Socratic irony and truthfulnessBefore considering Socrates' own explicit judgement during those final remarks on the jurors' moral offence and punishment, I should first address briefly the issue of Socrates' irony. In the past, some writers have asserted that this irony involves him in not telling the truth about himself during his defence, in which case the jury might well have been justified in convicting him. Actually, there does seem to be a consensus among the more extended treatments of the Apology that have emerged during the last decade, at least on the point that Plato presents Socrates as committed to making as sincere an attempt at a defence of his case as is consistent with his philosophical commitment to virtue, and so to telling the truth.3I shall not re-argue this point in detail, but shall take it to be secured by two basic considerations: consistency with the Crito would require Socrates to recognise a legal obligation to make a sincere attempt at defence while his obligation to Apollo to continue his mission in Athens if possible would motivate that attempt with the goal of acquittal.4 Instead, I want to show what role irony does have in Socrates' defence, given that his principled law-abidingness requires him to attempt to persuade the jury, in accordance with truth and justice, that he is innocent (cf. 19a6-7, 18a7-b1, 18e5).Where Socrates acknowledges the obligation to defend himself, he remarks on the difficulty he faces, a difficulty that has resulted from the slander to which he has long... (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front (...) of Klee's Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Concept of Will in EarlyLatin Philosophy NEAL W. GILBERT AN HISTORICALDISCUSSIONOf the concept of will is best begun with an analysis of the use of voluntas in Latin philosophy, from its earliest occurrences in Lucretius and Cicero on down to Augustine and medieval times. This development can be traced without much controversy because the line of transmission and development is more or less unbroken. But the (...) correlating of Latin psychological terms with their Greek originals presents problems. Greek philosophy was indeed the source from which Latin philosophical psychology developed: Lucretius reflects Epicurean doctrine, while Cicero and Seneca were strongly influenced by Stoic philosophy when they discussed moral action. However, many modern scholars are convinced that the Greeks had no word that corresponds to our "will" at all, and so we seem to be left with no choice but to regard the will as an original creation of Latin philosophy. But this would be to overlook the fact that ancient Latin writers sometimes specifically equated voluntas with certain Greek terms, and such evidence ought not to go unexamined. Voluntas was well established in Latin usage before Roman writers began to concern themselves with philosophical problems, but it did not have a technical sense. It meant simply "good will," or "favor," or concretely, a "will, or testament. ''I Clustered around it were other derivatives of "volo," such as "benevolentia" and "malevolentia," "well-wishing" and "ill-wishing." When Roman writers began to deal with philosophical problems, there were a number of different contexts in which voluntas could play a leading role. Chief among them, naturally, was the "freedom of the will" which, then as now, intrigued the ordinary man or the moralist. However, discussions revolving around the determinist-libertarian issue often fail to clarify the concept of the will itself. Major philosophers (Chrysippus, Augustine, or Hume, for example) offer fine distinctions within moral action when considering the determinist-libertarian dispute, but lesser figures are apt to "C'est seulement lots de la creation du vocabulairephilosophiqueque voluntas a pris le sens abstrait et technique de 'volont6'." Ernout, A., and A. Meillet,Dictionnaire Etymologique de la langue latine, 4th ed. (Paris, 1959),sub "volo." [17] 18 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY neglect the detailed analysis of moral action in favor of sweeping metaphysical pronouncements. When a Latin writer wished to say that a person did something of his own accord, the locution most natural to him was "sua sponte," an ablative absolute derived from the same root as our word "spontaneous." The nominative case of "sponte" ("spons") was almost never used, so that dictionaries are perhaps somewhat misleading in suggesting that the word "spons" means "free will": it would be more correct to say that the phrase "sua sponte" means "of his own free will." Latin writers also indicate that someone did something willingly by saying that he did it "non invitus" ("not unwillingly "). Finally, they could apply the adjective "voluntarius" to such an action, or say that it was done "ex voluntate." When the latter term begins to be used as a designation for a separate faculty of the soul distinct from reason or intelligence, it begins to resemble the modern concept of will. Augustine is usually given credit for introducing the concept of will into philosophy, but even the earliest Latin treatment of the free-will problem framed the issue in terms of voluntas. Nevertheless, I think that the received view is substantially correct, although it would be more proper to say that what Augustine introduced into philosophy was not the concept of will in general but the concept of the evil will. What Augustine called the "good" will ("bona voluntas") was closely related to the "reasonable desire" of the Stoic sage, rendered into Latin by Cicero as voluntas, without any adjective. The addition of the evil will altered the outlines of moral analysis considerably, involving among other things the major shift from a Socratic or Platonic psychology and ethics (usually labeled "intellectualistic") to a Christian psychology and ethics (usually labeled "voluntaristic"). Such a characterization is likely to be drawn too sharply, and to overlook anticipations of voluntarism in Greek thought or reminiscences of Greek intellectualism in Christian thought. Hence it may be useful... (shrink)

Numenius is one of the most important authors who, in the Imperial Age, deal with the figure of Socrates. Socrates is important in the Platon­ic tradition, in particular in the sceptical tradition, when the Socratic dubitative “spirit” of the first Platonic dialogues became important to justify the “suspension of judgement.” Numenius criticises the whole Academic tradition by saying that the Academics (particularly the sceptics) betrayed the original doctrine of Plato and formulated a new image of Socrates. (...) For Numenius, Socrates plays a central role because Plato would have inherited his doctrine. What does Socrates’s doctrine consist in? According to Numenius, Socrates theorised a “doctrine of three Gods” (which can be likely found in the second Platonic epistle) which is strictly bound up with the main aspect of Plato’s thought. In fact, in Numenius’s view, Plato belongs to a genealogy which can be linked to Pythagoras himself. From this perspective, Numenius says that Socrates’s original thought is a theology which also belongs to the Pythagorean tradition and which Plato further developed. For Nume­nius, Socrates is not the philosopher of doubt, but a theologian who first theorised the existence of three levels of reality (Gods), which is also the kernel of Numenius’s metaphysical system. For this reason, Numenius puts Socrates within a theological genealogy that begins with Pythago­ras and continues with Socrates and Plato, and that the Academics and the Socratics failed to understand. (shrink)

The article addresses a common difficulty of counselors in confronting clients with the problems in their thinking and behavior in a way that they could start benefiting from a constructive self-reflective state in the long run, a state that would replace the common tendency to hide oneself, to blame, to victimize or to repress aspects of their humanity connoted as negative in order to maintain a positive self image. The highlight is on the main characteristics of efficient (...) confrontations with oneself and others, so as to engender reasoning competence training without an unnecessary loss in the quality of the consultative relationship. Working in psychotherapy and having progressively integrated more philosophical work into this professional practice, the author puts together a few concepts and ideas that are likely to facilitate the processes in the psychotherapeutic and the philosophical approaches to intrapsychic and interpersonal dialogue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE MAN BLIND FROM BIRTH AND THE SUBVERSION OF SIN: SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT FUNDAMENTAL MORALS1 James Alison I would like to undertake with you a reading of a passage from the Bible, John Chapter 9. I hope that we will see this chapter yield some interesting insights in the light of my attempt to apply to it the mimetic theory ofRené Girard. I'm not going (...) to expound mimetic theory for you: there is no shortage of books in which such expositions are to be found.2 I'mjust going to put the theory to work, with minimal recourse to technical jargon, in a reading from Scripture, hoping that it will be something like an exercise in publicity for the fecund use to which any of you might put mimetic theory. The reading will not be a simple commentary, but an attempt to experiment with the perspective of the reading. That is to say, we're asking "Who is reading this passage?," "With whom do we identify?" And the reason for this approach is to nudge us into beginning to raise certain questions of fundamental morals, how 'This paper was first published in Theology andSexuality 6, March 1997, and appears here by kind permission ofthe editor. With minor alterations this is the author's translation and adaptation ofa talk given at the Instituto Teológico de America Central (ITAC) in San Pedro Montes de Oca, San José, Costa Rica in May 1995. For instance: R. Schwager, Must there be Scapegoats? Violence andRedemption in the Bible (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987); R. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul's Hermeneutic ofthe Cross (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); J. Williams, The Bible, Violence and the Sacred: Liberationfrom the Myth ofSanctioned Violence (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991); Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroad, 1995)—this is the most accessible ofthe accounts. James Alison27 we talk about them, or live them in a more or less coherent and convincing way. I can't promise you any great conclusions, because I'm only just beginning to get into this subject. For that reason, I'll begin by saying that what follows is somewhat experimental, and will end with a few hints as to possible future paths to follow. I should also begin by saying that my intention is not to cause scandal, but to provoke a discussion which allows a fuller way ofliving a Christian life. In this sense what I'm trying out is an attempt at a search for a theological method which I have not yet mastered and which, if developed, will, I hope, prove somewhat emancipatory for all ofus. Miracle or theological debate? Let us begin our reading of John 9. At first sight we have an account of a miraculous healing. It is the story of a man blind from birth who receives his sight from Jesus one Sabbath, and then of the consequences of this healing among the people who witness, or hear about, the matter. Ifthe account were to be found in one of the synoptic Gospels, perhaps it might remain at that—there is no shortage of such stories. I have no doubt that in the background to the story we're dealing with an historical incident of a healing carried out by Jesus on a Sabbath. However, here the "miraculous healing" element doesn't receive much emphasis, nor does the Sabbath or rather, the matter ofthe Sabbath does receive a certain weight, as we will see later on, but with some very idiosyncratically Johannine touches. In any case, the purpose of this Chapter is determined by the debate about sin, sight, blindness and judgement within which it is set: these are the jeweller's artwork which show forth, and make sense of, the gem ofthe healing. Let us look at the beginning of the story. Jesus sees a man born blind, and his disciples ask him: "Master, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answers them: "Neither this man nor his parents. He is blind so that the works of God may be made manifest in him." That is to say, the whole story which follows comes as an illustration... (shrink)

In Plato’s Symposium eros and paideia draw the fabric of dramatic and rhetorical speeches and, especially, the picture of the relation between Socrates and Alcibiades. This paper will focus, firstly, on two important facts, which are essential for the correct understanding of the dialogue, both of which appear at the beginning. First, it is said that Socrates, Alcibiades and the others were present at the famous banquet, and second, that the banquet and the erotic speeches of the (...) participants were so celebrated as to attract the attention for several decades to come. So, the memory of that symposium is thus the memory, far beyond the other symposiasts, and through the erotic speeches, of something precise: that is, a particularly significant relationship, that between Socrates and Alcibiades. What matters most for the aim of this paper is the fact that Alcibiades is considered one of the major reasons for the defeat of Athens and the main cause of the crisis into which the city was plunged during the last years of 5th century BC. Due to the distrust of the city towards the groups of ‘philosophers’ that remitted to Alcibiades’ group, it is no surprise that the so-called Socratics committed themselves to refuting the accusation of Socrates having been Alcibiades’ mentor, to the point of reversing the charge. In the same way as the others Plato, also a Socratic, concerns himself with what might be called the ‘Alcibiades’ Connection’. Realizing there obviously was no way to deny the deep connection between Socrates and Alcibiades, he uses a clever dramatic construction with the intention of operating a political intervention upon the memory of this relationship, that is, of rewriting history, with the intent of relieving him of a more precise charge, which must have especially weighed upon Plato andupon Socrates’ memory: of him having been Alcibiades’ lover/mentor. This Platonic apology is based, ultimately, in a clever rhetorical strategy, which emphasizes the now traditional sexual paranomia of Alcibiades, in order tomake him guilty of an attempted excessive and outrageous seduction not only of Socrates, but of the polis itself. Reusing comic and oratorical/rhetorical motifs of his time, therefore, Plato deepens the J’accuse against Alcibiades, trying to withdraw him from the orbit of Socrates and the Socratics. (shrink)

The thesis of this book is that there is a philosophy implicit in Plato's dialogues, but philosophers cannot agree about its content because it is the imaginative vision of a way of life, rather than a system. The positions advocated are characters in a dramatic conflict of ideas, written by a poet for an audience of intellectuals and depicting with irony, ambiguity, and consummate artistry the Idea of Talk. Plato's own position is that in an imperfect world we (...) can have a vision of it perfected and, in the light of this vision, can see the really real, that is, what is worthwhile. This is, however, neither metaphysics nor epistemology, but a value statement and an attitude toward life. Plato is saying that knowledge of the Good is knowledge of man's possibilities, and that to know the Good is to love the Good, to make passionate commitment to the object of knowledge. Other points: Immortality is not future life but present life lived in the vision of the Ideal. The Republic is not a program but an ironic picture of the Idea of the Spartan state, warning that, while the search for perfection is the source of all order in life, overemphasis of a single value is the death of the rest. Plato advised the study of mathematics because, since it comes to indisputable conclusions, he hoped it would teach that intellectual rigor which the humanities and social sciences, being matters of opinion do not. Plato's doctrine emerges only from the earlier, "Socratic" dialogues. The later ones are dogmatic, rather than dramatic, and seem to provide starting points for Aristotle.--L. G. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Magic Buffalo" and Berkeley's Theory ofVision: Learning in Society David M. Levy Introduction Berkeley's Theory of Vision contains the remarkable claim that the perception ofdistance is learned by experience. This thesis is rooted in Berkeley's doctrine that the physical basic of optical perception is angular. An impression of angle? impacts upon the optic nerve. The interpretative problem confronting an individual is that of reconstructing two pieces ofinformation, distance d (...) and magnitude m, from one datum T. Let the ratio ofm/d form arctan T. How do we come to distinguish between the pair m1,d1 and the pair m2,d2 when m^d 1 = m2/d2? How do we distinguish big objects at a distance from small objects up close? The evidence Berkeley provides for this thesis is of a funny sort. He gives examples that we do, in fact, distinguish large distant objects from small near objects. Since the arctan of the pair m1, d 1 is by hypothesisthe sameas thatofthepairm2, d2thenrecognizingdistance must be alearned abihty. We cannotextractd and m from? alone. The proper interpretation ofBerkeley's philosophy ofscience is a matter of considerable debate.1 Nonetheless, as a working theorist of visual perception he is afairly simple-minded falsificationist. Here is what he says: find a person born blind who comes by surgery to see. If that person can distinguish at a glance big distant objects from small near objects, 111 amend my theory.2 The literature on Berkeley's Theory ofVision can be fairly said to bifurcate between those who "see" the argument and those who don't. Berkeley's most important eighteenth century disciple, Adam Smith, extended Berkeley's teaching to encompass the remarkable claim that we learn to perceive our economic interest (Levy 1992a, 1992b). The negative reaction to Berkeley's theory starts in 1842 with Samuel Bailey who pronounced himself mystified by the very claim that we learn to perceive distance. The debate between Bailey and John Stuart Mill, a debate which has twentieth century counterparts, has all the characteristics ofpeople talking past each other. Volume XLX Number 1 223 DAVID M. LEVY The missing social dimension The problem, as I see it, with Berkeley's proposed critical test—stipulating his own doctrine—is that a blind person would grow up in a sighted community. Perhaps, if he grew up in a blind community, and most of the community became sighted at the same time he did, all the community might be able to perceive distance. The problem with Berkeley's test is that ifhe himself is correct about the importance ofheuristics in making the visual distinctions, the fate of one individual is somewhat beside the point. One individual surely cannot create the necessary heuristics. This learning requires some evolutionary social process. Thus, while Berkeley's thesis requires some claim about some verybasicsocial epistemology(Fuller 1988), his proposed test, asking about a blind person growing up in a community silently presumed to be sighted, does not take into account the social dimension oflearning. Having said this, it is easy to think ofa better test for Berkeley's theoryofvision. Let us find an entire community where life takes place without the visual perception of great distance. Take any individual from this community and ask Berkeleian questions. Now, we know the answer becausejust such a dialogue was reported thirtyyears ago. One society which fulfils the test criterion is that ofthe BaMbuti people who lived their life in a very dense African forest. The American anthropologist Colin Turnbull took his friend from the BaMbuti, Kenge, to the top of a hill. Here is TurnbuH's famous report: Then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles away, far downbelow. He turned to me and said, "Whatinsects are those?" At first I hardly understood; then I realized that in the forest the range of vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, however, Kenge was looking for the first time Over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison. The same thing happened later on... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who was Socrates? CORNELIA DE VOGEL I CONSIDERIT TO BE quite a privilege to be invited to speak of Socrates,1 not only because of the wonderful picture drawn by Plato of his master in what we call the Socratic dialogues, but perhaps mostly because there is a real challenge in the difference of opinion among modern scholars on the question of "Who was Socrates?" I have (...) solid grounds for being convinced that we can answer that question in a positive manner; that is, I think I can explain, first, that it is not true (as some modern scholars hold) that we are unable to grasp the historical reality that stands behind the name of Socrates; second, that there are a few modern interpretations of Socrates which are suggestive but false; third, that one and only one interpretation is well founded and correct. I think it is worthwhile to spend an hour considering these points. Socrates is one of those four famous Greek philosophers who did not leave any written works. The other three are: Pythagoras, who in Aristotle's day already seemed to disappear in the haze of a remote past; Pyrrho, the founder of the Sceptic School, and Carneades, that famous dialectician who was the head of the New Academy in the second century. On none of these so much as on Socrates have modern critics endeavored to demonstrate that he never existed? The most refined representative of the nineteenth-century style of criticism is O. Gigon, who modified Dupr6el's thesis insofar as he does not deny explicitly that there existed an Athenian called Socrates, and even that he may have been an important personality. But he does hold that we cannot know of what importance was Socrates. To prove his thesis Gigon deals first with the tradition about the indictment, the litigation and condemnation of Socrates; next with the story about the Delphic oracle and Socrates' calling to philosophy; then with his marriage and family life, and last, with his relation to the city of Athens. It is not too difficult to cite divergent and even contradictory information on all these points. As to Plato's dialogues, in which the philosopher Socrates is pictured--to the life, as it might seem to us--according to Gigon the historical value of t Lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, May 25, 1962. ~E. Dupr6el, La ldgende de Socrate et les sources de Platon (Brux., 1921); O. Gigon, Sokrates (Bern, 1947; Samml. Dalp). (See my review in Mnemosyne [1950]; see also Phronesis [1955], I.) A. H. Chroust, Socrates, Man and Myth (London, 1957), adopts essentially Gigon's thesis. [14s] 144 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY these writings is by no means greater than that of any other of our sources. Why should they be more trustworthy? Because the image they present is beautiful? That would be a deceptive ground, for Plato may have invented freely, and we have good reason to believe he did. In fact, if anybody holds that we do not know anything for certain about Socrates, he must begin by disparaging Plato's testimony altogether. Next, he must deny that Aristotle said a word of truth about what was the proprium of Socrates as a philosopher, and in what Plato differed from him. Third, he must assert that there is a complete disagreement between Plato and Xenophon as to the personality of Socrates, not to mention the fifthcentury comedian Aristophanes (who, as a matter of fact, drew a fairly strange portrait of the philosopher). After having thus rejected the testimony of contemporaries and their direct successors, he may turn to the gossip of those later authors who have no authority at all: Aristoxenus, a furious anti-Socratic, who is cited by Plutarch as a classical instance of malignity; Diogenes Laertius, that late writer (3rd century A.D.) who tells us the strangest stories about all Greek philosophers; Athenaeus, Herodicus, Aelianus, and so on--and find there divergent and contradictory information about Socrates' life and behavior. Let us begin by stating that we must not follow this procedure. Moreover, let us state that it is not interesting to us that, while Plato and Xenophon say Socrates was married... (shrink)

Socrates continues to be an extremely influential force to this day; his work is featured prominently in the work of contemporary thinkers ranging from Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, to Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière. Intervening in this discussion, What Would Socrates Do? reconstructs Socrates' philosophy in ancient Athens to show its promise of empowering citizens and non-citizens alike. By drawing them into collective practices of dialogue and reflection, philosophy can help people to become (...) thinking, acting beings more capable of fully realizing the promises of political life. At the same time, however, Joel Alden Schlosser shows how these practices' commitment to interrogation keeps philosophy at a distance from the democratic status quo, creating a dissonance with conventional forms of politics that opens space for new forms of participation and critical contestation of extant ones. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to David Carr, “The Significance of Music for the Promotion of Moral and Spiritual Value”Iris M. YobDavid Carr has addressed a question that has been lurking in philosophical literature for centuries and, I might add, in our collective intuition as well: Just what is the connection between music and the moral and spiritual life? And as we have come to expect from his work, he (...) brings a new perspective to this perennial question in his answer. First he traces a line of thinking since Plato about music and the ordering of the soul, he touches on the role of music and the other arts in exploring the complexities of the moral imperative as it is lived out in human lives, and returns at the end to give a new take on the old Platonic idea of ordering of the soul. Just maybe, he suggests, the detachment, however temporary, "from the trials and tribulations that beset us in the day to day rough and tumble of human practical affairs" "in the interests of some more balanced perspective" on spiritual and moral matters "might be easier to achieve in the contemplation and appreciation of great works of 'music alone.'"This conclusion does not lay claim to more than what is perfectly reasonable. Allowing oneself to be immersed in a great work of music or art or architecture or dance may very well provide that distance from every day life where one might [End Page 209] re-center and refocus, refresh and renew one's outlook on the world. Such an engagement with an artwork can interrupt the patterns of thinking and acting that might have become increasingly thoughtless and ego-centric. It can be a re-creation in the true sense of the word. Paul Tillich, one of the great twentieth century religious philosophers, tells of an experience he had during the First World War where he served as a chaplain in the German army. On a brief leave from the front he visited Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and stood entranced before Botticelli's "Madonna and Child with Singing Angels." The moment was spiritually transformative, he tells us, lifting his spirits beyond the mud and grime of the battlefield to contemplate life and meaning on a different plane altogether. The experience enabled him to return to duty with renewed inner strength and calm.1 I believe this is a rather powerful and compelling example of what Carr is talking about.In coming to his conclusion, Carr is relying on the particularly difficult case of "music alone," that is, music that does not have words, title, or any other kind of representative function. In other words his argument does not depend on any didactic nature or morally or spiritually directive intent of the music. Rather, it is centered on music that ostensibly is not about anything. This is musical sound composed and performed for the appreciation of what it is in itself. And yet, in providing distance from the every day world, according to Carr, it can give expression to "realms of spiritual experience that lie beyond the sensual and empirical." Here we enter the world of the metaphorical and symbolic, what Rudolf Otto would call the "irrational" or "superrational," or the realm of the Holy. While Carr does not state this explicitly I would go so far as to say that this realm of the wordless and sacred is where the spiritual and the moral are grounded and from where they draw their power.Against this background, I would like to ask how does "music alone," in the sense intended by Carr and Peter Kivy from whom he borrowed the term bring about this effect? We are unable now to ask Tillich what it was that gave the Botticelli its impact for him, but it is curious that what it did for him it most likely did not do for all the other soldiers from the front who happened upon it the way he did. Tillich would most likely explain its effect by resorting to his theory of symbols, because after all this painting does have a literal meaning that might very well have inspired him. But... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth Will Set You Free, or How a Troubled Philosophical Theory May Help to Understand How People Talk About Their AddictionPatricia A. Ross (bio)Keywordsveridicality of narrative, contingency of theories, belief-behavior, causal connectionConsider the following proposition: If one were to recognize the unsatisfactory implications of maintaining a certain theoretical position, one would thereby be motivated to accept a more adequate theory, which would alter one's (...) beliefs and, in turn, alter the behaviors that are based upon those beliefs. Faith in this proposition is what motivates many of us to teach. But, alas...Allison Mitchell's argument for rethinking addiction intervention—in particular, rethinking twelve-step programs—is premised on this proposition. According to her argument, addicts function with an impoverished sense of self that is reflective of a grossly simplified form of philosophical materialism. By recognizing the limitations of this philosophically unconvincing view, and by, in effect, accepting a better, more complete materialism, addicts can come to modify their self-conception. This modification is instrumental to recovery.A careful consideration of the chain of events being proposed, and the problems with it, is helpful for understanding the limitations of her argument. There are four points that I consider in turn: (1) considering narratives can tell us something about the self-conception of addicts, (2) philosophical materialism can help us to understand and explain something about an addict's self-conception and how it is inadequate, (3) this sense of self is distinct from nonusers and the way in which it is distinct helps to understand the problem of addiction, and (4) a change in self-conception with respect to materialism helps recovery and, thus, our best intervention is one based on having addicts accept a full materialist theory of the self and not a pretheoretic one. [End Page 227]With respect to the first point, it should be noted that Mitchell's overall argument does not depend on whether or not it is true that narratives of addiction tell us something veridical about the self-conception of addicts. Such narratives may simply provide us with a potential theory—a possible worlds scenario—of how addicts conceive of themselves. Mitchell points this out herself. The narratives and the interpretation that she provides of these narrative, "are meant only to highlight a certain pattern of self-expression and conception that may in fact be common in persons who use mind-altering substances; the readings do not establish any empirical matters of fact or philosophical truths, nor do they prove any conclusions about how such persons (must) express themselves or conceive their nature" (Mitchell 2006, 214).Thus, what the argument is actually concerned with are the theoretical claims about the self-conception of addicts that are garnered from these narratives. Nevertheless, because the narratives provide the starting point for Mitchell's argument, it is worth thinking carefully about the epistemic status of this body of literature. In particular, could a consideration of such literature lead us astray in our endeavors to understand how addicts might misconceive of themselves and, if so, in what way? What sort of epistemic status does this information hold?Mitchell is motivated by Wittgensteinian analyses of the relationship between thought and language. The particular idea that she employs from Wittgenstein is that every act of self-expression, whether it is verbal or written narrative, reveals something about the conceptual framework with which the author is working. Thus, one can learn about the author of a narrative—one can acquire a sense of how that individual conceives of him- or herself—by looking at the language that is employed to talk about and describe him- or herself.Mitchell enumerates some problems with this approach. She mentions that the author may fail to make his or her intended sense clear to readers; that the reader's narrative expectations determine the interpretation given to the narrative; that literary narrative may be less direct, less ordinary than everyday uses of language; and that interpreting such narrative via philosophical framework may ascribe to people positions that are more precise and sophisticated than they actually intend (p. 213).Aside from these quite serious problems, it is necessary to recognize... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Response to David Carr, “The Significance of Music for the Promotion of Moral and Spiritual Value”Iris M. YobDavid Carr has addressed a question that has been lurking in philosophical literature for centuries and, I might add, in our collective intuition as well: Just what is the connection between music and the moral and spiritual life? And as we have come to expect from his work, he (...) brings a new perspective to this perennial question in his answer. First he traces a line of thinking since Plato about music and the ordering of the soul, he touches on the role of music and the other arts in exploring the complexities of the moral imperative as it is lived out in human lives, and returns at the end to give a new take on the old Platonic idea of ordering of the soul. Just maybe, he suggests, the detachment, however temporary, "from the trials and tribulations that beset us in the day to day rough and tumble of human practical affairs" "in the interests of some more balanced perspective" on spiritual and moral matters "might be easier to achieve in the contemplation and appreciation of great works of 'music alone.'"This conclusion does not lay claim to more than what is perfectly reasonable. Allowing oneself to be immersed in a great work of music or art or architecture or dance may very well provide that distance from every day life where one might [End Page 209] re-center and refocus, refresh and renew one's outlook on the world. Such an engagement with an artwork can interrupt the patterns of thinking and acting that might have become increasingly thoughtless and ego-centric. It can be a re-creation in the true sense of the word. Paul Tillich, one of the great twentieth century religious philosophers, tells of an experience he had during the First World War where he served as a chaplain in the German army. On a brief leave from the front he visited Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin and stood entranced before Botticelli's "Madonna and Child with Singing Angels." The moment was spiritually transformative, he tells us, lifting his spirits beyond the mud and grime of the battlefield to contemplate life and meaning on a different plane altogether. The experience enabled him to return to duty with renewed inner strength and calm.1 I believe this is a rather powerful and compelling example of what Carr is talking about.In coming to his conclusion, Carr is relying on the particularly difficult case of "music alone," that is, music that does not have words, title, or any other kind of representative function. In other words his argument does not depend on any didactic nature or morally or spiritually directive intent of the music. Rather, it is centered on music that ostensibly is not about anything. This is musical sound composed and performed for the appreciation of what it is in itself. And yet, in providing distance from the every day world, according to Carr, it can give expression to "realms of spiritual experience that lie beyond the sensual and empirical." Here we enter the world of the metaphorical and symbolic, what Rudolf Otto would call the "irrational" or "superrational," or the realm of the Holy. While Carr does not state this explicitly I would go so far as to say that this realm of the wordless and sacred is where the spiritual and the moral are grounded and from where they draw their power.Against this background, I would like to ask how does "music alone," in the sense intended by Carr and Peter Kivy from whom he borrowed the term bring about this effect? We are unable now to ask Tillich what it was that gave the Botticelli its impact for him, but it is curious that what it did for him it most likely did not do for all the other soldiers from the front who happened upon it the way he did. Tillich would most likely explain its effect by resorting to his theory of symbols, because after all this painting does have a literal meaning that might very well have inspired him. But... (shrink)

Independent on Sunday October 2nd One of the country's lead­ing philosophical counsellers, and chairman of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP), Tim LeBon, said it typically took around six 50 ­minute sessions for a client to move from confusion to resolution. Mr LeBon, who has 'published a book on the subject, Wise Therapy, said philoso­phy was perfectly suited to this type of therapy, dealing as it does with timeless human issues such as love, purpose, happiness and (...) emo­tional challenges. `Wise Therapy, is part of a series aimed at promoting an integrative attitude as its ethos. Among all the many perspectives of psychotherapists and counselors, philosophy needs to take its place and needs to find its voice. Tim LeBon has provided an effective means by which counselors can bring philosophy into their work with clients' - APPA journal `Tim Le Bon's Wise Therapy is a comprehensible and well argued book dealing with the practical therapeutic applications of philosophical research that may well be of interest to philosophers but -- as the author himself intends -- will be of most obvious benefit to therapists and counselors, both by informing their dialogue with clients in new ways and by helping them become more informed about ways to resolve the ethical dilemmas arising within the context of their own work' - Metapsychology `A fascinating workshop for therapists and clients, backed up a thorough degree if philosophical acuity' - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis `I strongly recommend the book for philosophers as well as practitioners, teachers, students and supervisors in counselling and psychotherapy' - Self and Society `Provides some additional and valuable arrows for the therapist's quiver' - Irvin Yalom, author of Love's Executioner `Like Aristotle, Tim LeBon examines what is said and extracts what is best from it…. There are many fascinating exercises designed to bring out and enlighten the client's values, conception of the good life, well-being, happiness, pleasure, and the proper place of reason in life…. Wise Therapy is well written and engaging. The case histories are illuminating examples of therapeutic techniques at work, the thought experiments are well designed, and the philosophical position adapted from the internal debates of the philosophers is level headed…. I recommend it highly to philosophers with an interest in counselling, and psychological counsellors with an interest in philosophy' - Jeff Mason, The Philosophers' Magazine `Tim LeBon has… authored a text which should become a staple on the philosophical counsellor's bookshelf…. Wise Therapy is a concise, well-written book…. His ability to relate philosophical concepts to counselling concerns is admirable and attests to the skill and knowledge he possesses as a working counsellor. But, by far the most important part of Tim LeBon's book to PC is the last chapter, "The Counsellor's Philosophical Toolbox"' - Craig Munns in The Examined Life ` Tim LeBon has done a good job of offering practical approaches to some of the most important and vexing issues that arise in counselling…. Tim LeBon's book contains helpful suggestions, practical information, and useful examples, and would make a good addition to the library of any counsellors willing to allow philosophy to turn mere client sessions into wise therapy' - Peter Raabe, Practical Philosophy Wise Therapy is an original and practical guide to how philosophy can benefit counselling and psychotherapy. Tim LeBon argues that therapy, informed by philosophy, can help clients make better decision and achieve emotional wisdom. He uses philosophical approaches to explore issues of right and wrong, the emotions and reasons, well-being and the meaning of life, and develops a 'counsellor's toolbox' of techniques that can help practitioners apply the wisdom of philosophy to good therapeutic practice. For counsellors who may find philosophical approaches to therapy useful, this work addresses key philosophical topics - the emotions, free will, the meaning of life and ethics. It is jargon-free where possible and assumes no previous philosophical training. From The Independent, 16th November 2004 Plato is my agony aunt It was the end of a love affair that broke her heart. Could the wisdom of the great philosophers show her how to be happy again? Claire Smith tries a novel form of therapy "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates said. Nor is the life you're left with after your boyfriend has left you for another woman - at least, that's how it felt in October last year when mine broke rank and went off with an art student from Cleveland, Ohio. We were over there for the opening of his new art exhibition. He'd flown over four days before me and had met her at a party. Supposedly, they "connected". The five months that followed were a roller-coaster of confusion, vitriol and despair. I knew there'd been problems in our relationship. We saw the world very differently; he delighted in the charm of the ordinary, I wanted maximum divinity. He walked; I galloped. He drank tea; I loathed the stuff. But, along the banks of the Thames, we'd made a promise to always stick together. Our love was something unique: "transcendental", I called it. And besides, we recycled. Surely a commitment to save the world would save our relationship? Alas, no. So there I was, a woman scorned. Hell truly hath no greater fury. And what made it worse was that I still believed in our transcendental love. If I wanted to change the way I was feeling, I needed to alter the way I was thinking. But how? A few bottles of wine and a sharp blow to the head might have done the trick. Fortunately, there's an older, more trusted way of turning your head on its head that counsellors are starting to use: philosophy. The idea of employing Plato as an agony aunt was begun in 1981 by the German philosopher Gerd Achenbach. Although philosophy spends a lot of its time asking real-life questions that affect real-life people - What is happiness? And is it always wrong to lie? - most of the debate goes on in ivory towers. What Achenbach and subsequent philosophers including Tim LeBon, the chairman of the UK's Society for Philosophy in Practice, wanted to do was "give practical application" to this gigantic library of great thoughts. So how does it work? Like most types of therapy, you sign up for a set of sessions. "Two would give you a new perspective on one issue; six would help you to make a major life-decision, like a career change; with 12 you can start to rethink your entire life philosophy," explains LeBon. Each session lasts 50 minutes and costs £50 - and, no, you don't have to have any previous knowledge of philosophy. "If you think of Friends, it would suit Ross and Chandler more than Joey," LeBon says. "It's for anyone who wants to make their emotions more intelligent. Or for those who have tried other kinds of therapy, and want something more cerebral." The first session begins with the patient venting off about whatever's troubling them. The rant over, the counsellor then picks out some key concepts that are crucial to the problem - in the case of heartbreak, it is love and happiness that come hurtling to the fore - and then gets the patient to define what they mean. So, what is love? What is happiness? To kick-start the patient's thinking, LeBon describes what a great philosopher had to say about it. In my case, he tells me what Plato wrote about love in his Symposium: that to stop man fighting the gods, Zeus decided to cut each human in two, so they would lose their strength. "This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other," Plato said. "Each of us is a 'matching half' of a human whole, because each was sliced like a flatfish, two out of one, and each of us is always seeking the half that matches him." This method of probing what we might think are "obvious" ideas, such as love and happiness, was devised by Socrates in the squares of Athens. "The only I thing I know is that I know nothing at all," he boasted. What Socrates showed was that although many of the thinkers of his time thought they knew what justice, happiness and goodness meant, their understanding was tied in to their personal agenda and world view, and, what's more, when pushed, their ideas often contradicted themselves. A bit like me on love. Whereas part of my understanding of love was something that gave life meaning, made it worth living and bound us together, I also believed that true love was "transcendental": that it was out of this world, and it didn't matter if the two people who loved each other couldn't get along in the day-to-day. Love was bigger than the mundane. But when it came to the next stage of the therapy, critical thinking - "to check out whether your assumptions stand up to examination" - I walked head first into a contradiction. If I think love's purpose is to make life worth living, but then say it's irrelevant to daily life, surely my two ideas of love are not compatible? As the cogs in my brain start to creak into motion, I feel myself taking a step back from my predicament: thinking about how I've been thinking. This idea I had of transcendental love might have started off as a romantic dream. But when the relationship stopped working, and I found myself feeling trapped and frustrated, I used it to justify the mechanics of a relationship that just didn't work in the daily grind. I used it to lie to myself. In the final stage, LeBon gets me to start thinking about how to go forward. "You can't change what has happened," he says. "You can't change that he's left you, or how you behaved in the relationship. So, as the Stoics did, let's work on controlling the controllables: the things that you can change." To work out what can be changed, he gets me to try out a thought experiment, a method often used in philosophy to imagine other worlds where people can have different codes of behaviour. Thought experiments shatter your preconceived ideas of how the world should be and let your imagination run wild to how the world could be. "I find Viktor Frankl very useful here, the Austrian psychiatrist and concentration-camp survivor who actually believed that everything in life happens for a purpose," LeBon says. "Suppose this break-up did happen for a reason that will work to your benefit," he suggests. "What might that be? The answer might be that you can now focus on something important that was denied in the relationship. Or - the Hollywood version - so you'll meet someone who is really right for you." Temporarily freed of any sense of responsibility for the relationship that was, and its sorry demise, the list came fast. I could now travel more; he didn't like me travelling on my own, but too often he didn't want to go anywhere, preferring to stay in his studio and make art. I'd love to meet someone with a similar sense of adventure to mine. For the first time in two years, I was being honest with myself about what I really wanted - listening to those voices that we all have inside our heads, and too often try to muzzle. So did philosophy save me? Well, I'm now dating a travel writer I have to run to keep up with. I still haven't got over the fact that my replacement came from Cleveland, Ohio. But I guess I never will. Tim LeBon can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] A FEW WORDS FROM THE WISE Compiled by Ed Caesar · "At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet" - Plato · "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness" - Friedrich Nietzsche · "That man shall live as his own master and in happiness who can say each day 'I have lived'" - Horace · "The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy" - Aristotle · "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than friendship" - Thomas Aquinas · "Whatever you do... love those who love you" - Voltaire · "Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination" - Immanuel Kant · "Happiness is a state of which you are unconscious. The moment you are aware that you are happy, you cease to be happy" - Jiddu Krishnamurti · "Love is an ideal thing. Marriage is a real thing" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe I shrink, therefore I am Therapy has many answers, but some questions require the help of a philosopher, says Clint Witchalls Sunday November 21, 2004 The Observer Danny had worked in the City of London for 10 years. As a research analyst, stockbroker and fund manager, he'd made a lot of valuable contacts, earnt a lot of cash, and learnt some important business skills. However, as he approached his mid-thirties, he no longer felt good about himself or what he did for a living, and he found his colleagues cold and unfriendly. A chronic illness made him realise his mortality, and he began to reassess his priorities. Danny had been struggling with his career conundrum for nearly five years when he met David Arnaud, a philosophical counsellor. After a few soul-searching sessions, Danny arrived at a decision. Today, he teaches economics to sixth-formers, and he loves it. 'It's a much better lifestyle,' he says. Many people are turning to philosophical counsellors to get answers to questions such as: 'How do I make sense of myself?' 'What is important to me?' 'Where am I going?' These are perhaps not the sort of questions that require psychiatric intervention, but Arnaud, who recently completed the first empirical study of philosophical counselling in the UK, has found that within just five sessions the majority of clients, with important decisions to make, tend to move from a state of concern and confusion to a resolution. Modern philosophical counselling can be traced back to 1981, when the philosopher Gerd Achenbach opened the first practice near Cologne. Achenbach referred to the new discipline as 'therapy for the sane.' Today, there are hundreds of philosophical counsellors around the world, with the movement particularly strong in the US, Britain and the Netherlands. 'The dilemmas people face aren't always primarily psychological,' says Alex Howard, a philosophical counsellor from Newcastle. 'If people face problems that are social or economic, it doesn't make sense to define their problems in purely psychological terms.' Tim LeBon, a founder member of the Society for Philosophy in Practice (SPP) and author of Wise Therapy, adds: 'We are faced with far more life choices than our grandparents, yet have far fewer resources to deal with them. Our grandparents may have gone to a priest or to other family members for advice; most people don't trust these solutions any more and so want to make their own well-informed, well thought-out choices. Philosophical counselling can help these people - people in mid-life crises who are wondering how to make the most of the rest of their life. People who want to take stock of their values.' Where stressed executives might once have been prescribed a course of tranquillisers or antidepressants, they can now get a dose of Bertrand Russell instead: 'Success is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.' While some philosophical counsellors do recommend books for their clients to read, most sessions are about helping the client identify faulty thoughts. For example, a briefing in Aristotelian logic might show a client why their beliefs are erroneous. The person might infer that they're a screw-up because they've screwed up. The counsellor could point out that they're making an error called 'fallacy of composition' - that is, what's true of the part isn't necessarily true of the whole. In philosophical counselling, problems aren't pathologised as they are by the psychiatric profession, and the dialogue between client and counsellor is more like a meeting of equals, compared to many therapies where the client is treated like a patient and seen as someone who is, in some way, inadequate. 'Anybody can benefit from philosophical counselling,' says Howard. 'But it does require someone who is willing to take stock.' Lou Marinoff, author of international bestseller Plato Not Prozac! has done much to promote philosophical counselling. 'Some people who have stabilised their neurochemistry and validated their emotions now wish to examine or re-examine the criteria of their beliefs, the principles of their conduct, or the meaning of their lives,' he says. 'With whom shall they do this? Psychologists and psychiatrists can shed light on such issues - as can rabbis, priests, imams and gurus. Philosophers are now rejoining the ranks of helpers.' LeBon believes certain therapies (such as cognitive behavioural therapy) don't go far enough in helping their clients. 'For instance, if you are anxious about your relationship, a cognitive therapist would try to dispute your catastrophising and jump to conclusions to make you feel less anxious,' says LeBon. 'A philosophical counsellor would do this, but would also look for existential meaning in your anxiety - perhaps you really don't want to be in the relationship and that is what your anxiety is telling you.' LeBon also gives short shrift to psychoanalysts. 'There's very little evidence for the Freudian unconscious, and it's time to move on to more intellectually satisfying and helpful therapies,' he says. However, Alain de Botton, the man who popularised philosophy as self-help, isn't ready to bury psychologists and their ilk just yet. 'The truth is that psychoanalysis grew out of philosophy - it's not some completely new idea, and in fact, done properly, psychoanalysis is philosophical anyway. It may even be dangerous to the mental health of some people to suggest a philosopher rather than a properly trained analyst. The knowledge of analysts when it comes to many emotional problems is now much greater than that of most philosophers.' Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Is the Gorgias so Bitter?1Alessandra FussiMihi in oratoribus irridendis ipse esse orator summus videbatur.-Cicero, De Oratore 1.471. The hand of an apprentice?Commentators have often responded with uneasiness to Plato's Gorgias. E. R. Dodds speaks of the "disillusioned bitterness" of the criticisms leveled against Athenian politics and politicians and of the tragic tone of the dialogue's last part, which culminates in a prediction of Socrates' condemnation (...) (1959, 19). F. M. Cornford observes that the discussion between Socrates and Callicles "is marked by a bitterness of tone rarely found elsewhere in the dialogues" (1945, 21). A. E. Taylor is more explicitly irritated: "Personally-he writes-I cannot help feeling that, with all its moral splendor, the dialogue is too long: it 'drags.' The Plato of the Protagoras or Republic, as I feel, would have known how to secure the same effect with less expenditure of words; there is a diffuseness about our dialogue which betrays the hand of a prentice, though the prentice in this case is Plato" (1960, 103). Many readers of the Gorgias have a similar emotional response, yet the feeling that this is a bitter dialogue is never analyzed, accounted for, or adequately justified.While assessing various hypotheses on the date of composition of the Gorgias, Dodds speculates that its "disillusioned bitterness" may suggest that Plato wrote the dialogue right after Socrates' death and under the impact of the event. The Gorgias is so bitter, the reasoning goes, because Plato was enraged with the Athenians when he wrote it. Dodds goes on to discard the hypothesis of such an early date of composition, but he does not revise his view that this is indeed a bitter dialogue. Why, then, does the [End Page 39] Gorgias sound so bitter? Instead of relying on external factors, I suggest it would be more profitable to turn to the dialogue itself for an answer. After all, the impression of bitterness is a function of the emotional impact that the dialogue has on its readers. A well-constructed chain of arguments can hardly sound bitter. The Gorgias contains many arguments, but its emotional impact must lie elsewhere. So where?In the dialogue, Socrates is involved in three discussions of increasing length and complexity with interlocutors who, in one way or another, defend the power of rhetoric and the superiority of political life over philosophical life. The discussions cannot, however, be characterized as mere exercises in abstract reasoning, or urbane conversations on different views of the good life; the Gorgias is a "fighting dialogue," as indicates its opening sally, "to war and battle" (447a1).2 As the saying goes, these are fighting words, since Callicles is basically accusing Socrates of being a coward.Even if we abstract from the themes evoked in the Gorgias, it is difficult to ignore the peculiarity of its dramatic movement. First, we are plunged in medias res, with no clear indication as to the time and place of the dialogue's unfolding. We then proceed through a tour de force of conversations that begin, are immediately interrupted, start again, and continue through refutations, repeated interruptions, fits of anger, and bad temper. If we expected Socrates to win against his nonphilosophical interlocutors, we are sorely disappointed. The further the conversations proceed, the more they are infiltrated by anger and misunderstanding, and the more we come to feel that, though Socrates' interlocutors may well be silenced, they will remain unpersuaded. Indeed, toward the end of the dialogue, Callicles simply refuses to respond to Socrates, who is finally reduced to performing a monologue. The dialogue ends with a myth addressed to Callicles in the stated conviction that the young man will dismiss it as an old wives' tale (527a5-b3). The invocation of Callicles' name, which concludes the dialogue, is significantly and poignantly left hanging.Besides the points just mentioned, I think that several aspects of the dramatic setting contribute significantly to the dialogue's peculiar emotional impact on its readers. I will try to show this, first, by considering eight dramatic devices Plato uses in the Gorgias and, second, by contrasting these devices with their counterparts in the Protagoras. The two dialogues... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Body and Soul in the Philosophy of Plotinus AUDREY N. M. RICH BEFORE THE TIME Of Aristotle, there had been no serious philosophical enquiry into the relation existing between the body and the soul. Admittedly, in those Dialogues of Plato in which the problem of Motion begins to assume importance, something approaching a scientific interest in the question starts to emerge. In the Phaedrus, for instance, the soul (...) is considered as the source of all bodily movement and change,1 and in the Timaeus, the interaction of body and soul is given some attention and a special bodily organ allotted to each phase of the tripartite soul (69c-71a). But it is fair to say that on the whole, Plato does not give the impression of being vitally concerned about the soul-body relation. In fact, in the Phaedo, he makes it abundantly clear that he views such an association as morally regrettable rather than scientifically interesting; at this stage of his thought, he prefers, like Socrates, to ignore such questions as those discussed by Empedocles and Alcmaeon, namely, "whether we think with the blood, or whether it is the brain that is the seat of sensation" (96b). Thus, to some extent Plato merits the censure of Aristotle who, in the De Anirna (I:1,407b15-18), ranks him among those who "associate the soul with and place it in the body without specifying why this is so and how the body is conditioned." In Aristotle's opinion, examination of the soul-body connection is essential: "for it is by this association that the one acts and the other is acted upon, that the one moves and the other is moved; and no such mutual relation is found in haphazard combinations" (407b 18-21). Now there is a strong likelihood that Aristotle's criticism of Plato on this point may have led Plotinus to take up the problem to some extent neglected by his master. He must have known the De Anima, probably through the commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias which, we know, were read in his school along with the writings of other Peripatetics like Aspasius and Adrastus2; and although he did not himself envisage the soul-body relation in Aristotelian terms, nevertheless his whole enquiry into the subject is deeply colored by the language and influence of the De Anirna. Of course, Plotinus is much too loyal a Platonist to remain untouched by the dualism of the t245c-e; cp. Laws X: 898c5. ~Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, c. 15. [q 2 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Phaedo, and the undertone of suspicion and hostility toward the body which is lacking in the De Anima but present in much of Plato, runs right through the Enneads of Plotinus. In fact, almost the last words of his final treatise on psychology reveal that this uneasy attitude persists to the end: "Life in the body," he says, "is in itself evil.''~ Strictly speaking, however, the extreme dualism of a Dialogue like the Phaedo has no real place in Plotinus' system. In his view, both body and soul are alike descended from the primal Absolute or One; each represents a different stage in the evolution of plurality from unity; soul is an earlier stage, body, a later; and though soul does not require body in order to exist, nevertheless, without body, it could never come forth fTom the intelligible realm to display its powers in the visible universe (IV: 3.9). Thus, because body is, in a sense, necessary to soul, because, figuratively speaking, it is the only "place" appropriate for the soul's occupation (IV: 3.9), it is impossible to view the relation between body and soul as one of unmitigated hostility. For to some extent, body and soul imply each other. On the cosmic level indeed, they never exist apart. For though we may speak of the "ensoulment" (~Ft~c0oLg) of the cosmos, because the cosmos is, in fact, eternal and uncreated, there never was a time when its soul and its body were dissociated (IV : 3.9). In the case of the human soul and body, however, matters are rather different, since it is evident that the two were separate... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cross-Examining Socrates. A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s Early DialoguesMark L. McPherranJohn Beversluis. Cross-Examining Socrates. A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato’s Early Dialogues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 416. Cloth, $69.95.This book is a valuable and thoroughly-researched contribution to the study of Plato's Socratic dialogues. Its fine qualities stem in part from its cathartic motivations: for years Beversluis suppressed his (...) ever-growing reservations concerning the "standard picture" of Socrates's interaction with his various interlocutors (16). On Beversluis's account, this position naively takes Socrates's own apologia at face-value, portraying him as a self-sacrificing soul-therapist who treats his corrupt, one-dimensional interlocutors fairly, despite their many carefully drawn faults (e.g., stupidity, vanity, and violence, followed by face-saving exits). Beversluis aims to rectify this picture by retrying Socrates in a class-action suit on behalf of Socrates's interlocutors—who, he thinks, the standard account has quite unfairly maligned (while it has simultaneously ignored Socrates's "dark side"; e.g., his unscrupulous, hypocritical, and harmful tactics [esp. his conscious use of fallacy]).Beversluis's book contains a Preface, Introduction, and seventeen chapters, finishing with a very good bibliography, general index, and indexes of passages cited, names, and modern authors. Chapter 1, "The Socratic Interlocutor," examines the structure of Plato's Socratic dialogues and the role of their interlocutors. Beversluis contrasts Plato's dialogues with those produced by Augustine, Anselm, Hume, and Berkeley, arguing that a key difference between them lies in the fact that Socrates is presented as having no system to expound, championing instead the intrinsic value of philosophizing. Also, Socrates's interlocutors are drawn from a "narrow sociological group," (29) and are unprepared for their (unpleasant) encounters with Socrates (31).Chapter 2, "Elenchus and sincere assent," cogently argues that the "say what you believe" constraint on Socrates's use of the elenchus represents a consensus in need of critical reappraisal. In particular, Beversluis contends that Socrates often relies on qualified or uncomprehending assent, and that our texts do not support the idea that Socrates never argues with the soul-ignoring intention to win an argument using faulty argumentation and willful misrepresentation of the interlocutor's statements.The next fourteen chapters closely assess Socrates's encounters with Crito, Ion, Hippias, Laches and Nicias, Charmides and Critias, Euthyphro, Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Hippocrates, Protagoras, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. The book ends with a chapter on "The last days of the Socratic interlocutor," outlining the view that Plato's later work features non-elenctic spokesmen who are sensitive to the moral dangers of careless (i.e., Socrates's) elenchus-wielding.In his central chapters, Beversluis argues that "Saint Socrates" is in fact a philosophical [End Page 583] Jekyl and Hyde. Although scholars have celebrated the former philanthropic figure as a model philosopher, that has obscured his Hyde-like, predatory behavior towards innocents such as Euthyphro and Crito. However, here readers are themselves given a mixed bag: while Beversluis offers, for example, a detailed and smart defense of Cephalus against those who portray him as a petty-minded, superstitious, moral fraud (Chapter 9)—as well as sensitive, careful analyses of Socrates's less-than-clear arguments throughout—other chapters occasionally go overboard in their apologetic efforts. One example will have to suffice here.According to Beversluis, Euthyphro's typical characterization as a pretentious, dense, father-bashing, religious zealot who "would have done well in the Nazi Youth Movement," (R. F. Holland; 163), has drawn attention away from the fact that Socrates's treatment of Euthyphro is abusive and ineffectual. But although Beversluis rightly sees that the figure of Euthyphro is being used in a complex fashion by Plato, his account is marred in several ways. For example, although it is likely that Socrates does not himself possess complete definitions of virtue-concepts such as justice (164-169), unlike Euthyphro, Socrates can presumably provide elenchus-proof defenses of his own non-traditionalist claims. Again, while Socrates may overwhelm Euthyphro with his principles of proper definition (Eu. 5c-d, 6d-e), proceeding on uncomprehending, merely verbal agreement (169-177), Plato surely did not intend... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Logic of Probabilities in Hume's Argument against Miracles Fred Wilson The position is often stated that Hume's discussion of miracles is inconsistent with his views on the logical or ontological status oflaws ofnature and with his more general scepticism. Broad, for one, has so argued.1 Hume's views on induction are assumed to go somethinglike this. Any attempt to demonstrate knowledge ofmatters offact presupposes causal reasoning, but (...) the latter is based not on any perception of necessary connections, but on an unreasoned expectation that because events have been constantly conjoined in the past they will be constantly conjoined in the future. The fact that our past experience gives rise to certain expectations provides absolutely no reason to think that these expectations will be fulfilled. But this is forgotten as soon as he turns to the topic of miracles where the argument requires certain assumptions about laws of nature. Here he claims that the laws of nature arebased upon afirm andunalterable experience and dismisses what he apparently admits to be strong evidence for miracles on the basis of the claim that such events are absolutely impossible. The inconsistency between the discussion of miracles and the earlier discussions of induction and causality is clear. Nonetheless, there is a certain implausibility to this claim that makes it a difficult one to entertain seriously, since it is unlikely that a philosopher as careful as Hume would have failed to recognize the inconsistency if it existed. What I propose here to argue is that there is in fact no inconsistency, and that this becomes clear once one places the discussion ofmiracles in the broader context ofthe overall argument ofthe first Enquiry. In particular, the charge ofinconsistency disappears once one eliminates the caricature ofHume's views on causal reasoning upon which it rests. To come to grips with the discussion of miracles in Hume it is necessary to place that discussion in its historical context. In the generally empiricist atmosphere that developed in Britain following the mid-seventeenth century civil wars, the general defence of the reasonableness of Christianity consisted of two parts. First, it washeldthatrational argument, whether causal or teleological orboth, could yield a reasonable belief that a deity ofa more or less traditional sort existed. Then, second, in order to establish further that Jesus was the Son ofGod it was held that one could rely upon a chain oftestimony Volume XV Number 2 255 FRED WILSON leading back from the present to the past to infer the existence of miracles testifying to the divinity ofJesus. Hume attacks this second inference in the essay on miracles andthe first in the essay that follows in the Enquiries on God's particular providence (the themes of which are developed more fully in the Dialogues on Natural Religion). Given the central place that the appeal to miracles held in Christian apologetics in the 17th and 18th centuries, Hume's systematic attack on the argument from miracles constituted a clear attack on Christianity. To be sure, Hume's argument would never have persuaded JohnWesley, but that would hardly have surprised Hume himself, nor should it surprise us: those in the grips of religious enthusiasm, whether it be John Wesley or Jimmy Swaggart, will hardly be persuaded by rational argument, however much it is still true that they ought to be persuaded by it. The appeal to miracles tojustify specifically Christian beliefs had a long history. One can find it already in the late Roman period in Eusebius. Muslim thinkers were to challenge this traditional defence by arguing that chains oftestimony become more unreliable the longer they become. As for their own Islamic beliefs, these they admitted had also to be justified by an appeal to miracles, but there was, it was claimed, a unique self-justifying miracle in the Koran, the specially revealed Word of God. The critical theme of the Muslim apologists, that the longer a chain of testimony the less assurance it gives of the fact that a miracle had occurred, was developed in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries.6 It seems to have been introduced by the Oxford orientalist Edward Pocock who had discovered this line of Muslim apologetics while... (shrink)

THE pervasive role of causality in the development of Galileo's science has been obscured largely by two factors. Philosophers who address the problem usually exhibit an anti-causal bias traceable to David Hume, and this disposes them to concentrate on passages in Galileo's writings that can be given a positivist interpretation. Historians are likewise selective in their treatment of his texts, for they tend to enforce sharp dichotomies between Galileo's earlier Latin compositions and his treatises in Italian, especially the two dialogues (...) of his later years for which he is justly famous. With this twofold reinforcement from philosophers and historians of science, one might think that the problem of causality in Galileo's science is whether or not the Italian physicist actually reasoned in causal terms such as those explained in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. A large and influential school at the moment would say that this is the question, and that it is best answered in the negative: causal analysis played little or no role in the development of Galileo's science, and certainly less and less in his later years. Indeed, it was his rejection of Aristotle precisely on these grounds that merits for him the title, "Father of Modern Science," the canons of which science are almost diametrically opposite those of the science advocated by Greek peripatetics and medieval scholastics, before the onset of the modern era. (shrink)

Contrary to its self-proclamation, philosophy started not with wonder, but with time thrown out of joint. It started when the past has become a problem. Such was the historical situation facing Athens when Plato composed his Socratic dialogues. For the philosopher of fifth century BCE, both the immediate past and the past as the Homeric tradition handed down to the citizens had been turned into problematicity itself. In this essay, I will examine the use of philosophy as memory (...) theatre in Plato's Republic. I shall do so by interpreting Book X of the Republic as Plato's “odyssey” and suggest that such Platonic odyssey amounts to an attempt to re-inherit the collapsed spatial and temporal order of the fallen Athenian maritime empire. In my reading, the Odysseus in the Myth of Er comes forth for Plato as the exemplary Soldier-Citizen-Philosopher who must steer between the Scylla of ossified political principles and the whirling nihilism of devalued historical values, personified by Charybdis. I shall further suggest that Plato’s memory theatre also constitutes a device of amnesia and forgetting. The post-Iliadic Odysseus must drink of forgetfulness from the river Lethe, so that the revenant soldier, Er, and those who inherited the broken historical present during and after the Peloponnesian War, would be enabled to remember in a particular way. Such remembrance, I shall conclude, may be what Plato means by philosophy, a memory theatre of psychic regulation and moral economy that sets itself decidedly apart from earlier tragic and comic catharsis. (shrink)