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Plato: Divided Soul in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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Plato’s Metaphysical Development before Middle Period Dialogues.Mohammad Bagher Ghomi - manuscript

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 (...)

Plato: Metaphysics, Misc in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Varieties of Emotion in Philosophy of Mind

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On Love and Poetry—Or, Where Philosophers Fear to Tread.Jeremy Fernando - 2011 - Continent 1 (1):27-32.

continent. 1.1 (2011): 27-32. “My”—what does this word designate? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to,what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. Søren Kierkegaard. The Seducer’s Diary . I can’t sleep till I devour you / And I’ll love you, if you let me… Marilyn Manson “Devour” The role of poetry in the relationalities between people has a long history—from epic poetry recounting tales of yore; to emotive lyric poetry; to (...) rude, irreverent limericks; to Hallmark cards which have ditties that allow one to cringe, and somehow fall in love at the same moment. Without going into a notion of aesthetics, or attempting to choose which form of poetry is superior, we might want to consider why the form of poetry itself has long been a part of relationality. And whilst doing so, we might always keep in mind that poetry—especially poetry that moves, transports us—is the form that Plato has been warning us about, particularly if we want to become good citizens.As Avital Ronell teaches us in Stupidity : the poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity, between the autonomy that produces the concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy—a being who at least since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy. The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge. Philosophy cringes (287). And considering that the philosopher is the lover of wisdom, we might begin to ask ourselves why one lover is warning against another—if the philosopher is in love with wisdom, then is the poet perhaps his rival, his challenger, for that very love? For, one must also remember that Plato—through Socrates—mentions constantly that Homer is his favourite. Moreover, by adopting both his own voice, whilst mixing it with Socrates’, Plato is adopting the form of poetry that he warns most about—the warning almost serves more as a homage to poetry than anything else. Here, we might open the register that one of the main reasons that he ejects a particular kind of poet is on the grounds of effecting effeminacy on the populace—good poetry moves you, affects you, transports you, shifts you beyond reason, puts you “out of your mind.” However, Plato also teaches us that rhetoric in its highest form requires divine inspiration by way of the daemon, or the muse. This moment of divine intervention is one that seizes—perhaps even ceases—you; putting you “beyond yourself.” In other words, a good rhetorician must always already be open to the possibility of otherness—the same otherness that possibly resides in the feminine. One could also trace this back to the poet that he both loved, and feared, most—Homer. Perhaps the effect of effeminacy that Homer's poetry opened is precisely the source of its power: through listening to Homer, one's body, one’s habitus is opened to the possibility of the feminine. And here, one must remember that the source of all learning—and all teaching—also lies in mimesis, in repetition, in habit. Once the habitus is opened to the possibility of invasion, of intervention, of otherness, there is quite possibly no possibility of distinguishing whether the mimesis is that of reproduction, or if there is always already a productive aspect to it. And by extension, if learning cannot be controlled, the very notion of teaching itself is shifted from a master-student relationality to one where the master is potentially changed as well—the relationality between the master and the student is not only inter-changing, but one cannot even know who is teaching, or learning, at any point. All that can be said is that they are in a relationality; which means that one is ultimately unable to locate the locus of knowledge, of wisdom—the site of which Plato is attempting to convince us is the sole domain of the philosopher. And it is this that philosophy is cringing from. To compound matters, philosophy is striving for wisdom; which can only come from the Gods. In other words, this is a gift that has to be bestowed on them—and more than that, wisdom is always already exterior to one’s control and knowledge. At best, it is the role of one to recognise the gift, to answer the call as it were. Here, if we listen carefully, we can hear the echo of Alexander Graham Bell, and the telephone. And as we are attempting to respond to the call of wisdom—the call that both poetry and philosophy are listening out for—it might be helpful to recall the agreement between Alexander Graham Bell and his brother Melville. In the biography, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude , Robert V. Bruce notes that Aleck and Melly made a “solemn compact that whichever of us should die first would endeavour to communication with the other if it were possible to do so” (63). Since Melville was the one who passed on first, this pact put the onus on Aleck to receive the call of his brother. If you take into consideration the fact that until Melville’s death, both brothers had been working on an early prototype of the telephone, the instrument of distant sound can be read as an attempt by Aleck to maintain the possibility of keeping in touch with Melly, of hearing the voice from beyond. However, this was a connection that was not premised on any knowing, reason, or rationality; it was rather, one that was based on hope, and born out of love. And here, if we eves-drop on a cross-line with The Telephone Book , we can pick up the voice of Avital Ronell once again and hear, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading” (380). In other words, the telephone can be read as the openness to the possibility of responding to the other; one that might always remain unknown. Even in this day of caller-identification, we can never know for sure who the other person on the line is until we pick up: hence, the only decision we can make—the effects of which we remain blind to until it affects us—is to either pick up or not, to either respond or not. And it is not as if the decision to pick up comes without risks: each time we answer a call, we run the risk of it ruining our day. Even when we don’t know who the caller is, perhaps especially when we don’t know who the person on the other end of the line is—and here one only has to think of prank calls—we are leaving ourselves completely open to being affected by another. Thus, philosophy finds itself in the position of Vladimir and Estragon. Since they have no idea who Godot is, they can never know if or when he shows up—thus, if he (and we are taking his gender on the word of the boy, some boy—we don’t even know if it is the same boy—who comes round in the evening) has already come, they would not be in the position to know it. And even if someone comes to them and announces that “I am Godot,” the wait would not be over—without referentiality to the name, they would have to take on faith that that person is indeed Godot. Hence, all they can know is that they are waiting for Godot; and Godot is the name of that waiting itself. All philosophy can know is that it is waiting; and wisdom is the name of that waiting itself. Which brings us to Tina Turner’s eternal question, “what’s love got to do, got to do with it?” In order to begin to consider that, we have to first attempt to examine the notion of love itself. Perhaps we might begin to consider what the difficulty of the statement “I love you.” For, if love is a relationality between two persons—both of whom remain singular, and are attempting to respond to each other—this suggests that neither of them subsume the other under themselves. In other words, the other remains wholly other. If this is so, then the “you” in the statement always remains shrouded in mystery. And even if the “you” was replaced with the name of the person, the veiling remains: for, names refer both to the singularity that is the person, and also every other person bearing that name, at exactly the same time. To compound matters, the only time one has to utter a persons name is in their absence—thus, the correspondence of a name to that particular person is at best an affect of memory. And if we consider the notion of memory, we have to also open the register of forgetting—bringing along with it the problem that there is no object to forgetting. For instance, when one utters “I forgot,” all one is uttering is the fact that one has forgotten, and nothing more—the moment there is an object to the statement, one has strictly speaking remembered what one has forgotten. Moreover, we have no control over when forgetting happens to us. And since it is always already exterior to us, affects us, and has no necessary object, there is no reason to believe that every moment of memory might not bring with it a moment of forgetting. Hence, whenever we utter a name—even if we accept the correspondence between the utterance and the person in front of us—all we are doing is uttering the fact that we are naming. Thus, it is not so much that ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ but more appropriately, ‘a rose is a rose is a rose’—the relationality between its name and the phenomenon of its sweet smell can only be established after that moment of naming, that instance of catachresis. So, whenever one utters “I love you,” not only is it a performative statement, it is the very naming of that love—all you are doing is establishing a relationality between you and the other. And since there is no necessary referent—one is naming that referentiality as one utters it—this suggests that it is always already a symbolic statement; without which the mystery of the other cannot me maintained. In other words, one cannot love the other without maintaining this symbolic distance—through a ritual; in this case the utterance “I love you.” This might be why Valentine’s Day seems to provoke such a massive reaction: the most common one from people (besides florists) being, Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Those among the nay-sayers who maintain a soft spot for Karl Marx would proceed to call it the commodification of relationships; those who prefer the Gods would claim that the sanctity of relationships has been profaned; the gender theorists would note how the fact that males buy the gifts only serves to highlight the unequal power-relation between the genders. Whichever side and variation of the arguments they choose boils down to this: the discomfort lies in the fact that they are confronted with the notion of relationships moving into a mediated sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only; it should not only remain between them, but more pertinently, be an unmediated experience between two persons. Which of course completely misses the point. For, if we reopen the register that relationships are the result of a negotiation between two persons, there must then be a space between them for this very negotiation to occur. Otherwise, all that is happening is, one person is subsuming the other within their own sphere of understanding; effectively effacing the other. If that were the case, there would no longer be any relationality; all negotiation is gone and the other person is a mere extension of the self—one is in a masturbatory relationality with one’s imaginary. Hence, any relationship must always already carry with it the unknown, and possibly always unknowable. The other person is an enigma, remains—must remain—enigmatic to you. This is the only way in which the proclamation “I love you” remains singular, remains a love that is about the person as a singular person—and not merely about the qualities of the person, what the person is. For, if the mystery of the other is unveiled, then the love for the other person is also a completely transparent love: one that you can know thoroughly, calculate; a check-list. And if they are knowable, this suggests that they can also be negated, and hence, the love can also go away. Only when the love for the other person is an enigmatic one, one that cannot be understood, can that love potentially be an event—and if it is an event, then strictly speaking, it cannot be known before it happens; at best, it can be glimpsed as it is happening, or perhaps even only realised retrospectively. At the point in which it happens, it is a love that comes from elsewhere: this strange phenomenon is best captured in the colloquial phrase, I was struck by love;” or even more so by, “I was blinded by love.” This is a blinding to not only the subject of the encounter—the self—but also of the very object of that encounter, the “you”—all that can be said is that there is an encounter. And it is for this reason Cupid is blind: not just because love is random (and can happen to anyone at any time), but more importantly because even after it happens, both the reason you are in love, and the person you are in love with, remain blind to you. Since there is an unknowable relationality with the other person, the only way you can approach it is through a ritual. This is the lesson that religions have taught us: since one is never able to phenomenally experience the God(s), one has no choice but to approach them symbolically. These rituals are strictly speaking meaningless—the actual content is interchangeable—as it is the form that is important. Rituals allow us momentary glimpses at secrets; and secrets are never about their content(s). Rather, secrets entail the recognition that they are secrets; the secret lies in their form as secret. This can be seen when we consider how group secrets work: since the entire group knows the secret, clearly the content of the secret is not as important as the fact that only members within the group are privy to this secret. Occasionally the actual content can be so trivial that even other people outside the group might know the information; they just do not realize its significance. For instance, if I used my date of birth as my bank-account password, merely knowing when I was born would not instantly give you the key to my life savings. In order for that to happen, you would have had to recognise the significance of the knowledge of my birthday. This means that you have to know that you know something. Since the God(s) are, strictly speaking, unknowable, this suggests that rituals put one in a position to potentially experience the God(s). The meaningless gestures on Valentine’s Day play precisely this ritualised role. It is not so much what you give the other person, but the fact that you give it to them. The gift in this sense is very much akin to an offering; the gift opens the possibility of an exchange. Gift-giving does not guarantee that you will like what is returned; there is always a reciprocation of the gift, but what is returned to you is never known in advance, until the moment it is received. This means that the worst thing that one can do is not give the gift: that would be akin to a cutting off of all possibilities, a complete closing of all communication with the other person. This at the same time also means that you cannot wait for the other person to give you something before you get them their gift: if that were the scenario, the reciprocal gift would be nothing more than a calculated return. The only manner in which both persons can give true gifts is to offer them independently of the other person, whilst keeping them in mind. In this way, the two gifts are always already both uncalculated (in the sense of not knowing what the return is) and also a reciprocation for the other (without knowing whether the other person actually has a gift in the first place). Naturally, this would seem like an irrational, even stupid, way of buying gifts. But it is precisely the stupidity involved that saves the relationship from being banal—more importantly, stupidity prevents it from entering the mere profane. This is not to say that an enigmatic love cannot end—of course it can. However, the difference lies in the fact that if the relationality is wholly transparent, it is subsumed under reason—completely predictable, within the self, and thus never open to the possibility of otherness, exteriority, musing. A love that is an event is one that is also open to the possibility of the divine, the sacred—always already closer to the possibility of wisdom. If we establish that both love and wisdom are exterior, to our knowledge, and the finitude to our selves, this suggests that both are names for the possibility of openness to otherness. In other words, and what choice do we have here but to use the words of the other, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—is a name for one who is waiting, and nothing more. But that still leaves us with the question of this uncomfortable relationality between philosophy and poetry. But before we address that question, we have to take a momentary detour, and consider the whether it is possible to call one a poet. For, if we take the notion of a poet to be one who reaches the highest levels of rhetoric (beyond the lawyer, and the orator, who only aim to either please the crowds, or convince by way of sophistry), then we must also acknowledge that one can only become a poet at the moment of seizing, the point of inspiration, by the muses. Without this divine moment, all (s)he can do is practice her craft. As no one can control when the muses make their appearance, one could always be practising in vain—in some way, one is always already practising to be least in the way when the muse whispers into one’s ear; one is practising so as not to be vain. And since one cannot know when the muse will appear, there is no time frame to the practising—unlike the lawyer who speaks against a clock, poetry knows no time; the only time that matters is the time appropriate to poetry itself. Thus, all the poet (if one can use this term) is practising for the possibility of effacing her/him self—and waiting. Thus, in order for poetry to occur, in order to be seized, the poet—along with all her concerns—must cease. In other words, there is no poet; there is only the possibility of poetry. However, even as there is no time frame to this waiting, even as all we can say is that poetry is a name for waiting, the one who is practising is always already also in time. And since (s)he is in a symbolic relationality with the possibility of poetry, this suggests that the practising is her sacrifice, and time is precisely what she is sacrificing. Here, it might be helpful to turn to a strange source when it comes to poetry—Georges Bataille—and consider his teachings in the first volume of The Accursed Share where he reminds us that, the “essence [of sacrifice] is to consume profitlessly .” This is where each exchange is beyond rationality, beyond calculability, beyond reason itself, “unsubordinated to the ‘real’ order and occupied only with the present.” He continues: Sacrifice destroys that which it consecrates. It does not have to destroy as fire does; only the tie that connected the offering to the world of profitable activity is severed, but this separation has the sense of a definitive consumption; the consecrated offering cannot be restored to the real order.” (58) Since there is no need for a physical change in the object of sacrifice—“it does not have to destroy as fire does”—this suggests that the tie is severed symbolically. Hence, there is an aspect of trans-substantiation in this sacrifice: the form remains the same; in fact there is no perceivable change—this is the point at which all phenomenology fails—but there is always already a difference, an absolute separation from the “real order,” from logic, calculability, reason. The object of sacrifice, the victim [,] is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth…Once chosen, he is the accursed share , destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things…” (59). And it is this tearing away from the order of things—the order of rationality—that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (55). For, only when it is no longer useful, when it is no longer abstracted—subjected, subsumed under—merely a use-value, can the object be an object as such, can a subject be a subject as such; be a singularity. Thus, it is never so much who or what is sacrificed, but the fact that there is a sacrifice. So even as (s)he is sacrificing her time to poetry, it is always already beyond her knowledge whether what (s)he is doing is actually preparing her for poetry or not—all (s)he can know is that she is sacrificing and nothing more. Hence, all (s)he can do is to open her self to the possibility of this relationality—all (s)he can do is be in love with poetry. At the moment the muse whispers into her ear, (s)he ceases to be, and becomes a medium for poetry—and since this possession is always already beyond our cognitive knowledge, this is also a moment of divine wisdom. In other words, there is no difference between poetry and wisdom—the moment of poetry is the moment of wisdom. And this might be the very reason for the philosopher’s aversion to poets. Not so much because they may corrupt the youth (this is after all the aim of all thinking, all philosophy), but precisely because in order to do so, the philosopher must wait for a moment of possession, for divine musing, for poetry. Hence, all thought, all thinking, all philosophy, is nothing but the waiting for the possibility of poetry itself. (shrink)

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True Love Is Requited.George Rudebusch - 2004 - Ancient Philosophy 24 (1):67-80.

I defend the argument in Plato's Lysis that true love is requited. I state the argument, the main objections, and my replies. I begin with a synopsis of the dialogue.

Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Plato: Eros in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Plato: Lysis in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Evolution of Consciousness in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

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An Anatomy of Thought the Origin and Machinery of Mind.Ian Glynn - 1999 - Oxford University Press.

Love, fear, hope, calculus, and game shows-how do all these spring from a few delicate pounds of meat? Neurophysiologist Ian Glynn lays the foundation for answering this question in his expansive An Anatomy of Thought, but stops short of committing to one particular theory. The book is a pleasant challenge, presenting the reader with the latest research and thinking about neuroscience and how it relates to various models of consciousness. Combining the aim of a textbook with the style (...) of a popularization, it provides all the lay reader needs to know to participate in the philosophical debate that is redefining our attitudes about our minds. Drawing on the rich history of neurological case studies, Glynn picks through the building blocks of our nervous system, examines our visual and linguistic systems, and probes deeply into our higher thought processes. The stories of great scientists, like Ramon y Cajal, and famous patients, like Sperry's split-brained epileptics, illuminate the scientific issues Glynn selects as essential for understanding consciousness. Some might argue that his lengthy explorations of natural selection overemphasize evolutionary explanations of psychological phenomena, but they must also agree that evolutionary psychology has distanced itself mightily from social Darwinism in recent years and merits a reappraisal. The great consciousness debate may form the core of the 21st-century Zeitgeist; get ready for it with An Anatomy of Thought. -Rob Lightner From Publishers Weekly How do we know? What do we think? How could a philosophical problem-'the mind-body problem,' say-induce a headache? What can evolutionary theory, molecular biology, the history of medicine and experimental psychology tell us about the features of human consciousness, and (once again) how do we know? Glynn, a physician and Cambridge University professor, meticulously attempts to answer these questions and more, setting forth the results of all sorts of research relevant to our brains-from 19th-century dissections to Oliver Sacks-like case studies, work with monkeys and supercomputers, and the enduring puzzles of philosophy, which he rightly saves for near the end. After explaining evolution by natural selection and 'clearing away much dross,' Glynn lays out the experiments and theories that have shown 'how nerve cells can carry information about the body, how they can interact' and how sense organs work; demonstrates the 'mixture of parallel and hierarchical organization' in our brains and 'the striking localization of function within it'; considers where neuroscience is likely to go; and admits that, among the many fields of exciting research just ahead, 'we can be least confident of progress toward a complete, scientific explanation of our sensations and thoughts and feelings.' Other recent explaining-the-brain books have sometimes advanced simplistic, or implausibly grand, claims about the nature and features of consciousness in general. Instead, Glynn offers a patient, informative, well-laid-out researcher's-eye view of what we have learned, how we figured it out and what we still don't know about neurons, senses, feelings, brains and minds. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal The nature of consciousness, which perennially troubles the minds of scientists and philosophers, is the subject of an ever-growing body of literature. Two of the latest entries approach the topic from different perspectives. Glynn, a professor of physiology and head of the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge, offers a comprehensive summary of what we know about the brain-both its evolution and its mechanisms. Among the topics he covers are natural selection, molecular evolution, nerves and the nervous system, sensory perception, and the specific structures responsible for our intellect. Using the mechanisms involved in vision and speech as models, Glynn skillfully describes various neurological deficiencies that can lead to 'disordered seeing' and problems with the use of language. He carefully distinguishes what we know through experimental evidence from what we know through the observation of patients with neurological damage. He also describes some of the major theories that attempt to explain why these structures arose. While his book concentrates on the structures that make up the mind, Glynn is well aware that some physical events appear explicable only in terms of conscious mental events-a situation that conflicts with the laws of modern physics. Only briefly, however, does he consider the various approaches that have been taken to deal with the issues of mind/body and free will. In contrast, this is the primary focus of The Physics of Consciousness. After reviewing the fundamentals of classic physics, Walker (who has a Ph.D. in physics) summarizes elements of the new physics in which our knowledge of space, time, matter, and energy are all dependent on the moment of observation. Walker explores the meaning of consciousness as a characteristic of the observer. In this context both the observer and the act of measurement are critical. In essence, Walker leads his reader on a journey through his concept of a 'quantum mind,' which can both affect matter (including other minds) and can be affected by other distant matter/minds. To break up what would otherwise be an extremely dense text, Walker also relates the very touching story of the loss of his high-school sweetheart to leukemia. Indeed, it is his memory of their relationship that drives Walker to seek an understanding of ultimate reality. At times, he has a tendency to be dogmatic-as when he concludes, 'our consciousness, our mind, and the will of God are the same mind.' While An Anatomy of Thought is appropriate for most academic libraries, the Physics of Consciousness will be most accessible to readers with some knowledge of advanced physics. -Laurie Bartolini, Illinois State Lib., Springfield Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist The codiscoverers of natural selection-Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace-disagreed over the possibility of finding an evolutionary explanation for the human mind. Glynn here argues Darwin's side of the debate, tracing an eons-long path of development starting from simple amino acids floating in primal seas and extending through the erect hominids in which the powers of a massive brain first manifest themselves. Patiently adducing evidence of an evolutionary origin for the underlying molecular machinery, Glynn dissects the nerve centers that make possible speech and hearing, sight, and reading. Pressing deeper, he lays bare the cortical foundations of personality. But those who deal with the mind must attend also to the arguments advanced by philosophers. And it is when he turns from dendrites to syllogisms (especially the vexing mind-body paradox) that Glynn's empirical reasoning fails him. In the end, he concedes his perplexity in trying to conceive of an evolutionary origin for human consciousness. This concession may set the shade of Alfred Wallace to chortling, but it will draw readers into an honest confrontation with a profound enigma. Bryce Christensen. (shrink)

Explanation in Neuroscience in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Mind-Body Problem, General in Philosophy of Mind

Neurobiological Theories and Models of Consciousness in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Philosophy of Consciousness, General Works in Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of Mind, General Works in Philosophy of Mind

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The morality of huck Finn.Carol Freedman - 1997 - Philosophy and Literature 21 (1):102-113.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Morality of Huck FinnCarol FreedmanA familiar refrain is that emotions threaten our capacity for moral judgment because they infringe on our ability to be impartial. Some hold that emotions lead us to serve personal rather than impersonal ends. And most Kantians argue that even when emotions influence us to pursue impartial ends, they still fail to be moral motives. Barbara Herman argues, however, that emotions can play an (...) important role in a Kantian model of moral judgment. 1 But her description of the moral role of emotions ultimately falls short. 2The problems with Herman’s argument are illustrated by a passage from Huckleberry Finn. The passage challenges a common Kantian assumption that any decision motivated by compassion or love is not a case of moral judgment. I contend that there is good reason to interpret Huck’s decision to help his friend Jim as an instance of moral judgment, even though it is also a case of acting from compassion and love. And though Herman’s theory offers a Kantian way of supporting my reading of Huck, her model fails to do justice to Huck’s case. But there is much that we can learn from the way it fails.IHuckleberry Finn is a story “which details some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy... [who has] run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting, good widow, who wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him....” 3 The journey that follows, in which Huck is accompanied by the widow’s runaway slave, Jim, becomes a symbol of a boy’s attempt to grow up, discover his own identity, make his own decisions. In the part of the journey that has come to be known [End Page 102] as Huck’s “crisis of conscience,” we find him trying to decide whether he should help Jim escape from a slaveholder who has just captured him, or whether he should write to Miss Watson to tell her the where-abouts of her slave (pp. 168–69). On the face of it, Huck seems torn between the voices of conscience and temptation. Writing to Miss Watson, as he describes it, is “the right thing and the clean thing.” To do otherwise would just confirm his “wickedness”: “stealing a poor old woman’s nigger,” he says, “who hadn’t ever done me no harm.” But Huck also loves Jim. He says: “I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.” So Huck seems torn between his sense of what’s right and his compassion. When, in exas-peration, he finally decides not to write the letter, but chooses instead “to go to hell,” it sounds like compassion triumphs over conscience. 4But is it necessarily the case that just because Huck acts from compassion that he does not conceive of what he’s doing as right—that he does not engage in moral judgment? I think it is most plausible to say that when Huck finally decides not to turn Jim in, he comes to a more heart-felt conception of what’s right, not that he does what he believes is wrong.Even though Huck describes helping Jim as “stealing,” and sinful, and the sort of thing for which he will “go to hell,” it is not clear that he thinks it is the wrong thing to do. Huck’s deliberation is tied up with thoughts of social condemnation and eternal punishment. He is obsessed with the pain he will endure if he does not write to Miss Watson. His thoughts begin with the pain of social condemnation (“And then think of me! It would get all around, that Huck Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom”); but they quickly turn to the pain of eternal punishment (“And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven... I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared”). But Huck describes the... (shrink)

Ethics in Value Theory, Miscellaneous

Narrative in Aesthetics

Object-Oriented Ontology in Continental Philosophy

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Meillassoux’s Virtual Future.Graham Harman - 2011 - Continent 1 (2):78-91.

continent. 1.2 (2011): 78-91. This article consists of three parts. First, I will review the major themes of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude . Since some of my readers will have read this book and others not, I will try to strike a balance between clear summary and fresh critique. Second, I discuss an unpublished book by Meillassoux unfamiliar to all readers of this article, except those scant few that may have gone digging in the microfilm archives of the École normale (...)

Filipino Philosophy in Asian Philosophy

Speculative Materialism in Continental Philosophy

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32

Knowing Our Own Minds. [REVIEW]Tadeusz Szubka - 2000 - Review of Metaphysics 53 (3):739-740.

This important and timely collection is the result of a conference on self-knowledge held at the University of St. Andrews in 1995. A number of papers included in it focus on the epistemology of self-knowledge. In particular, they try to provide a plausible explanation of what makes knowledge of our own mental states immediate and authoritative. Crispin Wright deals with that problem in the context of Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind. John McDowell replies to Wright’s essay by providing a (...) different picture of Wittgenstein’s later views on mind and philosophy. Christopher Peacocke considers, in his contribution, conscious attitudes, especially the possession condition of the concept of belief, and argues that a conscious belief gives rise to the relevant second-order belief in a way that is neither inferential, nor observational. Michael Martin responds by suggesting that Peacocke’s proposal applies only to conscious episodes of a certain kind. Most of the contributors to the collection are convinced that the observational model of self-knowledge is fatally flawed. Cynthia Macdonald undertakes to show that not everything is wrong with that model and its various criticisms can be effectively met. Elizabeth Fricker in her long essay offers a careful analysis of the distinction between two conceptions of selfknowledge: a special access account, according to which we have a unique privileged access to our own mental states, and a constitutive account holding that the self-ascription of a particular mental state is a necessary condition of being in that state. She finds that distinction, and the dichotomy based upon it, untenable. Akeel Bilgrami and Tyler Burge are concerned in their respective contributions with the role of self-knowledge in free, responsible agency, and in the practice of reasoning. They seem to suggest that in view of that role one should endorse a constitutive account of self-knowledge. The prevailing number of current theories of mental content accept a thesis of externalism to the effect that mental content is constituted and individuated not only by factors lying inside one’s head, or inside one’s subjective realm, but also and foremost by external and environmental factors. It seems, however, that the combination of externalism about mental content with our ordinary conception of self-knowledge leads to a certain tension and highly implausible consequences. Some philosophers, including Paul A. Boghossian, argue that the tension is genuine, and selfknowledge is simply incompatible with externalism. We have to claim this because otherwise we would have to agree on an apparently absurd extension of the domain of what can be known nonempirically or a priori. Other contributors are not convinced by Boghossian’s argument for incompatibilism. Brian McLaughlin and Michael Tye in their joint essay attempt to show that the argument does not apply to the most popular version of externalism. Martin Davies thinks the argument can be blocked by invoking principles limiting the transfer of epistemic warrant across known entailments, and Diana Raffman believes it is ultimately based upon equivocation. Moreover, as illustrated by Jim Edwards on an example of sense experience, one can accept externalism while modifying the extent of our self-knowledge in various ways. The last two contributions of the collection, by Barry C. Smith and James Higginbotham respectively, are concerned with knowledge of what we mean when we speak a language and its connections with self-knowledge in general. (shrink)

Epistemology of Mind in Philosophy of Mind

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Towards a Religious Education Otherwise.Anna Strhan - 2012 - In Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical Responsibility. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 119–140.

This chapter contains sections titled: Religious Education in Britain Today: A Snapshot The Phenomenological Approach The Critical Realist Model Privileging Judgemental Rationality A Religious Education Otherwise? Notes.

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Socratic dialogue in Lesia Ukrainka's poetic and practical philosophy.Anatoliy Yermolenko - 2021 - Filosofska Dumka (Philosophical Thought) 2:20-36.

The article is about the poetic-practical philosophy of dialog of Lesia Ukrainka, which is manifested in the dramatic creativity of the prominent poetess, her translation activity and the concept of “person-nature relations”. In the text it is shown that Lesia Ukrainka created a new genre of contemporary drama on the basis of application of “Socratic dialog”, which started an important direction in contemporary literature and coincides with a leading trend of world philosophy associated with the paradigmatic turning point (...)

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Plato: Philebus in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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55

Problems with the Life of Pleasure: The Γένεσις Argument in Plato's Philebus.Derek Van Zoonen - 2021 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 59 (2):167-191.

At Philebus 53c4–55a12, Plato’s Socrates identifies pleasure as an ontologically inferior “becoming” (γένεσις) rather than a “being” (οὐσία) and then uses this information to infer that pleasure, somehow, lacks value. This paper argues that Plato’s γένεσις argument is not about the goodness of individual, particular episodes of pleasure but instead targets the identification of pleasure as the good around which we ought to organize our lives. It also shows that the argument is made up of two subarguments—the (...) from finality and the argument from a life not worth living—both of which conclude that, as a γένεσις, pleasure cannot be the good our life as a whole is aimed at reaching. Read in this way, the much maligned γένεσις argument turns out to be more cogent and more interesting than is usually thought. (shrink)

History: Pleasure in Philosophy of Mind

Model Theory in Logic and Philosophy of Logic

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128

Diophantine geometry from model theory.Thomas Scanlon - 2001 - Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 7 (1):37-57.

§1. Introduction. With Hrushovski's proof of the function field Mordell-Lang conjecture [16] the relevance of geometric stability theory to diophantine geometry first came to light. A gulf between logicians and number theorists allowed for contradictory reactions. It has been asserted that Hrushovski's proof was simply an algebraic argument masked in the language of model theory. Another camp held that this theorem was merely a clever one-off. Still others regarded the argument as magical and asked whether such (...)

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116

Problems with Lewis' argument for the identity theory.Michaelis Michael - 2012 - Ratio 26 (1):51-61.

David Lewis presented a celebrated argument for the identity theory of mind. His argument has provided the model for the program of analytic functionalism. He argues from two premises, that mental states are analytically tied to their causal roles and that, contingently, there is never a need to explain any physical change by going outside the realm of the physical, to the conclusion that mental states are physical. I show that his argument is mistaken and that (...)

Causal Role Functionalism in Philosophy of Mind

David Lewis in 20th Century Philosophy

Mind-Brain Identity Theory in Philosophy of Mind

Psychological Explanation in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Psychophysical Reduction, Misc in Philosophy of Mind

The Exclusion Problem in Philosophy of Mind

Science, Logic, and Mathematics

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28

Assumption-based argumentation with preferences and goals for patient-centric reasoning with interacting clinical guidelines.Kristijonas Čyras, Tiago Oliveira, Amin Karamlou & Francesca Toni - 2021 - Argument and Computation 12 (2):149-189.

A paramount, yet unresolved issue in personalised medicine is that of automated reasoning with clinical guidelines in multimorbidity settings. This entails enabling machines to use computerised generic clinical guideline recommendations and patient-specific information to yield patient-tailored recommendations where interactions arising due to multimorbidities are resolved. This problem is further complicated by patient management desiderata, in particular the need to account for patient-centric goals as well as preferences of various parties involved. We propose to solve this problem of (...)

Evolutionary Developmental Biology in Philosophy of Biology

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Marine invertebrates, model organisms, and the modern synthesis: epistemic values, evo-devo, and exclusion.Alan C. Love - 2009 - Theory in Biosciences 128:19–42.

A central reason that undergirds the significance of evo-devo is the claim that development was left out of the Modern synthesis. This claim turns out to be quite complicated, both in terms of whether development was genuinely excluded and how to understand the different kinds of embryological research that might have contributed. The present paper reevaluates this central claim by focusing on the practice of model organism choice. Through a survey of examples utilized in the literature of the Modern (...)

The Model-Theoretic Argument in Metaphysics

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59

Reasoning about Non-Actual Possibilities. Problems with the Douven-Putnam Model-Theoretic Argument against Metaphysical Realism.Manuel Pérez Otero - 2002 - Critica 34 (102):29-45.

Igor Douven has offered an original reconstruction and defence of Putnam's model-theoretic argument against metaphysical realism. Douven's construal has notable exegetical virtues, since it makes sense of some assumptions in Putnam's argument which his opponents have considered question-begging or puzzling. In this article I provide an indirect defence of metaphysical realism, by showing why this new version of the anti-realist argument should also be rejected. The main problems in the Douven-Putnam argument come from ascribing to (...)

Fine-Tuning in Cosmology in Philosophy of Physical Science

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Problems With the Argument From Fine Tuning.Mark Colyvan, Jay L. Garfield & Graham Priest - 2005 - Synthese 145 (3):325-338.

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even granting the fine tuning of the universe, it does not (...)

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60

Think with Socrates: An Introduction to Critical Thinking.Paul Herrick - 2014 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Brief yet also comprehensive, Think with Socrates: An Introduction to Critical Thinking uses the methods, ideas, and life of Socrates as a model for critical thinking. It offers a more philosophical, historical, and accessible introduction than longer textbooks while still addressing all of the key topics in logic and argumentation. Applying critical thinking to the Internet, mass media, advertising, personal experience, expert authority, the evaluation of sources, writing argumentative essays, and forming a worldview, Think with Socrates resonates (...)

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15th/16th Century Philosophy in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

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92

Breve storia dell'etica.Sergio Cremaschi - 2012 - Roma RM, Italia: Carocci.

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...)

Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy: Topics in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Applied Ethics

Cambridge Platonism in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

Medieval Philosophy: Topics in Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

Meta-Ethics

Normative Ethics

Social and Political Philosophy

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Eliminativism about Propositional Attitudes in Philosophy of Mind

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37

The neurocomputational mind meets normative epistemology.Kenneth R. Livingston - 1996 - Philosophical Psychology 9 (1):33-59.

The rapid development of connectionist models in computer science and of powerful computational tools in neuroscience has encouraged eliminativist materialist philosophers to propose specific alternatives to traditional mentalistic theories of mind. One of the problems associated with such a move is that elimination of the mental would seem to remove access to ideas like truth as the foundations of normative epistemology. Thus, a successful elimination of propositional or sentential theories of mind must not only replace them for purposes of (...)

Epistemic Normativity, Misc in Epistemology

Philosophy of Neuroscience, Misc in Philosophy of Cognitive Science

Varieties of Emotion in Philosophy of Mind

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66

Love, self-constitution, and practical necessity.Ingrid Albrecht - unknown

My dissertation, “Love, Self-Constitution, and Practical Necessity,” offers an interpretation of love between people. Love is puzzling because it appears to involve essentially both rational and non-rational phenomena. We are accountable to those we love, so love seems to participate in forms of necessity, commitment, and expectation, which are associated with morality. But non-rational attitudes—forms of desire, attraction, and feeling—are also central to love. Consequently, love is not obviously based in rationality or inclination. In contrast to views that attempt (...) to fit love into existing models of practical reasoning, I argue that love participates in a unique form of practical necessity, different from both moral and psychological necessity, yet bearing resemblances to each. Distinctive to this type of practical necessity is a direct appeal to another particular person that cannot be delivered in third-personal terms—that is, a non-moral yet normative type of expectation on another person. This type of expectation is predominant in loving relationships, but can also make better sense of the experiences of humor and beauty, as well as attitudes like forgiveness, gratitude, and agent-regret. I treat Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the experience of beauty in the Critique of Judgment and Christine Korsgaard’s work on self-constitution as fruitful starting points for this account of love. I conclude that our loving relationships enable us to have distinctive personal selves, and provide support for this account of love by offering a complementary theory of grief. In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on two prominent approaches to love characteristic of the sentimentalist and rationalist traditions. I begin with the work of David Hume, which treats desire (understood as something like a simple impulse or craving) as the paradigmatic mental state, and emphasizes our personal and affective dimensions. Hume has the valuable insight that loving someone affects our sense of ourselves. But Hume’s view becomes unsatisfying when he claims that love is essentially enfeebling, implying that to love is to be passive toward and readily overcome by another person. While this indicates Hume’s awareness that love involves being open and receptive to another person, the problem is that love is also a demanding attitude. Hume lacks the conceptual resources to offer a nuanced view of the self, in which we can—with one attitude—be both demanding of and vulnerable to another person. Hume’s model of a desire-based deliberative process has recently been revived in Harry Frankfurt’s discussions on love and rationality. Frankfurt, however, goes beyond Hume’s picture of the self by introducing a notion of “identification,” which he offers to make sense of our apparent ability to commit ourselves decisively to certain projects or people. I argue that active powers like identification and commitment cannot be accommodated within any basically Humean moral psychology. Such abilities, and with them the possibility of love, depend on something closer to a Kantian conception of rational agency. I next focus on the work of Kant, who provides the substantial counterpart to Humean-inspired moral theories, but is not known for his insight into our emotional lives. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides love into “practical love”—what we experience when we are morally motivated to help someone—and “pathological love”—what we experience when we feel fond of something. But in reality, we experience love neither as a mere preference for another person, nor as something that generates the kind of demands that would be binding on any rational creature. David Velleman attempts to remedy the deficiency of Kant’s dichotomy. Velleman offers a Kantian theory in which he describes love and respect as two ends of a continuum of attitudes that it is morally appropriate to have toward people. Velleman’s view has the peculiar implication that everyone deserves the love of everyone else, and I argue that this is a fatal flaw. Like Kant and Velleman, Korsgaard characterizes personal love as involving the treatment of other people as Kantian ends-in-themselves to a heightened degree. Korsgaard, though, also contends that our individual identities depend upon our personal relationships, and I take this position seriously for the remainder of the dissertation. Ultimately, however, characterizations of loving relations as subsets of moral relations can account for the authority of the demands of love, but not its particularity. The major conclusion of Part One is that any attempt to understand love primarily on a model of practical reasoning with which we are already familiar is doomed to fail. Our experience of love calls for a theory of a unique type of practical necessity. In Part Two I take seriously the possibility that love is simultaneously inescapable (in something like the way morality is supposed to be), and yet ineluctably personal. In love, we experience an engagement with a person as essentially particular, rather than as an instance of a rational agent in general. To make sense of this direct attachment to an individual, I argue that love involves distinctive forms of expectation and disappointment. When those we love let us down, they hurt our feelings, which is not a response to a failed prediction, but nor is it a reaction to a moral insult or offense. According to Peter Strawson and Stephen Darwall, second-personal moral reactive attitudes (such as resentment) always have third-personal analogues (such as indignation). In contrast, I argue that the type of hurt feelings associated with love is a second-personal reactive attitude that does not have a third-personal corollary. I take this as evidence that the expectations involved in love are not objective in the way that the moral is objective. Nor, however, is love a matter of mere preference. On my interpretation, Kant introduces this different type of expectation in the Critique of Judgment. Whereas he characterizes moral judgments as universally communicable, judgments of beauty implicitly involve only second-personal address: I appeal to your direct experience with a particular object. This provides the conceptual space for an account of love according to which it involves a uniquely second-personal form of practical necessity. I contend that the second-personal addresses we make in love are appeals to strengthen the intimacy implicit in the loving relationship, and I identify three interrelated dimensions of that intimacy. First, those we love have the standing to interpret us in a constitutive manner. We fine-tune and make determinate the character of our concerns and interests in part by accepting the interpretations provided by those we love. In that way, the people we love have the normative power to constitute who we are. Second, we share a perspective with those we love in a way that is not reducible to or derivative of our independent perspectives. Loving someone centrally involves the activity of forming concerns together, and we do this in a mode best understood on the model of playing a spontaneous game or improvising music. Finally, being loved enables us to see ourselves as distinctive and special, because the concern those who love us have for us does not track the objective merit of our characteristics. These dimensions of the intimacy that characterizes a loving relationship reveal what it is that we appeal for in love, and how we are hurt when our appeals are rebuffed. In broad terms, this dissertation advocates the recognition of a non-moral yet normative type of expectation, which is predominant in loving relationships. Humor and beauty, too, make more sense when understood in terms of this non-moral yet normative type of expectation, as they involve appeals to others that are more than mere predictions of, but less than rational demands for, a certain kind of response. Introducing this alternative notion of expectation into the discourse of moral philosophy can shed light on other common attitudes that are clearly normative, but defy translation into objective, third-personal terms. Such attitudes include certain experiences of pride and shame, apology and forgiveness, the bestowing of mercy, gratitude, agent-regret, and perhaps a basic sense of trust we have in others. Ultimately, I situate love in respect to grief, which demonstrates my theory’s ability to make sense of related dimensions of our emotional lives. The people we love and grieve over give us a sense of who we are as distinctive, particular individuals, as the three interrelated dimensions of intimacy in loving relationships reveal. Consequently, grief is best understood as a type of practical disorientation—namely, a disorientation that involves the loss of the personal self. I present my account of grief against the type of account that would draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of love and grief from empirical psychological data alone. In particular, these data indicate that we recover quickly from the deaths of loved ones, and Dan Moller draws the philosophical conclusion that those we love fulfill certain roles in our lives and are replaceable. In contrast, I contend that while we should acknowledge the truth of the objective judgment, made in the third-person, that we will likely recover after the deaths of those we love, it does not follow that we must affirm such a claim from the internal perspective of one person who loves another. As a result, the case of love and grief supports a general claim concerning the proper work of moral philosophy, which is that the understanding of ourselves gained through empirical data is not a substitute for the normative conclusions that are revealed through first-personal reflections on our relationships. (shrink)

Plato: Interpretive Strategies in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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On reading plato mimetically.Hayden W. Ausland - 1997 - American Journal of Philology 118 (3):371-416.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Reading Plato MimeticallyHayden W. Ausland(Timon Sillographus fr. 52W)Plato comes to mind first as a philosopher, but we should not forget that he bequeathed his philosophical understanding to posterity mainly in the form of his literary works. How best to appreciate these has traditionally been a matter of some disagreement, although one problem has lately come to the fore: What limitations inhere in subjecting the dialogues' philosophical component (...) to analysis in isolation from its literary context? But an emergent consensus that they are best read "dramatically" remains vague in its method, meaning different things to different people. Much confusion is attributable to current academic trends in philosophy or literary theory, and it is hard to know how best to approach the question. In its responsible form, however, the endeavor to read Plato as a literary philosopher rests on principles neither arbitrary nor very new. It is therefore possible that restating some key traditional maxims can serve a constructive philological purpose. In the following, these are first presented under four general headings within section I and then (section II) illustrated with reference to the argument of Plato's Phaedo.1I1. Mimetic Drama versus Philosophical TreatisePlato's philosophical writings are evidently not methodical treatises. As literary dialogues carried on without the benefit of his participation, they are materials inconvenient for doxographers or dogmatic opponents. This does not mean that they are works meant to record the factual or even typical conversations of other persons, for the historical features they exhibit are subordinate to clearly fictional hypotheses. Plato's writings accordingly resist the assumption that they convey simply anyone's philosophical doctrines, if by this we mean definite theses to which a thinker is theoretically committed.2 So Plato's dialogues are different from what the form became especially later, where it often served the needs of technical instruction or religious disputation; in such dialogues teachings indeed appear straightforwardly as statements of designated characters. But in Plato's genuinely dramatic compositions none of the personae can be assumed to speak for the author—even where a paraenetic hypothesis for a discussion might suggest otherwise. Plato's role as a major figure in the history of philosophy has made this recognition hard for students of his dialogues. Modern philosophical exegesis remains rooted in its earlier professional habits, and the most dogged attempts of recent times to elicit a Platonic doctrine in this way betray an ecclesiastical background with tolerable clarity.3 Thus a superficially [End Page 372] plausible approach takes the apparent protagonist as a philosophical spokesman for the author himself. Socrates, who was Plato's teacher and philosophical model, most often seems to serve this role and thus seems to have been the paradigm for a Timaeus, Critias, or occasionally nameless understudy. On such an assumption a Platonic teaching (whether unitary or developing) can be isolated from the statements or arguments made by dramatic characters of this type, who are presumably Plato's literary spokesmen. This is to feel one psychagogic effect of the literary design, but it fails to do full justice to the dialogue form as used by Plato. Other dialogues can employ drama for the sake of their teachings, but what appear as teachings in Plato's dialogues can normally be understood as argumentative topoi included for the sake of a greater dramatic economy. And that so many of the dialogues feature unequal conversational relationships derives from the nature of the situations he fictionalizes, as well as the difference between the modern and ancient understandings of dialogue.4 Plato's dialogues accordingly need to be appreciated as real works of the literary art, conveying what they do as poetic wholes rather than as vehicles for views attributed to select characters.Plato's dialogues require a literary treatment in terms germane to their philosophical nature, for there lurks a complementary misunderstanding in readings that ignore key differences between ancient and modern principles of composition. Such readings either reduce philosophical significance or else can coalesce with doctrinal readings to ill effect. Thus, for instance, scholars will reduce the character Socrates to a kind of dramatic "hero."5 But the romantic hero is a modern invention distorting... (shrink)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue (review).Matthew Simpson - 2004 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (4):497-498.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of VirtueMatthew SimpsonJoseph R. Reisert. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 211. Cloth, $42.50.This important book is an interpretation and defense of Rousseau's theory of moral education, in which the author explains and justifies Rousseau's ideas about what virtue is, why it is important, and how it can be cultivated.Briefly, this is his reading: in (...) advanced societies, people come to possess intense and incoherent passions, enflamed by amour-propre, which set them at odds with themselves and with each other, making bourgeois existence unsatisfying and exploitive. To create a better life, people must learn to restrain their desires in a way that promotes their own happiness; they must be taught virtue, which Reisert defines as, "the strength of character to rule over one's passions, so that one can make oneself do what one knows one ought to do" (8). Finally, the best model for the moral educator is not ruler to ruled, but friend to friend.The book is both a defense of this interpretation of Rousseau, and a defense of Rousseau's social and psychological theory itself, most notably against Aristotle, Locke, and Buffon. While the two lines of argument do not go together seamlessly, Reisert offers a number of contributions to Rousseau scholarship and to social thought, especially as it intersects with liberal political theory. He divides the work into two parts. The first explains Rousseau's theory of human nature and his diagnosis of the ills of society. The second interprets and defends his ideas about how to remedy that condition through the cultivation of virtue by means of friendship. The final chapter discusses the importance of virtue for contemporary liberal politics.The first half of the book, on Rousseau's "physics of the soul," touches on self-love, pity, vanity, and conscience. For some reason, Reisert limits his discussion largely to the meaning of amour-propre in the second Discourse and Emile to the exclusion of other issues and other books. Even so, he gives an interesting interpretation of amour-propre, and how it leads to the restless, banal misery that both authors think is characteristic of modern life.The problems of this section come when Reisert attempts to defend Rousseau. He argues that his theory of human nature is to be preferred because it answers questions that others cannot, such as how essentially asocial beings have come to live in societies. Yet, this question and some others he discusses come into being only because of Rousseau's own assumptions, for example that people are asocial in the first place. So, Rousseau's ability to solve puzzles that exist only on the basis of his own principles cannot be taken as evidence for those principles without begging the question.The second half of the work is more innovative. Reisert makes two basic arguments: that only virtue can alleviate the dissatisfactions of bourgeois existence; and that only the relationship of friendship can bring about this "education to virtue" (141). The first is less controversial given that he defines virtue simply as the power to restrain irrational desires for the sake of happiness; yet he goes on to make an interesting distinction between the virtue of Socrates who does not have irrational desires to begin with, and that of Emile who has them but can control them.The most original part of the book is his argument that only the relationship of friendship can foster virtue. He says that the amour-propre which makes people miserable also makes them resistant to efforts to improve their character. "A friend," on the other hand, "can, through force of personality and the power of example, exert a potent influence on his friend without thereby provoking resistance or inspiring resentment" (171). He gives a fascinating account of how a friend can be a kind of better self through whose eyes one sees the source of one's own dissatisfaction and the need for virtue to make life enjoyable. His most path breaking suggestion is that in his writings, especially Emile, Rousseau intended to be such a friend to... (shrink)

Plato: Elenchos in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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Does Socrates Have a Method?: Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato's Dialogues and Beyond (review). [REVIEW]Rebecca Bensen - 2003 - Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2):266-267.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 266-267 [Access article in PDF] Gary Alan Scott, editor. Does Socrates Have a Method? Rethinking the Elenchus in Plato's Dialogues and Beyond. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii + 327. Cloth, $45.00. This is an anthology of sixteen essays concerning the topic of Socratic method and closely related issues that influence the interpretation of Plato's dialogues. Three (...) of the essays, in part, have been previously published with new material added by the authors for this volume. These are by Lesher, McPherran, and Schmid. Nine essays are versions of papers given at a conference of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy in October 1997. The four remaining essays are original contributions written by authors who respond critically to the essays in their respective sections. The book is divided into four parts, each with three essays followed by a critical response.The editor, Gary Alan Scott, does a fine job of introducing the various problems associated with the use of the phrase "the Socratic elenchus" as a convenient label. This phrase seems almost unavoidable when talking about Socrates' dialectical method due to the influence of Vlastos's 1983 paper entitled "The Socratic Elenchus." Vlastos furthered an unfortunately narrow tradition that cast Plato's Socrates' versatile and psychologically sensitive practice of philosophy into a mold, restricting it to a single identifiable logical procedure, in which Socrates refuted his interlocutors by using their agreement to premises to overturn their original theses.Vlastos conceived of the Socratic method as mainly a truth-seeking method. His central focus was to explain how Socrates used "the elenchus" to seek the truth given that the logic of the procedure could only detect inconsistency in the interlocutor's beliefs. Vlastos was preoccupied with the question of how Socrates acquired and confirmed his true moral beliefs. Vlastos was far less concerned with understanding the full scope and depth of Socrates' philosophical method than with how to justify what Vlastos perceived to be the positive results of the truth-seeking method, understood as "constructive" moral doctrine. The concern with truth led Vlastos to deal directly with the thorny problems connected with Socrates' use of fallacious argumentation, irony, and the possibility of deception in Socratic method. Such issues, in my view, are the interesting issues which Vlastos confronted. However, very few scholars (including those in this volume) have given these issues the attention they deserve, whether or not they have accepted Vlastos's model of the elenchos.Scott's anthology recognizes both the critical attention that Vlastos's interpretation received and his powerful impact on how certain issues of Socratic method have been discussed, and continue to be discussed, by Plato scholars. Particular attention to this topic is [End Page 266] given, in the essays of Part Two, by Carpenter and Polansky; Benson; McPherran; and Brickhouse and Smith. As Scott notes (6-7), there is a deliberate effort by most contributors to break with the tradition, and re-think old assumptions about the Socratic method associated with Vlastos's model. The current lack of consensus between scholars seems to be a desirable effect because it expands and stimulates discussion, especially about what terms one ought to use in talking about Socratic method.The essays in Part One, by Lesher, Ausland, and Tarrant, with critical commentary by Young, help familiarize the reader with the historical and linguistic contexts associated with the term elenchos and its cognates, as examined by Lesher, and with the contrast between elenchos and exetasis, as examined by Tarrant. In his article, Ausland shows how "many features of Socratic dialectic" are similar to courtroom practices (40), while also noting the differences in Socrates' approach and aim which set his method apart from such practices (42-3).The last two sections illustrate the work being done on specific dialogues by authors who are breaking new hermeneutical ground in Platonic scholarship. These essays turn the reader's attention both toward the innovative features of Socratic method, which most readers would welcome... (shrink)

Kant's Works in Aesthetics, Misc in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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Teaching & learning guide for: Art, morality and ethics: On the moral character of art works and inter-relations to artistic value.Matthew Kieran - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (5):426-431.

This guide accompanies the following article: Matthew Kieran, ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value’. Philosophy Compass 1/2 (2006): pp. 129–143, doi: 10.1111/j.1747‐9991.2006.00019.x Author’s Introduction Up until fairly recently it was philosophical orthodoxy – at least within analytic aesthetics broadly construed – to hold that the appreciation and evaluation of works as art and moral considerations pertaining to them are conceptually distinct. However, following on from the idea that artistic value is (...) broader than aesthetic value, the last 15 years has seen an explosion of interest in exploring possible inter‐relations between the appreciative and ethical character of works as art. Consideration of these issues has a distinguished philosophical history but as the Compass survey article suggests (‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43), it is only very recently that figures in the field have returned to it to develop more precisely what they take the relationships to be and why. Consensus is, unsurprisingly, lacking. The reinvigoration of the issues has led sophisticated formalists or autonomists to mount a more considered defence of the idea that aesthetic and literary values are indeed conceptually distinct from the justification or otherwise of the moral perspective or views endorsed in a work (Topic I). The challenges presented by such a defence are many but amongst them are appeals to critical practice (Lamarque and Olsen), scepticism about whether or not art really can give us bona fide knowledge (Stolnitz) and the recognition that truth often seems to be far removed from what it is we value in our appreciation of works (Lamarque). One way to motivate consideration of the relevance of a work’s moral character to its artistic value concerns the phenomena of imaginative resistance. At least sometimes it would seem that, as Hume originally suggested, we either cannot or will not enter imaginatively into the perspective solicited by a work due to its morally problematic character (Topic II). In some cases, it would seem that as a matter of psychological fact, we cannot do so since it is impossible for us to imagine how it could be that a certain attitude or action is morally permissible or good (Walton). The question then is whether or not this is a function of morality in particular or constraints on imaginative possibility more generally and what else is involved. At other times, the phenomena seem to be driven by a moral reluctance to allow ourselves to enter into the dramatic perspective involved (Moran) or evaluation of the attitude expressed (Stokes). Nonetheless, it is far from obvious that this is so of all the attitudes or responses we judge to be morally problematic. After all, it looks like we can and indeed often do suspend or background particular cognitive and moral commitments in engaging with all sorts of works (Nichols and Weinberg). If the moral character of a work interacts with how we appreciate and evaluate them, then the pressing question is this: is there any systematic account of the relationship available to us? One way is to consider the relationship between our emotional responses to works and their moral character (Topic III). After all, art works often solicit various emotional responses from us to follow the work and make use of moral concepts in so doing (Carroll). Indeed, whether or not a work merits the sought for emotional responses often seems to be internally related to ethical considerations (Gaut). Yet, it is not obvious that we should apply our moral concepts or respond emotionally in our imaginative engagement with works as art as we should in real life (Kieran, Jacobson). A different route is via the thought that art can convey knowledge (Topic IV). There might be particular kinds of moral knowledge art distinctively suited to conveying (Nussbaum) or it may just be that art does so particularly effectively (Carroll, Gaut, Kieran). Either way where this can be tied to the artistic means and appreciation of a work it would seem that to cultivate moral understanding contributes to the value of a work and to betray misunderstanding is a defect. Without denying the relevance of the moral character of a work some authors have wanted to claim that sometimes the immoral aspect of a work can contribute to rather than lessen its artistic value (Topic V). One route is to claim that there is no systematic theoretical account of the relationship available and what the right thing to say is depends on the particular case involved (Jacobson). Another involves the claim that this is so when the defect connects up in an appropriate way to one of the values of art. Thus, it has been claimed, only where a work reveals something which adds to intelligibility, knowledge or understanding in virtue of its morally problematic aspect can this be so (Kieran). The latter position looks like it could in principle be held whilst nonetheless maintaining that the typical or standard relationship is as the moralists would have it. Yet perhaps allowing valence change for such reasons is less a mark of principled explanation and more a function of downright inconsistency or incoherence (Harold). The topics themselves and suggested readings given below follow the structure articulated above as further amplified in the Compass survey article. The design and structure given below can be easily compressed or expanded further. Author Recommends 1 Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 126–60. 2 This article develops the idea that engaging with narrative art calls on moral concepts and emotions and can thereby clarify our moral understanding. 2 Carroll, Noël. Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. 4 Part IV consists of six distinct essays on questions concerning the inter‐relations between art and morality including the essay cited above and the author’s articulation and defence of moderate moralism. 3 Gaut, Berys. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. 4 Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 7 This monograph provides the most exhaustive treatment of the issues and defends the claim that, where relevant, whenever a work is morally flawed it is of lesser value as art and wherever it is morally virtuous the work’s value as art is enhanced. Chapters 7 and 8 defend concern ethical knowledge and chapter 10 is a development of the article cited above concerning emotional responses. Chapter 3 also gives a useful conceptual map of the issues and options in the debate. 5 Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. 9 A wide ranging and extended treatment of relevant issues which objects to generalising moral treatments of our responses to art works and defends the idea that particular works can be better because of rather than despite their moral defects. 6 Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. 11 A general argument for immoralism is elaborated by outlining when, where and why a work’s morally problematic character can contribute to its artistic value for principled reasons (through enhancing moral understanding). 7 Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. 13 This chapter argues against both aestheticism and straightforward moralism about art, elaborating a defence of immoralism in relation to visual art whilst ranging over issues from pornographic art to the nature and demands of different genres in art. 8 Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’ Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. 15 This article concisely outlines and defends a sophisticated aestheticism that denies the importance of truth to artistic value. 9 Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. 17 This article articulates and defends the claim that no knowledge of any interesting or significant kind can be afforded by works appreciated and evaluated as art. 10 Walton, Kendall. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I.’Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. 68 (1994): 27–51. 19 This article builds on some comments from Hume to develop the idea that when engaging with fictions it seems impossible imaginatively to enter into radically deviant moral attitudes. Online Materials ‘Aesthetics and Ethics: The State of the Art.’American Society of Aesthetics online (Jeffrey Dean):. ‘Art, Censorship and Morality’ downloadable podcast of Nigel Warburton interviewing Matthew Kieran at Tate Britain (BBC/ou Open2.net as part of the Ethics Bites series):. ‘Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)Moral Character of Art Works and Inter‐Relations to Artistic Value.’Philosophy Compass 1.2 (2006): 129–43 (Matthew Kieran):. ‘Ethical Criticism of Art.’Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Ella Peek):. ‘Fascinating Fascism.’New York Review of Books Piece Discussing Leni Riefenstahl (Susan Sontag):. ‘The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1450s), Giovanni de Paolo’ (Tom Lubbock):. Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling discuss Lolita (CBS):. Sample Syllabus Topic I Autonomism/aestheticism • Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. Dean. ‘Moderate Autonomism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 38.2 (1998): 150–66. • Beardsley, Monroe. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958. Chapter 12. • Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgement.Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952 [1790]. • Lamarque, Peter. ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, 127–39. • ——. ‘Tragedy and Moral Value.’Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73.2 (1995): 239–49. • Lamarque, Peter and Stein Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Chapter 10. • Stolnitz, Jerome. ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art.’British Journal of Aesthetics 32.3 (1992): 191–200. Topic II Imaginative Capacities, Intelligibility and Resistance • Moran, Richard. ‘The Expression of Feeling in Imagination.’Philosophical Review 103.1 (1994): 75–106. • Nichols, Shaun. ‘Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing’. Mind & Language 21.4 (2006): 459–74. • Stokes, Dustin. ‘The Evaluative Character of Imaginative Resistance’. British Journal of Aesthetics 46.4 (2006): 387–405. • Tanner, Michael. ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, II’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 51–66. • Walton, Kendall (1994). ‘Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality, I’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 68 (1994): 27–51. • Weinberg, Jonathan. ‘Configuring the Cognitive Imagination.’New Waves in Aesthetics. Eds. K. Stock and K. Thomson‐Jones. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 203–23. Topic III Moralism and Emotions • Carroll, Noël. ‘Moderate Moralism.’British Journal of Aesthetics 36.3 (1996): 223–37. • Carroll, Noël. ‘Art, Narrative and Moral Understanding.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.126–60. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapter 10. • ——. ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art.’Aesthetics and Ethics: Essay at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182–203. • Hume, David. ‘Of the Standard of Taste.’Selected Essays. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993 [1757]. 133–53. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Emotions, Art and Immorality.’Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Emotions. Ed. Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. 681–703. • Tolstoy, Leo. What is Art?. London: Penguin, 2004. Chapters 5 and 15. Topic IV Moralism and Knowledge • Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. M. Heath. London: Penguin, 1996 [367–322 BC]. • Carroll, Noël. ‘The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature and Moral Knowledge.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. • Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. Chapters 7 and 8. • Gaut, Berys. ‘Art and Cognition.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 115–26. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Art, Imagination and the Cultivation of Morals.’Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54.4 (1996): 337–51. • Nussbaum, Martha. ‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible: Literature and the Moral Imagination.’Love’s Knowledge. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. 148–68. • Plato. The Republic. Trans. D. Lee. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Book 10. Topic V Immoralist Contextualism • Harold, James. ‘Immoralism and the Valence Constraint.’British Journal of Aesthetics 48.1 (2008): 45–64. • Jacobson, Daniel. ‘In Praise of Immoral Art.’Philosophical Topics 25 (1997): 155–99. • ——. ‘Ethical Criticism and the Vices of Moderation.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 342–55. • John, Eileen. ‘Artistic Value and Moral Opportunism.’Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 331–41. • Kieran, Matthew. ‘Forbidden Knowledge:The Challenge of Cognitive Immoralism.’Art and Morality. Ed. Sebastian Gardner and José Luis Bermúdez. London: Routledge, 2003. 56–73. • Kieran, Matthew. Revealing Art. London: Routledge, 2005. Chapter 4. • Patridge, Stephanie. ‘Moral Vices as Artistic Virtues: Eugene Onegin and Alice.’Philosophia 36.2 (2008): 181–93. Focus Questions 1 What is the strongest argument for the claim that the moral character of a work is not relevant to its artistic value? Does artistic or literary criticism tend to concern itself with the truth or morality of works? If so, in what ways? If not, why do you think this is? 2 What different explanations might there be for difficulty with or resistance to imaginatively entering into attitudes you take to be immoral? How might this relate to the way our imaginings work as contrasted with belief? How might different literary or artistic treatments of the same subject matter make a difference? 3 How do narrative works draw on our moral concepts and responses? Can we suspend our normal moral commitments or application of moral concepts in responding emotionally to art works? Should we respond emotionally to art works as we ought to respond to real world events we witness? Why? Why not? 4 How, if at all, do art works convey moral understanding? How, if at all, is this related to the kinds of moral knowledge art works can teach or reveal to us? When, where and why might this be tied to the artistic value of a work? How can we tell where a work enhances our moral understanding as opposed to misleading or distorting it? 5 What art works do you value overall as art which commend or endorse moral values and attitudes that you do not? Is appreciation of them always marred or lessened by the morally dubious aspect? If not, what explains the differences in evaluation? What, if anything, might you learn by engaging with works which endorse moral attitudes or apply moral concepts different from those you take to be justified? How, if at all, might this connect up with what makes them valuable as art? (shrink)

Aesthetics and Ethics in Aesthetics

Moral Character in Normative Ethics

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21

The Meaning of Proper Names, with a Definiens Formula for Proper Names in Modern English. [REVIEW]M. Z. E. - 1967 - Review of Metaphysics 20 (4):733-734.

The first six chapters of this book present and criticize six views of the nature of proper names, among which are theories that proper names have no meaning or connotation, that proper names have more meaning than other signs or that their meaning is infinite, that ordinary proper names should be analysed into "logically" proper names, etc. This part of the book is the best. One may find in these chapters several well-reasoned arguments which seem to totally demolish the theories (...)

Names in Philosophy of Language

On Molinism and Manipulation: Does Molinism answer the problems about Providence, Foreknowledge and Free Will?R. I. Anderson - unknown

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Molinism attempts to resolve the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human libertarian freedom by the inclusion of the divine will into the solution. Moreover, middle knowledge is providentially useful under the Molinist model because of the way God uses it. This speaks of an integral link between the divine will and intellect that works in such a way as to provide a foreknowledge solution and, allegedly, the best view of providence. Nevertheless, there have been several anti-Molinist arguments by analogy (...)

Divine Foreknowledge in Philosophy of Religion

Divine Middle Knowledge in Philosophy of Religion

Divine Providence in Philosophy of Religion

Topics in Free Will, Misc in Philosophy of Action

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45

Socrates and Gregory Vlastos: The Power of Elenchos in the "Gorgias".Asli Gocer - 1994 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst

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 (...)

Plato: Elenchos in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

Plato, Misc in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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66

Wisdom, wine, and wonder-lust in Plato's.Mark Holowchak - 2003 - Philosophy and Literature 27 (2):415-427.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 415-427 [Access article in PDF] Wisdom, Wine, and Wonder-Lust in Plato's Symposium M. Andrew Holowchak PLATO EMPLOYS A VARIETY of literary and philosophical tools in Symposium to show how eroticism, properly understood, is linked to the good life. These have been a matter of great debate among scholars. Cornford, for instance, argues that Symposium must be read along with Republic, in that the (...) latter examines mostly the lower education of gymnastics and music (the "lesser mysteries"), while the former elucidates principally the higher education of philosophers (the "greater mysteries"). 1 Thus, stylistic differences correspond to differences in philosophical aims between the two works. Neumann says that Diotima's teaching is essentially sophistic. Eros by nature aims at the good without the "guidance of reason," which subserves eros. There is no need of conceptual oneness with the good as an independent formal entity, for the aim is reproduction is "always the particular good of a particular being." 2 Dover states that Symposium presents a consilience of reason and desire, which then continually reinforce each other, through a quest for good, which, if reached, is a fusion of reason and desire. Eros, then, is the cosmic force that "propels us on that road." 3 Bretlinger says that the eulogies of Symposium proceed in the manner of the Dionysian cycle of birth, struggle, death, and rebirth. 4 Markus maintains that the confusion of philosophical and literary exposition [End Page 415] and aim is a result of Plato insisting on a philosophy of love, based on eros, that greatly transcends eros in interest and scope. 5 Socrates' own perplexity in the dialogue as well as his insistence that he knows what he is talking about are perfect illustrations of a dialectical growth that eventually even transcends language. In short, the literary style mimics the philosophical maturation and understanding of Socrates' transcendent path. Thus, scholars themselves are far from general consensus on just what Plato was trying to do in this work.This difficulty is compounded by there being, as Dover observes, "so much unjustified and implausible assertion and so little rigorous argument." 6 These are reasons enough why many philosophers neglect the work. The problem is that in Symposium the rich philosophy of love that Plato expounds is nearly eclipsed by his multifold array and skillful use of literary tools. This makes bringing to light the philosophical merits of the work a much more difficult task than with other works. In consequence, a precise articulation of Plato's own thoughts on love seems an impossible task, or nearly so.In this article, I argue that Plato's philosophy of love unfolds primarily, though not exclusively, through his exposition of two sets of erotic contrasts: one concerning the proper method of eulogizing (rhetoric versus Socratic dialectic, Socratic dialectic versus "Platonic" eroticism); another concerning character (Socrates versus Alcibiades). If so, then Symposium distinguishes itself from the ethically driven, "Socratic" dialogues of Platoin two ways. First, not only does Plato in Symposium appeal to a much broader spectrum of philosophical interests, he also gives a non-dialectical account of love that is passed on to the symposiasts through Socrates qua "pupil" (and messenger) of the priestess Diotima. Second, in Symposium, Plato uses Socrates the man, not Socrates the dialectician, as a model of excellence of character in order to illustrate the very ideals sketched within the work. I A correlate of my thesis is that Symposium itself reads like an act of copulation that climaxes both in literary and philosophical senses. On the one hand, Plato artfully builds sexual tension through the story line. First, Socrates delays in seeing the Lenaian victor Agathon by one day. This lends itself to erotic frustration both in the obvious sense of Socrates not being able to see the handsome young orator immediately after his success and in terms of Socrates having to put off practice of [End Page 416] his true love—philosophy. Second, when he does go to see Agathon, Socrates' preparation is uncommon: he bathes and even puts on sandals. 7 Furthermore... (shrink)

Philosophy of Literature in Aesthetics

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41

Otherwise than Being-with: Levinas on Heidegger and Community.Chantal Bax - 2017 - Human Studies 40 (3):381-400.

In this article I argue that Levinas can be read as a critic, not just of Heideggerian being, but also of being-with. After pointing out that the publication of the Black Notebooks only makes this criticism more interesting to revisit, I first of all discuss passages from both earlier and later writings in which Levinas explicitly takes issue with Heidegger’s claim that there is no self outside of a specific socio-historical community. I then explain how these criticisms are (...)

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Object-Oriented Ontology in Continental Philosophy

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Objects as Temporary Autonomous Zones.Tim Morton - 2011 - Continent 1 (3):149-155.

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...)

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14

Interpreting Plato Socratically: Socrates and Justice.J. Angelo Corlett - 2018 - Cham: Springer Verlag.

J. Angelo Corlett’s new book, Interpreting Plato Socratically continues the critical discussion of the Platonic Question where Corlett’s book, Interpreting Plato’s Dialogues concluded. New arguments in favor of the Mouthpiece Interpretation of Plato’s works are considered and shown to be fallacious, as are new objections to some competing approaches to Plato’s works. The Platonic Question is the problem of how to approach and interpret Plato’s writings most of which are dialogues. How, if at all, can Plato’s beliefs, doctrines, theories (...)

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$33.51 new $34.47 from Amazon $39.19 used View on Amazon.com

Plato: Metaphysics, Misc in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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547

πολλαχῶς ἔστι; Plato’s Neglected Ontology.Mohammad Bagher Ghomi - manuscript

This paper aims to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when Plato (...)

Distributive Justice in Social and Political Philosophy

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32

The problem with English(es) and linguistic (in)justice. Addressing the limits of liberal egalitarian accounts of language.Stephen May - 2015 - Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 18 (2):131-148.

Van Parijs’s Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World furthers a nascent examination of multilingualism within political philosophy, drawing on continental European contexts where multilingualism is the norm. Van Parijs argues, in effect for linguistic cosmopolitanism via English as the current world language, and this seems ostensibly to be a considerable improvement on ‘the untrammeled public monolingualism’ of Anglo-American political theory. However, Van Parijs’s account is flawed in four key respects. First, there is the fundamental problem of his reductionist (...)

Social and Political Philosophy

Moore's Paradox in Philosophy of Language

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6 citations

274

Belief and the problem of Ulysses and the sirens.Bas C. van Fraassen - 1995 - Philosophical Studies 77 (1):7-37.

This is surely a bit of Socrates' famous irony. He draws the analogy to explain how his friends should regard poetry as they regretfully banish it from the ideal state. But lovers were no more sensible then than they are now. The advice to banish poetry, undermined already by Plato's own delight and skill in drama, is perhaps undermined still further by this evocation of a 'sensible' lover who counts love so well lost. Yet Socrates' image is one of avowed (...)

Preferences in Decision Theory in Philosophy of Action

The Reflection Principle in Philosophy of Probability

Evolutionary Developmental Biology in Philosophy of Biology

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40

Idealization in evolutionary developmental investigation: a tension between phenotypic plasticity and normal stages.Alan C. Love - 2010 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365:679–690.

Idealization is a reasoning strategy that biologists use to describe, model and explain that purposefully departs from features known to be present in nature. Similar to other strategies of scientific reasoning, idealization combines distinctive strengths alongside of latent weaknesses. The study of ontogeny in model organisms is usually executed by establishing a set of normal stages for embryonic development, which enables researchers in different laboratory contexts to have standardized comparisons of experimental results. Normal stages are a form of (...)

Evolutionary Biology in Philosophy of Biology

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Socratic Philosophizing with the Five Finger Model: The Theoretical Approach of Ekkehard Martens.Eva Marsal - 2014 - Analytic Teaching and Philosophical Praxis 35 (1):39-49.

Socratic Philosophizing is an open process of thinking that follows a net of methods. Martens develops his Five Finger Model in accordance with Socrates and the history of philosophy. Philosophizing within the community of inquiry is characterized by attitudes of curiosity, openness, and the willingness to make oneself understandable as well as to understand the other person in return. There are five core philosophical methods that assist in making such philosophizing successful: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Analysis, Dialectics and Speculation. These (...)

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27

Evolvability in the fossil record.Alan C. Love, M. Grabowski, D. Houle, L. H. Liow, A. Porto, M. Tsuboi, K. L. Voje & G. Hunt - 2022 - Paleobiology 48 (2):186-209.

The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, but paleontological thinking has tended to neglect recent discussions, because many tools used in the current evolvability literature are challenging to apply to the fossil record. The fundamental difficulty is how to disentangle whether the causes of evolutionary patterns arise from variational properties of traits or lineages rather than being (...)

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47

All Models Are Wrong, and Some Are Religious: Supernatural Explanations as Abstract and Useful Falsehoods about Complex Realities.Aaron D. Lightner & Edward H. Hagen - 2022 - Human Nature 33 (4):425-462.

Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed (...)

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René Descartes in 17th/18th Century Philosophy

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43

Descartes on Love and/as Error.Byron Williston - 1997 - Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (3):429-444.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes on Love and/as ErrorByron WillistonBut if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow With more, not only be no quintessence, But mixed of all stuffs, paining soul, or sense, And of the sun his working vigour borrow, Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use To say, which have no mistress but their Muse, But as all else, being elemented too, Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes (...) do.1One of philosophy’s most enduring questions is inspired by Plato’s Euthyphro: do we love something because it is lovable, or is it lovable because we love it?2 Perhaps nowhere is this problem more intractable than in Descartes’s theory of love. In his view love is the concrete attempt on the part of humans to develop an ethical reciprocity which ideally fulfils the need both to discover and to create value. The strict disjunction of the Platonic question is to this extent somewhat misleading because Descartes is genuinely challenged by the respective demands of both sides of the question. It would therefore be a mistake to fasten on one side of this distinction to the utter exclusion of the other.But the temptation to do precisely this with Descartes is strong indeed. This is a temptation which extends even to ethical matters, in which Descartes seems loathe to subordinate the search for certainty to merely contingent practical demands. In addressing the problem of moral weakness he writes, for [End Page 429] example, that “the strength of the soul is inadequate without knowledge of the truth.”3 The call to live in the light of certain truths—moral or otherwise—is so persistent a theme for him that the burden of proof would seem to be on those who want to claim that this is nevertheless not so in certain areas. The bulk of this paper is thus devoted to showing that, despite some appearances, Descartes is not concerned overmuch with the problem of attaining certainty and avoiding error in love judgments. He wants us to see love as a complex psycho-physical phenomenon which cannot be reduced to the desire to obtain true judgments about the world.To focus the discussion I examine Irving Singer’s philosophy of love as presented in The Nature of Love and especially his hermeneutic distinction between “appraisal” and “bestowal,” a distinction which maps felicitously onto the Platonic disjunction as sketched above. Singer criticizes the Cartesian theory of love as excessively “appraisive,” that is, as relying too heavily on an objective standard as guarantor of the worth of beloved objects. I maintain on the contrary that this interpretation distorts what Descartes’s texts tell us. By arguing that the will, with no necessary input from the appraising intellect, is paramount in love judgments, I show that love for Descartes is largely an imaginative means of “bestowing” value which as such does not require either the guidance or the corroboration of objective criteria. The bestowal theory warrants, rather, the free subjective creation of value. The distinction which Singer uses to criticize Descartes is thus turned to Descartes’s favor.I. Before getting to that argument, however, we need to examine the place which love as a specific passion has within the overall economy of the third notion primitive,4 that is, the union of body and soul as distinct from the treatment of these elements as mutually separate. Passions are for Descartes a species of thought. In a general sense all “perceptions” are passions of the soul. They represent the world to the will which then acts in some way on them (“action” is taken as the other species of thought). Now of these perceptions generally considered, some are caused by the external objects of the senses5 and some by the natural appetites and affections of the body.6 There are, however, those perceptions “whose effects we feel as being in the soul itself....”7 These are strictly speaking the “passions” of the soul; and despite our not always being able to locate their proximate cause,8 they may be stimulated by the [End Page 430] “fortuitous movement of the spirits,”9 by intellectual judgments, or by external... (shrink)

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14

Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett Bourbon (review).Katie Pelkey - 2023 - Philosophy and Literature 47 (2):475-476.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett BourbonKatie PelkeyEveryday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett Bourbon; 200 pp. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.In Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics, Brett Bourbon probes the nature of poetry and its centrality in our everyday lives, working from the ordinary-language philosophical framework associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, W. V. O. Quine, and Stanley Cavell. Bourbon's ideas contribute (...) new dimensions to the elusive concept of poetry and pivots the reader's attention inward: how can we recognize poetry in our day-to-day and why should we? At sentence level, his claims are clear and compelling to readers across disciplines with varying knowledge of philosophy and poetry. This book is thus addressed to "poets, literary scholars, philosophers, and students of religion, and anyone who cares about the ethics of everyday life, about the surprises that punctuate and give our lives form" (p. ix).Poems themselves are such "events of form," Bourbon emphasizes, which live among us and need not be constituted by words. Wordless poems can be uncovered and embraced through the development of a "poetic vulnerability" to ordinary experiences that are not necessarily wedded to one's aesthetic reaction. Bourbon designates the alphabet as one such example of what he calls a "primal everyday poem"; the alphabet is wordless and consists of a patterned order whose mere form does not encompass its meaning. The ordinary expression "I love you" also falls under this classification; the phrase is a performative poem whose intricate connotation is simplified by common language, yet is not the equivalent of its mere words. Bourbon asserts that, like the phrase "I love you," poems of the everyday cannot be reduced to mere language, conditions, or creative modes.Of the ineffable nature of poetry, Bourbon claims, "Poetry, like death, is that which we can only know by analogy—by examples—but it has a scope beyond all our examples" (p. 108). In terms of examples, he draws from poignant personal experiences to reinforce his arguments and provide insight into his keen sensibility. In chapter 1 ("Poems of the Everyday"), Bourbon recounts his own dismissal as a young boy of poetry's worthiness until one day while watching an old film, he in fact was struck by the phrase "I love you." This ordinary phrase allowed him to reconsider the parameters of what constitutes poetry and acknowledge the dichotomy of the phrase's formal power constituted by trivial symbols.Chapter 4 ("Epithalamion") is also rooted in personal experience. Bourbon opens with the flat assertion, "I have never liked weddings" (p. 43), but he notes a difference between a "marriage of forms" and "marriage of intimacy and stability": his distaste is for the former. He believes that a successful marriage can become a poem of the everyday—an event of power and "linguistic surrogacy"—where the event itself fosters more meaning than the words alone [End Page 475] can carry. Marriage can be a poem of discovery that arises from the action of learning what it means to love. But in the objects of the wedding and all its trite, heart-shaped symbols, Bourbon remarks, no poems are to be found.Bourbon dedicates chapter 5 ("Is a Poem the Same as Its Words?") to his claim that what a poem is cannot be bound by its words entirely or by meaning alone. If one finds each line of a poem intelligible, that does not indicate that the poem's meaning is consequentially understood. Conversely, a reader may not know a poem's meaning with complete certainty; what is said may not illuminate what is meant. In Bourbon's explanation of the sentence as a model for how particular words construct a poem, he says that one must determine how such a sentence-poem would be meaningful through our own reading. He claims that a poem is more than its words and cannot be simplified into sets of sentences or phrases. "A poem, if it is a sentence, is always more than that sentence; otherwise, a poem would not be a poem but a sentence" (p. 67).Bourbon's latest publication challenges traditional, long... (shrink)

Philosophy of Literature in Aesthetics

Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy of Science in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy

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65

Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern: An Eighteenth-Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary Biology.Elliott Sober - 2007 - In Jessica Riskin (ed.), Genesis redux: essays in the history and philosophy of artificial life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 131--62.

The design argument for the existence of God took a probabilistic turn in the 17 th and 18 th centuries. Earlier versions, such as Thomas Aquinas' 5 th way, usually embraced the premise that goal-directed systems (things that "act for an end" or have a function) must have been created by an intelligent designer. This idea – which we might express by the slogan "no design without a designer" – survived into the 17 th and 18 th centuries, 1 (...) and it is with us still in the writings of many creationists. The new version of the argument, inspired by the emerging mathematical theory of probability, removed the premise of necessity. It begins with the thought that goal-directed systems might have arisen by intelligent design or by chance; the problem is to discern which hypothesis is more plausible. With the epistemic concept of plausibility characterized in terms of the mathematical concept of probability, the design argument was given a new direction. The new probabilistic perspective did not extinguish the older idea of "no design without a designer." The two conflicting approaches coexisted, often with less than perfect clarity about their fundamental difference. At the same time, the details of how the probabilistic perspective ought to be articulated were slow in emerging. These characteristics of uneven development are exemplified in a debate that took place in the 18 th century among three probabilists – John Arbuthnot, Nicholas Bernoulli, and Abraham DeMoivre – on the proper explanation of human sex ratio. Arbuthnot proposed a probabilistic version of the design argument, claiming that it is intelligent design, not chance, that provides the better explanation of why slightly more boys than girls are born each year. Bernoulli rejected Arbuthnot's argument. DeMoivre defended Arbuthnot against Bernoulli's criticisms. The problem of explaining sex ratio, both in human populations and in the rest of nature, experienced another transformation after 1859 --it became a problem for the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin (1871) addressed the question in the first edition of The Descent of Man but withdrew his suggestion in the second (Darwin 1874). Carl Düsing (1884) provided a mathematical model that moved beyond the explanation Darwin offered. Fisher (1930) added the new idea of parental expenditure. Williams (1966) argued that the sex ratios found in nature provide the opportunity to test hypotheses of group selection against hypotheses of individual selection. Hamilton (1967) constructed a model that generalizes Fisher's approach and represents the effects of both group and individual selection. The theory of natural selection gradually developed the ability to predict sex ratios, not just explain them post hoc. (shrink)

Intelligent Design in Philosophy of Biology

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53

The Trials of Socrates and Joseph K.Cynthia B. Cohen - 1980 - Philosophy and Literature 4 (2):212-228.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cynthia B. Cohen THE TRIALS OF SOCRATES AND JOSEPH K. No two trials could have been more unlike than those of Socrates and Joseph K. As portrayed in Plato's Apology,' Socrates was the conscience of Athens, a thoughtful and courageous man whose life was devoted to the pursuit of wisdom. He challenged others to examine themselves and to transform themselves into lovers of truth and goodness. This gadfly of (...) Athens was put on trial by those whom he had stung and was dispatched with a final slap. He died the bravest, wisest, and most upright man of his time. By contrast, Joseph K., the protagonist of Kafka's novel, The Trial, was an ordinary bank clerk locked into a life of unreflective routine. His arrest one day by the agents of a Court he could not comprehend failed to change his rote approach. Like a fly stuck fast to flypaper, he was glued to the details of his immediate experience, and would not rise above these to find meaning in his dreary life, or even in his shameful death. Socrates was an original and constructive thinker who died rather than deny the purpose that he found in human life; Joseph K. was a leaden bureaucrat whose life was one long moment of guilty hesitation before a broader vision of things. Or is it that Socrates was an arrogant, peculiar, conniving failure who was engaged in an insidious attempt to undermine the moral and political values of Athens? And is it that Joseph K. was a successful young businessman who had established himself as a conscientious, decent, and eminently reasonable man struggling bravely for justice against an alien and capricious authority? Or perhaps these two trials should be seen as very similar. Each man was tried on charges of which he claimed to be innocent; each wanted to restore order and meaning to a disintegrating world; each led a life that became the cause of his death; and each was condemned for claiming that the unexamined life was not worth living. Or is it that Joseph K. was condemned for maintaining that it was the examined life that was not worth living...? 212 Cynthia B. Cohen213 Difficulties in the interpretation of works of literature are to be expected when their subjects are complex and subtle individuals set in an atmosphere in which basic questions of human significance are raised. Both the Apology and The Trial are such works. Socrates initially seems a model of clarity to the interpreter. He responds to his accusers in a form of direct discourse that can be taken at face value. He presents his arguments openly and cogently. There can be no doubt that his general position is coherent, consistent, and reasonable. Yet the interpreter 's initial satisfaction fades as Socrates' irony creates confusion about what Socrates professes to know. His lines of reasoning seem to intersect in paradox; his answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of human life curve around to miss each other. The interpreter emerges confused and perplexed. These transformations of perspective and significance are repeated in The Trial. Joseph K., too, is described in a straightforward manner that is clear and quite detailed. His reactions and arguments appear sensible and well-reasoned. Yet on closer examination, his simple statements turn out to have hidden meanings; his responses often contradict one another; his logical arguments appear pointless. His answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of human life are immediately challenged by a horde of competitors. To the interpreter, The Trial metamorphizes into a model of intentional obscurity. The problem of interpretation is compounded in the case of Socrates by the question of the accuracy of our information about him. The "Socratic problem" is well known. Each of the four major sources about his life and thought, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle, presents a somewhat different person. There has been strong support for the view that the portrayal of Socrates in the earlier dialogues of Plato is essentially sound, even though this earlier Socrates seems at variance with the later one. The resolution of this problem is irrelevant to this endeavor. Our purpose is to consider the life and... (shrink)

Philosophy of Literature in Aesthetics

Induction, Misc in General Philosophy of Science

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89

Formal and material theories in philosophy of science: a methodological interpretation.Alan Love - 2011 - In Henk W. De Regt, Stephan Hartmann & Samir Okasha (eds.), EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009. Springer. pp. 175--185.

John Norton’s argument that all formal theories of induction fail raises substantive questions about the philosophical analysis of scientific reasoning. What are the criteria of adequacy for philosophical theories of induction, explanation, or theory structure? Is more than one adequate theory possible? Using a generalized version of Norton’s argument, I demonstrate that the competition between formal and material theories in philosophy of science results from adhering to different criteria of adequacy. This situation encourages an interpretation of “formal” and (...)

Inductive Reasoning in General Philosophy of Science

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121

Problems with the deductivist image of scientific reasoning.Philip Catton - 1999 - Philosophy of Science 66 (3):473.

There seem to be some very good reasons for a philosopher of science to be a deductivist about scientific reasoning. Deductivism is apparently connected with a demand for clarity and definiteness in the reconstruction of scientists' reasonings. And some philosophers even think that deductivism is the way around the problem of induction. But the deductivist image is challenged by cases of actual scientific reasoning, in which hard-to-state and thus discursively ill-defined elements of thought nonetheless significantly condition what practitioners (...)

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18

Co-option of stress mechanisms in the origin of evolutionary novelties.Alan Love & G. P. Wagner - 2022 - Evolution 76:394-413.

It is widely accepted that stressful conditions can facilitate evolutionary change. The mechanisms elucidated thus far accomplish this with a generic increase in heritable variation that facilitates more rapid adaptive evolution, often via plastic modifications of existing characters. Through scrutiny of different meanings of stress in biological research, and an explicit recognition that stressors must be characterized relative to their effect on capacities for maintaining functional integrity, we distinguish between: (1) previously identified stress-responsive mechanisms that facilitate evolution by maintaining (...)

Evolutionary Biology in Philosophy of Biology

Skepticism about Character in Normative Ethics

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78

The Empirical Argument Against Virtue.Candace L. Upton - 2016 - The Journal of Ethics 20 (4):355-371.

The virtues are under fire. Several decades’ worth of social psychological findings establish a correlation between human behavior and the situation moral agents inhabit, from which a cadre of moral philosophers concludes that most moral agents lack the virtues. Mark Alfano and Christian Miller introduce novel versions of this argument, but they are subject to a fatal dilemma. Alfano and Miller wrongly assume that their requirements for virtue apply universally to moral agents, who vary radically in their psychological, (...)

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45

COVID-19 current controversies.Jennifer Blumenthal-Barby - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 46 (7):419-420.

This July 2020 issue of JME introduces a new section, “COVID-19 Current Controversies,” which will be a recurring section in each issue for the foreseeable future. This issue reflects on some of the most pressing ethical issues that have arisen roughly 6 months into the pandemic. Kathleen Liddell and colleagues examine important legal considerations at play in ventilator allocation decisions raised by the pandemic.1 They point out that ethics-based triage protocols that argue from the principle of “saving the most lives” (...)

Biomedical Ethics in Applied Ethics

Equality and Responsibility in Social and Political Philosophy

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47

Problems with Responsibility: Why Luck Egalitarians should have Abandonned the Attempt to Reconcile Equality with Responsibility.Maureen Ramsay - 2005 - Contemporary Political Theory 4 (4):431-450.

Conceptions of desert and responsibility have had a powerful influence in justifying economic inequality. Currently, they are being reaffirmed in policies advocated by the centre left in Britain. In contrast, luck egalitarianism, one of the dominant theoretical positions in contemporary political philosophy, puts equality at the top of the agenda and notoriously undermines traditional notions of desert and rejects the conception of personal responsibility on which traditional ideas rely. Although luck egalitarians are sceptical about desert and redefine responsibility to reduce (...)

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33

Άγων λóγων: Il "Protagora" di Platone tra eristica e commedia (review).Christopher Rowe - 2002 - American Journal of Philology 123 (3):521-524.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 521-524 [Access article in PDF] Andrea Capra. Il "Protagora" di Platone tra eristica e commedia. Il Filarete: Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell'Università degli Studi di Milano, 197. Milan: LED, Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto, 2001. 237 pp. Paper, 22.72. This is a book of two halves and Two Parts, perhaps, respectively, "literary" and "philosophical": one primarily concerned with (...) the form of the Protagoras, the other more concerned with the dialogue's argumentative content and context. More helpful, however, is the author's own subtitles for the Two Parts: "Plato 'persuades' his audience" and "Socrates 'persuades' the sophists." Capra is admirably conscious throughout of the need to distinguish between what Socrates is saying and what Plato is trying to achieve through what Socrates is saying; between the audience for whom the written artifact is composed, on the one hand, and the fictional audience that the character, Socrates, is addressing, on the other. Plato—so Capra claims—has constructed a dialogue for hearers or readers who would have been thoroughly familiar with the dramatic theater and its conventions and who would immediately have recognized the allusions to comedy in setting, action, even characterization. Why construct a dialogue in this extraordinary fashion? No other dialogue is so constructed, even if there are comic touches in many. Here is one of the most interestingly worked parts of Capra's overall thesis: It isn't just any comedy that the Protagoras resembles—it's the Clouds, which figures so centrally in Plato's account of Socrates' accusers in the Apology. Only everything is turned upside down, so that it's Socrates who's outside (the right side?), the sophists inside (the house of Callias), whereas in Clouds, it was Socrates inside (the phrontisterion/pensatoio), and Socrates was a sophist. So here is Plato, as it were, talking over the heads of his characters and replying to Socrates' critics by turning the tables on them.But that is only half of the picture, half of Capra's book (or a pretty inadequate description of half of the book), and, of course, rather less than half of the Protagoras itself. What about the conversation between Socrates and Protagoras that occupies by far the largest proportion of the pages? To say that it resembles a comic agon is of course only a beginning; if it is to be an effective riposte to Aristophanes and to those jurors he so fatally influenced, then Socrates has to win. And that, of course, he does hands down. But then we have the problem, or rather Capra has the problem, that he seems to win by taking over [End Page 521] the very method that his sophistic opponents use, i.e., eristic; and this is bizarre, given the way that the opening dialogue between Socrates (or Strepsiades) and Hippocrates (or Pheidippides) in Socrates' house emphasizes the distance, and difference, between what Socrates has to offer and what his opponents offer. What is afoot here? Capra's answer is that crossing the threshold of Callias' house, into the company of Protagoras and the rest, is like the philosopher's descent into the Cave in the Republic. Being with the prisoners, Socrates takes up their methods, their ways of doing things. But he has no option but to do that with an opponent like Protagoras in the other corner, for Protagoras denies the very basis of Socratic dialectic. There is, for him, no such thing as science, no such thing as objective knowledge; Socrates is therefore forced to fight by Protagoras' rules to get a grip on him at all. What emerges, paradoxically, near the end of the dialogue is the requirement—even on popular (the prisoners' own) premises—for a measuring art, which makes measuring not the prerogative of each and every Protagorean individual but rather a matter of technical expertise. And so (according to Capra's argument) we arrive back at that very realm of knowledge, which in the Republic is the means by which we shall raise... (shrink)

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