Socrates' promise and Alcibiades' failure (Alcibiades 103-116) -- The exaltation of virtue (Alcibiades 116-135) -- Rescuing Alcibiades (Second Alcibiades) -- A puzzling retrospective (Symposium 211-222).

Interprets the Letters as a literary unity (designed almost as a novel by Plato) and provides insight into and information about Plato's self-understanding and his overall intentions as an author of his dialogues.

Helfer opens his book with a series of vigorous reflections that have the virtue of challenging some of the reader’s deeply seated beliefs concerning political emotions. While we moderns see political ambition mostly as a threat to the public good that needs to be checked, ancients, the author suggests, considered that passion in a positive light. Indeed, they regarded political ambition as the manifestation of a powerful desire to achieve noble deeds in the civic sphere, an aspiration they saw (...) as a central feature of human nature. That Alcibiades presents us with the most spectacular example of a man animated by such a passion is uncontentious, no matter how controversial this historical person was. By studying... (shrink)

Although determination, perseverance, and high expectations appear to be laudable characteristics within our society, ambition seems to carry a hint of selfishness or self-promotion (perhaps especially at the cost of others). One can speak of the goals or aims of a team or group, but it seems more characteristic to ascribe ambition to a single individual. Etymologi-cally, ambition derives from the Latin word ambire, which can mean to strive or go around (ambo + ire), but the term also characterizes one (...) who canvasses for votes. It may also be telling that the Latin noun for canvassing (ambitio) is only two letters removed for the Latin term for election fraud (ambitus). It is thus welcome that in his Socrates and Alcibiades Ariel Helfer seeks to examine the notion of political ambition through a study of Plato’s dialogues concerning that most am-bitious of Athenians, Alcibiades, an Athenian general who seems to have epitomized both the German word Wunderkind and the French phrase enfant terrible in his short life. It was one that included leading, betraying, and then leading again the Athenian army and navy during the Peloponnesian Wars. Helfer examines the three dialogues of Plato that include Alcibiades as an interlocutor: First Alcibiades, Second Alcibiades, and the Symposium. He does so (in his words) “to gain a fuller understanding of the constellation of desires that gives political ambition its force, including the desire to be devoted to a noble cause, and to determine whether, in Plato’s understanding, these desires necessarily find their fullest expression in political life” (p. 7). (shrink)

p. cm. — (Zeuthen lecture book series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-262-18187-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-262-68100-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Decision-making. 2. Economic man. 3. Game theory. 4. Rational expectations (Economic theory) I. Title. II. Series.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy of Music Education Review 12.1 (2004) 84-88 [Access article in PDF] Response to Yiannis Miralis, "Manos Hadjidakis: The Story of an Anarchic Youth and a 'Magnus Eroticus'" Jason Helfer University of Illinois There are two issues that struck me as essential from my consideration of Miralis'paper and the ideas of Manos Hadjidakis: Eros as a pedagogical idea and learner interactions in the music classroom. These ideas developed (...) from my interpretation of this paper, from my experiences in teacher training, and teaching in the public schools. I will examine each in turn, after a brief recapitulation of Hadjidakis' ideology.Hadjidakis' ideas were shaped through reaction against much of the work that took place within traditional musical conservatories and the larger Greek culture. They were also shaped by "his close friendships and collaborations with other poets, composers, and artists." Hadjidakis articulated his reactionary ideas not only through sound (that is, composition and performances), but also through the larger media. The cultural content of the broadcasting services in Greece leaves much to be desired although, as head of the radio Third Programme... Manos Hadjidakis brought a breath of fresh air to the stuffy studios of the broadcasting [End Page 84] organizations with talks, readings, discussion programmes-and the highly original daily program This is Lilliput.1The intended result of this work clarifies one of Hadjidakis' fundamental assumptions: one should be led to a deeper understanding of the self and others, beauty and goodness through engagement and perpetual reflection within the arts. Miralis asserts that the idea of reflection and the resultant self-knowledge and growth are qualities to which a good educator should aspire. Central to this claim is the idea of Eros.2Eros can be problematic if narrowly defined. "The name Eros has been wrongly restricted in common speech to what is really only one form of this universal desire. Just as the word "making" really means creation of any kind but has been misappropriated to one species... so the name of Eros is misappropriated to one species of passion, but really means 'any and every desire for good things and happiness.'"3 My understanding of Hadjidakis' idea of Eros is best articulated in the exchange between Socrates and Diotima in Plato's Symposium.4 Plato's idea of Eros is that the individual moves through a series of stages with the help of another until one has a "complete" and "clear" understanding of the good or beautiful.5 He makes a distinction between the good and the beautiful when Diotima asks Socrates to substitute the word "good" for the word "beautiful."6 This is not merely a change in semantic. Rather, it is a necessary transformation insofar as it emphasizes that a good thing may not be physically beautiful, but still considered good (such as the historical Socrates). The transcendence of the beautiful leading toward the "pure" good is an essential step in obtaining the Platonic understanding of Eros. "The state of mind of the philosopher who has attained knowledge of the good or of beauty is a desire to make beauty or goodness present wherever possible to a higher degree, it is not a desire to just to look at goodness or beauty. It is rather a desire to take anything that is partially good or partially beautiful and to make it more good or more beautiful."7 For Hadjidakis, the necessary quest for goodness and beauty was evident in the creation, combining, and sharing of poetry and music. This idea was not only apparent in his musical creations, but also in his work in the socio/political arena.Further, the Symposium begins as a series of speeches on the subject of love, but "Plato makes the word eros bear a burden far in excess of anything it had ever been made to bear; and the 'love' which he goes on to portray strains the language of eros almost out of recognition."8 However, love is not forgotten; rather "'Love'... is to mean not only the whole complex of... (shrink)

Generics and frequency statements are puzzling phenomena: they are lawlike, yet contingent. They may be true even in the absence of any supporting instances, and extending the size of their domain does not change their truth conditions. Generics and frequency statements are parametric on time, but not on possible worlds; they cannot be applied to temporary generalizations, and yet are contingent. These constructions require a regular distribution of events along the time axis. Truth judgments of generics vary considerably across speakers, (...) whereas truth judgments of frequency statements are much more uniform. A generic may be false even if the vast majority of individuals in its domain satisfy the predicated property, whereas a frequency statement using, e.g., usually would be true. This paper argues that all these seemingly unrelated puzzles have a single underlying cause: generics and frequency statements express probability judgments, and these, in turn, are interpreted as statements of hypothetical relative frequency. (shrink)

In this paper I explore elements from Kant’s philosophy of right to develop a relational account of the wrong of poverty. Poverty is a relational wrong because it involves relations of problematic dependence, inequality, and humiliation. Such relations infringe the rights to freedom and equality of the poor. And the called-for response is one of public recognition and protection of the rights of the poor. This position means we must radically reconceptualize our individual duties to the poor: not _private beneficence_, (...) but _private remedies for public failures_. (shrink)

Both traditional accounts of hope and some of their recent critics analyze hope exclusively in terms of attitudes that a hoper bears towards a hoped-for prospect, such as desire and probability assignment. I argue that all of these accounts misidentify cases of despair as cases of hope, and so misconstrue the nature of hope. I show that a more satisfactory view is arrived at by noticing that in addition to the aforementioned attitudes, hope involves a characteristic attitude towards an external (...) factor, on whose operation the hoper takes the prospect's realization to depend causally. (shrink)

The two standard interpretations of Kant’s view of the relationship between external freedom and public law make one of the terms a means for the production of the other: either public law is justified as a means to external freedom, or external freedom is justified as a means for producing a system of public law. This article defends an alternative, constitutive interpretation: public law is justified because it is partly constitutive of external freedom. The constitutive view requires conceiving of external (...) freedom in a novel, second-personal way, that is, as an irreducibly relational norm. (shrink)

The paper is a discussion of the interpretation of game theory. Game theory is viewed as an abstract inquiry into the concepts used in social reasoning when dealing with situations of conflict and not as an attempt to predict behavior. The first half of the paper..

Introduction Introducing Accessibility theory 0.1 On the role of context Utterances cannot be processed and interpreted on their own. ...

In this article, I examine the issue of the alleged circularity in the determination of homologies within cladistic analysis. More specifically, I focus on the claims made by the proponents of the dynamic homology approach, regarding the distinction (sometimes made in the literature) between primary and secondary homology. This distinction is sometimes invoked to dissolve the circularity issue, by upholding that characters in a cladistic data matrix have to be only primarily homologous, and thus can be determined independently of phylogenetic (...) hypotheses, by using the classical Owenian criteria (for morphological characters) or via multiple sequence alignment (for sequence data). However, since in the dynamic approach, sequence data can be analyzed without being pre-aligned, proponents have claimed that the distinction between primary and secondary homology has no place within cladistics. I will argue that this is not the case, since cladistic practice within the dynamic framework does presuppose primary homology statements at a higher level. (shrink)

This Article explores the rule of law aspects of the intersection between intellectual property and antitrust law. Contemporary discussions and debates on intellectual property, antitrust, and the intersection between them are typically framed in economically oriented terms. This Article, however, shows that there is more law in law than just economics. It demonstrates how the rule of law has influenced the development of several IP doctrines, and the interface between IP and antitrust, in important, albeit not always acknowledged, ways. In (...) particular, it argues that some limitations on IP rights, such as exhaustion and limitations on tying arrangements, are grounded in rule of law principles restricting the arbitrary exercise of legal power, rather than solely in considerations of economic efficiency. The historical development of IP law has reflected several tensions, both economic and political, that lie at the heart of the constitutional order of the modern state: the tension between the benefits of free competition and the recognition that some restraints on competition may be beneficial and justified; the concern that power, even when conferred in the public interest, can often be abused and arbitrarily. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that the superlative quantifiers at least and at most do not have the same type of truth conditions as the comparative quantifiers more than and fewer than. We propose that superlative quantifiers are interpreted at the level of speech acts. We relate them to denegations of speech acts, as in I don’t promise to come, which we analyze as excluding the speech act of a promise to come. Calling such conversational acts that affect future permissible speech (...) acts “meta-speech acts,” we introduce the meta-speech act of a GRANT of a proposition as a denial to assert the negation of that proposition. Superlative quantifiers are analyzed as quantifiers over GRANTS. Thus, John petted at least three rabbits means that the minimal number n such that the speaker GRANTs the proposition that John petted n rabbits is n = 3. We formalize this interpretation in terms of commitment states and commitment spaces, and show how the truth conditions that are derived from it are partly entailed and partly conversationally implicated. We demonstrate how the theory accounts for a wide variety of distributional phenomena of superlative quantifiers, including the contexts in which they can be embedded. (shrink)

Addressing one of the most difficult conceptual topics in the study of classical Hinduism, Ariel Glucklich presents a rigorous phenomenology of dharma, or order. The work moves away from the usual emphasis on symbols and theoretical formulations of dharma as a religious and moral norm. Instead, it focuses on images that emerge from the basic experiential interaction of the body in its spatial and temporal contexts, such as the sensation of water on the skin during the morning purification, or (...) the physical manipulation of the bride during the marriage ritual. Images of dharma are examined in myths, rituals, art, and even the physical landscape of the Hindu world. The varied and contingent experiences of dharma infuse it with a meaning that transcends a false analytical distinction from adharma, or chaos. Glucklich shows that when dharma is experienced by means of living images, it becomes inescapably temporal, and therefore inseparable from adharma. (shrink)

In this paper we show that focus structure determines the interpretation of bare plurals in English: topic bare plurals are interpreted generically, focused bare plurals are interpreted existentially. When bare plurals are topics they must be specific, i.e. they refer to kinds. After type-shifting they introduce variables which can be bound by the generic quantifier, yielding characterizing generics. Existentially interpreted bare plurals are not variables, but denote properties that are incorporated into the predicate.The type of predicate determines the interpretation of (...) its bare plural subject. The individual/stage-level distinction, though important, is not sufficient: since only arguments can be topics, only those stage-level predicates which have locative arguments can have existential bare plural subjects.Certain verbs (e.g., hate) fail to incorporate their bare plural objects; therefore no existential reading of the object is available. We provide a novel solution to this puzzle based on the following two claims: (i) incorporated bare plurals do not introduce discourse referents; (ii) nonincorporating verbs are presuppositional. (shrink)

Agricultural reports and guides, nonhuman animal welfare studies, and animal rights reports attempt to document and convey the condition of nonhuman animals in agriculture. These disciplines tend to resist a prolonged and methodically versatile examination of individual animals. In his pioneer work, Lovenheim , The author produced such a biographical documentation of calves in the dairy and meat industries. He provided an exceptionally prolonged and detailed tracing of their lives as individuals, establishing an emotional attachment in both documenter and reader. (...) Yet, sentiments for the farmers, typical urban conceptions of communication with nonhuman animals, and difficulties in obtaining the relevant information limit Lovenheim's success and imply similar difficulties in other cases. (shrink)

Resumen En este trabajo se identifican estrategias de descortesía modalizadas deónticamente en ambientes laborales argentinos en contacto interlingüístico español-inglés e intercultural argentino-estadounidense en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires durante 2012–2014. Se lo hace poniendo el foco de atención en la descortesía producida a través de correos electrónicos empresariales con propósitos laborales escritos en inglés en un medio fuertemente regulado que privilegia, fundamentalmente, funciones transaccionales y procedimentales para asegurar la maximización de sus fines lucrativos. En un corpus natural de 148 (...) correos electrónicos (agrupados en 22 secuencias, con aproximadamente 17.000 palabras), se identificaron cuatro estrategias de descortesía modalizadas deónticamente: ataque por atribución de la responsabilidad, contraataque por impugnación de la responsabilidad, contraataque por acatamiento forzado de la responsabilidad y ataque o contraataque por naturalización de la responsabilidad. A través de estas estrategias, se des-idealiza, desvaloriza y disminuye la imagen social con el propósito ulterior de reconstituir el orden moral que afianza el statu quo de los ambientes laborales estudiados. (shrink)

Uma interpretação corrente do fenômeno social ensina que todos os bens coletivos são bens convergentes. As concepções bem-estarista e utilitarista na economia e na filosofia, respectivamente, são os seus principais expoentes. A tese consiste em aceitar que “totalidades sociais” são inexoravelmente compostas de “partes” e que, por isso, na base de cada bem público ou social se encontrariam sempre os indivíduos, os quais seriam, em última análise, responsáveis pela sua existência. Assim, os bens públicos seriam bens para os quais convergem (...) interesses e escolhas dos agentes sociais. O presente estudo mostra, em primeiro lugar, segundo a compreensão de Taylor, que nem todos os bens coletivos são bens convergentes. Alguns bens sociais podem ser considerados bens irredutivelmente sociais, cuja justificativa se encontra na reflexão sobre o significado. Em segundo lugar, aborda a contribuição que a noção hegeliana de eticidade teve sobre a formulação desse argumento. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

We introduce a homotopy-theoretic interpretation of intuitionistic first-order logic based on ideas from Homotopy Type Theory. We provide a categorical formulation of this interpretation using the framework of Grothendieck fibrations. We then use this formulation to prove the central property of this interpretation, namely homotopy invariance. To do this, we use the result from [8] that any Grothendieck fibration of the kind being considered can automatically be upgraded to a two-dimensional fibration, after which the invariance property is reduced to an (...) abstract theorem concerning pseudonatural transformations of morphisms into two-dimensional fibrations. (shrink)

The determination of “who is a J” within a society is treated as an aggregation of the views of the members of the society regarding this question. Methods, similar to those used in Social Choice theory are applied to axiomatize three criteria for determining who is a J: 1) a J is whoever defines oneself to be a J. 2) a J is whoever a “dictator” determines is a J. 3) a J is whoever an “oligarchy” of individuals agrees is (...) a J. (shrink)

Hostages have become an important political and security issue in the context of conflicts in the Middle East and in Africa. The work of Marcel Mauss helps us to shed a new light on this phenomenon, which today is portrayed in negative terms as a major violation of fundamental universal rights such as the right to liberty. In The Gift, however, Mauss refers to the granting of hostages as “acts of generosity.” In line with Mauss’ approach, I consider hostageship as (...) a “total social phenomenon,” combining politics, law, and economics, in both domestic and global settings, which reveals structural political and social questions that need to be addressed. The article highlights the role that hostages fulfilled as “gifts” in premodern international relations when hostages were granted and not taken as they are today. I underline the role they notably performed as elements of proto-diplomacy. I show the reasons why the function of hostages has changed over time by underlining the importance of the later Middle A... (shrink)

Este artículo examina las cuestiones culturales y los supuestos relacionados con la adopción de las tecnologías, al igual que los principios éticos aplicados a ellas. Se analizan cuestiones prácticas y problemas éticos que han surgido por el uso de la tecnología. Además, se desarrolla el concepto de infoesfera como un mundo inmaterial, en el marco de una ética informacional donde coexisten e interactúan las entidades informacionales. Para la Filosofía de la información, el elemento fundamental de la infoesfera es la información. (...) La infoesfera es equiparable a la totalidad del ser. (shrink)

Character education is an increasingly discussed topic drawing upon virtue ethics as a moral theory. Scholars have predominantly understood educating character as a process that entails the formation of certain distinct character traits or functions through practice and habituation. However, these approaches present some problems. This paper explores the educational implications of various accounts focusing on the relationship between _phronesis_ and other virtues. In particular, our focus will be on those that Miller ( 2023 ) has classified as Standard Model (...) and Eliminativist Model of practical wisdom. Starting from these accounts, we will outline three specific problems that the latter models appear to generate at a theoretical level in character education. Finally, we will address the task of demonstrating why the monist account of moral virtue recently proposed by the Aretai group—which conceives being virtuous in possessing _phronesis_ understood as ethical expertise—might offer a refined response to these challenges. In addition, we will illustrate three educational pathways that can emerge from the same model. (shrink)

"Some sentences contain no overt quantifier, yet are interpreted quantificationally, e.g., Plumbers are available (entailing that some plumbers are available), or Plumbers are intelligent (whose entailment is less clear, but seems to be saying that a large number of plumbers are intelligent). Where does the quantifier come from? In this book, Ariel Cohen makes the novel proposal that the quantifier is not simply an empty category, but is generated by reinterpretations mechanisms, which are governed by well specified principles. He (...) demonstrates how the puzzling and sometimes mysterious properties of such sentences can be naturally derived from the reinterpretation mechanisms that generate them. The resulting picture has substantial implications that language contains hidden elements, underlying its surface structure"--. (shrink)

The paper springs from a position that economic theory is an abstract investigation of the concepts and considerations involved in real life economic decision making rather than a tool for predicting or describing real behavior. It is argued that when experimental economics is motivated by theory, it should not look to verify the predictions of theory but instead should focus on verifying that the considerations contained in the economic model are sound and in common use. It is argued that when (...) theory is motivated by experiments, the theorist should not be hasty in adopting new functional forms but should try to identify the basic psychological themes which are revealed exposed by the experiment. Finally, some critical comments on the methodology of experimental economics are presented. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Solarpunk Conference by From Imagination to ActionAriel Kroon and Kees SchullerFrom Imagination to Action, The Solarpunk Conference, June 24, 2023, VirtualThe Solarpunk Conference was born out of the desire to see an accessible space dedicated to discussions of solarpunk. With solarpunk growing in popularity in both popular and academic circles, the need for such a space seemed obvious to the organizers. The organizers also felt the need (...) to bridge academic and popular conversations in a way that was productive and opened further discussion, as the disconnect between the academic and popular spheres is often damaging to social movements. [End Page 634]This was especially important for solarpunk because of its nature as being built from below. Solarpunk is crowdsourced, having evolved over the years from social media aesthetic to literature to social movement, with few canonical critical texts. Taking into consideration the distributed democratic nature at the heart of solarpunk, the conference aimed to be accessible to the widest array of people possible: in this regard, the conference was incredibly successful. As a remote conference, the event was already more financially and practically accessible than an in-person event. Tickets were available to those across the financial spectrum, with a large percentage of our tickets being pay-what-you-can, or free to those in need; live captioning was provided on the day of, volunteers were available throughout the day to address accessibility concerns, and the ability for attendees to request live translations or other accessibility options was also provided. Further, while still retaining academic integrity and value, the majority of the presentations were legible to the largely non-expert, non-academic audience.The other key goal for the conference was to create a space for conversation and networking between otherwise disconnected members of the solarpunk community. To this end, alongside the Zoom webinars used for presentations, a Discord server was created for attendees that saw consistent engagement, networking, and project sharing, further allowing presenters to engage with attendees after their talks, enabling extended Q+A sessions that otherwise would have not been possible within schedule constraints. This hybrid model between Zoom and Discord proved incredibly effective, allowing for a wide range of interactions, and encouraging the community building and idea sharing that were key to this conference.Throughout the conference, themes of climate grief and the disaffection and despair of late-stage neoliberal capitalism returned to the fore, with speakers positioning solarpunk as a way to combat these negative affects. Mirroring these themes, most speakers emphasized the necessity of direct (solarpunk) action to escape the dystopian long-present of contemporary corpo-capitalism. Perhaps because of these same themes appearing in the movement as a whole, solarpunk is often reduced to an aesthetic of green utopia, which is an unfair stereotype given that many strands of solarpunk thought could be labeled as anti-utopian or in the vein of critical utopian theory. Solarpunk’s explicit aim to imagine sociopolitical and economic realities beyond late-stage capitalist neoliberalism requires it to divest from what Lauren Berlant calls “stupid optimism”—“the faith that adjustment to certain forms or practices [End Page 635] of living and thinking... will secure one’s happiness” (2011, 126). Solarpunk rejects classical utopian picturing of a future world that operates according to the logics of the present, which in turn have been shaped by the (often racist, sexist, and classist) logics of the past (cf. Williams 2018; Kroon 2021). It is also important to note that solarpunk does not adhere to a singular vision of the future but instead acknowledges the biodiversity of nonhuman nature and the diversity of the human experience, and so encourages multiple futures that serve the peoples and lands on which they rest.The conference began with opening remarks by one of the organizers, Lindsay Jane, followed by a land acknowledgment by Cheryle Chagnon-Greyeyes, traditional knowledge-keeper and Indigenous activist from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Treaty Six. Chagnon-Greyeyes welcomed participants in nehiyaw (Cree), acknowledging her location in Mohkinstsis (Calgary, Alberta) and the Indigenous nations there, and reminding attendees to think about their connection to the land that they were on. She shared a teaching... (shrink)

What is the relationship between human rights and the rights of states? Roughly, while cosmopolitans insist that international morality must regard as basic the interests of individuals, statists maintain that the state is of fundamental moral significance. This article defends a relational version of statism. Human rights are ultimately grounded in a relational norm of reciprocal independence and set limits to the exercise of public authority, but, contra the cosmopolitan, the state is of fundamental moral significance. A relational account promises (...) to justify a limited conception of state sovereignty while avoiding the familiar cosmopolitan criticisms of statist accounts. (shrink)

Our knowledge about the world is often expressed by generic sentences, yet their meanings are far from clear. This book provides answers to central problems concerning generics: what do they mean? Which factors affect their interpretation? How can one reason with generics? Cohen proposes that the meanings of generics are probability judgments, and shows how this view accounts for many of their puzzling properties, including lawlikeness. Generics are evaluated with respect to alternatives. Cohen argues that alternatives are induced by the (...) kind as well as by the predicated property, and thus provides a uniform account of the varied interpretations of generics. He studies the formal properties of alternatives and provides a compositional account of their derivation by focus and presupposition. Cohen uses his semantics of generics to provide a formal characterization of adequate default reasoning, and proves some desirable results of this formalism. (shrink)

In this article, I develop three conceptual innovations within the area of formal metatheory, and present a computer program, called Reconstructor, that implements those developments. The first development consists in a methodology for testing formal reconstructions of scientific theories, which involves checking both whether translations of paradigmatically successful applications into models satisfy the formalisation of the laws, and also whether unsuccessful applications do not. I show how Reconstructor can help carry this out, since it allows the end-user to specify a (...) formal language, input axioms and models formulated in that language, and then ask if the models satisfy the axioms. The second innovation is the introduction of incomplete models (for which the denotation of some terms is missing) into scientific metatheory, in order to represent cases of missing information. I specify the paracomplete semantics built into Reconstructor to deal with sentences where denotation failures occur. The third development consists in a new way of explicating the structuralist notion of a determination method, by equating them with algorithms. This allows determination methods to be loaded into Reconstructor and then executed within a model to find out the value of a previously non-denoting term (i.e. it allows the formal reconstruction to make predictions). This, in turn, can help test the reconstruction in a different way. Finally, I conclude with some suggestions about additional uses the program may have. (shrink)

Claiming rights against one another is a perfectly familiar phenomenon. We express the elementary thought you cannot do that to me in a variety of ways. And yet, in spite of the perfect familiarity of this phenomenon, the two standard philosophical theories of rights face notorious difficulties in accounting for it. My aim in this paper is to introduce a distinctive, second-personal account of rights. I will call this the independence theory of rights, the view that rights are specifications of (...) a basic right to independence against another. And I will argue that by taking as basic the second-personal thought you cannot do that to me the independence theory best illuminates the basic phenomenon of having rights against one another. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.2 (2002) 260-272 [Access article in PDF] Tragic Conflict and Greatness of Character Ariel Meira IT IS A SURPRISING FACT that some of our best literary examples of greatness of character are of persons acting in a way that involves them in a terrible burden of guilt. As spectators we perceive Oedipus, in Sophocles's Oedipus the King, 1 as one who upon discovering the identity (...) of his father and mother affirms that he bears guilt for killing the former and committing incest with the latter, and we typically concur in some vague way with his affirmation. 2 We do not, after all, think that his affirmation is merely the consequence of some confusion about morals on his part, and that he would have been more justified in treating his discovery with a light conscience. Furthermore, it seems that our conception of his greatness is intimately bound up with our being acquainted with him as someone who acted so as to render himself profoundly guilty in this way. What is paradoxical is that moral taint would be expected to reduce our admiration for a character and our attribution of greatness to it. Why then should noteworthy paradigms of greatness of character be morally tainted characters? Can we make sense of the idea that some kinds of guiltiness might be constitutive of greatness of character?As it is well-known, Aristotle says that in order for a tragedy best to achieve its desired effect, it should portray a protagonist "who is not pre-eminent in moral virtue, who passes to bad fortune not through vice or wickedness, but because of some hamartia...." 3 The term "hamartia" is variously translated as "piece of ignorance," "miscalculation," and "error of judgment," but as O. B. Hardison notes, it must be treated as designating a moral flaw, because it renders the protagonist [End Page 260] less than "pre-eminent in moral virtue." 4 However, even if the term is interpreted as covering what I have described as the moral taint associated with greatness of character, it should be clear that Aristotle does not provide here an answer to my question. At best he can be viewed as explaining why morally tainted characters of this sort are crucial to achieving tragic effect. He is not explaining how it is that such characters can be viewed as paradigms of greatness.I propose not to treat this paradox in its most general form, but rather by confining my attention to an interesting subclass of cases. What I have in mind are cases in which a protagonist finds himself or herself in what I shall call circumstances of tragic conflict. Such circumstances determine that a choice must be made between two (or perhaps more) courses of action, even though each of the courses involves the violation of an important moral claim, or the destruction of a crucial value. As spectators or readers, we typically perceive the protagonist as emerging with a heavy burden of guilt (much in the way noted above regarding Oedipus), and we recognize that he or she was bound to emerge guilty, no matter which course of action would have been chosen. Cases such as that of Agamemnon (bearing guilt for the sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia in Aeschylus's Agamemnon), 5 of Jephthah (again bearing guilt for the sacrifice of his daughter, in Judges 11), 6 and of Orestes (bearing guilt for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra in Euripides's Orestes) 7 belong quite uncontroversially to this subclass. 8These protagonists make difficult choices, and carry them out with courage and resolution, qualities which explain to some extent our perception of them as possessing greatness of character. But in making their choice, they necessarily render themselves guilty, whether or not they have made the correct choice (assuming there is a correct choice in the circumstances). And we sense that suffering the peculiarly poignant pain which accompanies their guilty action is at least partly constitutive of their greatness. Clearly, we are faced again with the paradox of the association of guilt with greatness of character.In... (shrink)