This article overviews the scholarly history of research centred on the Socratic problem. Eight breaking points in this history are identified and the developments emerging from them are analysed. 1) The pre-history of the Socratic problem began with the varying and conflicting portrayals of Socrates that sprang up during his lifetime and shortly after his death. 2) The problem was first explicitly admitted in the 18 th century with the earliest historical investigations critically pursuing the truth behind the fiction. 3) (...) The problem was then established in research in the 19 th century as a result of the influential remarks of Schleiermacher and Hegel on the discrepancies in Plato’s and Xenophon’s portrayals of Socrates. 4) In the beginning of the 20 th century, an emerging disapproval of Xenophon as a reliable source was accompanied by an elevation of the source value of Plato. 5) The crisis of the mid-20 th century took the form of a denial of the very possibility of reaching genuine knowledge of the historical Socrates. 6) The reaction to the crisis assumed the two-folded shape of a broadened study of the sources and a partial reappraisal of Plato’s trustworthiness. 7) Beginning from the 1990s, an optimistic program claiming that all of Plato’s early dialogues recreates the philosophy of the historical Socrates gained ground. 8) Today’s research climate is characterised by a renewed pessimism regarding the possibility of approaching the historical Socrates. (shrink)

This essay comprises two chapters from the first part of Bollnow’s book on moods, namely the second chapter on the concept of Stimmung and the third chapter on Stimmungen as the sustaining foundation of the soul. It argues that moods constitute the simplest and most original form in which human life comes to know itself. Moods are understood as a specific harmony between, first, the inner and outer world; second, the states of the body and the soul; and, third, the (...) individual faculties of the soul. Moods differ from emotions in the narrow sense, which are always intentionally directed towards a specific object, whereas moods do not have any specific object; they are states of being, structuring and coloring human existence as a whole. Hence, no system of moods is provided, but their extensive diversity is indicated. Furthermore, transient, unsteady, or “moody” moods are distinguished from persistent or basic moods. (shrink)

Inquisitive modal logic, InqML, is a generalisation of standard Kripke-style modal logic. In its epistemic incarnation, it extends standard epistemic logic to capture not just the information that agents have, but also the questions that they are interested in. Technically, InqML fits within the family of logics based on team semantics. From a model-theoretic perspective, it takes us a step in the direction of monadic second-order logic, as inquisitive modal operators involve quantification over sets of worlds. We introduce and investigate (...) the natural notion of bisimulation equivalence in the setting of InqML. We compare the expressiveness of InqML and first-order logic in the context of relational structures with two sorts, one for worlds and one for information states, and characterise inquisitive modal logic as the bisimulation invariant fragment of first-order logic over various natural classes of two-sorted structures. (shrink)