In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PLATO'S STATESMAN STORY: THE BIRTH OF FICTION RECONCEIVED by John Tomasi In "Plato's Atlantis Story and the Birth of Fiction," Christopher Gill wants to distinguish the story ofAdantis in the Critias from Plato's earlier stories—like diat in the Statesman.1 These stories, Gill claims, belong to different literary genres. While the Statesman story is but another example of fable, the Adantis story of the Critias represents the first example—the (...) first in Plato and indeed the earliest in all Western written culture—of an exciting new literary genre: narrative fiction. Gill describes narrative fiction as a kind ofgame into which the author invites his audience to join. The invitation to play the game of fiction is an invitation "to share in the willing and conscious acceptance of the false as true" (p. 65). The audience is provided the opportunity to become "willfully self-deceived" about the story's truth. Perhaps the main constraint on a story's belonging to the genre of fiction is the author's ability to transmit this special invitation to his reader. Gill says one major way to do this is by a framework of introductory signals which are mixed in a certain way. The Adantis story, as Gill claims, seems to be framed with signals that a self-deception game is about to begin. Socrates says Critias is like a playwright competing in front of an audience (108a). Gill reads line 107 to mean that Critias is concerned direcdy with "the problem of giving his narrative the illusory realism which he says audiences require." Also, Gill says, "the fact that it is a game is signalled by the overt claim to historical truth in a context in which we are not disposed to accept the claim" (p. 72). Plato thus introduces the Adantis story with a delicate mixture ofconflictingclaims about the story's factual status. Gill suggests the reader should interpret this special mixture of signals as being a Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 348-358 John Tomasi349 sort of invitation to "make pretend," to play a pleasant game, to allow die reader to become willfully self-deceived. Within die Adantis story itself diere are further marks of die fiction genre. Narrative fiction can be a compelling game, and good fiction writers often slip into the game themselves, writing with a concern for detail and with a word choice so sensitive that the reader may feel that die writer too must believe in this fictional world. The Adantis story certainly exhibits this mark of fiction. As Gill puts it, in writing about Adantis Plato seems at times to have become "momentarily infatuated with the world he is creating."2 Such infatuation, exhibited especially perhaps in the detailed descriptions in the Critias of the splendors of the Adantean city and in the passionate portrayal of the growth of hubris in the citizens' hearts, is perhaps what gives the Adantis story some of its special potency, what makes it especially gripping to us (116c—ll7e; 121a-c). Clearly, it is a story with which writer as well as reader might develop an intimate relationship. In Plato's Atlantis story the framing signals are mixed with a deliberate subtlety, and the reader at times senses the writer's infatuation with his own tale. The Adantis story is thus crafted to get from the reader what Plato is after: "a willed self-deception, a chosen suspension ofincredulity for the duration of the story." Gill concludes, "This new element of intended complicity in the fictional game makes his work the first piece of deliberately fictional narrative in Greek literature" (p. 76). Gill's argumentthat the Adantis story belongs to the genre ofnarrative fiction is provocative and on the whole convincing. But is the Adantis story really the first Western instance of that genre? Is it even Plato's first attempt at fiction? I think it is not. I would like now to examine the storywithin the Statesman, a storywhich Gill says was probablywritten before the Adantis story. Might the Statesman story be a still earlier instance of narrative fiction? The signals framing the Statesman story are mixed indeed. At first, the Stranger tells young Socrates that... (shrink)

I should like to offer three criticisms of Professor Cobb’s challenging paper. The first is that he has failed to explain how divine efficient causation in the world is possible. The second is that he did not succeed in showing that such divine causality is actual. Finally, he fell short of demonstrating that it is necessary to introduce the idea of God in a philosophy that is to give an adequate description of the world.

The importance of understanding human cooperation urges further integration between the relevant disciplines. I suggest ideas for bottom-up and top-down integration. Evolutionary psychology can investigate the kinds of reasoning it was adaptive for humans to employ. Disciplines can learn from each other's approaches to similar problems, and I give an example for economics and evolutionary biology.

This third volume in the definitive edition of Dewey's early work opens with his tribute to George Sylvester Morris, the former teacher who had brought Dewey to the University of Michigan. Morris's death in 1889 left vacant the Department of Philosophy chairmanship and led to Dewey's returning to fill that post after a year's stay at Minnesota. Appearing here, among all his writings from 1889 through 1892, are Dewey's earliest comprehensive statements on logic and his first book on ethics. Dewey's (...) marked copy of the galley-proof for his important article The Present Position of Logical Theory, recently discovered among the papers of the Open Court Publishing Company, is used as the basis for the text, making available for the first time his final changes and corrections. The textual studies that make The Early Works unique among American philosophical editions are reported in detail. One of these, A Note on Applied Psychology, documents the fact that Dewey did not co-author this book frequently attributed to him. Six brief unsigned articles written in 1891 for a University of Michigan student publication, the Inlander, have been identified as Dewey's and are also included in this volume. In both style and content, these articles reflect Dewey's conviction that philosophy should be used as a means of illuminating the contemporary scene; thus they add a new dimension to present knowledge of his early writing. (shrink)

An analysis of Gibbon's five signs of civilizational decay.

This collection of recent articles by leading scholars is designed to illuminate one of the greatest and most influential philosophical books of all time. It includes incisive commentary on every major theme and argument in the Meditations, and will be valuable not only to philosophers but to historians, theologians, literary scholars, and interested general readers.

We must agree, I think, with Frank Ebersole that there is something preposterous in supposing that the God of religious belief, the God who handed down tablets to Moses on Mt. Sinai, etc., should be proven to exist by the ontological argument. Indeed, when we place the one, the ontological argument, by the side of the other, the God of religious belief, there seems hardly to be any connection between them. But if we agree to this perception of things, what (...) sense can we make of the ontological argument, for example, the “pull” that it sometimes exerts on us? (shrink)

In his analysis of the logic of history and social sciences Mill was much influenced by French writers of the Saint Simonian school and especially Auguste Comte. This school divided history into 'organic' and 'transitional' periods. In organic periods human personalities and institutions are coherently organized in a stable system, the workings of each part complementing and reinforcing the workings of the others. But this cannot last forever, stability is never absolute: the system starts to come apart, there follows a (...) period of more or less disorder and confusion, in which the parts of society pull against or collide with one another, personalities and institutions do not suit one another, people are dissatisfied and disappointed and change becomes rapid - until out of the struggle another stable organization develops, another 'organic' period. So on this view it is possible to draw non-arbitrary lines across history, to recognise distinct 'periods', though some of these will be periods of transition or revolutionary periods without any high degree of coherence. (shrink)

This chapter will examine two puzzles that percolate Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (PITC). They concern: (1) whether or not memory is pictorial and (2) whether or not the temporal determinations (past, now, future, etc.) are categories. Considering these aporetic discussions helps us to understand the time diagrams Husserl uses, as well as some of the motivation behind Husserl’s talk of the two intentionalities of retention and his talk of the time-constituting flow. Moreover, this approach (...) to PITC helps to highlight the role that aporetic considerations play in phenomenological investigation more generally. (shrink)

The dissertation is conceived as a major study of the controversial philosopher of world history, Oswald Spengler, as the exponent of a distinctive variety of political realism. The relationship of his ideas to German historicism and international theory is probed. The question of the historical inevitability of the eclipse of Europe by the ascendant superpowers and the epochal significance of the emergence of the American Century is considered in light of his philosophy. Spengler's many lectures and treatises on politics are (...) carefully examined in order to aid in harvesting his enduring wisdom on the art of statecraft, his insights into its ethical dilemma, and his reflections on the crisis of international politics in the twentieth century. The key thesis that Spengler transformed the cyclical philosophy he originally elaborated in his major work, The Decline of the West, summoning forth an arresting vision of world history as a soaring spiral culminating in the destruction of modern civilization, is buttressed through extensive quotation from posthumously published archival material. The actuality of his profoundly tragic thought, which illuminates the apocalyptic specter which haunts contemporary world affairs--the global ecological crisis, the cessation of economic growth in the overpopulated periphery and the danger of the collapse of the American-sponsored post-World War II international economic order, and the unending peril of a global war waged with thermonuclear, chemical, biological, and conventional weapons is explored. A provocative neo-Spenglerian scenario of the rapid deterioration of American economic power and the disintegration of the pax Americana, based on the classic analogy between Rome and America is adumbrated as an especially pessimistic contribution to the stormy debate about American "relative" decline. Finally, the significance of his philosophy to international political thought, particularly the utility of his pessimism in guiding statesmen in retarding the inevitable decline of the pax Americana as well as its value in exposing the guarded optimism at the core of "pessimistic" modern realist thought and in raising the question of its ultimate exhaustion in the face of the insurmountable crisis of modernity, is summarized. (shrink)

As everyone here knows, any criticism of Zionism is always met with accusations of antisemitism. This leads one to ask, what exactly is the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism? In answering this question, our guide will be the writings of Palestinian philosopher named Fayez Sayegh, who wrote in 1960, “if anti-Jewishness did not exist, Zionists would have to create it.”1 Of course, this claim clashes with the commonsense idea that Zionism and the Israeli state are strict antidotes to antisemitism. Why (...) does Sayegh say this? What evidence does he have to support it? And what might his answers mean for the IHRA definition of antisemitism? (shrink)

Wolfhart Pannenberg's engagement with the natural sciences is surveyed. A critique is given of his treatment of these themes: the concept of a field; contingency; the role of the future.