In this book, William H. F. Altman argues that it is not order of composition but reading order that makes Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, Crito, and Phaedo “late dialogues,” and shows why Plato’s decision to interpolate the notoriously “late” Sophist and Statesman between Euthyphro and Apology deserves more respect from interpreters.

Eldon Soifer and Béla Szabados argue that hypocrisy poses a problem for consequentialism because the hypocrite, in pretending to live up to a norm he or she does not really accept, acts in ways that have good results. They argue, however, that consequentialists can meet this challenge and show the wrongness of hypocrisy by adopting a desirefulfilment version of their theory. This essay raises some doubts about Soifer and Szabados's proposal and argues that consequentialism has no difficulty coming to grips (...) with hypocrisy, whether or not one favours a desire-fulfilment account of the good. (shrink)

In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, prediction error, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of prediction error may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or novelty of (...) a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioral error, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been the subject of intense interest as a locus of cognitive control. Several computational models have been proposed to account for a range of effects, including error detection, conflict monitoring, error likelihood prediction, and numerous other effects observed with single-unit neurophysiology, fMRI, and lesion studies. Here, we review the state of computational models of cognitive control and offer a new theoretical synthesis of the mPFC as signaling response–outcome predictions. This new synthesis has two interacting (...) components. The first component learns to predict the various possible outcomes of a planned action, and the second component detects discrepancies between the actual and intended responses; the detected discrepancies in turn update the outcome predictions. This single construct is consistent with a wide array of performance monitoring effects in mPFC and suggests a unifying account of the cognitive role of medial PFC in performance monitoring. (shrink)

In "The Cerebral Code," he has solidly embedded his ideas in experimental neurophysiology and neuropharmacology, deriving from his decades in the laboratory.

The pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student, is the subject of Plato the Teacher. “The crisis of the Republic” refers to the decisive moment in his central dialogue when philosopher-readers realize that Plato’s is challenging them to choose justice by going back down into the dangerous Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good, as both Socrates and Cicero did.

ABSTRACT:Public attitudes toward science in the United States can profoundly affect national well-being, and even national security. We live in a time when these attitudes are considerably more negative than usual. This critical assessment identifies a number of contributors to public antipathy toward science, some of which are intrinsic to the nature of science and as old as science itself, and some of which are external to science, have arisen recently, and may be unique to the present. Historic examples of (...) scientific developments and challenges and two major current examples (the COVID-19 pandemic and anthropogenic climate change) illustrate the interplay of science and public attitudes and actions, and the development and consequences of antipathy toward science. The problem areas that contribute to public antipathy in turn suggest strategies that may mitigate the antipathy, although some social and political factors will impose limits on possible mitigation. The energy required to sustain an acceptable level of civilization needs to be acknowledged, along with the need to minimize anthropogenic climate change. (shrink)

In this book, William H. F. Altman considers the pedagogical connections behind the post-Republic dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of their Reading Order.

Aristocrats and Archaeologists: An Edwardian Journey on the Nile. By Toby Wilkinson and Julian Platt. Cairo: the American University in Cairo Press. 2017, Pp. xv + 144, illus., maps. $29.95. [Distributed by Oxford University Press].

This volume offers an unusual variety of topics presented during the sixth annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy.

Policymakers, legislators, scientists, thinkers, military strategists, academics, and all those interested in understanding the future want to know how twenty-first century scientific advance should be regulated in war and peace. This book tries to provide some of the answers. Part I summarises some important elements of the relevant law. In Part II, individual chapters are devoted to cyber capabilities, highly automated and autonomous systems, human enhancement technologies, human degradation techniques, the regulation of nanomaterials, novel naval technologies, outer space, synthetic brain (...) technologies beyond artificial intelligence, and biometrics. The final part of the book notes important synergies that emerge between the different technologies and legal provisions, existing and proposed, assesses notions of convergence and of composition in international law, and provides some concluding remarks. The new technologies, their uses, and their regulation in war and peace are presented to the reader who is invited to draw conclusions. (shrink)

In a recent discussion article in this journal, Gila Sher responds to some of my criticisms of her work on what she calls the formal-structural account of logical consequence. In the present paper I reply and attempt to advance the discussion in a constructive way. Unfortunately, Sher seems to have not fully understood my 1997. Several of the defenses she mounts in her 2001 are aimed at views I do not hold and did not advance in my 1997. Most prominent (...) among these are her claims that I reject the formal-structural account, because it licenses “unnatural” logical constants, and that I consider the “truth-functional criterion” for connectives “a paradigm of a successful criterion of logicality”. Both of these claims are simply false, as even a moderately careful reading of my 1997 will show. Other charges she makes have some basis in fact but are inaccurate. For example, she says that I claim that FS is “neutral with regard to the apriority of logic,” and that this neutrality “renders it inconsistent”. What I actually say is that Sher’s acceptance of the neutrality in question is “inconsistent with part of the legacy of Tarski, a legacy that she finds very congenial”, not that FS itself is inconsistent. More interestingly, she misunderstands my claim about the apriority of logic, and clarification of this misunderstanding suggests two distinct ways in which logic might be held to be free of empirical influence. It is also noteworthy that Sher’s statements about the apriority of logic constitute both a change in the position she took in her 1991 and, although she seems not to realize it, an admission that she does not take issue with one of my major criticisms. (shrink)

This Element critically surveys the full range of G. E. Moore's ethical thought, including: his rejection of naturalism in favor of the view that 'good' designates a simple, indefinable property, which cannot be identified with or reduced to any other property; his understanding of intrinsic value, his doctrine of organic wholes, his repudiation of hedonism, and his substantive account of the most important goods and evils; and his critique of egoism and subjectivism and his elaboration of a non-hedonistic variant of (...) utilitarianism that, among other things, creatively blends aspects of act- and rule-oriented versions of that theory. (shrink)

This book looks back at the simpler versions of mental life in apes, Neanderthals, and our ancestors, back before our burst of creativity started 50,000 years...

Demonstrates that Plato and Xenophon ought to be regarded less as rivals and more as engaged in a dialogue advancing a common goal of preserving the Socratic legacy.

In the second half of the twentieth century, a surprising change in the notion of scientific truth gained ground when an evolutionary cosmology made the Newtonian world machine into no more than a passing phase of the cosmos, subject to exceptions in the neighborhood of Black Holes and other unusual objects. Physical and chemical laws ceased to be eternal and universal and became local and changeable, that is, fundamentally historical instead, and faced an uncertain, changeable future just as they had (...) in the initial phases of the cosmos.The earth sciences along with biology had become historical in the nineteenth century; and the Big Bang cosmology in effect brought physics and chemistry into line, allowing venturesome intellects to concoct a new all-embracing worldview that recognizes the catalytic role of the observer in defining what is observed, and how different levels of local complexity provoke new and surprising phenomena--including terrestrial life forms, and most notably for us, humanly-constructed symbolic meanings--of which science is only one example.The article then argues that it is time for historians to take note of the imperial role thus thrust upon their discipline by making a sustained effort to enlarge their views and explore the career of humankind on earth as a whole, thus making human history an integral part of the emerging scientific and evolutionary worldview.Tentative suggestions of how this might be addressed, focusing on changes in patterns of communication that expanded the scale of human cooperation, and thus conduced to survival, follow. Dance, then speech, were early breakthroughs expanding the practicable size of wandering human bands; then caravans and shipping allowed civilizations to arise; writing expanded the scale of coordination; warfare and trade harshly imposed best practice across wide areas of Eurasia and Africa and kept the skills of that part of the world ahead of what the peoples of other continents and islands had at their command. Then with the crossing of the oceans after 1492 our One World began to emerge and swiftly assumed its contemporary shape with further improvements in the range and capacity of communication--for example, printing, mechanically-powered transport, instantaneous data transmission--with consequences for human society and earth's ecosystem yet to be experienced.Much remains to be investigated and, in particular, interactions between the history of human symbolic meanings and the history of other equilibria--ecological, chemical, physical--within which we exist needs further study. But with suitable effort, history can perhaps become scientific and the emerging scientific evolutionary worldview begin to achieve logical completeness by bringing humankind within its scope. (shrink)

Interrogating received knowledge is constitutive to any critical project, and recently there has been a wave of scholarship which argues for locating the origin of racist-thinking prior to modern Europe—even prior to the Common Era—without any real consideration of the potential dangers accompanying such a seismic redefinition. By expanding “racism” to include potentially any pre-modern xenophobic or ethnicist atrocity, even well-meaning scholarship dilutes the peculiar injustice of modern Europe’s most successful epistemological weapon. As a result, we lose any criteria to (...) distinguish ubiquitous oppressive projects from specifically racist-projects of hegemony and domination. However laudable its intent, such scholarship falls prey to methodological, epistemological, and practical errors that hamstring the ameliorative impact of contemporary anti-racist work while ironically diminishing racism’s impact. For if every conflict is racist, then contemporary colorblindness is correct: if white supremacy isn’t particularly white, then racism is a distinction without a difference. (shrink)

Recent Plato scholarship has grown increasingly comfortable with the notion that Plato’s art of writing brings his readers into the dialogue, challenging them to respond to deliberate errors or lacunae in the text. Drawing inspiration from Stanley Fish’s seminal reading of Satan’s speeches in Paradise Lost, this paper considers the narrative of Timaeus as deliberately unreliable, and argues that the actively critical reader is “the missing fourth” with which the dialogue famously begins. By continuing Timaeus with Critias—a dialogue that ends (...) with a missing speech—Plato points to the kind of reader he expects: one who can answer Critias’ question : ὡς μὲν γὰρ οὐκ εὖ τὰ παρὰ σοῦ λεχθέντα εἴρηται, τίς ἂν ἐπιχειρήσειεν ἔμφρων λέγειν. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.

Relatively new and now ubiquitous, smartphones and tablet computers are changing our lives by asking us to rethink the ways that we conduct business, form and maintain relationships, and read books and magazines. In the same capacity, mobile devices are redefining how health care is administered, monitored, and delivered through specialized technologies called medical apps (applications). In general, apps are pieces of software that can be installed and run on a variety of hardware platforms, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop (...) computers. Medical apps, in particular, refer to a wide variety of software that focuses on health care (loosely defined). Whether these apps target the health-care .. (shrink)

In _The Sequential Imperative_ William Edmondson describes the functional specification of the brain. This new approach to Cognitive Science depends on detailed understanding of speech, but the outcome is an understanding of the functionality of the brain in any species.