This note is a sequel to Huber. It is shown that obeying a normative principle relating counterfactual conditionals and conditional beliefs, viz. the royal rule, is a necessary and sufficient means to attaining a cognitive end that relates true beliefs in purely factual, non-modal propositions and true beliefs in purely modal propositions. Along the way I will sketch my idealism about alethic or metaphysical modality.

The Port-Royal Logic includes a brief discussion of modal propositions, containing several mnemonic devices for rules of equivalence governing the possibility, necessity, impossibility, and contingency of propositions. When the mnemonics are decoded, it can be seen that these rules treat possibility and contingency as formally equivalent modes. The aim of this paper is twofold: to show that this identification of possibility and contingency follows from the Logic’s formal treatment of those modes; and to show that such a treatment of (...) these modes conflicts with claims the authors make in other contexts. In particular, the equivalence of possibility and contingency conflicts with the Cartesian principle that whatever is clearly and distinctly conceivable is possible—a principle that Arnauld and Nicole explicitly endorse elsewhere in the Logic. Why, then, would the authors adopt such equivalence rules? The paper concludes with a discussion of the historical precedents for these rules: they were a standard feature of Scholastic logic textbooks in seventeenth century France. It is likely that Arnauld and Nicole simply reproduced the rules for this reason, without recognizing that they were a poor fit for a Cartesian logic textbook like the Port-Royal Logic. (shrink)

"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we (...) obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature. (shrink)

When the Macedonians had conquered Greece, city-states continued to exist along-side the more powerful kingdoms, and were often forced to accommodate their policies to the wishes of the powerful kings who were, in theory, their allies. If kings and cities were to co-operate effectively, there would need to be some way of adapting the authority of royal wishes to the theoretical rights of the cities to self-determination. The contrast between the powers of a king, theoretically all-powerful within his kingdom, (...) and the autonomy of a city did not need to be total. Aristotle, who was acquainted with the Macedonian kingdom, made a clear distinction between kingship and tyranny, between rule by the law and autocracy. He listed Macedonia alongside Sparta and Epirus as kingdoms which were ruled in the interests of all. (shrink)

This case study discusses the scope of responsibilities and the basis of legitimacy of multinational corporations in a complex operating environment. In January 2013 a precedent was set when Shell was held liable in The Hague for oil pollution in the Niger Delta. The landmark ruling climaxed the ongoing dispute over the scope of Shell’s responsibilities for both the company’s positive and negative impact. Shell’s was considered a forerunner in corporate social responsibility and had even assumed public responsibilities in a (...) context of a public responsibility void. However, the company remained a regular target of civil society activism and legal proceedings concerned with malpractice. The court case attracted international attention for its novelty and increasing media and civil society pressure required immediate action. How can Shell respond to this negative publicity to keep its license to operate? What is the scope of the company’s responsibilities in such a controversial human rights context? Students are expected to discuss these questions going beyond a simple moralistic or liability thinking. They are encouraged to take into account the complex structural processes that connect persons and institutions in very different social and geographical positions. The experiences of Shell are an excellent case in point since attention is drawn to the background conditions of globally operating companies, in which the isolation of perpetrators based on causality is not realistic. The case also reveals the particular challenges, which MNCs face in the context of increasing demands to take on public responsibilities while respecting their economic mandate. (shrink)

This article is about the rules of succession in Bronze Age Greece as reflected in Greek tradition. The question as to whether or not the figures dealt with by this tradition are historical is of little relevance to the present discussion: what I seek to recover is not the history of one royal house or another but rather the recurring patterns according to which the members of these houses – no matter whether real or fictitious – were expected to (...) behave when it came to the question of accession to the throne and transmission of the kingship to their successors. (shrink)

I briefly consider why Descartes stopped work on the _Rules_ towards the end of my paper. My main concern is to accurately characterize the project represented in the _Rules_, especially in its relation to early-modern logic.

Inscriptions of Assyrian kings disclose that these rulers maintained and improved the land near the palace. This paper brings together the pictorial versions of what may be described as the “Assyrian royal landscape,” that is, outdoor scenery designed for royal purposes and represented on the stone panels that lined the walls of the palaces at Nimrud, Nineveh, and Dur-Sharrukin. The royal landscapes differ from reign to reign, since they each reflect some aspect of the particular king’s (...) class='Hi'>rule. The description and discussion of the individual scenes also take into account the rationale behind their creation. Textual and archaeological data are supportive additions, and the previous studies of other scholars are also considered. The discussion of scenes carved on the stone panels follows in chronological sequence the reigns of four Assyrian kings: Ashurnasirpal II, Sargon II, Sennacherib, and Ashurbanipal. The chronological presentation demonstrates that royal landscape imagery in the sculptural arts progressed as a method of documentation by the Assyrian kings. (shrink)

This article uses Jeremy Bentham's notion of disambiguation, which links language to power and ‘sinister interest’, to analyse criticisms of the Royal Academy of Arts by Benthamites and Philosophic Radicals at the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures of 1835/6. This practice of disambiguation aimed to produce a distinction between the Royal Academy of Arts and the publicly funded art school. I situate this activity within the linguistic turn taken by Bentham's ethics, and its relevance to a dilemma (...) of pedagogy in commercial society framed by Adam Smith. Smith's dilemma turns on the conflict between the requirement for a pedagogy that conforms to the principle of free trade, and an equally binding requirement for a virtue ethical model of pedagogy that offers a remedy for the corrupting effects of commerce on character. Adam Smith's support for private academies of art asserted a hierarchy of virtue ethics over utility, thus safeguarding autonomous ethical reasoning within capitalist forms of social life. Bentham's thought, in contrast, eschews the link between ethics and character, and places ethics itself within normative rules of language and cognition. (shrink)

This paper aims to construct a comprehensive theory of royal succession of Mencius. Basically, there are three distinct modes of royal succession described in the Mencius: abdication, hereditary succession, and revolution. Abdication involves the voluntary transfer of power by the incumbent ruler to a virtuous minister. Hereditary succession entails the transmission of power to the son of the incumbent ruler. Revolution marks the foundation of a new dynasty by deposing the incumbent ruler. What are their exact relationships? In (...) contrast to hereditary succession, which represents “rule by heredity,” abdication and revolution are often categorized together as “rule by virtue,” which became the backbone of the Confucian virtue politics. However, Mencius' writings, especially 5A5 and 5A6, suggest his clear intention to establish a coherent, or at least, compatible relationship between abdication and hereditary succession. This paper analyzes Mencius' discussions on royal succession to elucidate how he perceived the connection between abdication and hereditary succession, and to explore why he considered revolution as a separate category. In this study, I refer to the former as the “entrenched‐trust model” and distinguish the latter as “anticipated‐trust model.” The final section of the paper compares the three modes of royal succession in terms of the nature of the people's trust, the susceptibility of the people's approval, and the candidate's disinterest in power. (shrink)

The Irish chemist Richard Kirwan is remembered among historians for his resourceful defense of the phlogiston theory of combustion, but his pursuit of the sciences of the environment has been little studied. This paper considers his work in Ireland in the 1790s, especially on mineralogy and meteorology, and situates it against the backdrop of elite projects for national improvement and armed insurrection against British rule. Kirwan is viewed as having the outlook of a metropolitan intellectual, which he struggled to (...) reconcile with the circumstances of Irish provinciality and an emergent – sometimes militant – nationalism. (shrink)

This article provides an exploration of the relationships between a procedural account of epistemic democracy, illegitimate laws and judicial review. I first explain how there can be illegitimate laws within a procedural account of democracy. I argue that even if democratic legitimacy is conceived procedurally, it does not imply that democracy could legitimately undermine itself or adopt grossly unjust laws. I then turn to the legitimacy of judicial review with regard to these illegitimate laws. I maintain that courts do not (...) have a moral privilege on the overthrow of illegitimate laws; in this respect the refusal of royal assent has the same status. I also explain how the rule of the clear mistake fails to restrict the action of courts to only illegitimate laws. Finally, I argue for the positive epistemic inputs of weak judicial review. (shrink)

This paper explores how, at the 1875 Royal Commission on Vivisection, the anaesthetised animal was construed as a boundary object around which “cooperation without consensus” Computer supported cooperative work: cooperation or conflict? Springer, London, 1993) could form, serving the interests of both scientists and animals. Advocates of anaesthesia presented it as benevolently intervening between the scientific agent and animal patient. Such articulations of ‘ethical’ vivisection through anaesthesia were then mandated in the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act, and thus have (...) had significant downstream effects on the regulation of laboratory animals in Britain and beyond. Constructing this ‘consensus’ around the anaesthetised animal, however, required first excluding abolitionists and inhumane scientists, and secondly limiting the interests of experimental animals to the avoidance of pain through anaesthesia and euthanasia, thereby circumventing the issue of their possible interest in future life. This consensus also served to secure the interests of vivisecting scientists and to limit the influence of public opinion in the laboratory to administrative procedure and scheduled inspection. The focus on anaesthesia was connected with discussions of what supporting infrastructures were required to ensure proper ethical procedure was carried out by scientists. In contrast to the much studied polarisation in British society between pro- and antivivisectionists after 1876, we understand the 1875 Commission as a conflict amongst scientists themselves, while also being an intra-class conflict amongst the ruling class. (shrink)

L'histoire critique des textes bibliques a été conçue par Richard Simon comme un art de juger, selon des règles strictes, des meilleures leçons à conserver. Cette méthode, qui impose dans la traduction de l'Écriture une règle d'uniformité textuelle, aurait fait défaut selon lui dans la version du Nouveau Testament donnée à Port-Royal « selon la Vulgate, avec les différences du grec ». La critique à la manière de Richard Simon n'est cependant pour Antoine Arnauld, qui préfère l'uniformité du sens (...) à celle du texte, qu'un art sans jugement : c'est de l'extension de l'art de penser à une logique pour le contingent, que dépend à ses yeux une définition véritablement générale de la critique. The critical history of biblical texts was conceived by Richard Simon as an ars judicandi, whose rules had to be applied to the discrimination between true and false lessons. Concerning translation, this method required in his view a principle of textual uniformity, so he thought defective the Port-Royal version of The New Testament . Antoine Arnauld, however, gave preference to the semantic uniformity over the literal one, and stated that a real definition of critique in its logical generality ought to be supplied by the extension of the art of thinking to the case of contingent truths. (shrink)

The Hellenistic monarchies arose from the collapse of Alexander’s empire, and represented new forms of rule. This study demonstrates how the Hellenistic ruler presented himself and his family in picture, text and on official occasions. In particular the representation of the Hellenistic royal couple and the role of the queen at court are examined on the basis of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Central aspects of the study are the political background to the marriage between Ptolemy II, during his reign (...) that marriage between royal siblings and the deification of the ruling royal couple were introduces, and his sister Arsinoë II, and how the royal couple presented themselves to Greeks, Macedonians, and Egyptians. (shrink)

Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole were philosophers and theologians associated with Port-Royal Abbey, a centre of the Catholic Jansenist movement in seventeenth-century France. Their enormously influential Logic or the Art of Thinking, which went through five editions in their lifetimes, treats topics in logic, language, theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and also articulates the response of 'heretical' Jansenist Catholicism to orthodox Catholic and Protestant views on grace, free will and the sacraments. In attempting to combine the categorical theory of (...) the proposition with a Cartesian account of knowledge, their Logic represents the classical view of judgment which inspired the modern transformation in logic and semantic theory by Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein and recent philosophers. This edition presents a new translation of the text, together with a historical introduction and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

How different were the claims of Assyrian royal inscriptions from actual Neo-Assyrian practice? This essay explores this question by examining two unusual claims made by Sargon II in relation to his rule of Samaria. The first claim, which appears both in the Khorsabad annals and in a Nimrud prism, should be translated “I again settled Samaria, more than previously.” Based on the historical reconstruction derived from archaeological data, I argue that this phrase refers to the movement of exiles (...) into areas in the western part of the province of Samaria. These areas in the western part of the province, around the sites of Aphek, Hadid, and Gezer, experienced significant population increases in the Assyrian period. The second passage, in Sargon’s Great Display Inscription from Khorsabad, refers to Sargon’s treatment of non-deported Samaritans. It should be translated “I trained the remnant in their crafts.” The historical reality behind this claim is the shift in agricultural techniques and activities in Samaria as a result of the Assyrian conquest. The Assyrian domination of Samaria required the production of grain surpluses, which needed to be made available in the Aphek-Gezer region in the western part of the province of Samaria. In each of the claims from the royal inscriptions examined in this essay, we see that the royal inscriptions credit the king with activities performed by the provincial governor. They change the description of the activity to make it “fit for royalty.”. (shrink)

Sprat situated his analysis of the Royal Society within an emerging Anglican Royalist narrative of the longue durée of post-Reformation England. A closer examination of Sprat's own religious views reveals that his principal interest in the History of the Royal Society, as in the closely related reply to Samuel de Sorbière, the Observations, was to appropriate the advantages and benefits of the Royal Society as support for a re-established, anti-Calvinist Church of England. Sprat connected the two through (...) a reformulation of the powerful conventions of ‘Reformation’ and ‘Israel’, both of which still resonated strongly in the religious politics of the 1660s. Applying his voluntarist theology, Sprat changed especially the representation of the chosen nation from a tale of divine castigation and punishment to a rational and probabilistic covenant based on material success as the indicator of God's pleasure. Sprat proposed that the knowledge and application of nature, through the experimental labours of the Royal Society, could build an increasingly wealthy nation and so a permanent home for the reconfigured Israel. Attaching this to a renewed monarchical and Anglican state also meant security for the traditional forms of rule. (shrink)

Engineers make an enormous contribution to promoting the wellbeing of individuals and the communities in which they live, but engineering may also give rise to adverse consequences. Engineering therefore requires ethical awareness, and professional engineers often use ethical codes to guide their actions. The content of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s authoritative Statement of Ethical Principles is discussed and compared to the paradigmatic Rule of St Benedict. This leads to suggestions for the development of an enriched code for (...) engineering that considers not only what actions are desirable but also how and why they should be carried out. Issues arising in the formulation of an enriched code acceptable also to those of no explicit faith or of other faiths are considered. It is suggested that the development of enriched professional codes is a general and strategically important challenge for theological ethics. (shrink)

One of the most important and famous historical documents from the English legal and constitutional legacy is the Magna Carta Libertatum. Signed and sealed in the year 1215 the Magna Carta is further on viewed as the sole inception of the idea of limiting the power of the ruler trough legal rules. That limitation is to be made with legal rules that are binding for everyone, even the monarch. Therefore, the Great Charter is viewed as the first document signed by (...) a monarch with which, the principle of supremacy of the law is set out. That supremacy of the law has been further on developed by eminent scholars and practitioners, eventually leading to the development of the concept of rule of law. Rule of law, as a concept, means that the royal authority is going to be inferior to the law. However, this concept means a lot more than simply that. Unlike the principle of legal state, the rule of law is closely linked to justice, separation of powers and legal certainty. All of these concepts are actually prerequisites for its existence. That is why each of them is separately examined and elaborated. Furthermore, as one of the most important principles the rule of law had a great influence on the constitutional systems around the world. Since the Republic of Macedonia strives to become a democratic state where the rule of law is established and developed it is important to elaborate the influence of this principle in it. Therefore, the research gravitates over the principle of rule of law in the Republic of Macedonia. (shrink)

In an earlier article, it was established that the rules which govern the relations between universities and their students may find their legal source in prescription, royal charter, parliamentary legislation or contract. This article compares judicial review of student rules according to these different sources, whether this review forms part of public law (the review of byelaws, delegated legislation or the expression of other statutory rule‐making powers) or of contract law (as a matter of the fairness of the (...) rules as terms of the student contract or by the inherent qualification of any contractual rule‐making power in a university by reference to reasonableness). Both similarities and differences in these different types of review are identified and their implication in the student context assessed (notably, as to the exclusivity of the visitorial jurisdiction in the case of chartered universities). Finally, it is argued that the compatibility of student rules with students' human rights may be relevant to review in contract law as well as in public law as a result of the very inclusive nature of the grounds of this review. (shrink)

This article draws analogies between the making of norms by contract, often seen as typical of private law, and by subordinate law-making, often seen as a typically public function and for public bodies. These analogies are set in the context of those rules which govern the relations between universities and their students, as the same types of rule may find their source in a range of legal sources: prescription, royal charter, parliamentary legislation or contract. Of these different sources, (...) the common law courts long accepted that chartered corporations, created by exercise of royal prerogative, were entitled to make subordinate legislation (known as byelaws) for the furthering of their purposes for both members and non-members, despite this law-making being extra-parliamentary. This article suggests how this power to make byelaws in chartered corporations may apply to chartered universities, noting the difficulties arising from the allegedly eleemosynary nature of these bodies and from the possible coexistence of statutory powers. It then examines the way in which the contract between a student and a university arises, and how this contract may form the legal basis of student rules, whether these rules are conceived as terms of the contract itself or as expressions of a unilateral power in the university arising from the contract. A subsequent article will compare the review of student rules on the grounds of public law principle and of contractual regulation. (shrink)

Between 1234 and 1258 King Henry III, having emerged from the tutelage of ministers inherited from his father, controlled the government of England himself. Looking at this period of personal rule, it would be easy to gain the impression that Henry's kingship, in its theory, and also to some extent its practice, challenged the position of the magnates. M. T. Clanchy, for example, in a justly famous article has suggested that in the 1240s and 1250s Henry III evolved a (...) theory of royal absolutism, a theory which had threatening implications for the magnates. He has also stressed the extent to which Henry was “the initiator both of the methods and of the theory” behind Edward I's quo warranto campaign, which questioned the liberties possessed by the magnates in the field of local government. As for Henry's court, the impression has been given by R. F. Treharne that few English barons were present there, and that the king was largely surrounded by officials and foreign relatives — the latter being his wife's Savoyard uncles and his own Poitevin half-brothers of the house of Lusignan. G. W. S. Barrow has written that Henry “appeared to be excluding the barons as a class from membership of his royal council.” The question whether Henry, like his father John, was pressing magnates to pay their debts has never been investigated; but Matthew Paris's picture of the king as a “vigilant and indefatigable searcher after money” might indicate that the revolution of 1258, like that of 1215, was a “rebellion of the king's debtors.”. (shrink)

I thank Michael Symons and Dr Paul Rule for comments on this paper; and Channel 10’s Chris Kenny and Grant Heading for access to the uncut tape of Mr Kenny’s interview with Mr Milera.

The judgment in Qarase v. Bainimarama provided a legal basis for the 2006 military coup in Fiji and stated that the President was entitled to grant authority to the military to act outside of the powers prescribed by the written Constitution. According to the ruling, the Royal Prerogative powers that remained in government following British rule could be utilised by the President at any time that he considered it necessary. This paper explores the rationale for that judgment and (...) the role that Royal Prerogative powers may play in the governance of countries that were previously subject to British rule. It further considers the impact of this judgment upon democracy in Fiji and the future protection of human rights for its citizens. (shrink)

The object of this article, which analyses Statesman 291a1-303d3, is to show how the good, the object of politics qua knowledge, makes the regime with which it is associated a utopia. The good cannot be actualized anywhere in the sensible realm, because no city can be governed without laws, and the laws define what is good most often for the greatest number. A government of the good, without laws, is a utopia, but the laws, to the extent that they aim (...) at the common interest, are in themselves the imprint of the good. I defend the thesis, at first sight paradoxical, that the true politicians are not those who know the good and imitate it, but those who recognise the utility of laws and agree to submit themselves to their authority. Thus Plato dismisses all existing regimes as sophistic regimes where power is exercised in the interest of the rulers and not of the ruled. Not every regime, however, bears the imprint of the good equally. By making politics a branch of knowledge, Plato imposes a numerical criterion on the classification of regimes; he crosses the criterion of number with that of law. I therefore argue for another paradox: the best possible regime is a monarchy in which the rulers obey the laws, the best existing regime is none other than democracy. (shrink)

We can characterise thought in two different ways. Which is preferred can have implications for important issues about reasoning and the norms that govern cognition. The first, which owes much to the picture of the mind encountered in Descartes' Meditations, observes that paradigmatic examples of thoughts and inferences are events and processes whose special characteristics stem from their being ‘mental’ occurrences. For example they are conscious or, if unconscious, they stand in some special relation to thought processes that are conscious. (...) They typically involve attitudes towards contents or propositions. In general, thoughts have a distinctive onto-logical status and this status depends upon their being mental and typically conscious. The second emphasises that thought is a kind of activity with a definite function. It involves the use of intelligence to solve problems, answer questions, make plans and so on. Thought should be studied as a kind of goal-directed activity. Those interested in the norms that govern thought should attend to the role of responsible disciplined reflection in carrying out this activity. (shrink)

Leaders are faced with ethical and moral dilemmas daily, like those within the military who must span from large-scale combat operations to security cooperation and deterrence. For businesses, these dilemmas can include social and environmental impact such as those in mining; and for governments, the social and economic impact of their decision-making in their response to COVID-19. The move by Western defence forces to align their foundational principles, policies, and “soldier” dispositions with the changing values of the countries they serve (...) are starkly illustrative of challenges faced by all leaders. While admirable, such changes face the apparent contradiction of enhancing individual moral agency within a hierarchical organization that maintain enforceable codes of conduct. Ethical leadership theory provides aspirational goals, but lacks empirically based guidance on how to implement policies that facilitate values-based behavior. Using a discourse theory analysis of a moral dilemma vignette with Royal Australian Air Force personnel, this research identifies important aspects of agency and subject position that must be addressed if such policies are to succeed. These findings show that the potential contradiction can be addressed by acknowledging the contrasting tendency to bureaucratic process by leaders at upper levels, while lower-level leaders address moral issues by incorporating their subjectivity and making a conscious deontological choice between humanity and comrade loyalty. (shrink)

According to Aristotle, there are three qualitatively different forms of rule: royal, political, and despotic. Royal and political rule are free, while despotic rule is unfree. In unfree rule the ruler rules in his own interest. But free men deserve to be ruled in their own interests, which occurs in royal and political rule. In political rule some of the ruled have a right to participate in public life. Being a citizen (...) does not necessarily mean, however, having the right to higher office. In actual constitutions, the distribution of political power beyond that accompanying mere citizenship usually depends on an additional criterion. Political virtue is the best criterion because officials possessing it are most likely to produce a happy citizenry. If a political community has a man with political virtue that outweighs that of all others combined, no other man is qualified to participate in public deliberation and judgment, to be a citizen. Under this royal rule, there is neither shared rule nor rule of law. Despite this Aristotle says that royal rule is better than political rule. A king is more effectively able to produce a happy population than would any multitude of citizens ruling jointly. This means that one need not be a citizen, let alone hold high office, to be happy. In fact happiness primarily consists in philosophical contemplation, for which there is more time in a monarchy. Corresponding to the three kinds of rule there were three dimensions to Aristotle's practical policies. (shrink)

Philosophers typically rely on intuitions when providing a semantics for counterfactual conditionals. However, intuitions regarding counterfactual conditionals are notoriously shaky. The aim of this paper is to provide a principled account of the semantics of counterfactual conditionals. This principled account is provided by what I dub the Royal Rule, a deterministic analogue of the Principal Principle relating chance and credence. The Royal Rule says that an ideal doxastic agent’s initial grade of disbelief in a proposition \(A\) (...) , given that the counterfactual distance in a given context to the closest \(A\) -worlds equals \(n\) , and no further information that is not admissible in this context, should equal \(n\) . Under the two assumptions that the presuppositions of a given context are admissible in this context, and that the theory of deterministic alethic or metaphysical modality is admissible in any context, it follows that the counterfactual distance distribution in a given context has the structure of a ranking function. The basic conditional logic V is shown to be sound and complete with respect to the resulting rank-theoretic semantics of counterfactuals. (shrink)

In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the north of Scotland was, according to popular history, terrorized by the king’s son, Alexander Stewart. Known more commonly by the name Wolf of Badenoch, Alexander is remembered as a defier of royal rule, and a scourge upon the lords of the north. This paper seeks to unravel some of the complicated political relationships operating at this time, and to define specifically, that between Robert Stewart II and his son, Alexander (...) Stewart. (shrink)

À travers l’exemple des architectes, au moment de leur recherche d’un statut juridique face à leurs concurrents directs, les artisans maçons, nous nous interrogeons sur les raisons qui vont orienter cette profession naissante à se saisir de la coutume comme savoir juridique essentiel et structurant. Que ce soit dans la littérature pratique manuscrite, puis publiée, ­depuis le début du xviie siècle, ou bien à travers les volontés didactiques de leur Académie royale, la coutume semble être convoquée comme l’unique source du (...) droit de ces professions du bâtiment. Pourquoi ce choix alors que le droit romain, la jurisprudence, la réglementation technique présentent les règles de l’art de bâtir? La coutume d’abord, celle de Paris très rapidement, devient le soubassement d’une profession nouvelle. En effet, elle est enseignée aux architectes et elle leur est commentée, sous le titre emblématique des « loix des bâtiments ». Nous entrevoyons deux fondements à ce choix : d’une part, une raison politique extrinsèque donne accès via l’expertise à la possibilité pour l’architecte, comme le maçon depuis toujours, de dire la position juste dans le cadre du conflit judiciaire comme dans celui du conseil amiable ; d’autre part, une raison pratique intrinsèque – faisant écho à sa plasticité – permet de rendre efficace les éléments matériels qu’elle traite et réglemente. Toujours est-il que si la coutume apparaît comme exposant le « bon sens », elle n’existe que parce qu’elle est relayée par une certaine doctrine. Que serait la coutume sans ses commentaires? Notre étude est basée sur l’analyse de l’environnement politique et institutionnel de l’installation de la coutume comme source spécifique et utile de ces professions et des commentaires de coutumes réalisées successivement – et de plus en plus largement – par un charpentier, un médecin, un ingénieur et architecte du roi et par le professeur d’architecture de l’Académie et ses suiveurs. La coutume permet ainsi de réguler habilement les droits et obligations des différents titulaires des droits réels. (shrink)

Algebraic equations in the tradition of Descartes and Frans Van Schooten accompany Christiaan Huygens’s early work on collision, which later would be reorganized and presented as De motu corporum ex percussione. Huygens produced the equations at the same time as his announcement of his rejection of Descartes’s rules of collision. Never intended for publication, the equations appear to have been used as preliminary scaffolding on which to build his critiques of Descartes’s physics. Additionally, Huygens used algebraic equations of this form (...) to accurately predict the speeds of bodies after collision in experiments carried out at the Royal Society. Despite their deceptive simplicity, Huygens’s algebraic equations pose significant conceptual problems both mathematically and for their physical interpretation especially for negative speeds; they may very well have been the source of a new principle, the conservation of quantity of motion with direction. (shrink)

In May 2021, Royal Dutch Shell was ordered by the Hague District Court to significantly reduce its CO2 emissions. This ruling is unprecedented in that it attributes the responsibility for mitigating climate change directly to a specific corporate emitter. Shell neither directly causes climate change alone nor can alleviate it by itself; therefore, what grounds this responsibility attribution? I maintain that this question can be answered via Young’s social connection model of responsibility for justice. I defend two claims: First, (...) I argue that the model explains Shell’s connection to climate change and that this relationship grounds Shell’s responsibility. Second, by identifying a way in which the social connection model could be applied to corporations in legal practice, I further develop Young’s model. I question Young’s distinction between political and legal responsibility for justice and propose that courts could mediate citizens’ actions regarding political responsibilities. (shrink)

In the article various means that are used for creating the image of Elizabeth II are studied. The choice of the subject matter for the analysis is determined by the interest to the British royal family. The author considers various definitions of the concept ‘image‘ and analyzes its characteristic features. It is noted that image can be positive and negative, controlled and uncontrolled, desired and actual. The image helps to show particular traits of a personality. It is based on (...) the person’s appearance, his or her manners, hobbies, interests, speech peculiarities. It is known that such factors as family environment, sports, pets and hobbies play a great role in the creation of the image. There are the following aspects of the image: professional, social and portrait. Special attention is paid to verbal and non-verbal means of creating an image. The main lexical, phonetic and stylistic characteristic features of the monarch’s Christmas Broadcasts have been singled out. A positive image of the monarch is created with the help of verbal and nonverbal means. The Queen’s public addresses and Christmas broadcasts may serve as an example of verbal means used for image creation. Patriotism, sense of duty, loyalty to traditions, adherence to the rules of Royal etiquette is evident in the communicative behavior of the Queen. It is noted that public addresses play a certain role in the creation of a positive image of the English Queen. (shrink)

Alexander’s conquest of Persia transformed the way he ruled, with aspects of Achaemenid monarchy becoming prominent. In general, historians have focused on instances of deliberate engagement with Achaemenid practices, leading to the impression that this change resulted from conscious imitation. Here, I nuance this view, arguing that the gradual adoption of aspects of Achaemenid royal space played a pivotal role in transforming Alexander’s monarchy. This approach shifts our focus away from Alexander himself, placing his reign in a wider context, (...) while also demonstrating how space can act as a conduit for cultural interchange. (shrink)

Arguments analogous to those found in the late medieval theory of the king’s two bodies, popularized by Ernst Kantorowicz, were resurrected in early nineteenth-century constitutional theories of the moderating powers of monarchy. Post-revolutionary French liberal thought, echoed by its Portuguese counterpart, rediscovered the virtues of the institution of royalty, notably the immaterial and immortal body of the king. This rediscovery was prompted by the uncertainties of different national political contexts which made many contemporaries believe it desirable to integrate restored monarchies (...) within modern constitutional models for state stability. This first occurred with the Bourbons’ return to post-Napoleonic France and the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, and then with the Braganza royal family’s return to Portugal in 1821 after thirteen years of rule from Brazil. Using arguments similar to those previously made in late medieval European political and legal thought, French and Portuguese liberals developed a theory of the king’s two powers, according to which the monarch at once exercised a moderating power, defined by the abstract institutional nature of the king’s person, and an executive power, embodied within his physical person. This conceptualization of royal duality was intended to make it possible to delegate executive power to ministers, leaving the king only the attributes of a largely symbolic power. Liberals thereby hoped to confine the monarch to his purely institutional body in a de-politicized constitutional role. (shrink)

In Herodotus' royal council scene, where Xerxes decides whether or not to punish the Greeks, the king's cousin and adviser Mardonius is made to say these famous lines (Hdt. 7.9β.1):καίτοι [γε] ἐώθασι Ἕλληνες, ὡς πυνθάνομαι, ἀβουλότατα πολέμους ἵστασθαι ὑπό τε ἀγνωμοσύνης καὶ σκαιότητος. ἐπεὰν γὰρ ἀλλήλοισι πόλεμον προείπωσι, ἐξευρόντες τὸ κάλλιστον χωρίον καὶ λειότατον, ἐς τοῦτο κατιόντες μάχονται, ὥστε σὺν κακῷ μεγάλῳ οἱ νικῶντες ἀπαλλάσσονται· περὶ δὲ τῶν ἑσσουμένων οὐδὲ λέγω ἀρχήν, ἐξώλεες γὰρ δὴ γίνονται.Yet, the Greeks do wage (...) war, I hear, and they do so senselessly, in their poor judgement and stupidity. When they have declared war against each other, they find the finest, flattest piece of land and go down there and fight, so that the victors come off with terrible loss—I will not even begin to speak of the defeated, for they are utterly destroyed.This passage has long been one of the pillars of the ‘orthodox’ view of Greek warfare. It appears to describe a very peculiar way of war, in which conflicts were resolved by single battles at prearranged times, fought on open ground where neither side had an advantage. Fairness counted for more than tactical skill; all conditions were made equal, so that the winners could truly claim to be the braver and stronger men. The result, as Mardonius stressed, was needlessly bloody—but it was quintessentially Greek. Modern authors have argued that this ‘agonistic’ style of fighting, this ‘wonderful, absurd conspiracy’ of open hoplite battle, determined the shape of Greek warfare until the long and hard-fought Peloponnesian War changed the rules. (shrink)

When Huck Finn embarks upon his hilarious education of the slave Jim in the moral vagaries of the monarchies of Europe, he takes himself to be propounding the merest common sense. He may have thought large‐scale villainy restricted to autocracies, but his creator was clearly not so naive. More to the present point, Huck ends his discourse on princely rule with remarks that show he was not merely cataloguing the fact of widespread royal vice, but willing to countenance (...) it as necessary. As he puts it, ‘kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot’. (shrink)

In this book an eminent scholar presents a rich and penetrating analysis of the _Statesman_, perhaps Plato's most challenging work. Stanley Rosen contends that the main theme of this dialogue is a definition of the art of politics and the degree to which political experience is subject either to the rule of sound judgment or to technical construction. The _Statesman_, like Plato's earlier _Sophist_, features a Stranger who tries to refute Socrates. Much of his conversation is devoted to a (...) minute analysis of the art of weaving, selected by the Stranger as a paradigm of the royal art of politics, for he conceives of the city as an artifact. But the Stranger's successive efforts to find a method for defining the art of politics are failures, because there is no fitting model or technique of measurement by which to grasp politics that includes within its scope the totality of human existence—there is, suggests Plato, no technical construction of politics. Rosen reflects on the relevance of Plato to contemporary debates about political reconstruction on the one hand and about the deeper issue of the supposed end of modernity on the other. He argues that, far from being the father of essentialism and the reification of human nature, as others have suggested, Plato elaborates a rhetoric of politics as self-defense against nature. Just as weaving produces clothing to protect the body against the elements, so the statesman must produce myths or local models to protect the soul against the body. (shrink)

This volume explores, from a variety of perspectives, the political theory of the man who is arguably the greatest English political thinker. It is the first substantial collection of new, critical essays on Thomas Hobbes by leading scholars in over a decade. Hobbes’s writings stirred debate in his own lifetime, for two centuries thereafter, and continue to do so in ours. They emerged in a period of intense political turmoil—a time of civil war and regicide, of puritanical rule and (...) royal restoration. “They were motivated,” Dietz argues, “by concrete political problems and a practical concern, namely, to secure political order, absolute sovereignty, and civil peace.” The contributors emphasize and answer a series of expressly political questions that, to date, have not been fully addressed in the Hobbes literature. They contend that Hobbes’s writings are not mere static artifacts of a particular historical milieu, but rather rich sources of a variety of interpretations and criticisms that spur discussion and debate in their turn. (shrink)

On January 11, 2024, the United Kingdom (U.K.) Supreme Court rendered its judgment in _Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust_, restricting the circumstances in which “secondary victims” can successfully claim for damages in clinical negligence cases. This ruling has provided welcome clarity regarding the scope of negligently caused “pure” psychiatric illness claims, but the judgment may well prove controversial. In this article, I trace the facts and opinion from the majority and also discuss an important dissenting opinion. I then (...) reflect on what the ruling means for psychiatric illness claims by secondary victims, and more broadly on the implications for clinical negligence law. I suggest that while much-needed clarity has been injected in this area of the law, it is difficult, reading the majority of the Supreme Court’s emphasis on the restricted scope of a medical practitioner’s duty, to envision a scenario in which secondary victim could ever succeed in a clinical negligence context. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with six linguistic moves that we commonly make, each of which is considered in turn. These are: stating rules of representation; representing things categorically; mentioning expressions; saying truly or falsely how things are; saying vaguely how things are; and stating rules of rules of representation. A common-sense view is defended of what is involved in our doing each of these six things against a much more sceptical view emanating from the idea that linguistic behavior is fundamentally (...) messy. Both the fifth move and the sixth move involve vague concepts, and much of the essay is concerned with developing an approach to various problems and puzzles that attach to such concepts, most notably the sorites paradoxes. (shrink)

"Marin's admiration (in both seventeenth-century senses) for the word made flesh, and hence the word made power, is what makes this book both fascinating and disturbing." -- Times Literary Supplement A wicked queen orders the palace cook to kill her grandchildren and serve them up for dinner -- "in a sauce Robert." But as any good cook knows, this sauce is properly served with game, not domestic animals. Does the ogress transgress? Perhaps, but the cook breaks the rules as well. (...) Deceiving his mistress, he rescues the children and instead serves goat and lamb. In this provocative volume, Louis Marin treats a subject to which some of the most exciting literary criticism has been devoted: the body as represented in text and image. From fairy tales to biblical narrative, from the divine body in the eucharist to the body of Louis XIV as described in his physicians' journals, Marin focuses on the peculiar relationship between verbal and oral functions--speaking and eating, boasting and gluttony, lying and cannibalism. Drawing on the methodologies of semiology, philosophy of language, and literary and art criticism, Marin explores works by Rabelais, La Fontaine, Perrault, and the Logic of Port-Royal. Throughout, he is concerned with the conceptualization of desire and pleasure, justice and force, natural violence and political power -- and questions their ideological as well as their symbolic bases. (shrink)

Introduction: The empiricists and their context -- Empiricism and the empiricists -- The intellectual background to the early modern empiricists -- Martin Luther and the Reformation -- Aristotelian cosmology and the scientific revolution -- Aristotelian/scholastic hylomorphism and the rise of mechanism -- The Royal Society of London -- Francis Bacon (1561-1626) -- The natural realm : the idols of the mind -- Idols of the tribe -- Idols of the cave -- Idols of the marketplace -- Idols of the (...) theatre -- Knowledge and experience : induction introduced -- Aristotelian/scholastic syllogisms : deductions dismissed -- Baconian empiricism : induction introduced -- Conclusion: Bacon the empiricist -- Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) -- The natural realm : Hobbes's materialistic mechanism -- The importance of motion -- Sensation and the mind -- Knowledge and experience : definitions and the euclidean method -- Two kinds of knowledge and proper ratiocination -- The method of analysis and the method of synthesis -- Conclusion: Hobbes, the empiricist -- Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) -- The natural realm : Gassendi's atomism -- The basic principles of Gassendi's atomism -- Atomistic sensation -- Knowledge and experience : the middle way to knowledge -- The sceptics are partly correct -- Knowledge regained? -- Conclusion: Gassendi. the empiricist -- Robert Boyle (1627-1691) -- The natural realm : Boyle's mechanism (corpuscularianism) -- The basic principles of Boyle's mechanism (or corpscularianism) -- Sensation and the mind -- Knowledge and experience : mechanism and the cautious experimenter -- The excellency of mechanism -- Experimentation and the status of mechanism -- Conclusion: Boyle, the empiricist -- John Locke (1632-1704) -- The natural realm : Locke's mechanism -- Against innatism -- Ideas and the tabula rasa -- Primary and secondary qualities, and our confused idea of substance -- Locke on power -- Knowledge and experience : Locke's epistemology -- Indirect realism, or the representational theory of perception -- The certainty of knowledge -- The origin of knowledge -- The extent of knowledge -- Conclusion: Locke, the empiricist -- Isaac Newton (1642-1727) -- The natural realm : Newton's principia -- A world of forces : universal gravitation -- What kind of quality is gravity? -- Mechanism and action at a distance -- Knowledge and experience : rules for the study of natural philosophy -- The four rules -- Whither natural philosophy -- Conclusion: Newton, the empiricist -- George Berkeley (1685-1753) -- The natural realm : Berkeley's idealism -- The world contains only souls and ideas -- Esse est percipi : two arguments for idealism/immaterialism -- Against the primary/secondary quality distinction -- Knowledge and experience : Berkeley's common sense epistemology -- Against the representational theory of perception -- Defeating the skeptic, and returning to common sense -- Mechanism, newtonianism, and instrumentalism : Berkeley on the new science -- Responses to popular objections -- Conclusion: Berkeley, the empiricist -- David Hume (1711-1776) -- The natural realm : Hume's psychological approach -- Ideas and impressions -- The principles of association -- Knowledge and experience : Hume's semi-scepticism -- Relations of ideas vs. matters of fact -- From matters of fact to cause and effect : Hume's first question -- Knowledge of cause and effect : Hume's second question -- The problem of induction : Hume's third question -- Hume's positive account of causation : induction regained -- Conclusion: Hume, the empiricist -- Empiricism and the empiricists : summary and conclusion. (shrink)

"Margaret L. King has put together a highly representative selection of readings from most of the more significant—but by no means the most obvious—texts by the authors who made up the movement we have come to call the 'Enlightenment.' They range across much of Europe and the Americas, and from the early seventeenth century until the end of the eighteenth. In the originality of the choice of texts, in its range and depth, this collection offers both wide coverage and striking (...) insights into the intellectual transformation which has done more than any other to shape the world in which we live today. It is _simply the best introduction to the subject now available_."_ —Anthony Pagden, UCLA, and author of _The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters_ Contents:_ Chronology, Introduction _Chapter One - Casting Out Idols: 1620–1697_ _Idols, or false notions: _Francis Bacon, _The New Instrument_ _I think, therefore I am: _René Descartes, Discourse on Method _God, or Nature: _Baruch Spinoza, _Ethics_ _The system of the world: _Isaac Newton, _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_ _He searched for truth throughout his life: _Pierre Bayle, _Historical and Critical Dictionary_ _Chapter Two - _The Learned Maid: 1638–1740 _A face raised toward heaven:_ Anna Maria van Schurman, _Whether the Study of Letters Befits a Christian Woman_ _The worlds I have made:_ Margaret Cavendish, _The Blazing World_ _A finer sort of cattle:_ Bathsua Makin, _An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen_ _I warn you of the world:_ Madame de Maintenon, _Letter: On the Education of the Demoiselles of Saint-Cyr_, and _Instruction: On the World_ _The daybreak of your reason:_ Émilie Du Châtelet, _Fundamentals of Physics_ _Chapter Three - _A State of Perfect Freedom: 1689–1695 _The chief criterion of the True Church:_ John Locke, _Letter on Toleration_ _Freedom from any superior power on earth:_ John Locke, _Second Treatise on Civil Government_ _A white paper, with nothing written on it:_ John Locke, _Essay Concerning Human Understanding_ _Let your rules be as few as possible:_ John Locke, _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ _From death, Jesus Christ restores all to life:_ John Locke, _The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures_ _Chapter Four - All Things Made New: 1725–1784_ _In the wilderness, they are reborn:_ Giambattista Vico, _The New Science_ _Without these Names, nothing can be known,_ Carl Linnaeus, _System of Nature_ _All the clouds at last are lifted:_ Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, _The Successive Advancement of the Human Mind_ _A genealogical or encyclopedic tree of knowledge:_ Jean le Rond d’Alembert, _Preliminary Discourse_ _Dare to know! :_ Immanuel Kant, _What Is Enlightenment?_ _Chapter Five - Mind, Soul, and God: 1740–1779_ _The narrow limits of human understanding:_ David Hume, _Anof a Book Lately Published_ _The soul is but an empty word:_ Julien Offray de La Mettrie, _Man a Machine_ _All is reduced to sensation:_ Claude Adrien Helvétius, _On the Mind_ _An endless web of fantasies and falsehoods:_ Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach, _Common Sense_ _Let each believe that his own ring is real:_ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, _Nathan the Wise_ _Chapter Six - Crush That Infamous Thing: 1733–1764_ _This is the country of sects:_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Letters_ _Disfigured by myth, until enlightenment comes:_ Voltaire, _The Culture and Spirit of Nations_ _The best of all possible worlds:_ Voltaire, _Candide_ _Are we not all children of the same God?:_ Voltaire, _Treatise on Tolerance_ _If a book displeases you, refute it! :_ Voltaire, _Philosophical Dictionary_ _Chapter Seven - Toward the Greater Good: 1748–1776_ _Things must be so ordered that power checks power,_ Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _The Spirit of the Laws_ _Complete freedom of trade must be ensured:_ François Quesnay, _General Maxims for the Economic Management of an Agricultural Kingdom_ _The nation's war against the citizen: Cesare_ Beccaria, _On Crimes and Punishments_ _There is no peace in the absence of justice:_ Adam Ferguson, _An Essay on the History of Civil Society_ _Led by an invisible hand:_ Adam Smith, _An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations_ _Chapter Eight - Encountering Others: 1688–1785_ _Thus died this great man:_ Aphra Behn, _Oroonoko: or The Royal Slave_ _Not one sins the less for not being Christian: _Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, _Embassy Letters_ _Do you not restore to them their liberty?:_ Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, _Philosophical and Political History of European Colonies and Commerce in the Two Indies_ _Some things which are rather interesting:_ Captain James Cook, _Voyage towards the South Pole, and Round the World_ _The inner genius of my being:_ Johann Gottfried von Herder, _Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humankind_ _Chapter - Nine Citizen of Geneva: 1755–1782_ _The most cunning project ever to enter the human mind: _Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Human Inequality_ _The supreme direction of the General Will:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract _Two lovers from a small town at the foot of the Alps,_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Julie, or the New Heloise_ _Build a fence around your child’s soul:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Emile, or On Education_ _This man will be myself:_ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, _Confessions_ _Chapter Ten - Vindications of Women: 1685–1792_ _No higher design than to get her a husband:_ Mary Astell, _Reflections on Marriage_ _The days of my bondage begin:_ Anna Stanisławska, _Orphan Girl_ _A dying victim dragged to the altar:_ Denis Diderot, _The Nun_ _Created to be the toy of man:_ Mary Wollstonecraft, _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ _Man, are you capable of being just?:_ Olympe de Gouges, _Declaration of the Rights of Woman as Citizen_ _Chapter Eleven - American Reverberations: 1771–1792_ _I took upon me to assert my freedom:_ Benjamin Franklin, _Autobiography_ _Freedom has been hunted round the globe:_ Thomas Paine, _Common Sense_ _Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights:_ Thomas Jefferson and Others, _Declaration of Independence_ _A safeguard against faction and insurrection:_ James Madison, _Federalist No. 10_ _An end to government by force and fraud:_ Thomas Paine, _The Rights of Man_ _Chapter Twelve - Enlightenment's End: 1790–1794_ _A partnership of the living, the dead, and those unborn:_ Edmund Burke, _Reflections on the Revolution in France_ _The future destiny of the human species:_ Nicolas de Condorcet, _A Sketch of a Historical Portrait of the Progress of the Human Mind_ Texts and Studies, Index. 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In this paper, the author shows how research ethics committees must deal with illegality in the research protocol. He defines their legal duty by reference to the 2001 Clinical Trials Directive, and especially in the key areas of insurance, indemnity and no-fault compensation. The author is critical of the current GAfREC and recent guidelines issued by the Royal College of Physicians. He concludes that new rules are needed to replace the 2001 edition of GAfREC.

From my ongoing "Metalogical Plato" project. The aim of the diagram is to make reasonably intuitive how the Socratic elenchos (the logic of refutation applied to candidate formulations of virtues or ruling knowledges) looks and works as a whole structure. This is my starting point in the project, in part because of its great familiarity and arguable claim to being the inauguration of western philosophy; getting this point less wrong would have broad and deep consequences, including for philosophy’s self-understanding. -/- (...) (i.) is the first pass at elenchos in which the Socratic interlocutor does not reflect on knowledge being the crux of the problem. (ii.) is the second, rarer, reflective pass in which they are, making the investigation explicitly about knowledge. Its centrality in the Charmides makes that neglected dialogue of superlative importance. This structure is also the gateway through which the discussion/dialectic crosses into the Agathology (discussion of the form of the good) at Republic 505. -/- The problem of elenchos, then, grasped as a whole structure, is that it seems that knowledge can neither satisfactorily be included in nor excluded from its own scope. The development of the ti esti (“what is ---?”) question leads to the introduction of knowledge into its own scope (i. implicitly, as goodness contrasted with blind rule-following ii. explicitly qua knowledge) while the development of the dual peri tinos (“----about what?) question leads to K’s elimination from its own scope. The introductions are motivated to avoid contradiction, but produce regress; the eliminations are motivated to avoid regress, but produce contradiction. In scholarship, and in the history of philosophy, the ti esti question is universally recognized, to the point of being identified with philosophy’s origin and essence; the peri tinos question is neglected textually and never recognized as the equal dual to the ti esti. This, I claim, has blocked the development of a nontrivial logical appreciation of what Plato's Socrates is up to. (One rather disastrous effect of this neglect is taking Aristotle as the beginning of the development of logic, rather than, correctly, for the beginning of logic’s fatal separation from mathematics and dialectic.) -/- Further, because of this monopticism of the ti esti, the function of consistency in the elenchos has not been understood, even with respect to the ti esti. The ti esti is actually in search of completeness, given a norm of consistency; the peri tinos is in search of consistency, given a norm of completeness. Only appreciating the two questions as dual allows space in the structure to clarify these different orientations relative to consistency. (And, dually, to completeness, whose function in the elenchos is generally entirely missed by scholars and relegated to discussions of eros; it's not out of place there, of course, but its significance is secured here.) Recognizing the duality of the ti esti and peri tinos questions is thus the royal road, in the Socratic-Platonic context, to catching sight of what we post-Cantorians can recognize as the metalogical duality of consistency and completeness. (The salutary disruptive effects of this Plato-Cantor proximity have, of course, been traced in complementary ways by Badiou.) -/- Note that the diagram is supposed to provide a relatively accessible orientation, not to stand on its own, and certainly not to be the last word on any subject. An important qualification (telegraphed in the previous paragraph) is that what elenchos shows is not finally circular or paradoxical, though the problem first presents as such (stubbornly, obdurately, as "difficult" Plato's Socrates always says with characteristic understatement). What is depicted here is meant, at a first pass, to be the shape of that first presentation, the form of the problem of elenchos, rather than of its solution. It's not an accident that this problem strongly resembles "Russell's paradox" (not Russell's not a paradox.) Problem is to solution as RP is to the diagonal theorems. (shrink)