In his study entitled “The Beginning and the Method of the Logic,” Dieter Henrich assumes an interpretive stance with regard to the beginning of Hegel’s Logic which is in staunch opposition to the scholarly tradition. That tradition, as Henrich tries to show, has almost unanimously rejected the dialectic of Becoming as untenable. This holds true not only for those critics whose ultimate aim was to discredit speculative dialectical method in general, but even for the members of Hegel’s own school, who (...) wished to salvage as much of the Logic as possible. (shrink)

Successful jokes involve incongruities, but not any incongruity will do—not, for example, one as blatantly bare as an explicit instance of the form p.~p. Substitution in such is no secure generator of fun; and stand-up comedians would be lucky to escape with their lives, if—at the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night—they delivered one-liners such as “She came from Dungeness and not from Dungeness.” Build-up context, alcohol level, and delivery skills—and it is not impossible that any line, even the p.~p (...) instance, could secure some laughs; but laughs alone need indicate no joke. At a level virtually platitudinous, jokes require an incongruity—a tension—between expectations typically aroused by initial words and resultant sabotaging revelations. We could, no doubt, be a species that laughed at every expressed contradiction, yet one for which banana skins, sexual spasms, and implied inconsistencies raised no flicker. Which particular sayings generate incongruities and not mere laughter is no empirical matter, but one of logic, logic taken sufficiently widely to include semantics and pragmatics. These incongruities, with the masking, the movement and unmasking—the teasing, stripping, and exposed sabotage—are to be found within many philosophical paradoxes as well as within jokes. Laying bare the jokes’ mechanisms can help to resolve such paradoxes. Joking matter itself need be no joking matter; and as jokes and paradoxes rely upon veiled incongruities, an all-seeing god would see no joke and meet no paradox. (shrink)

Keith Thomas: Gerald Edward Aylmer, 1926-2000 Adrian Hollis: William Spencer Barrett, 1914-2001 Bruce Williams: Charles Frederick Carter, 1919-2002 Malcolm Mackintosh: John Erickson, 1929-2002 J. H .R. Davis: Raymond William Firth, 1901-2002 F. M. L. Thompson: Hrothgar John Habakkuk, 1915-2002 A. W. Price: Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919-2002 Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, 1921-2003 Michael Lapidge and Peter Matthews: Vivien Anne Law, 1954-2002 Ann Moss: John Lough, 1913-2000 Terence Cave: Ian Dalrymple McFarlane, 1915-2002 Ludwig Paul: David Neil MacKenzie, 1926-2001 Peter Birks: (...) John Kieran Barry Moylan Nicholas, 1919-2002 Jonathan Shepard: Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky, 1918-2001 David Cannadine: John Harold Plumb, 1911-2001 Daniel Waley: Nicolai Rubinstein, 1911-2002 Ian Wood: John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, 1916-1985 R. G. M. Nisbet: William Smith Watt, 1913-2002 G. W. Bernard: Richard Bruce Wernham, 1906-1999. (shrink)

Fran Brearton: Robert Graves and The White Goddess Joyce Hill: Authority and Intertextuality in the Works of Ælfric Michael Pennington: Barnardine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail David Womersley: Dulness and Pope Terence Cave: Montaigne Lord Moser: The Future of Our Universities Alexander Murray: The Inquisition and the Renaissance Robert Bagley: The Prehistory of Chinese Music Theory Edwin Cameron: Patents and Public Health: Principle, Politics and Paradox Mervyn King: What Fates Impose: Facing Up to Uncertainty Dominic Lieven: Empire, History (...) and the Contemporary Global Order Joan Oates: Archaeology in Mesopotamia: Digging Deeper at Tell Brak Timothy Besley: The New Political Economy Richard Gray: 'They Worship Death Here': William Faulkner, Sanctuary and Hollywood Lord Sutherland: Nomad's Progress James Piscatori: Imagining Pan-Islam: Religious Activism and Political Utopias. (shrink)

This book addresses the problem of fully explaining Socrates’ motives for philosophic interlocution in Plato’s dialogues. Why, for instance, does Socrates talk to many philosophically immature and seemingly incapable interlocutors? Are his motives in these cases moral, prudential, erotic, pedagogic, or intellectual? In any one case, can Socrates’ reasons for engaging an unlikely interlocutor be explained fully on the grounds of intellectual self-interest? Or does his activity, including his self-presentation and staging of his death, require additional motives for adequate explanation? (...) Finally, how, if at all, does our conception of Socrates’ motives help illuminate our understanding of the life of reason as Plato presents it? By inviting a multitude of authors to contribute their thoughts on these question—all of whom share a commitment to close reading, but by no means agree on the meaning of Plato’s dialogues—this book provides the reader with an excellent map of the terrain of these problems and aims to help the student of Plato clarify the tensions involved, showing especially how each major stance on Socrates entails problematic assumptions that prompt further critical reflection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:just Men and Just Acts in Plato's Republic JEROME SCHILLER I. Introduction Too MUCHhas already been written about Plato's Republic. But this, strangely enough, is why a little more needs to be written. For the book has been worked over so often that an obvious sign of fatigue has set in: critics are beginning to find such elementary flaws in the Republic that one wonders why he should waste (...) time on such a philosophically embarrassing work at all. It is to counter one of these recent criticisms and thus, hopefully, to help offset the fatigue, that this study is written. It purports not only to show the criticism mistaken, but also to sketch a way of looking at the Republic which should send the reader back for a further look at this incredibly rich work. The richness of the Republic is, indeed, a source of embarrassment for anyone writing on it. For because of its structure it is at least misleading to isolate one topic from the myriad others treated there, and because of its complexity, impossible to document interpretations of more than a few topics. I shall follow the time-honored practices here of merely expressing my bias on some topics (such as my non-political interpretation) and leaving it up to the reader to follow up hints of my interpretations of other topics (such as that of the Sun, Line, and Cave). II. Plato's Alleged Fallacy in the Republic David Sachs and A. W. H. Adkins have recently claimed that Plato commits the fallacy of equivocation in the Republic, not in the course of some minor argument, but in answering what is probably the central problem posed by the work: Why be just?1 Simply put, their objection goes like this: In the first book of the Republic, Socrates attempts to prove to Thrasymachus why justice is preferable to injustice. But even Socrates is dissatisfied with this answer and early in the second book, after a brilliantly fashioned defense of the Thrasymachean position by Glaucon and Adeimantus, the brothers ask for a more convincing demonstration from "You, [who have] passed your entire life in the consideration of this very matter." e Socrates seems to accept the challenge and proceeds to a search for the concept of justice writ large in the state. Now, claim Adkins and Sachs, Plato never does answer Glaucon's and AdeiDavid Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato s Republic, Philosophical Review, LX(XII (1963),141158 ;A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, A Study in Greek Values (Oxford,1960),p. 289. Adkins,in developingapolitical interpretation ofthe Republic, doesnot elaborate the criticism as does Sachs; hence I refer in this study primarily to the latter's article. sPlato, Republic 376e 2-3,trans. P. Shorey (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1937-42).All subsequent quotations are from this translation. [1] HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY mantus' request. For though he does eventually purport to show that justice is preferable to injustice, the justice he attempts to prove this of is not at all the same justice that Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind. Plato has simply equivocated on the term "iustice," meaning at one time the set of acts generally considered just,s but at another time a certain order in the individual's soul. He has purported to show that an individual with a well-ordered soul reaps advantages, but unless he can show a clear relation between this "Platonic" notion of justice and the "vulgar" notion of justice, the notion which Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind, he will not have answered the brothers' question, and will thus have avoided the central problem of the Republic. The relation he has to establish is, Sachs claims, that Platonic justice is a necessary and a sufficient condition for vulgar justice. Then he could argue that since he has shown that a man reaps advantages just to the extent that he is Platonically just, (1) a vulgarly unjust individual will not reap more advantages than a vulgarly just one (on the grounds that Platonic justice entails vulgar justice), and (2) a vulgarly just man will reap more advantages than a vulgarly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:just Men and Just Acts in Plato's Republic JEROME SCHILLER I. Introduction Too MUCHhas already been written about Plato's Republic. But this, strangely enough, is why a little more needs to be written. For the book has been worked over so often that an obvious sign of fatigue has set in: critics are beginning to find such elementary flaws in the Republic that one wonders why he should waste (...) time on such a philosophically embarrassing work at all. It is to counter one of these recent criticisms and thus, hopefully, to help offset the fatigue, that this study is written. It purports not only to show the criticism mistaken, but also to sketch a way of looking at the Republic which should send the reader back for a further look at this incredibly rich work. The richness of the Republic is, indeed, a source of embarrassment for anyone writing on it. For because of its structure it is at least misleading to isolate one topic from the myriad others treated there, and because of its complexity, impossible to document interpretations of more than a few topics. I shall follow the time-honored practices here of merely expressing my bias on some topics (such as my non-political interpretation) and leaving it up to the reader to follow up hints of my interpretations of other topics (such as that of the Sun, Line, and Cave). II. Plato's Alleged Fallacy in the Republic David Sachs and A. W. H. Adkins have recently claimed that Plato commits the fallacy of equivocation in the Republic, not in the course of some minor argument, but in answering what is probably the central problem posed by the work: Why be just?1 Simply put, their objection goes like this: In the first book of the Republic, Socrates attempts to prove to Thrasymachus why justice is preferable to injustice. But even Socrates is dissatisfied with this answer and early in the second book, after a brilliantly fashioned defense of the Thrasymachean position by Glaucon and Adeimantus, the brothers ask for a more convincing demonstration from "You, [who have] passed your entire life in the consideration of this very matter." e Socrates seems to accept the challenge and proceeds to a search for the concept of justice writ large in the state. Now, claim Adkins and Sachs, Plato never does answer Glaucon's and AdeiDavid Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato s Republic, Philosophical Review, LX(XII (1963),141158 ;A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, A Study in Greek Values (Oxford,1960),p. 289. Adkins,in developingapolitical interpretation ofthe Republic, doesnot elaborate the criticism as does Sachs; hence I refer in this study primarily to the latter's article. sPlato, Republic 376e 2-3,trans. P. Shorey (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1937-42).All subsequent quotations are from this translation. [1] HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY mantus' request. For though he does eventually purport to show that justice is preferable to injustice, the justice he attempts to prove this of is not at all the same justice that Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind. Plato has simply equivocated on the term "iustice," meaning at one time the set of acts generally considered just,s but at another time a certain order in the individual's soul. He has purported to show that an individual with a well-ordered soul reaps advantages, but unless he can show a clear relation between this "Platonic" notion of justice and the "vulgar" notion of justice, the notion which Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind, he will not have answered the brothers' question, and will thus have avoided the central problem of the Republic. The relation he has to establish is, Sachs claims, that Platonic justice is a necessary and a sufficient condition for vulgar justice. Then he could argue that since he has shown that a man reaps advantages just to the extent that he is Platonically just, (1) a vulgarly unjust individual will not reap more advantages than a vulgarly just one (on the grounds that Platonic justice entails vulgar justice), and (2) a vulgarly just man will reap more advantages than a vulgarly... (shrink)

Author: Kowalski Andrzej P. Title: CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND PREHISTORY OF THE CONTINENT OF ART (Kulturoznawcza archeologia i prehistoria Kontynentu sztuki) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2011, vol:.12, number: 2011/1, pages: 291-310 Keywords: JERZY KMITA, CULTURAL ARCHAEOLOGY, THE CONTINENT OF ART, SHAMANISTIC ORIGINS OF ART Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The paper presents an attempt at application of Jerzy Kmita’s achievements in philosophy of art, aesthetics, axiology, and history of culture to the research (...) on genesis of art. The problem of cultural genealogy of art shall be addressed in following contexts: 1. The context of the so-called ‘end of art in postmodern culture’ which manifests itself in the thesis concerning elimination of “grand narrations”, myths, and ideologies. According to J. Kmita, the art takes recourse to idea-meanings which are not ascribed to a handicraft. The meanings of superior axiological level express themselves in the art only. 2. The context of Bild-Anthropologie developed by H. Belting. Works of art are regarded here as images, especially—images of a cultural type. The accent lies here on genealogy of iconoclasm and theological discourse which uses Greek philosophical terminology. Ontology of “image as a presence” is analyzed with regard to magical realism and symbolism. Primordial and prehistoric images do not operate with signs of objects but instead they constitute objects themselves. 3. The context of structural anthropology where the art is interpreted within the horizon of mytho-logics and metaphoric-metonymical transformations. Kmita’s adjustment shows that metaphorical and metonymical meanings are indistinguishable. The art—which was ascribed a classificatory meaning—provided also socio-morphic categories. Totemic signs were more appreciated than totems themselves. It shows that the art transcends the reality which itself becomes a subject of the image. 4. The context of shamanistic origins of art. This conception universalizes results of neuropsychological research. Trance-practices are considered here as the origin of cave painting which presents a scheme of shamanistic visions. However, in folk cultures not all imaginary objects originate from trance-experience and the acceptance of their reality does not presuppose sensory deprivations (which is one of ethnological arguments showing limits of such interpretation). (shrink)

In Sophocles’ Ichneutai the second phase of the Satyrs’ tracking of the stolen cows begins with twenty-seven lyric lines (vv. 176-202), during which the Satyrs progressively advance towards the cave of the nymph Kyllene. The papyrus assigns the entire passage to the Chorus of the Satyrs. But it seems most probable that here we have a lyric dialogue between the Chorus and Silenos, with the greater part actually belonging to him. The lyric passage is full of exhortations and instructions (...) to the Satyrs for the tracking, which most likely come from the lips of Silenos. In the preceding trimeters Silenos has promised his sons to stay and guide them in their tracking, using his words and also a ‘hound-inciting’ whistling (172-175). What follows is an impressive stage-representation (and parody) of ancient hunting with dogs, in which apparently Silenos assumes the role of a hunter, while the Satyrs assume that of tracking-hounds. (shrink)

In order to better understand the meaning of Socrates’ philosophic life, Nichols explores the theme of caring that is prominent in Socrates’ Apology. What is the relation between the examined life that he says is the only one worth living for a human being and the care he claims and shows for others, especially the young of Athens? Nichols discusses Socrates’ illustrations of philosophic caretaking from the Symposium, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus, both his own caretaking activities as well as his teachings (...) about love and generation, the art of words, and midwifery. Finally, she argues that the god who “commands” an answer to his oracular riddle, as Socrates interprets it in the Apology, serves as a model for the union of questioning and caretaking central to Socrates' life of philosophizing. Through his presentation of Socrates, Plato therefore offers an alternative to the Eleatic Stranger’s view of divine and human care in the Statesman that forms a backdrop to Socrates’ defense in the Apology. (shrink)

The past decades have seen a growing “philosophical” interest in a number of authors, but strangely enough Saramago’s oeuvre has been left somewhat aside. This volume aims at filling this gap by providing a diverse range of philosophical perspectives and expositions on Saramago’s work. The chapters explore some possible issues arising from his works: from his use of Plato’s allegory of the cave to his re-readings of Biblical stories; from his critique and “reinvention” of philosophy of history to his (...) allegorical exploration of alternative histories; from his humorous approach to our being-towards-death to the revolutionary political charge of his fiction. The essays here confront Saramago’s fiction with concepts, theories, and suggestions belonging to various philosophical traditions and philosophers including Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Patočka, Derrida, Agamben, and Žižek. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Language of the CaveA. Serge KapplerThe Language of the Cave, by Andrew Barker and Martin Warner; vi & 198 pp. Edmonton: Academic Printing & Publishing, 1993, $54.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.The scholarly essays in this collection focus on the tension between Plato’s expressed views about style, poetry, and intellectual discourse on the one hand and his own practice on the other. Why does a man fiercely hostile (...) toward [End Page 266] literature and poetry write works that are themselves mimetic? Why does he repeatedly resort to story telling to make a point? Why do some of his works fail to fit his own prescriptions of clarity and unity? Six of the eight essays in this collection propose exonerating answers to these and similarly troubling questions.In stimulating counterpoint to this massive rescue operation, John Gould (“Plato and Performance”) argues that Plato’s attack on the irrationality of Greek literature and poetry has irrational roots in Plato himself. The reality defined by literary art, Gould suggests, is one of contradiction and conflict; its “incorrigible plurality”—the “drunkenness” of things as they are—is something that “Plato, at least in the puritanical mood of the Republic and the Phaedo, would not have wished to feel” (p. 25).Gould bases his contentions largely on a negative assessment of Plato’s arguments in the Republic. For him, the poverty and fierceness of those arguments strongly suggest an existential agenda at work. Implicitly supportive of this position, Penelope Murray (“Inspiration and Mimesis in Plato”) shows that the picture Plato paints of poets in the grip of irrational frenzy, in the Republic and elsewhere, far from being the traditional truth he purports it to be, is his own creation. It is a “far cry,” she convincingly argues, from the images of the poet that we find in pre-Platonic literature” (p. 46).The most original defense of Plato is offered by Mary Margaret McCabe in “Myth, Allegory and Argument in Plato.” She proposes that logical arguments in Plato’s text stand in a dialectical relation to stories and allegories elsewhere in the text. Mere logic presents too lean a picture of reality, while myths and allegories present one that is, from an Ockhamite perspective, too rich. The responsibility for finding the right theoretical balance lies with the reader.Now were it true that Plato’s famous images have no genuine heuristic value in the contexts in which they are offered, then McCabe’s thesis might be in some trouble. Yet that is precisely the claim of Manuela Teçusan (“Speaking about the Unspeakable: Plato’s Use of Imagery”), who reassures readers that because Plato resorts to poetic devices primarily in order to illustrate conclusions that are independently supported, he is not really guilty of an inconsistency needing to be explained away.If Plato’s complaints against literature are typically understood as presupposing extravagant metaphysical theses of his own, one possibility is to show that he is not actually committed to those theses. Christopher Rowe (“Reflections of the Sun: Explanation in the Phaedo”) and Michael Stokes (“Plato and the Sightlovers of the Republic”) weigh in with carefully argued versions of that time-honored project. Rowe can discover no reference in the Phaedo to the unhypothesized Good of the Republic, while Stokes discerns no genuine Platonic commitment to a two-world theory in Republic 5.Finally, Richard Rutherford (“Unifying the Protagoras”) diagnoses that dialogue’s notorious lack of unity as reflecting the disorganized minds and unsocratically competitive impulses of its Sophist participants, and Martin [End Page 267] Warner (“Dialectical Drama: The Case of Plato’s Symposium”) proposes that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, all of the Symposium displays both substance and unity.Reading these well-researched, engaging essays, one may find oneself wishing that their authors would occasionally wonder aloud whether Plato had any choice but to express himself through the poetic/dramatic medium which he criticizes. Perhaps he could have invented the straightforward philosophical prose style, but perhaps he was too busy building its conceptual and cultural foundations.A. Serge KapplerSkidmore CollegeCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

At the centre of the monograph (1984, first edition) lies a detailed interpretation and critique of the idea of the Good in the Republic. The main thesis of the interpretation runs as follows: The idea of the Good functions as a third item between thinking and being. The main purpose of the monograph is to introduce the systematic problem of the third item via the historical problem of the idea of the Good. The second, enlarged edition (1989) gives a new (...) reconstruction of an "exasperatingly difficult but ever fascinating topic" (H. Cherniss), that is, of the platonic theory of the ideal numbers and the two principles that were contained in the “so-called unwritten doctrines” (Aristotle). The final chapter gives new information on the reception of Plato's idea of the Good in P. Natorp and M. Heidegger. It also includes an updated bibliography. The third edition (2015) is a reprint of the second edition of 1989. Further remarks and an updated bibliography to 2005 are to be found in: - Ferber, Rafael (2005). Ist die Idee des Guten nicht transzendent oder ist sie es doch? Nochmals Platons ΕΠΕΚΕΙΝΑ ΤΗΣ ΟΥΣΙΑΣ. In: Barbaric Damir: Platon über das Gute und die Gerechtigkeit / Plato on Goodness and Justice / Platone sul Bene e sulla Giustizia. Würzburg, 149-174. - Ferber, Rafael / Damschen, Gregor (2015). Is the Idea of the Good Beyond Being? Plato's "epekeinea tês ousias" Revisted (Republic, 6, 509b8-10). In: Nails, Debra; Harold, Tarrant; Kajava, Mika; Salmenkivi, Eero. Second Sailing: Alternative Perspectives on Plato. Espoo, 197-203. (shrink)

In Book VII, p. 520, Socrates describes the arguments by which the philosophers must be induced to “return to the cave,” that is to say, to resume the practical business of politics from which they have escaped into the better life of contemplation. They must be shown that this sacrifice is a debt which they owe to the city in return for the opportunity which it has afforded them of becoming philosophers. “Will our pupils,"1 he continues, “when they hear (...) this, refuse to share in turn the toils of state, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heaven of ideas?” “Impossible,” Glaucon replies; “for they are just men, and the commands which we impose on them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not like our present ministers of state’. (shrink)

‘The shamanic context of cave art is attested by a number of features’, Michael Winkelman writes (p.6); and, scarcely pausing for breath, he proceeds to reel off as if they were matters of established fact a list of co njectures about the authorship and meaning of ice-age cave paintings. We are t o conclude, without question apparently, that ‘cave art images represent shamanic activities and altered states of consciousness, and the subterranean rock art sites were used for (...) shamanic vision questing’ (p. 7). Well, may be. The shaman hypothesis is certainly an intriguing one; and David Lewis-Williams, in particular, has made a plausible case for it. Yet my own first reaction is: not so fast. For one thing, I myself, in the pages of this Journal a few years ago, presented evidence which – to begin with, anyway – suggests that any such interpretation has to be complet ely mistaken. (shrink)

In Book VII, p. 520, Socrates describes the arguments by which the philosophers must be induced to “return to the cave,” that is to say, to resume the practical business of politics from which they have escaped into the better life of contemplation. They must be shown that this sacrifice is a debt which they owe to the city in return for the opportunity which it has afforded them of becoming philosophers. “Will our pupils,"1 he continues, “when they hear (...) this, refuse to share in turn the toils of state, when they are allowed to spend the greater part of their time with one another in the heaven of ideas?” “Impossible,” Glaucon replies; “for they are just men, and the commands which we impose on them are just; there can be no doubt that every one of them will take office as a stern necessity, and not like our present ministers of state’. (shrink)

Thomas Taylor in England, by K. Raine.--Thomas Taylor in America, by G. M. Harper.--Biographical accounts of Thomas Taylor.--Concerning the beautiful.--The hymns of Orpheus.--Concerning the cave of the nymphs.--A dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries.--Introduction to The fable of Cupid and Psyche.--The Platonic philosopher's creed.--An apology for the fables of Homer.--Bibliography (p. [521]-538).

A is for Alice and astronomers arguing about acceleration -- B is for Bernard's body-exchange machine -- C is for the Catholic cannibal -- D is for Maxwell's demon -- E is for evolution (and an embarrassing problem with it) -- F is for the forms lost forever to the prisoners of the cave -- G is for Galileo's gravitational balls -- H is for Hume's shades -- I is for the identity of indiscernibles -- J is for Henri (...) Poincaré and alternative geometries -- K is for the Kritik and Kant's kind of thought experiments -- L is for Lucretius' spear -- M is for Mach's motionless chain -- N is for Newton's bucket -- O is for Olbers' paradox -- P is for Parfit's person -- Q is for the questions raised by thought experiments quotidiennes -- R is for the rule-ruled room -- S is for Salvatius' ship, sailing along its own space-time line -- T is for the time-travelling twins -- U is for the universe, and Einstein's attempts to understand it -- V is for the vexed case of the violinist -- W is for Wittgenstein's beetle -- X is for xenophanes and thinking by examples -- Y is for counterfactuals and a backwards approach to history -- Z is for Zeno and the mysteries of infinity. (shrink)

Introduction -- "Mediating estrangement: a theory for diplomacy," review of International Studies (April, l987), 13, pp. 91-110 -- "Arms, hostages and the importance of shredding in earnest: reading the national security culture," Social Text (Spring, 1989), 22, pp. 79-91 -- "The (s)pace of international relations: simulation, surveillance and speed," International Studies Quarterly (September 1990), pp. 295-310 -- "Narco-terrorism at home and abroad," Radical America (December 1991), vol. 23, nos. 2-3, pp. 21-26 -- "The terrorist discourse: signs, states, and systems of (...) global political violence," World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century's End, ed. M. Klare and D. Thomas, St. Martin's Press (1991), pp. 237-265. -- "S/N: international theory, balkanisation, and the new world order," Millennium Journal for International Studies (Winter 1991), vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 485-506 -- "Cyberwar, videogames, and the Gulf War syndrome," Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Cambridge, Ma and Oxford, UK, 1992), pp. 173-202 -- "Act IV: fathers (and sons), mother courage (and her children), and the dog, the cave, and the beef," in Global Voices: Dialogues in International Relations, ed. James N. Rosenau (Boulder, Co and Oxford, Uk: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 83-96 -- "The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard," in the Political Subject of Violence, ed. G.M. Dillon and David Campbell, Manchester University Press (1993), pp. 94-113 -- "The C.I.A., Hollywood, and sovereign conspiracies," Queen's Quarterly (Summer 1993), vol. 100, no. 2, pp. 329-347 -- "Great men, monumental history, and not-so-grand theory: a meta-review of Henry Kissinger's diplomacy," Forum review article, Mershon International Studies Review (april 1995), vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 173-180 -- "Post-theory: the eternal return of ethics in international relations," New Thinking in International Relations Theory, eds. Michael Doyle and John Ikenberry (New York: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 55-75 -- "Cyber-deterrence," Wired (September 1994), 2.09., p. 116 (plus 7 pages) -- "Global swarming, virtual security, and Bosnia," the Washington Quarterly (Summer 1996), vol. 19, n0. 3., pp. 45- 56 -- "The simulation triangle," 21c (issue 24, 1997), pp. 19-25 -- "Virtuous war and hollywood," the Nation (3 april 2000), pp. 41-44 -- "Virtuous war/virtual theory," International Affairs (fall, 2000), pp. 771-788 -- "Hedley Bull and the case for a post-classical approach," International Relations at LSE: a History of 75 Years (London: Millennium Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 61-87. "the illusion of a grand strategy, op-ed," the New york Times, may 25, 2001 -- "In terrorem: before and after 9/11," Worlds in Collision, eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 101-116 -- "The question of information technology in international relations," Millennium Journal of International Studies (vol. 32, no. 3, 2003), pp. 441-456 -- "The illusion of a grand strategy," op-ed, the New York Times, may 25, 2001. (shrink)

MARINA PAOLA BANCHETTI-ROBINO is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and zoosemiotics. Her publications have appeared in such journals as Synthese, Husserl Studies, Idealistic Studies, Philosophy East and West, and The Review of Metaphysics. She has also contributed essays to The Role of Pragmatics in Contemporary Philosophy (1997), Feminist Phenomenology (2000), and Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology on the Perennial (...) Issue of Microcosm and Macrocosm (2006). She co-edited Philosophies of the Environment and Technology (1999) and is currently working on a book-length project entitled The Birth of Science Out of the Spirit of Myth: A Historico-Phenomenological Re-Examination of the Crisis of the European Sciences. BERNARD BOXILL was born in Saint Lucia, West Indies where he received his primary and secondary education. He studied philosophy at the University of New Brunswick, Canada and at the University of California, Los Angeles where he was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in 1971. He has published numerous articles, a book, Blacks and Social Justice (1992), and is professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ED BRANDON was born and educated in England, studying philosophy and linguistics at The University of York, England, and later philosophy at The University of Oxford with the late John Mackie. After teaching in Sierra Leone and briefly in England, he went to teach philosophy of education at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1978. From 1992 he has been attached to a policy unit of the Vice-Chancellery, based at the Cave Hill campus in Barbados, where he has been assisting since 2000 with a new major in philosophy. His academic work can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/bnccde/epb/personalpage.html CAROLYN CUSICK is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. She is a founding member of the Phenomenology Roundtable. Her research focuses on feminist epistemology, Africana philosophy, and phenomenology. LEWIS GORDON is President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is Laura H. Carnell Professor, the most distinguished chair, at Temple University, where he holds appointments in philosophy, religion, and Judaic studies and directs the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought and the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies. He is also Ongoing Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Government at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), Disciplinary Decadence: Living Thought in Trying Times (Paradigm, 2006), An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of A Companion to African-American Studies (Blackwell, 2006) and Not Only the Master's Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Paradigm, 2005). CLEVIS HEADLEY is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, director of the Ethnic Studies Certificate Program, as well as director of the Master's in Liberal Studies. Professionally, he serves as the Vice-President and Treasurer of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Professor Headley has published widely in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Africana philosophy. He has also published in Analytic philosophy, focusing specifically on Gottlob Frege. PAGET HENRY is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua, and the co-editor of C. L. R. James' Caribbean. Professor Henry also serves as the editor of the C. L. R. James Journal, and has published numerous articles on the political economy of the Caribbean as well as on African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. ESIABA IROBI is Associate Professor of International Theatre/Performance Studies at Ohio University, Athens. His groundbreaking book: A Theatre for Cannibals: Resisting Globalization on the Continent and Diaspora since 1441 will be published by Palgrave Macmillan, London, in 2007. He has been invited to be an External Resident Fellow at the prestigious Dartmouth College Humanities Institute for the 2007-2008 academic year. CHIKE JEFFERS is a graduate student in the Ph.D. program of the Philosophy Department at Northwestern University. His interests are in Africana philosophy, social and political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of religion and aesthetics. He is originally from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. CATHERINE JOHN is Associate Professor of African Diaspora Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Her book Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing was co-published by Duke University Press and UWI Press in 2003. She has published several articles on Caribbean literature and culture and her current book project is entitled The Just Society and the Diasporic Imagination. She spends her summer working in Woodside, St. Mary, Jamaica helping with a summer school for children and participating in the community's emancipation celebration. KENNETH KNIES is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus are phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is also a contributing editor for Political Affairs magazine. EDIZON LEN is a photographer and coordinator of the Fondo Documental Afro-Andino at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. In 2006, he was curator of the photo exhibit "The Color of the Diaspora" presented at the Cultural Center of the Catholic University of Ecuador and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is currently completing his doctorate at the Universidad Andina Simòn Bolivar with a focus on Maroon thought. REKHA MENON is Associate Professor of Art History at State University of New York, Buffalo State. She is the author of Seductive Aesthetics of Post Colonialism (forthcoming). Her area of research focuses on current philosophical investigations in colonial and neocolonial aspects of Indian art, artistic/cultural practices and philosophies and their relationship to Western arts and philosophies. Her manuscripts under review are: Ashamed of Our Nakedness, Is There Ever a Naked Body? Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Expressive Aesthetics and Insatiable Desire. MICHAEL R. MICHAU is a Ph.D. candidate in the Philosophy and Literature Program at Purdue University, and during the 2006-2007 school year, a lecturer in the Department of Comparative Studies and Department of Philosophy at Ohio State University. He is the co-founder and co-secretary of the North American Levinas Society. CHARLES W. MILLS is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He works in the general area of oppositional political theory, and is the author of numerous articles and three books: The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University Press, 1998), and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). MABOGO P. MORE is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. He has published articles on African philosophy and social and political philosophy in a number of academic journals, such as South African Journal of Philosophy, Dialogue and Universalism, Alternation, Theoria, and African Journal of Political Science. MARILYN NISSIM-SABAT, Ph.D., M.S.W. is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Lewis University. Dr. Nissim-Sabat is also a psychotherapist in private practice. She is the author of numerous book chapters and papers in the fields of philosophy (Husserlian phenomenology), psychoanalysis, feminism, and critical race theory. Citations of her works can be found on her website: marilynnissim-sabat.com. FREDERICK OCHIENG'-ODHIAMBO is a Senior Lecturer of Philosophy and Coordinator of the discipline at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. His major research areas are African philosophy and social philosophy. He has published several articles on philosophic sagacity. IVAN PETRELLA is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Miami. He is author of The Future of Liberation Theology: An Argument and Manifesto (SCM Press, 2006) and editor of Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation (Orbis Books, 2005) as well as co-editor of the series Reclaiming Liberation Theology (SCM Press) RICHARD PITHOUSE is a research fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. He is editor of Asinamali: University Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Africa World Press, 2006). SATHYA RAO is Assistant Professor in French translation at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Alberta, Canada. His research fields include: theory of translation, continental philosophy, postcolonial studies, discourses on Africa, and Francophone cinema and literature. He has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals and written chapters in several collective books such as: De l'Ecrit Africain a l'Oral le Phenomene Graphique Africain, Simon Battestini (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006) and Thèorie-rèbellion. Un Ultimatum, Gilles Grelet (Ed.) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2005). He has a co-edited a book on Francophone African cinema L'Afrique fait son cinema (Montreal: Memoires d'encrier, forthcoming). Sathya Rao is vice-president of the International Non-Philosophical Organisation (INPhO), member of the Canadian Association of Translatology (CATS), coordinator of the research team Poexil, and Secretary of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He is co-founder of an online journal Alternative Francophone. CATHERINE WALSH is Professor and Director of the doctoral program in Latin American Cultural Studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Quito, Ecuador. Her research interests include the geopolitics of knowledge, interculturality and concerns related to the Afro-Andean Diaspora and the production of decolonial thought. Among her recent publications are Pensamiento crìtico y matriz colonial (Quito: Abya Yala, 2005), "Interculturality and the Coloniality of Power. An 'Other' Thinking and Positioning from the Colonial Difference," in Coloniality of Power, Transmodernity, and Border Thinking, R. Grosfoguel, J.D. Saldivar, and N. Maldonado-Torres (Eds.) (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming) and "Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge: Decolonial Thought and Cultural Studies 'Others' in the Andes," Cultural Studies (forthcoming). KRISTIN WATERS has published widely in the areas of race and gender. Her anthology Enlightened Conversations: Women and Men Political Theorists (Blackwell, 2000) challenges political theorists to be more inclusive of race and gender in their research and teaching. Her book Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, co-edited with Carol Conaway (University of Vermont Press, forthcoming), addresses the varied intellectual traditions of black women's thought that spans more than two hundred years in North America. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State College and Visiting Research Associate at Brandeis University. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:366 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY In harmony with Glaucon or Kant, but unlike Thrasymachus, Ballard is unconvinced by Socrates' virtual identification of virtue with art (T~xpv)or expert knowledge (cf. 24f., 50-79). For the "tragic" intellectualism embraced by both Socrates and Thrasymachus precludes the "existential loyalty" prized by Ballard's Plato and Plato's Glaucon. Against "existential loyalty," Socrates' philosopher-kings, if left to themselves, would commit crimes of omission perhaps more heinous than (...) the crimes of commission perpetrated by Thrasymachus' paragon of wisdom, the perfect tyrant. Although aware that only their leadership can prevent the greatest evils in states, philosophers nevertheless refuse to rule, even in the ideal state, unless compelled (cf. Republic, 519B7-520A4). Thus neither Thrasymachus' tyrant nor Socrates' philosopher would willingly sacrifice their own pleasure and happiness for the common good. Their "epicurean" taste contrasts sharply with Ballard's more Kantian or Biblical call for "existential loyalty." No compulsion would be necessary to obtain the return of Ballard's philosophers to the political responsibilities of the "cave." For his subordination of reason to myth precludes escape from the "cave" either in the satanic direction of Thrasymachus or the divine direction of Socrates (cf. 120). However one may evaluate Ballard's solution to the central problem of Platonism, his book surely encourages the dialectic which, in spite of his intentions, may lead to the knowledge cherished by the Republic's Thrasymachus and Socrates. Against their "tragic" intellectualism, neither Ballard nor anyone else can prove more than what the Republic's Socrates admitted: The fact of infallible knowledge is incontestable only for those experiencing it within themselves, while the claim to possess it necessarily seems mere pretense or, at worst, tragic hubris to men whose introspection reveals no rational instrument (~p~,~ov) capable of apprehending the absolute good (Republic, 527D5--528A1; cf. Protagoras, 352A8-353B3; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, l177B27-11791A3; Metaphysics, 982B28-98385). The following minor errors were noted: Page 6, note 1: read "Bury" for "Bary"; page 24 (line 7 from bottom): read "Prot. 358C for "Prot. 385C" ; page 28, line 4: read "Nicias" for "Nisias" ; page 66 (line 8 from bottom): read "Republic IX" for "Republic IV." HARRY NEUMANN Scripps College Plato on Immortality. By Robert Leet Patterson. (University Park, Pa.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1965. Pp. 141. $5.00.) In this sympathetic account of Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul (as presented in the Phaedo and the Phaedrus) Professor Patterson has attempted to argue that Plato believed that his arguments were complete 'demonstrations' of the immortality of the soul. The author is concerned to indicate the intention, the background, and the structure of the various arguments which Socrates presents in defense of the view that the soul is immortal. In the course of his discussions Patterson seems to involve himself in a number of large issues (e.g, the problem of psycho-physical dualism, the concept of substance, the critique of materialism and epiphenomenalism, and the meaning of Plato's doctrine of Forms) which are not dealt with comprehensively and which transcend the primary concern of his book. The digressions which lead Patterson into exceedingly difficult philosophical problems and, in some cases, into the realm of exotic analogies (e.g., he at one point compares Plato's dualism to the views of Jainism, Hinayana, Samkhya, Nyaya-Vaiseshik, and Mimamsa metaphysics I) detract from the value of the book and tend to divert him from his basic intention. His defences of Plato's arguments are, on the other hand, interesting, if debatable. The basic teaching of the Phaedo is, it is said, that the soul in essence does not belong to the realm of becoming, but is a sempiternal entity. The first argument which Socrates prepublic : Utopia or Dystopia? " (The Modern Schoolman, May, 1967). On the relation of sophistry to the problem of the xwp~qp~,see Diotim~ts Concept of Love," American Journal of Philology, 86 (1965), 47-50. BOOK REVIEWS 367 sents is said to have a "Heraclitean" structure (p. 22) presumably because it appeals to a conception of "opposites." On this basis, the argument could just as well be described as Pythagorean. At any rate, the argument assumes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 233-250 [Access article in PDF] Narrative Theory and Function: Why Evolution Matters Michelle Scalise Sugiyama I It may seem a strange proposition that the study of human evolution is integral to the study of literature, yet that is exactly what this paper proposes. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, the practice of storytelling is ancient, pre-dating not only the advent of writing, but (...) of agriculture and permanent settlement as well. Secondly, narrative is ultimately a product of the mind, which in turn is the product of a long history of evolution by natural selection. Thus, an understanding of why and how humans create and consume narrative requires an understanding of (1) features of ancestral environments and (2) features of the mind that made the emergence of this phenomenon possible.There can be little doubt that narrative emerged in human prehistory. Language, an obvious prerequisite for storytelling, is likely to have emerged by at least 50,000 and possibly 250,000 years ago, depending upon whether one places one's trust in archaeological or anatomical evidence. 1 The most reasonable estimate is offered by Geoffrey Miller, who points out that, given its universality, the language faculty must have emerged by the time ancestral Homo sapiens began migrating out of Africa approximately 100,000 years ago. 2 Although the oldest known written narrative (The Epic of Gilgamesh) dates back only 5,000 years, the written literary traditions of many ancient cultures are known to be rooted in longstanding oral traditions. 3 The fact that many modern foraging peoples have rich and complex oral traditions further suggests that the emergence of narrative is not linked to the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Moreover, other forms of symbolic expression, such as the cave paintings, Venus figurines, and engraved bone [End Page 233] and antler that have been found at various sites throughout Europe, date back approximately 30,000 years, and rock paintings in Australia may date back even farther. 4 Since humans were physiologically capable of speech long before they began producing these artifacts, storytelling is likely to be at least as ancient as these other representational forms. Indeed, one scholar situates the "dawn of the oral tradition" within this period (Pfeiffer, p. 189). Given, then, that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have been in existence for approximately 100,000 years 5 and are the only hominid species or subspecies known for certain to exhibit storytelling behavior, we can safely say that oral narrative is a product of our hunting-and-gathering past, likely to have emerged between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago.The universality of narrative is further testimony to its being an ancient cognitive phenomenon. Literate or not, all known cultures, past and present, practice storytelling. 6 Moreover, all normally developing humans acquire the ability to process and generate stories: studies of Western children indicate that the ability to tell stories emerges spontaneously between the ages of two-and-a-half and three, and children as young as thirty months can distinguish between narrative and non-narrative uses of language. 7 In contrast to reading, writing, and arithmetic, no special education is required for narrative competence to develop, nor is there any evidence that oral literacy is acquired through contact with other cultures; although subject matter is often exchanged between groups, the practice of storytelling itself arises independently among even the most isolated peoples. Nor does any type of culture have a monopoly on narrative sophistication: the stories of hunter-horticulturalist societies are no less observant, insightful, or artful than those of agrarian or industrial societies.As with language, narrative takes the same basic form across cultures, which David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson define as "a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time." Given the preponderance of human agents in narrative, most narrative theorists would probably modify this barebones description to include character (usually understood to have a human psychology), goal-oriented action, and resolution. Frank Kermode, for example, defines the "proprieties" of narrative as "connexity, closure, and character," and John... (shrink)

In the year 1842, Thomas Cole (1801-1848) painted a set of four oil paintings entitled THE VOYAGE OF LIFE. As the title indicates, the artist likened life to a voyage. This voyage begins with man emerging as a child from a dark cave into the river of life in a spring setting. As this voyage through the river of life continues, man is seen passing through the stages of youth, manhood, & then finally old age. Likewise, the setting of (...) nature is seen correspondingly passing through the stages of summer, autumn, & then finally winter. Any voyage must have a starting point, destination & duration. Also any voyage is a continuation of some sort of existence, & there is a continuity of existence after the voyage is complete. What is this voyage? Why does it have to exist? What existed before this voyage? What will happen after the destination is reached? Why is it short for some, long for others? Why is it easier for some, harder for others? Daheshism deals with these issues & many others. Daheshism is a revolution in the human approach to philosophy, life & religion. It is a new garment for the body of traditional thought & belief. The aim of Daheshism is to provide a universal belief that encompasses all other beliefs. It accomplishes synthesis rather than fragmentation of religious beliefs & expansion rather than contraction of philosophical thought. To order: P.O. Box 16680-8680, Alexandria, VA 22302. Telephone: 703-845-8223, FAX 703-845-8224 or Baker & Taylor Books. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Science in a Democratic Society by Philip KitcherHenry S. RichardsonReview: Philip Kitcher, Science in a Democratic Society, Prometheus Books, 2011In examining the place of science in a democratic society, Philip Kitcher is ultimately asking what standards scientific activity is answerable to. Here, as in Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001), he rejects two extreme possibilities: first, the suggestion that science is autonomous, in the sense that (...) it is answerable only to its own standards; and, second, the suggestion that it is answerable to “vulgar democracy”—that is, to unconstrained majority rule by untutored citizens. In this book, as in the earlier book, he deploys the idea of “well-ordered science,” which he seeks to characterize in part by leaning on the idea of a hypothetical, ideal conversation. Crucially informing this newer book is a much fuller account of nonvulgar democracy. Underlying that account is a much broader picture of “the ethical project”—the title idea of another important Kitcher book from 2011 (Harvard University Press).In order to motivate the friends of science to turn to these broader ethical ideas, Kitcher persuasively rehearses the case against value neutrality in science. Much current distrust of science and scientists, he argues, derives from scientists falsely pretending—whether deludedly or cynically—that science can proceed in a value-neutral way. It cannot do so in resolving competitions among theories, let alone in setting the research agenda or weighing in on practical problems of public concern. By wearing a false mask of value neutrality, scientists succeed only in convincing the public that they are ideologically driven. This, in turn, gives an opening for dissenters motivated by religion or by their own ideologies to develop supposedly scientific counter-claims of their own, such as those that assert creationism or deny the reality of climate change. Better, then, for science and scientists to be frank about its lack of value neutrality. [End Page E-106]What values ought to inform science? To answer this question, Kitcher turns to his conception of the ethical project, of which Chapter 2 gives a summary. As he conceives of ethics, it arose pre-historically as a set of mechanisms helping us to deal with deficiencies in altruistic motivation. Although inspired by evolutionary theory, Kitcher spurns the sociobiologist’s identification of the good with the adaptive. Instead, while giving an elaborate reconstruction of how our ethical practices may actually have arisen, he gives pride of place to the idea of conversation. On his reconstruction, the “egalitarian plateau” touted by Will Kymlicka (Contemporary Political Philosophy [Oxford University Press, 1990], p. 5) and others as the great achievement of the Enlightenment was merely a delayed philosophical echo of the ethical project’s initial feature, one that would have been found in the ethical discussions of human hunter-gatherer bands of forty-thousand years ago. Being more focused on how life is lived than on philosophy, Kitcher, fairly enough, is unwilling to see the Enlightenment as an egalitarian age. Rather, most recent incarnations of the ethical project have been distorted by hierarchies and inequalities. Emphasizing the word, Kitcher writes, “I propose... that we undo the distortion,” and model the ethical project, going forward, as involving an egalitarian conversation. This frankness disarms any worry about the move from ‘was’ to ‘ought’ that might have arisen in the minds of those already puzzled by the current popularity of the cave-man diet; and in any case, since Kitcher’s account of the ethical project is defended at length in his contemporaneous book of that title, doubts about it would be better addressed in that context. Rhetorically, since the ideal of treating persons fundamentally as equals is even more popular than eating meat, he is on strong ground here.The book develops this core egalitarian proposal in three distinct ways, thereby gaining a rich evaluative basis for considering the place of science in society. The first is an account of the purposes to which science is answerable. Kitcher dismisses as unrealistically high-minded and ultimately elitist a conception of scientists as driven by a disinterested quest for truth and a simple love of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, his... (shrink)

continent. 2.1 (2012): 56–58 Nechvatal, Joseph, Immersion Into Noise , Open Humanities Press, 2011, 267 pp, $23.99 (pbk), ISBN 1-60785-241-1. As someone who’s knowledge of “art” mostly began with the domestic (Western) and Japanese punk and noise scenes of the late 80’s and early 90’s, practices and theories of noise fall rather close to my heart. It is peeking into the esoteric enclaves of weird music and noise that helped me understand what I think I might like art to be: (...) A way of learning about the world through perturbation—exploration by incitement and speculation of possible conditions. What I have always loved about artistic investigations influenced by noisy aesthetics or sensibilities is that they can be simultaneously transcendent and absurd, amusing and revelatory, singular and pluralistic, mindless and intensely penetrating. The provocative friction that noise brings to bear on aesthetic experience, artistic practice, and “the” Art World acts as a kind of impulse response, proposing new energies while revealing underlying structure; noise signals are a simultaneous synthesis and analysis of spaces, subjects and relations. About two weeks prior to Christmas 2011, Joseph Nechvatal was generous enough to spend some time with me at 39 Quai des Grands Augustins, Paris . We each had one glass of red wine, briefly discussed common acquaintances, shared points of interest, and his published writings. We also, I recall, disagreed lightheartedly about how much contemporary relevance the ideas of telematic-artist Roy Ascott have for today’s art-and-technology practitioner (Joseph > Jamie). After the encounter, I read through a PDF version of Immersion Into Noise Joseph was kind enough to send me ( the HTML version is here ). A number of points of entry into cultures of “noise” are available these days. There are the acoustic-spatial approaches of thinkers like Douglas Kahn, Brandon LaBelle and Salome Voegelin; the techno-cultural musicologies of Jonathan Sterne and David Toop; the political writings of Jacques Attali, former adviser to President François Mitterrand, in his Noise: The Political Economy of Music (spoiler alert: It’s not really about music). Enter the new writings of one Joseph Nechvatal, with his invitation of an Immersion Into Noise . Nechvatal has been active for over 20 years in on- and off-line discussions of art, technology, virtuality, as well as his own set of art-theoretical departures and terminologies. A practicing artist, and instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Immersion Into Noise , is Nechvatal’s third published volume. His writings, broadly, address a concern with the possibilities of a synthesis between the biological and the virtual, and the contemporary artistic resonances that these possibilities suggest. Nechvatal’s project is to try to name contemporary currents of artistic practice within our technologized culture. He comes at this through art history, post-modern philosophy, anthropology and consciousness studies. Portions of Immersion Into Noise have appeared in his PhD dissertation, as well as online art publications like Zing Magazine . An open-access publication, and part of the impressive and heartening activities of the Open Humanities Press, Nechvatal’s book is a somewhat unexpected addition to the Critical Climate Change series edited by Tom Cohen of SUNY University and Claire Colebrook of Penn State. Other titles in the series have address themes of post-globalism and cultures of threat. Joseph Nachvetal’s title is the first to focus entirely on art history, art practice and aesthetics. It is awkward to too easily fit Nechvatal’s writings in with the aforementioned burgeoning canon of cultural and artistic practice in, and writings on, noise (Russolo, Schaeffer, Cage and Yves Klein through to Kahn, LaBelle, Voegelin, et. al). Immersion Into Noise is not primarily an examination of sound-noise or phenomenologies of sound, and the relativist, non-objectivist possibilities arising therefrom in social, public, and exhibition art practices. Although Nechvatal makes mention of sonic practice and experience (his own encounter in 1968 with the technological complex was set in motion at a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Chicago Coliseum), he does so only by way of introducing a broader concept of “art-noise.” The noise-scape can envelope various kinds of involvement in all kinds of art, by artists, audiences, and distributed amalgams of all of these. Midway through the book, we are offered characteristics of an “immersive noise vision theory.” This theory, leading to an even more syncretic thinking about the art experience, is sketched out through further reference to the author’s personal observation, as well as his art-historical research and notes. Personal examples take on the reflex of a kind of art-noise-travel-writing, as Nechvatal visits Ryoji Ikeda’s Datamatics [ver 2.0] installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris), hears Cecil Taylor at Alice Tully Hall in New York, spends time with the cave paintings of Lascaux, France, and explores the Wagner-inspired Venus Grotto of Linderhof, Bavaria, to name a few. These site-events, to varying degrees, are renderings of noise-art’s potential to “place us back into a ritual position by dragging art down into the felt 360° noise-perspective of the enthusiastic and participatory.” (p.103) The arc of the ideas proposed here position immersiveness, saturation and “scopic all-over tension” as most productively foundational to noise art, or art-noise. An itinerary from the most ancient of artistic expressions (cave drawings) to the most digital of presentations is charted (Ikeda’s minimal/maximal bitwise works for synchronized audio and visual projection). The harsh sonic onslaught of Masami Akita (a.k.a. Merzbow), is, under this analysis, not so far from colossal denseness of the churches of the High Baroque (Nechvatal visits the Rosario Chapel in Santo Domingo Church, Puebla, Mexico). And there is much more here, eaten up by noise: A rethinking of the work of Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Nicolas Schöffler (whom Nechvatal names the true “the Father of Cybernetic Art”) and the Happenings of Alan Kaprow, all as art-noise in their own right. Each of these artists and moments demonstrate techniques of destabilization, immersiveness, frame-breaking and “all-over fullness and fervor.” Here is writing on art and art history that is as ambitious as it is promising: “wildly visionary,” Nechvatal states as in conclusion. Self-admittedly far-reaching to the point of verging on totalization, we are asked to consider that the moments, spaces, arts and artists Nechvatal appreciates in the book all derive from an increasingly prevalent “noise consciousness.” Along the way we gain an appreciation of noise as a productive and proactive tension in art, rather than an unwanted signal or unwelcome intrusion. Most promising here for me are Nechvatal’s revealing descriptions of the potential for noise to make manifest the material-perceptual framework of individual and collective art experience. How might we allow what we have been repeatedly taught is our contemporary condition of “information overload” to transform itself into a calm, warm, sympathetic kind of inundation. Treatment of experience in this way, dissolves boundaries between the bodily, informational, material and technical complexes that make up our world, and is the promise of a radical, if momentary, Immersion Into Noise. (shrink)

Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference in there. The main goal of this article is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early and (...) middle period dialogues. Though this is a kind of strengthening the developmentalistic approach corresponding the relation of the early and middle period dialogues, based on the fact that what is to be proved here is a essential development in Plato’ ontology and his epistemology, by expanding the grounds of development to the ontological and epistemological principles, it hints to a more profound development. The fact that the bipolar and split knowledge and being of the early period dialogues give way to the tripartite and bound knowledge and benig of the middle period dialogues indicates the development of the notions of being and knowledge in Plato’s philosophy before the dialogues of the middle period. -/- Keywords Plato; early dialogues; middle dialogues; being; knowledge; development -/- Introduction The differences between two groups of the early and middle period dialogues have always been a matter of dispute. Whereas the developmentalists like Vlastos, Silverman (2002), Teloh (1981), Dancy (2004) and Rickless (2007) think that from the early to the middle dialogues Plato’s philosophy changes, at least in some essential points, the unitarists like Kahn, Cherniss and Shorey believe that there happens no development and the differences must be taken as natural, ignorable and even pedagogic. In his well-known article, Socrates contra Socrates in PLATO, Vlastos lists ten theses of difference between two groups of dialogues. The first group which includes Plato’s early dialogues he divides to 'elenctic' (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras and Republic I) and 'transitional' (Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus and Meno) dialogues. These transitional come after all the elenctic dialogues and before all the dialogues of the second group which compose Plato’s middle period dialogues, including (with Vlastos' chronological order) Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides and Theaetetus (1991, 46-49). Vlastos asserts strictly that his list of differences are 'so diverse in content and method that they contrast as sharply with one another as with any third philosophy you care to mention, beginning with Aristotole’s' (ibid, 46). Vlastos’ list of differences between two Socrateses is considered a view breaking sharply between the early and the middle dialogues. Besides all ten differences between the two Socrateses in Vlastos’ list that can be supportive for our doctrine here, we intend to focus on some ontological as well as epistemological distinctions that have not completely been discussed hitherto. Contrary to the developmentalist theory of Vlastos, unitarian theory of Charles Kahn wishes to eliminate any substantial difference between the early and the middle dialogues. He distinguishes seven 'pre-middle' or 'threshold' dialogues including Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis and Euthydemus from the other Socratic dialogues which he calls 'earliest group' (1996, 41). The threshold dialogues, Kahn thinks, 'embarke upon a sustained project' that is to reach to its climax in the middle period dialogues, namely Phaedo, Symposium and Republic. Believing in that there is no 'fundamental shift'between the early and middle dialogues (ibid, 40), Kahn thinks the Socratic dialogues are just the 'first stage' with a 'deliberate silence' towards the theories of later periods (ibid, 339). One of the reasons of the surprising fact that Plato gives no hint of the metaphysics and epistemology of the Forms in the early dialogues, he thinks, is the pedagogical advantages of aporia. He thinks that Plato 'obscurely', and mostly because of education, hinted to some doctrines and conceptions in his early dialogues and with the aim of clarifying them only in the later ones (ibid, 66). The seven threshold dialogues, Kahn asserts, 'had been designed from the first' to prepare the pupils and readers for the views expounded in the middle period dialogues (ibid, 59-60). To show that the differences of the two Socrateses of the early and middle period dialogue are in their onto-epistemological grounds and thence cannot be explained by a unitaristic view, we try to draw the ontological and epistemological principles of the early dialogues in the first part below in order to show, in the second part, that those principles have been developed in the middle period dialogues. -/- A. The Onto-Epistemologic Principles of the Early Dialogues Socratic dialogues are paradoxical about knowledge because while being knowledge-oriented always searching for knowledge, they deny it and even never discuss it directly. Three elements of Socrates’ way of searching Knowledge throughout the early dialogues, i.e. Socratic 'what is X?' question, his disavowal of knowledge and his elenctic method combined together produce something like a circle which works, more or less, in the same way in these dialogues. Though this circle is an embaressing inquiry always resulting in ignorance instead of knowledge, its motivation is surprisingly Socrates’ passionate enthusiasm for knowledge, an intensive love of wisdom. The starting point of this circle is Socrates’ confession of having no knowledge which might be explicitly asserted or presupposed, maybe because it was one of the famous characteristics of Socrates; a confession always paradoxically accompanied with his intense longing for knowledge (e.g., Gorgias 505e4-5). Every time Socrates encounters with someone who thinks he knows something (οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι) (Apology 21d5) and tries to examine him. This examination seems to be the simplest one asking just what it is that he knows. Socrates’ elenchus, therefore, is always connected with 'what is X?' (τίς ποτέ ἐστιν) question, a question that most of the early dialogues of Plato are concerned with; 'what is courage?' in the Laches, 'what is piety?' in Euthydemus, 'what is temperance?' in Charmides and 'what is beauty?' in Hippias Major. This question we call here 'Socratic question' and probably is the very question the historical Socrates used to employ, is tightly interrelated with both his disavowal and his elenchus. He disclaims knowledge because he cannot find the answer to the question himself and he rejects others’ since they cannot offer the correct answer too. Every interlocutor can claim he knows X, if and only if he can answer the Socratic question. Otherwise, he is more of an ignorant than of a knower of τί ποτέ ἐστι X. Knowing the answer to this question is, thus, knowledge’s criterion for Socrates. Having found out that he cannot answer what it is which he would claim to know, the interlocutor comes to the point Socrates was there at the beginning. The least advantage of this circle is that he becomes as wise as Socrates does about the subject, becoming aware that he does not know it. At the end of the circle they are both still at the beginning, not knowing what X is. So let us first take a glance at these three elements. Socratic disavowal of knowledge is strictly asserted in some passages. At Apology 21b4-5, Socrates says: -/- I do not know of myself being wise at all (οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν) -/- Moreover, at 21d4-6: -/- None of us knows anything worthwhile (καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι) …. I do not know (οἶδα) neither do I think I know. -/- In Charmides Socrates speaks about a fear about his probable mistake of thinking that he knows (εἰδέναι) something when he does not (166d1-2). The somehow generalization of this disavowal can be seen in Gorgias. After calling his disavowal 'an account that is always the same' (509a4-5), Socrates continues (a5-7): -/- I say that I do not know (οἶδα) how these things are, but no one I have ever met, like now, who can say anything else without being absurd. -/- At the end of Hippias Major (304d7-8), Socrates affirms his disavowal of knowledge of 'what is X?' this time about the fine: -/- I do not know (οἶδα) what that is itself (αὐτὸ τοῦτο ὅτι ποτέ ἐστιν). Some other passages, however, made a number of scholars dubious about Socrates’ disavowal. Vlastos mentions Apology 29b6-7 as an evidence : 'that to do wrong and to disobey one’s master, both god and men, I know (οἶδα) to be evil and shameful'. He thinks that if we give this single text 'its full weight' it can suffice to show that Socrates does claim knowledge of a moral truth (1985, 7). Vlastos’ claim is not admittable since it would be too strange, I think, for a man like Socrates to violate his disavowal claim just after emphasizing it. We can see his claim just before the already mentioned passage: -/- And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. It is perhaps on this point and in this respect, gentlemen, that I differ from the majority of men and if I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything it world be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge (οὐκ εἰδὼς ἱκανῶς) of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have (οὐκ εἰδέναι) (Apology 29b1-6) Vlastos tries to solve what he calls the 'paradox' of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge distinguishing the 'certain' knowledge from 'elenctic' knowledge (1985, 11) and thinking that when Socrates avows knowledge, we must perceive it as an elenctic knowledge, a knowledge its content 'must be propositions he thinks elenctically justifiable' (ibid, 18). Irwin’s solution is the distinction of knowledge and belief. He approves that Socrates does not 'explicitly' make such a distinction, but still thinks that Socrates’ 'test for knowledge would make it reasonable for him to recognize true belief without knowledge, and his own claims are easily understood if they are claims to true belief alone' (1977, 40). While I agree with Vlastos up to a point, I strongly disagree with Irwin about the early dialogues. As I will try to show below, we are not permitted to consider any kind of distinction within knowledge in Socratic dialogues because only one category of knowledge is alluded to there and the distinction of knowledge and belief thoroughly belongs to the second Sorcates. Although no kind of distinction can be admittable here, I think Vlastos’ distinction can be accepted only if we regard it as a distinction between knowledge, which is unique and without any, even incomparable, rival, and a semi-idiomatic and ordinary one that is a necessary requirement for any argument, and thus, unavoidable even for someone who does not claim any kind of knowledge. An apparent evidence of this is Gorgias 505e6-506a4: -/- I go through the discussion as I think it is (ὡς ἄν μοι δοκῇ ἔχειν), if any of you do not agree with admissions I am making to myself, you must object and refute me. For I do not say what I say as I know (οὐδὲ γάρ τοι ἔγωγε εἰδὼς λέγω ἃ λέγω) but as searching jointly with you (ζητῶ κοινῇ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν). -/- The minimal degree of knowledge everyone must have to take part in an argument, conduct it and use the phrase "I know" when it is necessary is what Socrates cannot deny. We can call it elenctic knowledge only if we agree that it is not the kind of knowledge that Socrates has always been searching, the one that can be accepted as the answer of Socratic 'what is X?' question. His disavowal of knowledge is applied only to the knowledge which can truly be the answer of Socratic question and pass the elenctic exam; a knowledge that, I believe, is never claimed by first Socrates. Socrates conducts his method of examining his interlocutors’ knowledge, our second element here, by almost the same method repeated in Socratic dialogues. That whether we are allowed to regard all the examinations of Socrates in the early dialogues as based on the same or not has been a matter of dispute. Vlastos himself (1994, 31) distinguished Euthydemas, Lysis, Menexenns and Hippias Major from the other Socratic dialogues because he thinks Socrates has lost his faith to elenchus in there. Irwin (1977, 38) distinguishes Apology and Crito where Socrates’ own convictions is present. Contrary to some scholars like Benson (2002, 107) who take elenchus in all the Socratic dialogues as a unique method, Michelle Carpenter and Ronald M. Polansky (2002, 89-100) argue pro the variety of methods of elenchus. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith (2002, 145-160) even reject such a thing as Socratic elenchus which can gather all of the Socrates’ various arguments under such a heading. There can be no solution for the problem of elenchus, they think, is due to 'the simple reason that there is no such thing as 'the Socratic elenchos"'(p.147). Though we consider elenchus a somehow determined process and a part of Socratic circle in the early dialogues, all we assume is that whatever differences it might have in different dialogues, it has the same onto-epistemological principles and, thus, we are not going to take it necessarily as a unique method. This method sets out to prove that the interlocutors are as ignorant as Socrates himself is. That whether elenchus is constructive, capable of establishing doctrines as Vlastos (1994) or Brickhouse and Smith (1994, 20-21) believe or not is another issue to which this paper is not to claim anything. What is crucial for our discussion here is that elenchus does not reach to the very knowledge Socrates is looking for. This is strictly against Irwin who thinks that not only elenchus leads to positive results, 'it should even yield knowledge to match Socrates’ conditions'(1977, 68, cf. 48). He does not explain where and how they really yield to that kind of knowledge. He explains his elenctic method in his apology in the court (Apology 21-22), that how he used to examine wise men, politicians, poets and all those who had the highest reputation for their knowledge and every time found that they have no knowledge. If we accept, as I strongly do, that Socrates’ disavowal of his knowledge is not irony, it might seem more reasonable to agree that the process that has that disavowal as its first step cannot be irony as well. The key of the circle which can explain why Socrates disclaims knowledge and how he can reject others’ claim of having any kind of knowledge lies in the third element, Socratic question. In Hippias Major (287c1-2), Socrates asks: 'Is it not by Justice that just people are Just? (ἆρ᾽ οὐ δικαιοσύνῃ δίκαιοί εἰσιν οἱ δίκαιοι). He insists at 294b1 that they were searching for that by which (ᾧ) all beautiful things are beautiful (cf. b4-5, 8). At Euthyphro 6d10-11 it is said that the Socratic question is waiting for 'the form itself (αὐτὸ τὸ εἶδος) by which (ᾧ) all the pious actions are pious; and at 6d11-e1: -/- Through one form (που μιᾷ ἰδέᾳ) impious actions are impious and pious actions pious. -/- Since the X itself is that by which X is X, knowing 'X itself' is the only way of knowing X. It is probably because of this that Socrates makes the distinction between the ousia as a right answer to the question and effect as a wrong one: -/- I am afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is (τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ποτ᾽ ἐστίν) you did not wish to make clear its nature itself (οὐσίαν … αὐτοῦ) to me, but you said some effect (πάθος) about it. (Euthp. 11a6-9) -/- 1. Knowledge of what X is Now it is time to look for the onto-epistemological principles of Socratic circle and its three elements. It cannot reasonably be expected from the first Socrates to present us explicitly and clearly formulated principles of his onto-epistemology when such explications cannot be found even in the second Socrates who has some obviously positive theoris. Since there must be some principles underlying this first systematic inqury of knowledge, we must seek to them and be satisfied with elicitation of the first Socratas’ principle. What will be drawn out as his principles cannot and must not, thus, be taken as very fix and dogmatic principles. Some very slightest principles and grounds suffice for our purposes here. The first principle that is the prima facie significance of the Socratic question and his implementation of all those elenctic arguments I call the principle of 'Knowledge of What X is' (KWX): -/- KWX To know X, it is required to know what X is. -/- Aristotle (Metaphysics 1078b23-25, 27-29, 987b4-8) takes Plato’s τί ἐστι question as seeking the definition of a thing that is the same as historical Socrates’ search but applying to a different field. That Plato’s 'what is X?' question was a search for definition became the prevailed understanding of this question up to now. I am going neither to discuss the answer of Socratic question nor to challenge taking it as definition. What I am to insist is that knowledge is attached firmly to the answer of the question: Knowledge of X is not anything but the knowledge of what X is. It entails, certainly, the priority of this knowledge to any other kind of knowledge about X but it also has something more fundamental about the relation of knowledge and Socratic question. Socrates’ exclusive focus on the answer of his question can authorize the consideration of such an essential role for KWX in his epistemolgoy. The total rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are unable to answer the question can be regarded as a strong evidence for it. Socrates’ elenctic method and his rejection of others’ knowledge in the early dialogues, which all end aporetically with no one accepted as knower and nothing as knowledge, prevent us from finding any positive evidence for this. We have to be content, therefore, of negative evidences which, I think, can be found wherever Socrates rejects his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are not able to give an acceptable answer to his 'what is X?' question. 2. Bipolar Epistemology Socrates’ rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge has another epistemological principle as its basis. Let me call this principle Bipolar Epistemology' (BE): BE There is no third way besides knowledge and Ignorance. -/- BE says that about every object of knowledge there are only two subjective statuses: knowledge and Ignorance. Socrates’ disavowal, however, says nothing but that he is ignorant of knowledge of X because he does not know what X is. This means that BE is presupposed here. Socrates’ elenchus and his rejection of interlocutors’ having any kind of knowledge are the necessary results of the fact that he does not let any third way besides knowledge and ignorance. The first Socrates never let anyone partly know X or have a true opinion about it, as he would not let anyone know anything about X when he did not know what X is. -/- 3. Bipolar Ontology The principle of BE in first Socrates’ epistemology is parallel to another principle in his ontology. Plato’s bipolar distinction between being and not being is as strict and perfect as his distinction between knowledge and ignorance. This principle I shall call the principle of 'Bipolar Ontology' (BO): BO Being is and not being is not. BO is apparently the same with the well-known Parmenidean Principle of being and not being (cf. Diels-Kranz (DK) Fr. 2.2-5). Euthydemus’ statement against the possibility of false knowledge can be good evidence for this principle: -/- The things which are not surely do not exist (τὰ δὲ μὴ ὄντα … ἄλλο τι ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν). (Euthydemus 284b3-4) -/- He continues (b4-5): -/- There is nowhere for not being to be there (οὖν οὐδαμοῦ τά γε μὴ ὄντα ὄντα ἐστίν). -/- That BE does not let true opinion as a third option besides knowledge and ignorance seems to be related to BO’s rejecting a third option besides being and not being, which is itself the basis of the impossibility of false belief. Socrates’ elaborate discussion of the problem of false belief in Theatetus that leads to a more decisive discussion and finally to some solutions in Sophist can make our consideration of BO for the first group of dialogues authentive. -/- 4. &5. Split Knowledge and Split Being The fourth principle I shall call the principle of 'Split Knowledge' (SK): -/- SK Knowledge of X is separated from any other knowledge (of anything else) as if the whole knowledge is split to various parts. -/- This Principle is hinted and criticized as Socrates’ way of treating with knowledge in Hippias Major: -/- But Socrates, you do not contemplate the entireties of things, nor do people you have used to talk with (τὰ μὲν ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων οὐ σκοπεῖς, οὐδ᾽ ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). (301b2-4) -/- Contrary to Rankin who regards the passage as 'antilogical, almost eristic in tone rather than presenting a serious philosophy of being' (1983, 54), I think it can be taken as serious. Hippias criticizes Sorcates that he does not contemplate (σκοπεῖς) the entireties of things (ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων), a critique which Socrates is not its only subject but all those whom Socrates accustomed to talk with (ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). This last phrase, I think, extends this critic beyond this dialogue to other Socratic dialogues. Hippias’ use of the perfect tense of the verb ἔθω (to be accustomed) is a good evidence of this extension. We can get, thus, these ἐκεῖνοι as Socrates’ interlocutors in his other dialogues that hints that this criticism has the epistemological groundings of the previous dialogues as its subject. What ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι points to is that Hippias does not have in mind Socrates’ way of treating things only in this dialogue, but he is also criticizing Socrates’ way throughout his dialogues. At 301b4-5, Socrates and his interlocutors’ way of beholding things is described as such: -/- You people knock (κρούετε) at the fine and each of the beings (ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων) by taking each being cut up in pieces (κατατέμνοντες) in words (ἐν τοῖς λόγοις). This leads us to our next principle that is parallel to, and the ontological side of, SK, the principle of 'Split Being'(SB): -/- SB Everything (being) is separated from any other thing as if the whole being is split to many beings. -/- Socrates and his interlocutors and thus, as we saw, the Socratic dialogues are accused to regard everything as it is separated from all other things. This separation is en tois logois that, I think, can reasonably be taken as saying that Socratic dialogues (it refers of course to the dialogues before Hippias Major) cut up all things which have the same name/definition from all other things and try to understand them separately, without considering other things that are not in their logos. They, for example in Hippias Major, are cutting up to kalon and try to understand what it and all others inside this logos are by separating it from all other things. This is directed straightly against Socratic question and the way Socratic dialogues follow to find its answer, every time separating one logos. As Meyer (1995, 85) points out, every question 'presupposes that the X in question in a logos is something' and 'every answer to every question aims at unity' (84). The critique of Hippias Major is, therefore, at the same time a critique of SK and SB. It is also a critique of KWX because it is only based on KWX that Socratic dialogues could search for the answer of 'what is X' question supposing that knowing what X is is enough for the knowledge of X. SK and KWX are absolutely interdependent. What Socrates and all his previous interlocutors have neglected in Socratic dialogues, Hippias says, was 'continuous bodies of being' (διανεκῆ σώματα τῆς οὐσίας) (301b6). Either this theory actually belongs to the historical Hippias as it is being said or not, it is strictly criticizing SB. We have the same phrase with changing sūma to logos some lines later at 301e3-4: διανεκεῖ λόγῳ τῆς οὐσίας. Although this theory that can be observed as both an ontological and an epistemological theory is rejected by Socrates (301cff.), it is still against first Socrates’ onto-epistemological principles and might let us look at what is rejected as Socratic prineple. -/- 6. Knowledge is of Being The sixth principle that I think is presupposed by the first Socrates, is the 'Knowledge of Being' Principle (KB): -/- KB Knowledge is of Being. -/- This principle is obviously the source of the problem of false knowledge, a very important problem throughout Plato’s philosophy. We face this problem maybe for the first time in Euthydemus. In less than 20 Stephanus’ pages, 276-295, we are encountered with different interwoven problems about knowledge , all grounded in the problem of false opinion. Having challenged the obvious possibility of telling lies at 283e, at 284 Euthydemus discusses it saying that the man who speaks is speaking about 'one of those things that are (ἓν μὴν κἀκεῖνό γ᾽ ἐστὶν τῶν ὄντων)' (284a3) and thus speaks what is (λέγων τὸ ὄν) (a5). He must necessarily be saying truth when he is speaking what is because he who speaks what is (τὸ ὄν) and the things that are (τὰ ὄντα) speaks truth (τἀληθῆ λέγει) (a5-6). This is based on Parmenidean principle of the impossibility of being of not being which Euthydemus restates (284b3-4) and we mentioned discussing BO principle above. The things that are not are nowhere (οὐδαμοῦ) and there is no possibility for anyone to do (πράξειεν) anything with them because they must be made as being before anything else can be done, which is impossible (b5-7). The words, then, are of things that exist (εἰσὶν ἑκάστῳ τῶν ὄντων λόγοι) (285e9) and as they are (ὡς ἔστιν) (e10). The result is that no one can speak of things as they are not. It is this impossibility of false speach that is extended to thinking (δοξάζειν) at 286d1 and leads to the impossibility of false opinion (ψευδής … δόξα) (286d4). The general conclusion is asserted at 287a extending this impossibility to actions and making any kind of mistake. Not only knowledge is of being but speech, thought and action are of being simply because of the fact that nothing can be of not being. -/- B. First Socrates’ Principles in the Middle Period Dialogues Out of what were presupposed or criticized mostly in five dialogues, Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Laches and Charmides, we tried to draw the first Socrates’ principles. Our inquiry here is directed to find out the fate of these principles in the three dialogues of the middle period, Meno, Phaedo and Republic. To do this, first we ought to check the situation of Socratic circle in these dialogues. The Socratic circle that was predominant in the early dialogues, does not look like a circle here anymore though they certainly have some features in common. Meno, Phaedo and Republic II-X are not committed to the principles of the circle and the whole circle in disrupted in them. The difference of the two Socrateses towards acquiring knowledge is obvious. The Socrates of Meno, Phaedo and Republic is evidently more self-confident that he can get to some truths during his arguments as he does. They are in their first appearance, as almost all other dialogues, committed to Socrates’ disavowal. All of them try to keep the shape of the Socratikoi Logoi genre, which is committed to the historical Socrates’ way of discussion; a dramatic personage who is to challenge his interlocutors, ask them and refuse the answers. Nevertheless, the fact is that what we have in common between two groups of dialogues is mostly a dramatic structure. Whereas the first group’s arguments are based on Socrates’ disavowal and lead to no positive results, the second group is decisively going to achieve some positive results. The aim of the first Socrates was to show others that they are ignorant of what they thought they knew. The new Socrates of Meno, on the opposite, makes so much efforts to show that the slave boy has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the things that he does not know (οἶδε) (85c6-7). Despite his lack of knowledge, he has true opinions nevertheless. The way from these true opinions to knowledge, as Socrates states, is not so long. These true opinions are now like a dream but 'can become knowledge of the same things not less accurate than anyone’s' (οὐδενὸς ἧττον ἀκριβῶς ἐπιστήσεται περὶ τούτων) (c11-d1), if they be repeated by asking the same questions. The most outstanding text regarding Socrates’ disavowal is Meno 98b where he explicitly claims knowledge: -/- And indeed I also speak as (ὡς) one who does not know (εἰδὼς) but is guessing (εἰκάζων). However, [about the fact] that true opinion and knowledge are different, I do not altogether expect (δοκῶ) myself to be guessing (εἰκάζειν), but if I say about anything that I know (εἰδέναι) -which about few things I say- this is one of the things that I know (οἶδα). (98b1-5) This passage is very significant about Plato’s disavowal of knowledge. There can hardly be found, I think, anywhere else in Plato’s corpus where Socrates speaks about his knowledge of something as such. He says first that he speaks as someone who does not know. This ὡς οὐκ εἰδὼς λέγω comparing with what he used to say in the first group, οὐκ οἶδα, has this added ὡς. Socrates does not claim strongly anymore that he does not know anything but speaks only as someone who does not know. He needs this ὡς not only because he is going to accept that he does know some, though few, things immediately after this sentence, but also because he needs his previous disavowal to be loosened from Meno on. He does not merely say here that he knows something. It is then different from the examples mentioned before which could be taken as idiomatic or at least not emphatic. Socrates’ remarkable emphasis on distinguishing εἰδέναι from εἰκάζειν departs it from all other passages where he says only he knows something. Moreover, he claims definitely that he has knowledge about few (ὀλίγα) things. From the early to the middle dialogues, Socrates’ attitude to knowledge has totally renewed its face. He brings forth a new concept, true opinion, and he does not speak of knowledge as he used to before; the rough, perfect and unachievable knowledge of the first group has turned to something more smooth, realistic and achievable. Comparing with the early dialogues that did not set out from the first to reach positive results, the middle ones are extraordinarily and surprisingly positive and hence destroy the basis of the Socratic circle. The questions and answers are purposely directed to some specific new theories; most of them are not directly related to the topics or the main questions of the dialogues. They are suggested when Socrates draws the attention of the interlocutor away from the main question because of the necessity of another discussion. Even if the main question remains unanswered, we have still many positive theories, prominently of metaphysical type. These theories are so abundant and dominant in these dialogues, especially Phaedo and Republic, that one might think that they may appear to be arbitrarily sandwiched in there. This helps dialogues to keep their original Socratic structure while they are suggesting new theories. Hence, the Socratic question of 'what is X?', though is still used to launch the discussion, is loosened and is forgotten for most part of the dialogues. Meno that has first a differently formulated question, 'can virtue be taught?', leads finally to the Socratic question of 'What is virtue?'. Phaedo is dedicated to the demonstration of the immortality of soul and the life after death without having a central Socratic question. The case of Republic is more complicated. The first book, on the one hand, has all the criteria of a Socratic circle: its 'what is justice?' question, Socrates’ strong disavowal (e.g. 337d-e), his rejection of all answers and coming back to the first point without finding out any answer. This Book, considered alone, is a perfect Socratic dialogue, as many scholars regard it as early and separated from other books. The books II-X are, on the other hand, far from implementing a Socratic circle. They have still the 'what is justice?' question as their incentive leading question, but they are, in most of the positive doctrines and methods that encompass the main parts, ignoring the question. Even these books that, I believe, are the farthest discussions from the Socratic circle are so cautious not to break the Socratic structure of the dialogue as long as it is possible. What is changed is not the structure of the dialogue but the ontological and epistemological grounds based on which new theories are suggested. -/- 1. Knowledge of the Good We can clearly see in the second group of dialogues that the KWX principle loses the place it had before in our first group. It is not, of course, rejected, but still we cannot say that it has the same situation. KWX that was based on Socratic question, as we discussed before, was the leading principle of the first Socrates’ epistemology and of the highest position. Other epistemological principles, SK directly and BE indirectly, were relying on Socratic question and therefore on KWX. Such a position does not belong to KWX from Meno on. What makes it different in the second Socrates is another principle that is needed it not only as its complementary principle but also as what is more fundamental. Plato, then, does not reject KWX in this period, but, it seems, he transcends to another more basic principle; a principle we shall call the principle of 'Knowledge of the Good' (KG): -/- KG Knowledge of X requires knowledge of the Good. -/- Whereas all the dialogues of our first group are free from any discuscon about KG, it bears a very important role in the second group so as becomes the superior principle of knowledge in Republic. Trying to solve the problem of teachability of virtue, Socrates says that it can be teachable only if it is a kind of knowledge because nothing can be taught to human beings but knowledge (ἐπιστήμην) (Meno 87c2). The dilemma will be, then, whether virtue is knowledge or not (c11-12) and since virtue is good, we can change the question to: whether is there anything good separate from knowledge (εἰ μέν τί ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἄλλο χωριζόμενον ἐπιστήμης) (d4-5). Therefore, the conclusion will be that if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, virtue can be nothing but knowledge (d6-8). What let us discuss KG as an epistemological principle for the second Secrates is the relation he tries to establish between knowledge and the Good which, though is alongside with the mentioned thesis and the idea of virtue as knowledge, goes much deeper inside epistemology asking to regard the Good as the basis of knowledge. The effort of Phaedo cannot succeed in establishing the Good as the criterion of explanation and knowledge since, I think, it needs a far more complicated ontology of Republic where Socrates can finally announce KG. What is said in Republic is totally compatible with Phaedo 99d–e and the metaphor of watching an eclipse of the sun. In spite of the fact that we do not have adequate knowledge of the Idea of the Good, it is necessary for every kind of knowledge: 'If we do not know it, even if we know all other things, it is of no benefit to us without it' (505a6-7). The problem of our not having sufficient knowledge of the Idea of Good is tried to be solved by the same method of Phaedo 99d-e, that is to say, by looking at what is like instead of looking at thing itself (506d8-e4). It is this solution that leads to the comparison of the Good with sun in the allegory of Sun (508b12-13). What the Good is in the intelligible realm corresponds to what the sun is in the visible realm; as sun is not sight, but is its cause and is seen by it (b9-10), the Good is so regarding knowledge. It has, then, the same role for knowledge that the sun has for sight. Socrates draws our attention to the function of sun in our seeing. The eyes can see everything only in the light of the day being unable to see the same things in the gloom of night (508c4-6). Without the sun, our eyes are dimmed and blind as if they do not have clear vision any longer (c6-7). That the Good must have the same role about knowledge based on the analogy means that it must be considered as a required condition of any kind of knowledge: -/- The soul, then, thinks (νόει) in the same way: whenever it focuses on what is shined upon by truth and being, understands (ἐνόησέν), knows (ἔγνω) and apparently possesses understanding (νοῦν ἔχειν). (508d4-6) -/- Socrates does not use agathon in this paragraph and substitutes it with both aletheia and to on. He links them with the Idea of the Good when he is to assert the conclusion of the analogy: -/- That which gives truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say, is the Idea of the Good: being the cause of knowledge and truth (αἰτίαν δ᾽ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας) so far as it is known (ὡς γιγνωσκομένης μὲν διανοοῦ). (508e1-4) Knowledge and truth are called goodlike (ἀγαθοειδῆ) since they are not the same as the Good but more honoured (508e6-509a5). KG, which had been implicitly contemplated and searched in Phaedo, is now explicitly being asserted in Republic. As what was quoted clearly proves, this principle is the very one which we can observe as the most fundamental principle of the second Socrates in Republic, corresponding to the role KWX had in the first Socrates. The Form of the Good in Republic, of which Santas speaks as 'the centerpiece of the canonical Platonism of the middle dialogues, the centerpiece of Plato’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and …' (1983, 256) much more can be said. Plato’s Cave allegory in Book VIII dedicates a similar role to the Idea of the Good. The Idea of the Good is there as the last thing to be seen in the knowable realm, something so important that its seeing equals to understanding the fact that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful (517b). Producing both light and its source in visible realm, it controls and provides truth and understanding in the intelligible realm (517c). -/- 2. Tripartite Epistemology BE is thoroughy rejected in the second Socrates and substituted by its opposite, the principle of 'Tripartite Epistemolgy' (TE): -/- TE Opinion is an epistemological status between knowledge and ignorance. BE of the first Socrates was denying any third way besides knowledge and ignorance which was the foundation of Socratic circle without which Socrates could not reject his interlocutors’ possessing any kind of knowledge. We cannot say, however, that the first Socrates had a third epistemological status in mind but rejected it. Such a status was unacceptable for him so that one can say that he would reject any kind of such status if suggested. There were only two possibilities about knowledge: either one knows something or he does not know it. TE, thus, was not the first Socrates’ discovery and, I think it is not the second Socrates’discovery. All we can see in our second group of dialouges is that he uses this principle as an already demonstrated one. Having examined the slave boy in Meno for the prupose of showing the working of recollection, it truns out that he has some opinions in him while he still does not know. Without trying to prove it, Socrates takes this as the distinction between knowledge and opinion: -/- So, he who does not know (οὐκ εἰδότι) about what he does not know (περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ) has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the same things he did not know (περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε) (85c6-7). -/- The same distinction is set between ὀρθὴν δόξαν and ἐπιστήμην at 97b5-6 ff. (also cf. 97b1-2: ὀρθῶς μὲν δοξάζων … ἐπιστάμενος). He connects then their difference to the myth of Daedalus, the statue that would run away and escape. So are true opinions, not willing to remain long in mind and thus not worthy until one ties them down by αἰτίας λογισμῷ (98a3-4). Socrates says that this tying down is anamnesis. We face, in Phaedo, the same relation is settled between knowledge as the process of being tied down and getting the capability to give an account, on the one hand, and anamnesis, on the other hand. When a man knows, he must be able to give an account of what he knows (Phaedo 76b5-6) and since not all people are able to give such an account, those who recollect, recollect what once they learned (76c4). Although the distinction between knowledge and opinion is not explicitly used in Phaedo, referring to the parallel link between knowledge plus account and anamnesis in Phaedo and Meno, one can say that those who cannot recollect are not able to give account and, thus, are in a state of opinion. What is said at Phaedo 84a, though not yet a definite distinction between knowledge and opinion, makes a distinction between their objects so as we can agree that it is presupposed. The soul of the philosopher, Socrates says, follows reason, stays with it forever and contemplates the divine, which is not the object of opinoin (ἀδόξαστον) (84a8, cf. Meno 98b2-5). The distinction of knowledge and belief in Republic has a significant difference with what we discussed in Meno and Phaedo since the distinction of Meno was based on anamnesis and thus more an epistemological distinction. Even in Phaedo that we do not have any elaborate discussion about the distinction, the only hint to the matter at 76 is bound to the theory of anamnesis. In addition to the relation of the distinction with this theory, there is another evidence that does not permit us to consider the distinction as an ontological distinction. Let’s see Meno 85c6-7: -/- So, he who does not know about what he does not know has within himself true opinions about the same things he did not know (τῷ οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ ἔνεισιν ἀληθεῖς δόξαι περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε). (85c6-7) -/- This last sentence persists that the objects of knowledge and true opinion are the same. What Socrates is to say here is that whereas he does not know X he has true opinion about the same X. I think Socrates’ sentence that the slave boy οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ and his restatement of it by saying περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε is because he wants to emphasize that the slave boy who does not know, has true opinion about the same thing. Socrates could say this just with using τούτων and there would be no necessity to bring περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ for οὐκ εἰδότι if he did not want to emphasize. -/- 3. Tripartite Ontology The distinction between knowledge and true opinion in Republic, on other side, has nothing to do with recollection, but is based on an ontological principle, 'Tripartite Ontology' (TO): -/- TO There are things that both are and are not. -/- This principle I confine, among our three dialogues of the second group, to Republic not extended to Meno and Phaedo, is obviously the opposite of BO. Speaking about the lovers of sights and sounds in the fifth book, Socrates distinguishes them from philosophers because their thought is unable to understand the nature of beautiful itself besides beautiful things (476a6-8) and hence they can only have opinions. The philosopher who, on the contrary, believes in beautiful itself and can distinguish it from beautiful things (476c9-d3), has knowledge because he knows, contrasting others who have opinion because they only opine (d5-6). Since those whose knowledge were degraded as opinion will complain about Socrates’ such calling their thought, he provides them the following argument (476e7-477b1): -/- - Does the person who knows, knows (γιγνώσκει) something (τὶ) or nothing (οὐδέν)? - He knows something (τί). - Something that is (ὂν) or is not (οὐκ ὄν)? - Something that is (ὂν) for how could something that is not be known (πῶς γὰρ ἂν μὴ ὄν γέ τι γνωσθείη)? - Then we have an adequate grasp of this: No matter how many ways we examine it, what completely is (παντελῶς ὂν) is completely knowable (παντελῶς γνωστόν) and what is in no way (μὴ ὂν δὲ μηδαμῇ) is in every way unknowable (πάντῃ ἄγνωστον). - A most adequate one. - Good. Now, if anything is such as to be and also not to be (ὡς εἶναί τε καὶ μὴ εἶναι), won’t it be intermediate (μεταξὺ) between what purely is (εἰλικρινῶς ὄντος) and what in no way is (μηδαμῇ ὄντος)? - Yes, it’s intermediate. - Then as knowledge (γνῶσις) is set over what is (τῷ ὄντι), while ignorance (ἀγνωσία) is of necessity set over what is not (μὴ ὄντι) mustn’t we find an intermediate between ignorance (ἀγνοίας) and knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) to be set over the intermediate, if there is such a thing? -/- From the third status of being we must reach to the third status of knowledge. The simple reading of this text can be an existential reading, taking the "is" of the mentioned sentences as existence. The problem is that when it is said that there is something that both is and is not reading "is" existentially, it sounds too bizarre to be acceptable. It cannot easily be understandable to have something as both existent and non-existent at the same time. This problem arose so many debates and led many scholars to reject the existential reading of "is" and suggest some other readings like predicative or veridical readings. I think though Plato’s complicated ontology of Republic cannot be correctly understood by a simple existential reading, this "is" cannot be free from existential sense of being and, thus, cannot be reduced to just a predicative or veridical sense of being. -/- 4. Bound Knowledges In addition to KG, the Good is also the basis of another principle in the second Socrates, namely the principle of 'Bound Knowledge' (BK): -/- BK Knowledge of everything is bound to the knowledge of the Good. -/- We distinguished BK from KG because we want to insist, in BK, on what had not been insisted upon in KG, that is, the binding role that the Good plays in the second Socrates, contrasting the absence of such a role in the first Socrates. Socrates remembers, in Phaedo, his wonderful keen on natural philosophers' wisdom when he was young. The origin of this enthusiasm was Socrates’ hope to know the cause of everything as they used to claim. When he was searching the matters of his interest on their basis, Socrates says, he became convinced he can get no acceptable answer from them and found himself blind even to the things he thought he knew before. One day he hears Anaxagoras’ theory that 'it is Mind that arranges and is the cause of everything (ὡς ἄρα νοῦς ἐστιν ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος)' (Phd. 97c1-2 cf. DK, Fr.15.8-9, 11-12, 12-14) and thinks that he can finally find what he has always expected, i.e. something which can explain all things. What I intend to show here is that what makes Socrates hopeful is that Anaxagoras’ theory tries 1) to explain all things by one thing and 2) this explanation is understood by Socrates as if it is based on the concept of the Good. That Socrates was searching for one explanation for all things can be proved even from what he has been expecting from natural philosophers. The case is, nonetheless, more clearly asserted when he speaks about Anaxagoras’ theory. In addition to διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος of 97c2 mentioned above, we have τὸ τὸν νοῦν εἶναι πάντων αἴτιον (c3-4) and τόν γε νοῦν κοσμοῦντα πάντα κοσμεῖν (c4-5) all emphasizing on the cause of all things (πάντα) which can clearly prove that one of the reasons which caused Socrates to embrace it delightfully was its claim to provide the cause of all things by one thing. Another reason was that Anaxagoras’ Mind, at least in Socrates’ view, was attempting to explain everything by the concept of the Good. This connection between Mind and Good belongs more to the essential relation they have in Socrates’ thinking than Anaxagoras’ theory because there are almost nothing about such a relation in Anaxagoras. The reason for Socrates’ reading can be that Mind is substantially compatible with Socrates’ idea of the relation between good and knowledge. Both the thesis 'no one does wrong willingly' and the theory of virtue as knowledge we pointed to above are evidences of this essential relation. Nobody who knows that something is bad can choose or do it as bad. The reason, when it is reason, that means when it is as it should be, when it is wise or when it knows, works only based on good-choosing. In this context, when Socrates hears that Mind is considered as the cause of everything, it sounds to him like this: good should be regarded as the basis of the explanation of all things. We see him, thus, passing from the former to the latter without any proof. This is done in the second sentence after introducing Mind: -/- I thought that if this were so, the arranging Mind would arrange all things and put each thing in the way that was Best (ὅπῃ ἂν βέλτιστα ἔχῃ). If one then wished to find the cause of each thing by which it either perishes or exists, one needs to find what is the best way (βέλτιστον αὐτῷ ἐστιν) for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, about this and other things, what is the most excellent (ἄριστον) and best (βέλτιστον). The same man must inevitably also know what is worse (χεῖρον), for that is part of the same knowledge. (97c4-d5) This passage is a good evidence of Socrates’ leap from Anaxagoras’ Mind to his own concept of the Good that can explain why Socrates found Anaxagoras theory after his own heart (97d7). Mind is welcomed because of its capability for explanation on the basis of good to 'explain why it is so of necessity, saying which is better (ἄμεινον), and that it was better (ἄμεινον) to be so' (97e1-3). What Socrates thought he had found in Anaxagoras can indicate what he had been expecting from natural scientists before. Socrates could not be satisfied with their explanations because they were unable to explain how it is the best for everything to be as it is. It can probably be said, then, that it was the lack of the unifying Good in their explanation that had disappointed him. We must insist that we are discussing what Socrates thought that Anaxagoras’ theory of Mind should have been, not about Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. Phaedo 97c-98b, is not about what Socrates found in Anaxagoras but what he thought he could find in it. On the contrary, it should also be noted that it was not this that was dashed at 98b, but Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. It was Anaxagoras’ fault not to find out how to use such an excellent thesis (98b8-c2, cf. 98e-99b). Socrates gives an example to show how not believing in 'good' as the basis of explanation makes people be wanderers between different unreal explanations of a thing. His words δέον συνδεῖν (binding that binds together) as a description for the Good we chose as the name of BK principle: They do not believe that the truly good and binding binds and holds them together (ὡς ἀληθῶς τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ δέον συνδεῖν καὶ συνέχειν οὐδὲν οἴονται). (99c5-6) -/- Having in mind Plato’s well-known analogy of the sun and the Good at Republic 508-509, we can dare to say that his warning of the danger of seeing the truth directly like one watching an eclipse of the sun in Phaedo (99d-e) is more about the difficulty of so-called good-based explanation than its insufficiency, a difficulty which is precisely confirmed in Republic (504e-505a, 506d-e). Moreover, BK is asserted in a more explicit way in the Republic, where the Good is considered not only as a condition for the knowledge of X, as was noted above discussing KG, but also as what binds all the objects of knowledge and also the soul in its knowing them. At Republic VI, 508e1-3, when Socrates says that the Form of the Good 'gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower (τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ τὴν ἀλήθειαν παρέχον τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις καὶ τῷ γιγνώσκοντι τὴν δύναμιν ἀποδιδὸν)', he wants to set the Good at the highest point of his epistemological structure by which all the elements of this structure are bound. This binding aspect of the Good is by no means a simple binding of all knowledges or all the objects of knowledge, but the most complicated kind of binding as it is expected from the author of the Republic. The kind of unity the Good gives to the different knowledges of different things is comparable with the unity which each Form gives to its participants in Republic: as all the participants of a Form are united by referring to the ideas, all different kinds of knowledge are united by referring to the Good. If we observe Aristotle's assertion that for Plato and the believers of Forms, the causative relation of the One with the Forms is the same as that of the Forms with particulars (e.g. Metaphysics 988a10-11, 988b4), that is to say the One is the essence (e.g., ibid, 988a10-11: τοῦ τί ἐστὶν, 988b4-6: τὸ τί ἢν εἶναί) of the Forms besides his statement that for them One is the Good (e.g., ibid, 988b11-13) the relation between the Good and unity may become more understandable. Since the quiddity of the Good (τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ τἀγαθὸν) is more than discussion (506d8-e2), we cannot await Socrates to tell us how this binding role is played. All we can expect is to hear from him an analogy by which this unifying role is envisaged, the sun. The kind of unity that the Good gives to the knowledge and its objects in the intelligible realm is comparable to the unity that the sun gives to the sight and its objects in the visible realm (508b-c). The allegory of Line (Republic VI, 509d-511), like that of the Sun, tries to bind all various kinds of knowledges. The hierarchical model of the Line which encompasses all kinds of knowledge from imagination to understanding can clearly be considered as Plato’s effort to bind all kinds of knowledges by a certain unhypothetical principle. The method of hypothesis starts, in the first subsection of the intelligible realm, with a hypothesis that is not directed firstly to a principle but a conclusion (510b4-6). It proceeds, in the other subsection, to a 'principle which is not a hypothesis' (b7) and is called the 'unhypothetical principle of all things' (ἀνυποθέτου ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ἀρχὴν) (511b6-7). This παντὸς must refer not only to the objects of the intelligible realm but to the sensible objects as well. Plato does posit, therefore, an epistemological principle for all things, a principle that all things are, epistemologically, bound and, thus, unified by. -/- 5. Bound Beings The ontological aspect of BK we shall call the principle of 'Bound Beings' (BB): -/- BB Being of all things are bound by the Good. -/- We saw in our principle of Split Being (SB) how the first Socrates was criticized because of his approach to split being and separate each thing from other things. The principle of Bound Beings intends to make the things more related, a duty which is done again by the Good. In the allegory of Sun, there are two paragraphs that evidently and deliberately extend the binding role of the Good to the ontological scene: -/- You will say that the sun not only makes the visible things have the ability of being seen but also coming to be, growth and nourishment. (509b2-4) -/- This clearly intends to remind the ontological role the sun plays in bringing to being all the sensible things in order to display how its counterpart has the same role in the intelligible realm (b6-10): -/- Not only the objects of knowledge (γιγνωσκομένοις) owe their being known (γιγνώσκεσθαι) to the Good, but also their existence (τὸ εἶναί) and their being (οὐσίαν) are due to it, though the Good is not being but superior to it in rank and power. That the Good is here represented as responsible for being of things in addition to their being known means, in my opinion, that Plato wants to posit BB in addition to BK. The allegory of Cave at the very beginning of the seventh Book (514aff.) can be taken as another evidence. The role of the Good, one might say, is confined to the intelligible realm because it is asserted that the role the Good plays in this realm is corresponding to that of the sun in the visible realm. The fact that Plato wants to observe the Good also as the ontological cause of the sensible things is obvious from his saying, in the allegory of Cave, that the Form of the Good 'produces light and its source (τὸν τούτου κύριον) [i.e. the sun] in the visible realm' (517c3). We can conclude, then, that the ontological function of the Good is not confined to the intelligible realm in which it is the lord and provides truth and understanding (c3-4) because it is also responsible to produce τὸν κύριον of light. 6. Proportionality of Being and Knowledge Insofaras BE and BO principles of the first Socrates gave way to TE and TO principles of the second Socrates, we cannot expect him to preserve KB in the same way as it was in the first Socrates. The new tripartite ontology and epistemology necessitates some modifications in KB which results in the principle of 'Proportionality of Being and Knowledge' (PBK): -/- PBK To every class of being there is a proportionate category of knowledge. -/- This principle, of course, does not entail the refutation of KB and thus is not kind of rejecting PBK but only a more complicated version of it. Based on PBK, we can still agree that knowledge is of being (KB) but the issue is that since none of the concepts of knowledge and being in the second Socrates are as simple as they were for the first Socrates, we need a more complicated principle for their relation here. Although from Meno 97a where the distinction of knowledge and true opinion is drawn out in the second group of the dialogues, we can expect a new relation, it is articulated in its most complete way in Republic and specifically in the allegory of Line. All the beings are divided there hierarchically to four classes, to each of them belongs a class of knowledge: imagination to images, belief to the sensible things (more correctly: the things of which they[in previous class] were images (ᾧ τοῦτο ἔοικεν)), thought to mathematical objects (?) and understanding to the Forms and the first principle. The degree of clarity that each of the classes of knowledge shares in (σαφηνείας ἡγησάμενος μετέχειν) is proportionate to the degree that its object shares in truth (ἀληθείας μετέχει). (511e2-4) -/- Conclusion From the six onto-epistemilogical principles of the first Socrates, four principles turn to their opposite in the middle period dialogues. While bipolar epistemology and ontology of the early dialogues give place to tripartite epistemology in the middle period dialogues and tripartite ontology in Republic, the split knowledge and being of the first Socrates are inclined to be substituted by bound knowledges and bound beings in the second Socrates and specifically in Republic. Not all our system of principles in this article is necessarily determinative. Either they are rightly formulated or not, our result would not be vulnerable if we accept that 1) making the distinction of knowledge and belief, 2) accepting the being of not being and 3) trying to bind both being and knowledge by the concept of the Good happens only in middle period dialogues, having been absent in the early ones. These are the favourite results all those somehow arbitrary and even oversimplified principles were to illustrate; that there is kind of a development in the epistemological as well as the ontological grounds of Plato’s philosophy. -/- Notes . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eve W. Stoddard REASON ON TRIAL: LEGAL METAPHORS IN THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON 6 6 r I 1WO things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admi_I_ ration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." ' These are perhaps Kant's most well-known and oft-repeated words. They reflect not only the profound feeling (...) that underlies his technical and abstruse treatises, but also his characteristic preoccupation with law. The "starry heavens" are a synecdoche both for the wonder of nature as we perceive it in all its multiplicity, and for the marvel of science's ability to reduce, order, and subdue that infinite multiplicity into a few elegant laws. These two types of law, natural and moral, define the focus of Kant's critical philosophy, and metaphors drawn from jurisprudence pervade all three critiques. In the context of controversial statements on the role of metaphor in philosophical texts by Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Richard Rorty, I will analyze the legal metaphors in the prefaces and Transcendental Deductions of the Critique ofPure Reason. My goal in engaging Kant's texts in this controversy over metaphor is twofold: on the one hand to assess experimentally the value of these positions on metaphor in the history of philosophy, and, on the other hand, to examine the relations between critical conceptualization and insurgent metaphoricity in Kant's carefully elaborated and systematized text. In a textwhose key words are "universal and necessary for all possible experience," contingentand ambiguous metaphors might be expected to cause problematic unravelings. Richard Rorty has argued recently that "the history ofscience, culture and politics" should be viewed "as a history of metaphor rather than of discovery." 2 He compares the creations of new vocabularies to the 245 246Philosophy and Literature invention of "new tools" ("CL," p. 5), alluding to "Nietzsche's definition of truth as a mobile army of metaphors" (p. 6). From Plato's figures of the world as cave and the mind as charioteer with unruly horses, we shift to Locke's view of mind as tahda rasa and Descartes's description of the world as a machine. Rorty's paradigm of cultural history as a history of metaphor enters into an earlier, unresolved debate between Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricoeur over the relationship between metaphor and philosophical discourse. Like Derrida, Rorty follows Nietzsche's claims about metaphor in the history of philosophy, a view Ricoeur wants to disprove so that he can recover the privileged univocity of speculative discourse. However Rorty has nothing in common with die complexity and "invaginated" ambiguities, the dazzling multivocity of Derrida's writing on the economics of metaphor. Although Rorty appears at first to agree with Derrida that there is no truth or reality apart from the linguistic tropes which dominate different epochs and cultures, he retains a metaphysical distinction between literal reference and figurative play. Rorty adopts Donald Davidson's theory that metaphors do not have "meaning" precisely because diey have no place in the language game into which they are inserted. They produce an effect, but it is not meaning: "One can only savour it or spit it out"; it is not a " 'truth-value candidate' " ("CL," p. 6). However, through repeated use, the metaphor will find a role in the language game; dying as a metaphor, it will live as a literal statement. Therefore Rorty agrees with Ricoeur that a moribund metaphor is no longer a metaphor, but a literally functioning segment of discourse. Thus despite his initial move toward a Derridean, or atleast Nietzschean, position, Rorty ultimately takes a stand consonant with Ricoeur's desire to rescue speculative discourse from the unruliness of metaphor. Considering Rorty's celebration of Freud in an article on "The Contingency of Selfhood," 3 his failure to consider the role of unconscious associations and overdetermination in the writing and reading of texts is surprising. Dead or alive, a metaphor brings with it a host ofpersonal and public, conscious and unconscious, new and traditional associations that become juxtaposed against a similar number of associations connected with the signifying chain into which the metaphor has been inserted. In... (shrink)

On 22 July, 2011, we were confronted with the horror of the actions of Anders Behring Breivik. The instant reaction, as we have seen with similar incidents in the past—such as the Oklahoma City bombings—was to attempt to explain the incident. Whether the reasons given were true or not were irrelevant: the fact that there was a reason was better than if there were none. We should not dismiss those that continue to cling on to the initial claims of a (...) wider Jihadist plot behind the actions of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols as Islamophobes (or merely lacking common sense): for, it is often easier to rely on reason—no matter how fictional—than not to have anything to cling on at all. In many ways, it is even better if the reason is fictional: for, if grounded in a certain fact, or reality, it can then go away. However, if it is in the realm of the imaginary, it is then always already metaphorical: thus, can be applied to any and every situation. And it is this, if we echo Friedrich Nietzsche, that gives us our “metaphysical comfort”; that we can know what is going on. This is why conspiracy theories are so popular: underlying them is the logic that someone—no matter how implausible—is in control of the situation. One would rather believe that all acts of terror stemmed from Osama bin Laden (and the narrative worked even better when he was in a ‘cave in Afghanistan’) than if they were the actions, and decisions, of singular individuals. For, if there is a head organizing everything, it can be cut off; there is no controlling a mass of singularities. As Jean Baudrillard continues to teach us, the term ‘mass’ is not a concept. It is a leitmotif of political demagogy, a soft, sticky, lumpen-analytical notion. A good sociology would attempt to surpass it with ‘more subtle’ categories: socio-professional ones, categories of class, cultural status, etc. This is wrong: it is by prowling around these soft and acritical notions (like ‘mana’ once was) that one can go further than intelligent critical sociology. Besides, it will be noticed retrospectively that the concepts ‘class’, ‘social relations’, ‘power’, ‘status’, ‘institution’, and ‘social’ itself—all these too-explicit concepts which are the glory of the legitimate sciences—but also only ever been muddled notions themselves, but notions upon which agreement has nevertheless been reached for mysterious ends: those of preserving a certain code of analysis. To want to specify the term ‘mass’ is a mistake—it is to provide meaning for that which has none.1 And it is this lack of meaning—this nothingness of not only the mass, but our inability to know in general—that truly scares us. For, if we are never able to legitimately make a generalizing statement, this suggests that we can never actually posit beyond a singular, situational, moment. Hence, we can never claim to know anyone: at best, we can only catch momentary glimpses. It is for this very reason that the insanity plea Breivik’s lawyer will attempt is the one that horrifies us the most. For, if Breivik is insane, this foregrounds our inability to understand, know. And as Aristotle has taught us, it is more important that something is plausible than if something were probable—in this context, we would rather have Breivik as a calculating mass murderer than someone who was completely out of his mind. This is especially ironic in the light of the fact that none of us would say that we have any similarity with Breivik. If that were so, the declaration that he was mad should be no more than a logical consequence. However, we also want Breivik to be accountable for his actions. And in order for that to be so, we need him to be of sound mind. But if that were true, we can then no longer distinguish ourselves from him. And it is precisely this that scares us. For, we are horrified not when there are abnormalities to our way of life. There are usually two different reactions to this—either oppose and destroy it; or subsume it under the dominant logic. We see this most clearly in reactions to immigration: there are either calls for immigrants to ‘pack up and leave’ or pseudo-liberal notions of ‘we are all alike’. Both of which are merely version of “all men are brothers”—the brutal translation of which is that you are my brother if you live the same way as me; otherwise not only are you not my brother, you are also potentially not part of mankind (you might as well be, to echo Giorgio Agamben, bare life ). This is played out in our age of what is commonly termed post-political bio-politics —an instance of horribly awkward theoretical jargon that Slavoj Žižek channeling Agamben unpacks rather elegantly: “ post-politics is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and, instead, focus[es] on expert management and administration, while bio-politics designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”2 Žižek continues: Post-political bio-politics also has two aspects which cannot but appear to belong to two opposite ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’ to Homo sacer , that so-called sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded, like prisoners at Guantanamo or Holocaust victims, from all rights; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other brought to an extreme through an attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences the self as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of potential harassments [….] What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. That is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and […] the extreme expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .3 This is why the ones that are harshest towards new immigrants are the recently naturalized citizens of any country. For, if there is no longer any “ideological struggle” and all life is reduced to mere automaton-living, there is the realization that we are all the same—not in a tree-hugging hippie sense—but that the immigrant is the same as us precisely because we are all immigrants. And since all nations, and by extension peoples in a nation (especially those who believe in the notion of nationality, and national identity), have to find some manner, no matter from where or what it is, to distinguish themselves from those around them, the other (in spite, and especially in the light, of its absence) is the most crucial aspect of the discourse of nationality. More precisely, in the interests of what Baudrillard calls “preserving a certain code of analysis” (nationality in this case), what has to be maintained is the absolute otherness of the other. Very rarely is Boris Johnson right: “it is not enough to say he is mad. Anders Breivik is patently mad.”4 However, much like Breivik in his manifesto, he should have stopped whilst he was ahead. By attempting to diagnose Breivik—“the fundamental reasons for their callous behavior lie deep in their own sense of rejection and alienation. It is the ideology that gives them the ostensible cause … that gives them an excuse to dramatize the resentment … and to kill.”—Johnson falls into the same trap that he accuses others of: “to try to advance any other explanation for their actions … is simply to play their self-important game.” More crucially, and this is the point that Johnson completely misses, attempting to rationalize Breivik’s actions—to rehabilitate reason—is a desperate attempt at maintaining his otherness. In fact, we’ll end up going one step further, insist on Breivik’s sanity, put him on the stand, and hope that he will display such a difference from all of us that we can rest safe that we are unlike him and his kind. That, in itself, is a dangerous game to play. One should not forget that the turning point in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is in the central part of her novel where she lets the monster speak. At that moment, the monster moves from an ‘it’ to a fully subjectivized person; with his own stories, historicities, emotions, and so on. In Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Frankenstein , this is the moment where “the ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself to be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love.”5 But, in the case of Breivik, this goes beyond just a risk of us feeling for him: for, no right-minded person should ever deny another the opportunity to put forth her or his own case. The problem lies with us trying to deny the madness of Breivik’s act by putting him back under reason. The problem is in our inability to differentiate the act from the person; the singular from the universal.6 In our desperation to preserve the notion that we are rational beings incapable of becoming monsters, we’ve had to deny the meaninglessness—in the strict sense of it lying outside of reason—of Breivik’ act; we’ve had to “provide meaning where there is none.” For, if this act were a moment of madness—a moment that comes from elsewhere—we cannot say that it will not descend upon us one day. If Breivik’s actions were that of a sane person, one who is in control of his being, his self, we can then locate the otherness in his being. More importantly, this would allow us to distinguish ourselves from that said being. Breivik’s sanity is the only thing that allows us to say that ‘this act of terror is borne out of one with an ultra-right ideology’; and ‘since I am not of that ideology, I would never do such a thing’. By doing that, we attempt to protect ourselves by claiming that people who share Breivik’s ideology are foreign to us, other to us. However, if Breivik’s act was a moment of insanity, his otherness is no longer locatable: and the notion of ‘us and them’ shifts from a geographical, physical, religious, or cultural notion, to one in the realm of ideas. And this is what truly scares us. For, if what is foreign is not phenomenological, then it cannot be seen, detected, sensed. Anders Behring Breivik, Timothy McVeigh, and Terry Nichols, terrify us not merely for the fact that they were white in a white society, but more pertinently that their skin color did not matter: we would not be able to spot them even if they were blue, even if they were right next to us, even if we had known them all our lives. Even as we are grappling with holding Breivik accountable by declaring him of sound mind, what truly terrifies us is that deep down we know that Breivik’s act is a moment of madness; beyond all comprehensibility. And this means that we would not be able to spot the idea; even if it were in our heads at this very moment. We have gone to lengths to rehabilitate Breivik, McVeigh, Nichols, and such perpetrators of massive incomprehensible violence, in order to preserve our difference from them. What we have really been trying to deny is the fact that everyone, at any given moment, could have a moment of madness. And this is the true radicality of Mary Shelley: in allowing us to momentarily enter the head of the monster, she shows us not just the fact that he is like any one of us, but that any one of us could, in the right (or wrong) circumstance, be like him. Perhaps here, there is a lesson to be learned from Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street . The most dangerous thing that one could do on Elm Street was to mention Freddy’s name—once you had knowledge of him, you were open to the possibility of a visit during your dreams. This suggests that Freddy is a combination of externalities (after all, when you die, he survives) and your self (if you have never heard of him, he cannot come for you). In this sense, Freddy would be the manifestation par excellence of what Avital Ronell calls a “killer text”—it is one’s relationality with the text (and the ideas, notions, in the said text) that opens oneself to it, to the lessons of the text, to being changed, affected, even to the dangers of the text. After all, one should never forget Plato’s warning that ideas can corrupt, can be perilous. To compound matters, as Ronell reminds us, “the connection to the other is a reading—not an interpretation, assimilation, or even a hermeneutic understanding, but a reading.”7 Thus, in attempting to differentiate ourselves from Breivik by concocting some reason(s) why we are not like him, we have done nothing but read him, open a connection to him. *** Bang bang, he shot me down Bang bang, I hit the ground Bang bang, that awful sound Bang bang, my baby shot me down. “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” Sonny Bono, 1966. This is the part that we all know and remember. Whilst never quite remembering that this is a song that is not so much about violence, love, but about remembering. For, after the bridge comes the accusatory stanza: “Now he's gone, I don't know why/ And till this day, sometimes I cry/ He didn't even say goodbye/ He didn't take the time to lie.” Bang Bang is a game that the two lovers used to play; and all she has now is the memory of the game to remember him by. And the only reason she has to recall this game is: he never provided her a reason for his leaving, his death. Not that she will, can, ever get that satisfactory answer. This is precisely the game we are playing with Anders Behring Breivik. Even though he has left a 1500 page manifesto, even though we will allow him to use the court-room as his platform, we will continue screaming at him “tell me why …” For, what we want him to say is that we are not like him: what we really want him to do is, “take the time to lie …” Perhaps here, we should allow the echo of the infans to resound in baby . As Christopher Fynsk reminds us, the infans is one that is pre-language, pre-knowing, pre-understanding: it is the very finitude, and exteriority, of relationality itself.8 And thus, it is a position of openness to the fullness of possibility—and nothing else. This would be, in Ronell’s terms, a “connection to the other” that knows nothing other than the fact that it is a connection. The true horror of 22 July, 2011, is the fact that it is not Anders Behring Breivik who is mad, but the act itself that is. And this is precisely why only “my baby” that could have “shot me down.” For, it is an act that is from beyond, a sheer act of madness that—as Plato warns us—is whispered into our ears (and can so easily be mistaken for inspiration, and even wisdom), an act that can both seize, and cease, us at the same time. And what can this utter openness to an other, the other, be but a moment of love, a true ‘falling in love’. At the moment of whispering, nothing can be known as we are babies as our baby shoots us down …. Hence, all attempts at analyzing this event (including this one) are not only futile, but border on the farcical. The real tragedy is that we forget that all of us have the possibility of becoming Breivik. NOTES Jean Baudrillard. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities . Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, Paul Patton, & Andrew Berardini. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007. p. 37. Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p. 34 Ibid: 35-36. Boris Johnson. “ Anders Breivik: There is nothing to study in the mind of Norway’s mass killer .” The Telegraph . (25 July, 2011): Slavoj Žižek. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections . London: Profile Books, 2009. p.39. What is killing us is the notion that Breivik’s act is beyond reason, beyond knowing, outside understanding itself. This is why Boris Johnson’s plea was for us to ignore Breivik as a madman. But to do so, Johnson conflates the notion of the act and the person; the singular and the universal. This is exactly the same gesture as insisting on his sanity: the ‘madman’ is merely the absolute other, one that we are not. Avital Ronell. The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989: 380. Christopher Fynsk. Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000.  . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Michael Levin ROUSSEAU'S CURSE Pretext Rousseau is the author of a text he called his Confessions. ' But neither a text nor a confession can exist without a reader, or an other. Like it or not, we readers are participants in the rite of Rousseau's confessions. Do we have anything to confess? When the reading of a confession uncovers the spelling of a curse, so that the self-accused (...) author appears to accuse his readers, the discoverers of the curse can no longer pretend their neutrality and innocence. In fact, the detectives must assume the identity of the accused. In such a special case, then, the inevitable work of textual interpretation magically doubles as the story of a mysteriously elusive "crime" and its final, or anyway presumed detection. But, as in the very best of such stories, neither the skillfully executed crime nor its invisible author—if indeed these terms denote anything at all—need be what they seem. So perhaps the only thing we can say for sure here is that the spelling of the curse is the curse of spelling. And this puts us on the track of a mystery as ancient as the art of writing itself—a mystery whose story the scholars of hermeneutics have thus far preferred to ignore. The mystery I have in mind is the secret affinity between writing and death. A careful hermeneutic approach to Plato's critique of writing, however, may give us a crucial clue. For what binds written language to the power of death is its role in mourning, its incarnation in the form of shadows: black configurations of shadows placed for visibility against the white of the paper. In Plato's Myth of the Cave, the crime of writing is dimly adumbrated. Writing is idolatry, worship of false images, shadows. Rousseau's Confessions, written near the end of his life in the shadow of death, does not escape the shadows of doubt and suspicion which we, his readers, having discovered our own selves inscribed into the darkness of the text, cannot easily refrain from casting. But as soon as we recognize in the shapes of these shadows a suspicion for which 76 David Michael Levin77 we are responsible, we must confess our fatal complicity in the closing of the hermeneutical circle. Commentary on the Text If Rousseau's Confessions does not read like the typical memoir, neither does it read like the typical confession. A final twist awaits us. We read with a certain innocence, or faith, not prepared for the transitive conclusion: the text, as it happens, will bequeath a monstrous and impossible burden. What is the reader to do? How could it be that this man, who seemed to honor us, and won our trust with the candor of his revelations, should so boldly, by one cross conceit, vanish, only to leave us double-crossed and within a labyrinth which, as he would have us believe, we ourselves have wrought? What are we to make of his work? At first, the Confessions appears to be a work of light: with dazzling clarity of mind and courage no less prismatic, Rousseau proposes to take his readers into the gloomy chasms of his soul. "My purpose," he declares, "is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray is myself" (p. 17). That this, however, is not the whole of his intention, we learn through a neighboring sentence. For he says: "Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: 'Here is what I have done'..." (p. 17). And yet, even this does not fully disclose his design, since he concedes, somewhat later, that "it is as if, feeling my life escaping from me, I were trying to recapture it at its beginnings" (p. 31). But in the end, as in the beginning, darkness and light are one. And indeed, deep into the Seventh Book, we see that the author's light does begin to dim, and that he no longer speaks with much assurance. Nor is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Philosopher’s Demise: Learning FrenchPatrick HenryThe Philosopher’s Demise: Learning French, by Richard Watson; 133 pp. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995, $22.50.An internationally known expert on caving and the life and works of Descartes, Watson writes traditional philosophical criticism as well as novels like The Runner (1981) and Niagra (1993). The Philosopher’s Demise, however, is the final part of a very loosely woven trilogy that is neither traditional (...) philosophical discourse nor fiction. These are certainly lighter texts than the ones on Cartesian metaphysics—indeed, they are all funny—but they also contain a good deal of practical philosophy.The Philosopher’s Diet. How To Lose Weight and Change the World (1985), for example, deals with the issue of fat, tells you how to get it off and keep it off but, in very lean prose, it also probes deeply into the form of commitment. It contains chapters on fat, food, and roughage but others entitled “Running,” “Sex,” “How to live,” and “How to die.” Fat functions here as a metaphor—it is “what clutters the unexamined life” (p. 26)—representing “the nagging triviality, the utter banality, and the inevitability of ordinary reality that separate us from what we think we want to be” (p. 145).With an occasional nod to Sartre (We are what we eat as we are what we do.) and Pascal (By altering our behavior, we can alter our beliefs.), Watson writes to provoke his readers to make a commitment to get the fat out of their lives, to take control of their actions and, perhaps, by changing themselves, to change the world. If we can, for example, “control [our] own eating habits apart from the norm imposed by society” (p. 75), we can begin to act as individuals in all other matters and completely transform our lives and, possibly, those of others. Watson, who contributed a chapter to World Hunger and Moral Obligation (1977) and who, during the 1960s, wrote a still unpublished volume entitled Sex and Revolution in which he claims that if people could revolt sexually against the [End Page 420] taboos of America, they could then perhaps be convinced to take control of the world’s food production, now remarks here, as if in passing, that if we fast for a day or two to make up for binges, we will get “a gut comprehension of what hunger really is for as many as a third of the world’s people” (p. 129). At its deepest level, The Philosopher’s Diet unveils an entire world obsessed with food—“the rich are worried about eating too much and the poor too little” (p. 56)—and underscores the immorality of not trying to change a system of food production and distribution in which we are overfed while millions are starving.The Philosopher’s Joke (1990) is a tougher book to get a handle on. It contains five chapters written in the dominant styles of philosophical writing popular in each of the last five decades. Two additional chapters complete the volume: “How to Die” which appeared almost verbatim in The Philosopher’s Diet and “A Pig’s Tail (The End of the Second Millenium).” As the book’s cover warns us, it is not always easy to ascertain the author’s position vis-à-vis the opinions reached in the specific essays. The first two chapters, though, are clearly parodies of purely formalistic writing, while the third is a skeptical but straightforward and serious attempt to establish that all interpretation is subjective. The fourth deals with deception in Kierkegaard and the themes of innocence sullied and human entrapment in Western culture. The main joke here has been played on Kierkegaard by God, “the original con man” (p. 87). Chapter six examines recent novels and films that treat the relationships between humans and apes and asks, seriously, what it would mean regarding animal rights and the place of human beings in the cosmos, if it could be shown that apes and humans can interbreed. Chapter seven brings the volume full circle. It shows how form carries content in its examination of the circular form, multiple circles, and epicycles of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks, and: The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' WordsJohn D'Arcy MayThe Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks. Edited by Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. 140 + xi pp.The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' Words. By Lindsay Falvey. Adelaide: Institute for International Development, (...) 2002. 108 pp.Since Roy C. Amore's Two Masters, One Message (1987) revived the hypothesis of Buddhist influence on Christian origins and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit's research established links between Nestorian Christianity, Gnostic Manichaeism, and Mahayana Buddhism in Central Asia, there is scope for further reflection on commonalities between the two traditions over and above the purely doctrinal and philosophical. The two books under review, though intended for a general readership, are indications that interest in these matters is very much alive.Riegert and Moore preface their selection of texts with the story of Bishop Aleben (A-lo-pen), who travelled the Silk Road from Persia and was received with honour at the imperial capital of Xian (Chang-an) at the beginning of the Tang dynasty (635 CE). The emperor Taizong was sympathetic to what he called the "Luminous Religion," a Nestorian version of Christianity, possibly in Syriac, as presented by Aleben. It seems that these teachings were translated into Chinese in the form of sutras. One of them, preserved in stone as the Monument Sutra, features the cross rising from the lotus, the symbol chosen by Karl Reichelt for Tao-fung Shan, his Christian center in Buddhist style at Sha-tin outside Hong Kong, many centuries later. Thousands of Buddhist texts were preserved in the library cave at Dunhuang monastery, about one thousand miles west of Xian, where they were rediscovered by the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu, who arrived there in the 1890s and became the self-appointed guardian of the scrolls.Included in this treasure trove were the Jesus Sutras, which are now scattered in museums and private collections, largely inaccessible to the public. But if the selection published here in a very elegant translation is anything to go by, they are [End Page 190] extremely significant religious documents with a spiritual value all their own. For the uninitiated, there is no way of checking the authenticity of these translations. The commentaries that accompany them could be slightly tendentious in that they nudge us in the direction of the editors' particular holistic worldview. But the texts themselves have a beauty and integrity that speaks for itself. They represent a Higher Dharma of perfect purity (p. 86), which, like a mirror, reflects the world with no trace of self: no desire, no action, no virtue, no truth (pp. 80–83, 126–129). The Jesus story is retold, and Jesus is portrayed as the teacher of this Higher Path. The sutras speak of One Spirit who is self-created, One God who is creator of the world, and One Lord, the Messiah who will return. There are prayers, too: "O Loving Father, Enlightened Son, Holy Spirit King"; "Lamb of Love and Bliss"; "O Holy Sage, Universal Lord, Messiah" (pp. 110–113). The texts obviously bear witness to a Buddhist-Christian dialogue much earlier and at a far deeper level than many would have thought possible. Whether they represent the religion of the future, as the editors suggest, remains to be seen.Lindsay Falvey's project of interpreting the canonical texts of Buddhism and Christianity in reference to one another has a similar orientation. In the course of agricultural development work in Thailand he came to realize "that the striking similarity between the two teachers may well be a seamless cloak of congruence beneath the mantle of culture and lore" (p. 13); the texts, in other words, may be quite literally translatable into one another's terms. Though aware that Q, the collection of Jesus' sayings that is supposed to have been available to the synoptic evangelists, is a hypothetical reconstruction, he still feels able to use a version of it as a basis for his experiment. He prefaces this with what he calls "A... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks, and: The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' WordsJohn D'Arcy MayThe Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks. Edited by Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore. London: Souvenir Press, 2004. 140 + xi pp.The Buddha's Gospel: A Buddhist Interpretation of Jesus' Words. By Lindsay Falvey. Adelaide: Institute for International Development, (...) 2002. 108 pp.Since Roy C. Amore's Two Masters, One Message (1987) revived the hypothesis of Buddhist influence on Christian origins and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit's research established links between Nestorian Christianity, Gnostic Manichaeism, and Mahayana Buddhism in Central Asia, there is scope for further reflection on commonalities between the two traditions over and above the purely doctrinal and philosophical. The two books under review, though intended for a general readership, are indications that interest in these matters is very much alive.Riegert and Moore preface their selection of texts with the story of Bishop Aleben (A-lo-pen), who travelled the Silk Road from Persia and was received with honour at the imperial capital of Xian (Chang-an) at the beginning of the Tang dynasty (635 CE). The emperor Taizong was sympathetic to what he called the "Luminous Religion," a Nestorian version of Christianity, possibly in Syriac, as presented by Aleben. It seems that these teachings were translated into Chinese in the form of sutras. One of them, preserved in stone as the Monument Sutra, features the cross rising from the lotus, the symbol chosen by Karl Reichelt for Tao-fung Shan, his Christian center in Buddhist style at Sha-tin outside Hong Kong, many centuries later. Thousands of Buddhist texts were preserved in the library cave at Dunhuang monastery, about one thousand miles west of Xian, where they were rediscovered by the Taoist priest Wang Yuanlu, who arrived there in the 1890s and became the self-appointed guardian of the scrolls.Included in this treasure trove were the Jesus Sutras, which are now scattered in museums and private collections, largely inaccessible to the public. But if the selection published here in a very elegant translation is anything to go by, they are [End Page 190] extremely significant religious documents with a spiritual value all their own. For the uninitiated, there is no way of checking the authenticity of these translations. The commentaries that accompany them could be slightly tendentious in that they nudge us in the direction of the editors' particular holistic worldview. But the texts themselves have a beauty and integrity that speaks for itself. They represent a Higher Dharma of perfect purity (p. 86), which, like a mirror, reflects the world with no trace of self: no desire, no action, no virtue, no truth (pp. 80–83, 126–129). The Jesus story is retold, and Jesus is portrayed as the teacher of this Higher Path. The sutras speak of One Spirit who is self-created, One God who is creator of the world, and One Lord, the Messiah who will return. There are prayers, too: "O Loving Father, Enlightened Son, Holy Spirit King"; "Lamb of Love and Bliss"; "O Holy Sage, Universal Lord, Messiah" (pp. 110–113). The texts obviously bear witness to a Buddhist-Christian dialogue much earlier and at a far deeper level than many would have thought possible. Whether they represent the religion of the future, as the editors suggest, remains to be seen.Lindsay Falvey's project of interpreting the canonical texts of Buddhism and Christianity in reference to one another has a similar orientation. In the course of agricultural development work in Thailand he came to realize "that the striking similarity between the two teachers may well be a seamless cloak of congruence beneath the mantle of culture and lore" (p. 13); the texts, in other words, may be quite literally translatable into one another's terms. Though aware that Q, the collection of Jesus' sayings that is supposed to have been available to the synoptic evangelists, is a hypothetical reconstruction, he still feels able to use a version of it as a basis for his experiment. He prefaces this with what he calls "A... (shrink)