In the Statesman , Plato brings together--only to challenge and displace--his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reprinted here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean. The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical order (...) of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides , the Philebus , and the "unwritten teachings." "This study demonstrates how the Statesman is the culminating expression of Plato's lifelong effort, both in Athens and in the Academy, to bring metaphysical insight to the unending political crisis of his times."The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman a trail-blazing work. While not every reader will agree with the lessons Miller himself draws from this approach, none should fail to be impressed by its interpretive power. All this is exciting stuff. The interpretive pathway on which Miller has embarked has the potential for changing the face of scholarship on the late Platonic dialogues. Parmenides [Publishing] is to be commended for making these two important contributions available under a single cover." -- Kenneth Sayre, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame "Miller casts considerable light on virtually every aspect of the dialogue. . . . All in all, this book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the Statesman." -- Stanley Rosen, Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University MITCHELL MILLER is Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. He is the author of Plato's Parmenides. (shrink)

The question of the moral significance of Scripture is in reality a question about what kind of community the church must be to make the narratives of Scripture central for its life.

This article is concerned with exploring the idea of places as providing persons with nourishment. This version of person–place relations is displayed in a paper by McHugh and, in provocative fashion, in Michel Serres’s analysis of the human condition as a parasitic one. Unlike McHugh, Serres combines his analysis of parasites with a concern that principled actors may be insufficiently attached to places. His views are revealed in his interpretations of works by Molière and Plato. By reinterpreting these works, I (...) try to suggest that Serres’s well-founded scepticism as to the level of commitment of principled actors to the places that, as he rightly points out, are nourishing them, may not apply to the sub-set of principled actors who deserve to be called particular. (shrink)

In contrast to attempts that have been made to measure the clarity of reporting of the methods of clinical trials in journal articles, we report here an attempt to measure the accuracy of methods reporting. We focus in this article on eligibility criteria as a test case for the reporting of clinical trial methods. We examined the reporting of eligibility criteria in the protocol, methods paper (if applicable), journal article, and Clinical Alert for articles appearing in print between January 1988 (...) and September 1994 for which a Clinical Alert had been issued. Eligibility criteria were further classified into five categories in order to examine the content of information loss, if any. On average, 82% of protocol eligibility criteria were reported in methods papers. Journal articles and Clinical Alerts fared somewhat worse: 63% of criteria were reported in journal articles, 19% in Clinical Alerts. In all three categories of medical communication, the reporting of criteria that defined the study disease tended to be complete; reporting of criteria relating to trial precision, patient safety, legal and ethical concerns, and administrative considerations, was not complete. We found that criteria for clinical trial eligibility are frequently under-reported in medical communications. Moreover, some of the criteria omitted are of considerable clinical importance. We suggest that in the design phase of clinical trials, proposed eligibility criteria be scrutinized closely. Those criteria that survive this scrutiny and that have clinical import must be reported upon fully and accurately when communicating trial results. (shrink)

Aquesta publicació recull els textos de les ponències de "L'encontre Fora d'equi libri", organitzat pel Departament de Cultura i Mitjans de Comunicació els dies 5, 6 i 7 de setembre de 2008, que planteja el paper de la inestabilitat i la tra nsformació en el món contemporani. Les causes, els mecanismes i les conseqüèncie s d'estar fora d'equilibri apareixen de forma diversa en els més diversos àmbits de les ciències, les humanitats i la creació en general. L'encontre s'organitzàe n tres (...) sessions: "homo ecologicus", que reflexiona sobre el fer de manera respec tuosa amb l'ambient; "viure el canvi", que reflexiona sobre la necessitat d'adap tació a un món canviant, i "artistes al laboratori", que reflexiona sobre les co ndicions favorables al procés de creació. (shrink)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Remembering Fermi MORREL H. COHEN Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University Frelinghuysen Road. Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019 USA and Department ...

Stanley Rosen's book is the first full-length study of the Sophist in English and one of the most complete in any language. He follows the stages of the dialogue in sequence and offers an exhaustive analysis of the philosophical questions that come to light as Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger pursue the sophist through philosophical debate. Rosen finds the central problem of the dialogue in the relation between original and image; he shows how this distinction underlies all (...) subsequent technical themes and analyzes in detail such problems as non-being or negation and false statement. Arguing that the dialogue must be treated as a dramatic unity, he pays careful attention throughout to the setting, the events, the language used, and the relations between the natures of the speakers and the topics under discussion. (shrink)

The Mask of Enlightenment is the most detailed textual and thematic study of Nietzsche's most important but least understood works: Thus Spake Zarathustra. In this book Nietzsche was laying the groundwork for a fundamental philosophical and political revolution on a global scale. One of the difficulties that the text poses is Nietzsche's prophetic style; Stanley Rosen unweaves the complex threads that form the rhetorical voices of the work, and so explains the style in an accessible manner. He rejects (...) recent sceptical, deconstructionist interpretations of Nietzsche, and reveals a coherence underlying the multiple and apparently incompatible intentions embedded in the text. Nietzsche is a figure whose influence on contemporary thought in the humanities and social sciences continues to be enormous. This book is sure to become the definitive study of Zarathustra, and will have a broad appeal to philosophers and students of modern philosophy, intellectual historians, political scientists, and literary theorists. (shrink)

Plato's great attempt to define the nature of the sophist -- the false image of the philosopher -- has perplexed readers from classical times to the present. The dialogue has been central in the ongoing debate about the theory of forms, and it remains a crucial text for Plato scholars in both the analytical and the phenomenological traditions. Stanley Rosen's book is the first full-length study of the Sophist in English and one of the most complete in any (...) language. He follows the stages of the dialogue in sequence and offers an exhaustive analysis of the philosophical questions that come to light as Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger pursue the sophist through philosophical debate. Rosen finds the central problem of the dialogue in the relation between original and image; he shows how this distinction underlies all subsequent technical themes and analyzes in detail such problems as non-being or negation and false statement. Arguing that the dialogue must be treated as a dramatic unity, he pays careful attention throughout to the setting, the events, the language used, and the relations between the natures of the speakers and the topics under discussion. Rosen's new approach to the technical issues in the dialogue will be of interest to Plato scholars of all schools, and his analysis of the sophistical dimension of the world will engage all who have puzzled over what it means to be a philosopher. (shrink)

In this insightful and controversial book, the eminent philosopher Stanley Rosen takes a new look at the famous 'quarrel' that the moderns have with the ancients, analyzing and comparing ancient philosophers and modern Continental and analytical thinkers from Plato, Descartes, and Kant to Fichte, Nietzsche, and Rorty. He urges that we do not dismiss the classical heritage but appropriate it, for this appropriation is an indispensable step in the process of legitimizing our historical experience.

This is the first full-length study of the Symposium to be published in English, and one of the first English works on Plato to take its bearings by the dramatic form of the Platonic dialogue, a thesis that was regarded as heterodox at the time but which today is widely accepted by scholars of the most diverse standpoint. Rosen was also one of the first to study in detail the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of concrete human sexuality, as (...) it is presented by Plato in the diverse characters of the main speakers in the dialogue. His analysis of the theoretical significance of pederasty in the dialogue was highly controversial at the time, but is today accepted as central to Plato's dramatic phenomenology of human existence. Rosen discusses a variety of topics that had previously been neglected in the secondary literature, including the problem of the hybristic nature of the philosopher, the poetical dimension of Plato's conception of philosophy, and the theoretical implication of the difference between Platonic writing and Socratic conversation. (shrink)

This book presents another attempt at reconciling the various passages in Plato concerning what is perhaps his central metaphysical problem: the relationship of the Forms to things. The focus of the book is a new interpretation of the arguments of the Parmenides. To prepare the reader for this interpretation, Bigger offers his own analysis of dialogues from the early period and the middle period to show the ontological bifurcation of the Platonic position in its various expressions. His reading of the (...) Parmenides passages is based upon a threefold distinction of Ideas, and is supported with texts from the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Timaeus. Bigger disagrees with several contemporary interpretations of these arguments, and offers answers to the positions of R. J. Butler, G. Ryle, and G. Vlastos. His reading of the dialogues is interesting and usually very perceptive. He is not primarily interested in presenting another work in Platonic scholarship. Rather, borrowing a theme from Stanley Rosen who thinks that a problem in Plato is not solved by scholarship but by thinking it through on the basis of experience, Bigger in the last two chapters of the book presents his own solution to the problem of participation. This part of the book constitutes a complicated essay in technical metaphysics which embraces themes both from the dialogues of Plato and from A. N. Whitehead. Both as a reading of the Platonic dialogues and as a treatise on metaphysical theory, this is a valuable and stimulating book.--M. M. H. (shrink)

Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the steady influx of new classes. According to the model, the distribution changes from a pure exponential form for zero influx of new classes to a power law with an exponential cut-off form when the influx of new classes is (...) substantial. Predictions of the model are tested through the analysis of a unique industrial database, which covers both elementary units (products) and classes (markets, firms) in a given industry (pharmaceuticals), covering the entire size distribution. The model's predictions are in good agreement with the data. The paper sheds light on the emergence of the exponent tau approximately 2 observed as a universal feature of many biological, social and economic problems. (shrink)

The first part of my hypothesis, then, is simple enough, and would be accepted in principle by most students of Plato: the dramatic structure of the dialogues is an essential part of their philosophical meaning. With respect to the poetic and mathematical aspects of philosophy, we may distinguish three general kinds of dialogue. For example, consider the Sophist and Statesman, where Socrates is virtually silent: the principal interlocutors are mathematicians and an Eleatic Stranger, a student of Parmenides, although one who (...) is not always loyal to his master's teaching of what might be called monadic homogeneity. In these dialogues, the mathematical character of philosophy is not merely emphasized but exaggerated, and any attempt to interpret them must take this fact into account. Otherwise, we shall not be able to understand why the Stranger seems to classify the general's art in the same species of the genus hunting as the louse catcher. The significance of this step, which does not stem from humanitarian considerations, but rather illustrates how the human becomes invisible from the mathematical viewpoint, contributes its share to the obscurity of these two dialogues. Second, there are dialogues like the Phaedrus and Symposium, in which the style, the interlocutors, and even the subject-matter seem to be largely poetic and rhetorical. Here, the overwhelming impression is of enthusiasm, divine madness, and intoxication in speech and deed. Finally, there are dialogues like the Philebus and Republic, in which it is not so easy to say whether poetry or mathematics predominates, if indeed either may be said to do so. (shrink)

EVERY Platonic dialogue is a tangled web. The Sophist and the Statesman, in which the paradigm of weaving plays a central role, are especially complex in structure. In this paper, I shall look at the Statesman from a variety of perspectives, following distinct but connected threads in the web, and always heading toward, or with an eye upon, the myth of the reversed cosmos. It will be necessary for me to make a considerable number of small points and observations on (...) the text. However, such a procedure may be excused, given the nature of the enterprise. And without this accumulation of detail, such general remarks as I have to offer would be deprived of substance. (shrink)