Recollection is central to the epistemology of Plato’sMeno. After all, the character Socrates claims that recollection is the process whereby embodied human souls bind down true opinions (doxai) and acquire knowledge (epistêmê). This paper examines the exchange between Socrates and Meno’s slave to determine (1) what steps on the path to acquiring knowledge are part of the process of recollection and (2) what is required for a subject to count as having recollected something. I argue that the key to answering (...) these questions is to get clear on the kind of process recollection is supposed to be. In particular, I argue that recollection is a process akin to the kind of process Aristotle calls “changes” (kinêseisor incompleteenergeiai). The key feature of such processes is that they aim at an end beyond themselves and are not complete until that end comes about. In the case of recollection, the end is knowledge, but inferior mental states, such as false opinion, puzzlement (aporia), and true opinion can come about because of a process of recollection without making it the case that the subject has recollected anything. I argue that this interpretation provides a textually supported and philosophically coherent understanding of Socrates’ conception of recollection. (shrink)

What does Plato mean in saying that, for all forms, “F-ness is F”? In such claims, I argue, ‘F’ is being used metonymically to refer to the property of being productive of F-ness rather than to the property of being F, in a way consistent with univocity and the rejection of a genuine Self-Predication Assumption. I explain and defend this productive metonymy reading and show how it can resolve the troubling argument at Phaedo 74b7-c6.

In Republic VIII, oligarchy is represented as a transitional or hybrid regime combining features of aristocracy and timocracy with the rule of appetitive desire characteristic of democracy and tyranny. The apparently anomalous intermediary position of oligarchy, in which an object of appetitive soul provides the foundation for interpersonal and political norms, demonstrates the complexity of the interaction between ruling soul parts and underlying rational structures that give unity to each constitution and character type. This interaction cannot be adequately accounted for (...) in terms of the activity of autonomous soul parts whose interactions are wholly reduced to quantitative relations of force. (shrink)

In books 8 and 9 of Plato’s Republic, Socrates provides a detailed account of the nature and origins of four main kinds of vice found in political constitutions and in the kinds of people that correspond to them. The third of the four corrupt kinds of person he describes is the ‘democratic man’. In this paper, I ask what ‘rules’ in the democratic man’s soul. It is commonly thought that his soul is ruled in some way by its appetitive part, (...) or by a particular class of appetitive desires. I reject this view, and argue instead that his soul is ruled by a succession of desires of a full range of different kinds. I show how this view helps us better understand Plato’s depiction of corrupt souls in the Republic more generally, and with it his views on the rule of the soul, appetitive desire, and the nature of vice. (shrink)

In the so-called ‘dialogues of definition,’ Socrates appears to endorse the ‘priority of definition.’ This principle states that an agent cannot know anything about F-ness (its instances, examples, properties, etc.) without knowing what F-ness is (the definition of F-ness). Not only is this principle implausible, it is also difficult to square with Socrates’ method. In employing his method, Socrates appeals to truths about the instances and properties of F-ness, even while pursuing definitional knowledge; meanwhile, he holds that one cannot know (...) those truths without already knowing the definition. Thus, there is a tension between Socrates’ principle and his method. Commentators have tried to resolve this problem in various ways, though typically without a careful examination of his ‘What is F-ness?’ question. I argue that Socrates employs the ‘What is F-ness?’ question as a way of introducing two distinct types of investigation into F-ness (conceptual and causal). With this established, the relationship between Socrates’ principle and his method comes to light, and the tension is resolved. (shrink)

John Cook Wilson (1849–1915) was Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford and the founder of ‘Oxford Realism’, a philosophical movement that flourished at Oxford during the first decades of the 20th century. Although trained as a classicist and a mathematician, his most important contribution was to the theory of knowledge, where he argued that knowledge is factive and not definable in terms of belief, and he criticized ‘hybrid’ and ‘externalist’ accounts. He also argued for direct realism in perception, (...) criticizing both empiricism and idealism, and argued for a moderate nominalist view of universals as being in rebus and only ‘apprehended’ by their particulars. His influence helped swaying Oxford away from idealism and, through figures such as H. A. Prichard, Gilbert Ryle, or J. L. Austin, his ideas were also to some extent at the origin of ‘moral intuitionism’ and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which defined much of Oxford philosophy until the second half of the twentieth-century. Nevertheless, his name and legacy were all but forgotten for generations after World War II. Still, his views on knowledge are with us today, being in part at work in the writings of philosophers as diverse as John McDowell, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. (shrink)