The Visitor’s inquiry into the expertise of statesmanship in Plato’s Statesman consistently privileges knowledge as the sole source from which to derive legitimate authority to command. And yet the section of the dialogue to which he refers as a “play” (δρᾶμα, 303c8) of satyrs and centaurs (291a–303d) complicates matters significantly by spelling out the difficulty of identifying a true statesman and the dangers of thinking ourselves able to do so. Reading the account of human community provided in the myth of (...) the cosmos together with the “good imitation” of knowledge in the satyr play, a limited notion of properly human wisdom comes into view as the horizon within which to interpret knowledge and dialectical division in the dialogue. I conclude that the education of the dialectician is connected to the problem of the absence of the true statesman, and that the Statesman is prescribing ways in which members of the philosophical community ought to understand themselves in dialogue with the written word. (shrink)

In this book, Eric Sanday boldly demonstrates that Plato’s “theory of forms” is true, easy to understand, and relatively intuitive. Sanday argues that our chief obstacle to understanding the theory of forms is the distorting effect of the tacit metaphysical privileging of individual things in our everyday understanding. For Plato, this privileging of things that we can own, produce, exchange, and through which we gain mastery of our surroundings is a significant obstacle to philosophical education. The dialogue’s (...) chief philosophical work, then, is to destabilize this false privileging and, in Parmenides, to provide the initial framework for a newly oriented account of participation. Once we do this, Sanday argues, we more easily can grasp and see the truth of the theory of forms. (shrink)

Lawrence et al. have presented an argument purporting to show that “relative facts do not exist” and, consequently, “Relational Quantum Mechanics is incompatible with quantum mechanics”. The argument is based on a GHZ-like contradiction between constraints satisfied by measurement outcomes in an extended Wigner’s friend scenario. Here we present a strengthened version of the argument, and show why, contrary to the claim by Lawrence et al., these arguments do not contradict the consistency of a theory of relative facts. Rather, considering (...) this argument helps clarify how one should not think about a theory of relative facts, like RQM. (shrink)

Readers of Plato have often neglected the Laws because of its length and density. In this set of interpretive essays, notable scholars of the Laws from the fields of classics, history, philosophy, and political science offer a collective close reading of the dialogue "book by book" and reflect on the work as a whole. In their introduction, editors Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday explore the connections among the essays and the dramatic and productive exchanges between the contributors. This (...) volume fills a major gap in studies on Plato’s dialogues by addressing the cultural and historical context of the Laws and highlighting their importance to contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

This chapter [of the edited volume, A Companion to Ancient Philosophy] examines the shift in Plato’s account of the eidē or ‘forms’ from the Republic to the Parmenides. Forms in the Republic are characterized in terms of perfection, purity, and changelessness, with the form being an ultimate explanatory principle for being-X. Participants, while being-X, are also capable of not-being-X, either through qualitative change and coming-to-be, or through external changes in perspective or opinion, by which they “appear [φανήσεται]” not-X (R. V.479a7). (...) The form is treated as prior to participant and as prior to mixture with what would deny what it is. It is intrinsically changeless and not subject to changes in appearance. -/- In the Parmenides, the account of form shifts to accommodate the types of admixture demanded for combination with and division from other forms. In the Fifth Hypothesis, forms are subject to determinate “bonds of being and not-being,” which permits the form to present itself as an object of discursive knowing, being-X, -Y, and -Z, and not-being not-X, not-Y, and not-Z. Forms are still treated as pure and perfect, but now with the power of gathering together intelligible bonds of being and not-being. Thus, in the Parmenides, forms are the gathering source and the gathered terms subject to the admixture; they are that by which true speech is explained. In this chapter, I argue that the “turning of the soul from becoming to truth and being” (R. VII.525c) announced in the Republic is partially fulfilled through the account of veridical speech in the Parmenides. (shrink)

In this response I take issue with Professor Ausland’s use of the account of the soul in Republic 4 as a basis for reading Republic 8-9. I believe that the method and assumptions of Republic 4 are pre-dialectical and that Books 8-9 should be read in light of the digressive Books 5-7. By placing greater emphasis on the asymmetry between Book 4 and Books 8-9, the basic assumptions governing the decline of regimes will show themselves to tell a different story (...) of moral experience and moral decomposition than we find in Professor Ausland’s instructive and insightful reading of the dialogue. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Socrates sees one important truth in the position Callicles represents in the Gorgias: it is necessary in the case of extreme philosophical provocation to be able to overthrow completely the received order and to maintain oneself in the face of unimagined possibility. Without this faith in the power of wisdom to overturn and destroy received wisdom, philosophy would not be able to shepherd the good into the world in Socratic fashion. Interpreters are generally correct (...) to view Callicles as a threat to the Socratic ehtical position, but they generally fail to see that Socratic wisdom cannot operate without drawing substantially on the destruction of received order that Callicles promotes to a position of unique value in his competing ethical stance. Thus I read the conversation between Socrates and Callicles as an opportunity for Socrates to stand face to face with that aspect of his own philosophical wisdom that seems at first glance hostile to his own position. (shrink)

Philosophy is often taken at its core to be an argumentative appeal to our own native capacity to judge the truth without bias. I claim in this paper that the very notion of unbiased truth represents a particular interest, viz., the interests of the political as such: the city. My thesis is that Socrates’ city in speech in Book II of the Republic exposes the injustice concealed at the core of demonstrative philosophy, and on this basis he goes on to (...) offer an account of philosophical education based on a notion of musical inheritance. (shrink)

I use Plato’s Symposium to examine a tension that I believe to be key to self-knowledge. On the one hand, knowledge proper refers to noetic insight into the ultimate explanatory principles and causes, which “objects” are often referred to in the dialogues as forms. On the other hand, self-knowledge refers to basic modes of self-awareness and self-understanding that are at once embodied and interpersonal, and which are not explicitly related to the study of form. I believe these two basic commitments, (...) to knowledge and self-awareness, tend to obscure one another in the dialogues and in contemporary interpretations. My basic thesis is that the demands of theoretical knowledge and self-awareness are in tension with one another but that Platonic philosophy demands that we understand the nature of these opposed demands and endure the strife between them. Self-knowledge, understood in its most encompassing sense, is the life of reflectively enduring that strife, of reconciling the existential burdens of philosophy with the demands of theoretical knowledge proper. (shrink)

Au moment de décrire la fonction des yeux humains, qui sont donnés par les dieux afin que l’on puisse déduire la philosophie et le nombre à partir de la rotation du firmament, Timée interrompt son récit pour développer son explication des mécanismes physiques sous‑jacents à la fois à la vision et à tout type de mouvement et de changement. Il est intéressant de noter que, dans le contexte du Timée dans son ensemble, la chôra ne semble pas indispensable. Par exemple, (...) l’explication de la nécessité impliquant les types corporels de base et leurs isotopes et composés aurait pu s’effectuer assez facilement avec la simple affirmation des quatre solides réguliers, de leurs mouvements réguliers et des deux triangles élémentaires dont ils sont composés. Je soutiens dans cet article que si nous regardons la chôra dans le contexte du récit antérieur du mouvement d’errance des planètes, dont on dit qu’elles encadrent et font ressortir le nombre et l’identité du mouvement des étoiles fixes, et que si nous comparons cela à la décomposition des triangles élémentaires dans le contexte de la vie et de la mort du corps doté d’une âme, nous pourrons discerner la chôra dans le mouvement errant du vieillissement, de l’effondrement et de l’éloignement de la limite normative dans le récit plus large de la vie dans le Timée, tant au niveau biologique que moral de la description. Cette approche permettra de rendre compte non seulement de l’unité de la pensee de Timée, mais aussi du caractère disruptif du tournant remarquable par lequel il introduit la cause errante. (shrink)

A Companion to Ancient Philosophy is a collection of essays on a broad range of themes and figures spanning the entire period extending from the Pre-Socratics to Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic thinkers. Rather than offering synoptic and summary treatments of preestablished positions and themes, these essays engage with the ancient texts directly, focusing attention on concepts that emerge as urgent in the readings themselves and then clarifying those concepts interpretively. Indeed, this is a companion volume that takes a very (...) serious and considered approach to its designated task—accompanying readers as they move through the most crucial passages of the infinitely rich and compelling texts of the ancients. Each essay provides a tutorial in close reading and careful interpretation. Because it offers foundational treatments of the most important works of ancient philosophy and because it, precisely by doing so, arrives at numerous original interpretive insights and suggests new directions for research in ancient philosophy, this volume should be of great value both to students just starting off reading the ancients and to established scholars still fascinated by philosophy's deepest abiding questions. (shrink)

In January 2023, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward to 90 s before midnight.

> Wealthy nations must do much more, much faster. The United Nations General Assembly in September 2021 will bring countries together at a critical time for marshalling collective action to tackle the global environmental crisis. They will meet again at the biodiversity summit in Kunming, China, and the climate conference 26) in Glasgow, UK. Ahead of these pivotal meetings, we—the editors of health journals worldwide—call for urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5°C, halt the destruction of nature (...) and protect health. Health is already being harmed by global temperature increases and the destruction of the natural world, a state of affairs health professionals have been bringing attention to for decades.1 The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the preindustrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.2 3 Despite the world’s necessary preoccupation with COVID-19, we cannot wait for the pandemic to pass to rapidly reduce emissions. Reflecting the severity of the moment, this editorial appears in health journals across the world. We are united in recognising that only fundamental and equitable changes to societies will reverse our current trajectory. The risks to health of increases above 1.5°C are now well established.2 Indeed, no temperature rise is ‘safe’. In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people aged over 65 has increased by more than 50%.4 Higher temperatures have brought increased dehydration and renal function loss, dermatological malignancies, tropical infections, adverse mental health outcomes, pregnancy complications, allergies, and cardiovascular and pulmonary morbidity and mortality.5 6 Harms disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including children, older populations, ethnic minorities, poorer communities and those with underlying health problems.2 4 Global heating is also contributing to the decline in …. (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

Cancers rely on multiple, heterogeneous processes at different scales, pertaining to many biomedical fields. Therefore, understanding cancer is necessarily an interdisciplinary task that requires placing specialised experimental and clinical research into a broader conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Without such a framework, oncology will collect piecemeal results, with scant dialogue between the different scientific communities studying cancer. We argue that one important way forward in service of a more successful dialogue is through greater integration of applied sciences (experimental and clinical) (...) with conceptual and theoretical approaches, informed by philosophical methods. By way of illustration, we explore six central themes: (i) the role of mutations in cancer; (ii) the clonal evolution of cancer cells; (iii) the relationship between cancer and multicellularity; (iv) the tumour microenvironment; (v) the immune system; and (vi) stem cells. In each case, we examine open questions in the scientific literature through a philosophical methodology and show the benefit of such a synergy for the scientific and medical understanding of cancer. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

The emergent Coronavirus Disease 2019 caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 could produce a maternal immune activation via the inflammatory response during gestation that may impair fetal neurodevelopment and lead to postnatal and adulthood mental illness and behavioral dysfunctions. However, so far, limited evidence exists regarding long-term physiological, immunological, and neurodevelopmental modifications produced by the SARS-CoV-2 in the human maternal-fetal binomial and, particularly, in the offspring. Relevant findings derived from epidemiological and preclinical models show that a MIA (...) is indeed linked to an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring. We hypothesize that a gestational infection triggered by SARS-CoV-2 increases the risks leading to neurodevelopmental disorders of the newborn, which can affect childhood and the long-term quality of life. In particular, disruption of either the maternal or the fetal cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway could cause or exacerbate the severity of COVID-19 in the maternal-fetal binomial. From a translational perspective, in this paper, we discuss the possible manifestation of a MIA by SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent neurodevelopmental disorders considering the role of the fetal-maternal cytokine cross-talk and the CAP. Specifically, we highlight the urgent need of preclinical studies as well as multicenter and international databanks of maternal-fetal psychophysiological data obtained pre-, during, and post-infection by SARS-CoV-2 from pregnant women and their offspring. (shrink)

Altered attachment characteristics may disturb the HPA and can even cause changes in the hippocampus. However, it is unknown if that will influence spatial navigation performance, learning and recalling. In this study we pretend to verify if there are differences in spatial navigation learning and was associated with attachment style dimensions of anxiety and close-depend. Sixty-five female participants were recruited and were evaluated using the Adult Attachment Scale-R and tested on a virtual maze navigation task (VMT) at one moment (exploratory (...) trial + 3 trials) and 24h later (3 trials). There was a significant Moment x Trial x Close-Depend interaction for the outcome time, F (2, 126) = 3.807, p = 0.025, with post-hoc analysis indicating that the High Close-Depend group displayed significant improvements between Trial 1 and Trial 3 in the post-test assessment. Conversely, the Low Close-Depend group displayed significant improvements between Trial 1and Trial 3 but on the pre-test assessment. Furthermore, the Low Close-Depend group presented significant better performance in pre-test Trial 3 in comparison to the High Close-Depend group. Thereby, it seems that low comfort with proximity and trust in others is associated with reduced spatial navigation recall, although spatial learning performance was actually superior in these participants. It is possible that reduced exposure to social interaction and meaning relationship may be reduced in the Low Close-Depend group, leading to modifications in hippocampal function and, ultimately, reduced spatial recall. Conversely, participants with high comfort with proximity and trust in others may not display typical spatial learning in the proposed task as they are more willing to freely explore the presented environment. (shrink)

The Homeric epics are among the greatest masterpieces of literature, but when they were produced is not known with certainty. Here we apply evolutionary-linguistic phylogenetic statistical methods to differences in Homeric, Modern Greek and ancient Hittite vocabulary items to estimate a date of approximately 710–760 BCE for these great works. Our analysis compared a common set of vocabulary items among the three pairs of languages, recording for each item whether the words in the two languages were cognate – derived from (...) a shared ancestral word – or not. We then used a likelihood-based Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure to estimate the most probable times in years separating these languages given the percentage of words they shared, combined with knowledge of the rates at which different words change. Our date for the epics is in close agreement with historians' and classicists' beliefs derived from historical and archaeological sources. (shrink)

Summary A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas’s and Adorno’s thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the “non-identity thinking” of Adorno and the “ethics of the Other” of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and “inhuman” material others such as environments and animals; the (...) bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. “This is an extremely impressive, original, and thorough treatment of two key twentieth-century thinkers and their applicability to the most pressing social and political issues of our time.” — Jeffrey A. Bernstein, author of Leo Strauss on the Borders of Judaism, Philosophy, and History “This book is an excellent and timely contribution to political and environmental philosophy, located around a nuanced historical and philosophical approach to Levinas and Adorno. It will be of great interest to anyone concerned with these figures or with the current moment.” — Martin Shuster, author of Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity. (shrink)

Daoism and Environmental Philosophy explores ethics and the philosophy of nature in the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts to elucidate their potential significance in our contemporary environmental crisis. This book traces early Daoist depictions of practices of embodied emptying and forgetting and communicative strategies of undoing the fixations of words, things, and the embodied self. These are aspects of an ethics of embracing plainness and simplicity, nourishing the asymmetrically differentiated yet shared elemental body of life of the myriad things, (...) and being responsively attuned in encountering and responding to things. These critical and transformative dimensions of early Daoism provide exemplary models and insights for cultivating a more expansive ecological ethos, environmental culture of nature, and progressive political ecology. This work will be of interest to students and scholars interested in philosophy, environmental ethics and philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history. (shrink)