I will argue that, due to the level of attention given to comparing and contrasting Socratic Intellectualism with the Republic, the question of the possibility of akrasia in Plato’s thought has not yet been adequately formulated. I will instead be focusing on Plato’s Symposium, situating Alcibiades at its epicentre and suggesting that his case should be read as highlighting some of Plato’s concerns with Socratic Intellectualism. These concerns arise from the following position of Socratic Intellectualism: knowing the greater good will (...) necessarily entail doing good, and will thereby remove the motivational content of prior knowledge of what is good. Through Alcibiades, Plato explores the possibility of a negative reaction to knowledge of the greater good. Importantly, rather than simply arising as a result of being overcome by the passions, Alcibiades’ negative reaction assumes that rational freedom is required to reject the greater good in favour of the lesser. (shrink)

For many years, modern social science and philosophy have been a battlefield of conflicting visions of the human person. There are many armies involved in this fight—among them the personalists who, even among themselves, represent different approaches to the understanding of the human person.G. W. Allport states that both philosophy and psychology are interested in the same common subject matter—that is, the human person.1 Allport's statement in this regard is very clear: personalistic psychology and philosophy must join forces to fight (...) against the reduction of the human person to a mere football or an academic pawn. We have to acknowledge an interior power of self-directedness in the human person.This article is .. (shrink)

The Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, previously known as SVEC (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), has published over 500 peer-reviewed scholarly volumes since 1955 as part of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. International in focus, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment volumes cover wide-ranging aspects of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, from gender studies to political theory, and from economics to visual arts and music, and are published in English or French.

Elly Teman, Birthing a mother: The surrogate body and the pregnant self, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010, reviewed by Omi Leissner.

We got control over reproduction that is controlled by “a man or The Man,” an individual man or the doctors or the government. . . . Virtually every ounce of control that women won out of this legislation has gone directly into the hands of men—husbands, doctors, or fathers—or is now in the process of attempts to reclaim it through regulation. Among all my mother’s daughters, only I have inherited her ability to break open an apple with her hands. Be (...) that a function of nature or nurture, when I first picked up Birthing a Mother I knew I had to call upon a similar skill: I tried to imagine myself prying open my mind in order to let in a view of surrogacy other than the typical radical feminist one I .. (shrink)

Now unknown or forgotten, influential schoolmasters took the game of association football to many parts of England. They had several roles: they brought the game to individual schools, they established regional and national leagues and associations, and they founded professional football clubs. They also exported the game around the world, working as moral missionaries, passionate players and energetic entrepreneurs. The role of teachers in association football is a much neglected aspect of English cultural history. It is a story that deserves (...) to be told because it allows a fundamental reappraisal of the status and position of these teachers in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century society. This volume was previously published as a special issue of the journal _Soccer and Society_. (shrink)

Setting goals in the workplace can motivate improved performance but it might also compromise ethical behavior. In this paper, we propose that individual differences in the dispositional tendency to morally justify behavior moderate the effects of specific performance goals on unethical behavior. We conducted an experimental study in which working participants, who were randomly assigned to a specific goal condition or to a condition with a vague goal that lacked a specific target, completed two tasks in which they had the (...) opportunity to act unethically. In an ethical dilemma task, participants in the specific goal condition were more likely to advocate using unethical methods. However, in an anagram task, only those with high moral justification overstated their performance to a greater degree in the specific goal condition. As such, individuals may not be equally susceptible to the ‘dark side’ of goal-setting. (shrink)