In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Symbolic Mathematics and the Intellect Militant: On Modern Philosophy’s Revolutionary SpiritCarl PageWhat makes modern philosophy different? My question presupposes the legitimacy of calling part of philosophy “modern.” That presupposition is in turn open to question as regards its meaning, its warrant, and the conditions of its applicability. 1 Importance notwithstanding, such further inquiries all start out from the phenomenon upon which everyone agrees: philosophy running through Plato and Aristotle (...) looks significantly different from philosophy running from Descartes to Kant.My concern in this essay is with the phenomenon of the difference itself, rather than with the second-order questions associated with how properly to assign it historical meaning. I take the difference between ancient and modern philosophy to be as significant as differences in philosophy’s history can be: modern philosophy rests on a new interpretation of the nature and fulfillment of human reason, and disputes about the nature of human reason are the ultimate battles of philosophy. But the general thesis is not my main point. 2 The focus of this essay falls on what may be called the integrity of the phenomenon, on the specific interpretation of human reason that lends modern philosophy its peculiar face. [End Page 233]Modern philosophy’s strikingly revolutionary spirit is my point of departure. When Descartes writes in the first of his Meditations that “it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last,” 3 he reveals the same enthusiasm for total reform later found in Kant: “This attempt to alter the procedure which has hitherto prevailed in metaphysics, by completely revolutionizing it in accordance with the example set by the geometers and physicists, forms indeed the main purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason.” 4 How exactly did philosophy become so convinced that its central tradition—a sprawling, disorganized, ugly city, as Descartes has it in the Discourse (I:116)—needed razing to the ground in the interest of some rational town-planning? Moreover, the calls for revolution have not abated, despite contemporary disillusionment with both Cartesian rationalism and Enlightenment philosophy in general; they have grown more shrill. The confidence with which rationalism, foundationalism, universalism, logocentrism, Platonism, and so on are currently set at naught for the sake of contingency, particularity, and difference reveals the same revolutionary and totalizing spirit that marks the earlier phase of philosophy’s modernity. Such enthusiasm is reason’s freedom taken to an extreme. 5 What inspires this march of the intellect militant? What, if anything, justifies its hubristic self-assertions in the domain of philosophy? These are the questions I address.Descartes is commonly identified as the father of modern philosophy. While the full story of modern philosophy’s parentage is more complicated than this, it is fair to say that in Descartes self-consciousness of a new mode of doing philosophy emerges with a focus and revolutionary sense of purpose that caught philosophical imagination in his own time and continues to do so in ours. 6 Motifs of modern philosophy may be found in many places—Machiavelli, Hobbes, Francis Bacon, Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Jakob Boehme—nonetheless, Descartes’s intensely single-minded, even jealous advocacy commends itself to all but the most stubborn antiquarian mentality as modernity’s almost perfect philosophical representative. [End Page 234]That Descartes stands on a remarkable philosophical cusp is apparent in the contrast between the title and the subject matter of his most influential philosophical work: Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae (1641). To that point prima philosophia or First Philosophy had been construed as the metaphysics. It was not concerned with the critical question of how metaphysical sciences are possible and was not directly related to any doctrine of the human soul—except perhaps on the one point of the divinity of nous, the human soul’s highest part. In Descartes’s Meditations, on the other hand, the landscape has altered. Doubt, certainty, knowledge, the ego cogitans and its stream of representations are the new subject matter. What is first in philosophy is no longer what... (shrink)

In this paper I deal with Armstrong's last theory of states of affairs and its relation to truthmakers for sentences and the problem of uní versáis. More specifically, I discuss his truthmaker principie, rejecting some of the objections that has been raised against it. However, I also try to show that Armstrong's answer to the problem of the negative existencial sentences in terms of totality states of affairs is mistaken. Finally, I rebut Oliver's slinghot argument against truthmakers and also discuss (...) Armstrong theory of states of affairs as truthmakers. /// Este artículo trata de la última teoría de los estados de cosas de Armstrong, así como de su relación con los hacedores de verdad de los enunciados y con el problema de los universales. En particular, se discute su principio del hacedor de verdad, y se rechazan algunas de las objeciones que se han presentado al mismo. Por otra parte, se intenta mostrar también que la respuesta de Armstrong al problema de los enunciados existenciales negativos en términos de estados de cosas de totalidad es errónea. Finalmente, también se objeta la versión de Oliver del argumento de la honda y se discute la teoría de los hacedores de verdad como los estados de cosas. (shrink)

La production désirante se trouve informée par le fait que le sujet affectif est inscrit dans une époque, une culture, un milieu social et tributaire de différentes formes de socialisation qui le disposent ou l’inclinent à désirer telle ou telle chose. Les trois théories que nous proposons de confronter font valoir l’origine principalement sociale des défenses suscitées par la vie pulsionnelle. Cette transformation affective est nommée par Freud refusement culturel ( Kulturversagung ), par Adorno et Horkheimer intégration totale ou répression (...) ( Repression ) et par Elias également répression et refoulement des pulsions ( Dämfung der Triebe ) mais au sens d’une capacité accrue d’autocontrôle ( Selbstkontrolle ) ou d’autocontrainte ( Selbstzwänge ). Qu’est-ce qui spécifie et distingue chacune de ces trois formes d’intégration de la norme sociale à la personne, pour reprendre une expression d’Elias dans La Société de cour? (shrink)

Individuative Realism is the thesis that reality is individuated intrinsically-that is, that reality is divided up into objects that are circumscribed by boundaries that are totally independent of our gerrymandering. One strategy for substantiating the thesis would involve discovering some of reality’s inherent joints by direct observation. This paper critically considers the observational strategy by examining a number of proposals for how reality might be individuated intrinsically, and demonstrating case-by-case that the individuation in question is likely imposed by us, rather (...) than inherent in nature. It is additionally suggested that even if objects with crisply unambiguous boundaries were discovered, it would still not be enough to vindicate Individuative Realism. (shrink)

Individuative Realism is the thesis that reality is individuated intrinsically-that is, that reality is divided up into objects that are circumscribed by boundaries that are totally independent of our gerrymandering. One strategy for substantiating the thesis would involve discovering some of reality’s inherent joints by direct observation. This paper critically considers the observational strategy by examining a number of proposals for how reality might be individuated intrinsically, and demonstrating case-by-case that the individuation in question is likely imposed by us, rather (...) than inherent in nature. It is additionally suggested that even if objects with crisply unambiguous boundaries were discovered, it would still not be enough to vindicate Individuative Realism. (shrink)

Background: Compassion fatigue is recognized as impacting the health and effectiveness of healthcare providers, and consequently, patient care. Compassion fatigue is distinct from “burnout.” Reliable measurement tools, such as the Professional Quality of Life scale, have been developed to measure the prevalence, and predict risk of compassion fatigue. This study reviews the prevalence of compassion fatigue among healthcare practitioners, and relationships to demographic variables. Methods: A systematic review was conducted using key words in MEDLINE, PubMed, and Ovid databases. Data were (...) extracted from a total of 71 articles meeting inclusion criteria, from studies measuring compassion fatigue in healthcare providers using a validated instrument. Quantitative and qualitative data were extracted and compiled by three independent reviewers into an evidence table that included basic study characteristics, study strength and quality determination, measurements of compassion fatigue, and general findings. Meta-analysis, where data allowed, was stratified by Professional Quality of Life version, heterogeneity was quantified, and pooled means were reported with 95% confidence interval. A table of major study characteristics and results was created. Ethical consideration: This paper contains no primary data obtained directly from research participants. Data obtained from previously published resources have been acknowledged within references. Psychological distress, particularly compassion fatigue, can be insidious, no health profession is immune, and may significantly impact the ability to provide care. Results: A total of 71 studies were included. Compassion fatigue was reported across all practitioner groups studied. Relationships to most demographic variables such as years of experience and specialty were either not statistically significant or unclear. Variability in reporting of Professional Quality of Life results was found. Interpretation: Compassion fatigue exists across diverse practitioner groups. Prevalence is highly variable, and its relationship with demographic, personal, and/or professional variables is inconsistent. Questions are raised about how to mitigate compassion fatigue. (shrink)

BackgroundMulti-centre studies generally cost more than single-centre studies because of larger sample sizes and the need for multiple ethical approvals. Multi-centre studies include clinical trials, clinical quality registries, observational studies and implementation studies. We examined the costs of two large Australian multi-centre studies in obtaining ethical and site-specific approvals.MethodsWe collected data on staff time spent on approvals and expressed the overall cost as a percent of the total budget.ResultsThe total costs of gaining approval were 38 % of the (...) budget for a study of 50 centres (mean cost AUD $6960 per site) and 2 % for a study of 11 centres (mean cost AUD $2300 per site). Seventy-five and 90 % of time was spent on repeated tasks, respectively, and many time-consuming tasks, such as reformatting documents, did nothing to improve the study design or participant safety.ConclusionsImprovements have been made to the ethical approval application system, but more gains could be made without increasing risks of harm to research participants. We propose that ethical review bodies and individual sites publish statistics on how long they take to process approvals which could then be nationally benchmarked. (shrink)

The title of the original article has been corrected. The correct title is Gandhi: Philosopher or Pragmatic Politician? Gandhi Against Caste, by Nishikant Kolge; Oxford University Press 2017; Total Pages 316; Price 695 INR; ISBN 13:978-0-19-947429-5.

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch declared, (...) "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)

On pages 490-491, in describing the results of Experiment 2, the authors state that out of a total of 3840 responses, only 355 (or 9%) fell outside the response deadlines. In fact, the total number of responses in Experiment 2 was 3200 and so the 355 responses represented 11%, not 9%, of the total. This error has no other implications. The authors are grateful to Peter Graf (personal communication, March 12, 2000) for pointing out the error.

The rapid development of the Internet has granted college students easy access to vast amount of online resources, and to some degree has increased the chances of plagiarism problems. A number of studies have suggested that both faculty’s and students’ perceptions toward plagiarism are found to be influential on students’ plagiarizing behaviors, and limited research has been done to explore the perceptional differences between these two roles. This study aims to respond to the growing educational concerns about plagiarism by comparing (...) the perceptions held by faculty and college students. A total of 229 faculty and 634 college students in Taiwan completed the Perceptions of Student Plagiarism Questionnaire designed for the study. The results reveal that faculty held stricter standards than those of students. Results also indicate various causes of plagiarism, such as no interest in the learning subjects, lack of citation knowledge, or lack of research ability. Furthermore, significant disciplinary differences were shown to contribute to students’ plagiarism perception; the results reveal that most students with an Arts or Communication major held a relatively adverse thinking toward plagiarism. Last, this study provides research-based strategies for school and faculty to reduce the likelihood of plagiarism. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 12, Page 41-42, December 2011.

For the past thirty years or so we have witnessed the greatest period—at least for France—in the history of thinking about literature; I want first of all to stress this point, adding, however, that despite this fact problems of fundamental significance still seem to me to have been poorly raised.Among these is the problem of how to read a work. And yet, it is not as though reading has not been the object of continual attention, from the American fascination after (...) the war with “close reading” to the work of the deconstructionists: a revolution has taken place that has made reading the very center of its concern. Indeed, today, we think we can recognize in the structure of a text, in the relation between its words, a reality that is much more reliable and tangible than the meaning that runs along the surface, or than the author’s intention, or even than the author’s very being, the idea of which has been rendered problematical to the point of dissolution by the ambiguities inherent in his simplest utterances. It is not the writer who is real, it is his language—which is neither true nor false, signifying only itself. What is more, it is infinite; its forms and effects are disseminated everywhere in a book without ever being able to be totalized: and because of this, reading has a more clearly creative function than ever before—that is, of course, if readers make themselves attentive to all the levels in the depths of the text and bring them as much as they can into the various networks of their analyses. Reading has become a responsibility, a contribution, equal in its way to writing, and moreover it has now become an end in itself, since those who read need not judge themselves more real, more present in their relation to themselves, than the writer. And so, from this point of view, it would seem difficult to say that the problem of reading has been neglected by contemporary criticism. Yves Bonnefoy is professor of comparative poetics at the Collège de France in Paris. He is the author of five books of poetry, including the recent Ce qui fut sans lumière . Bonnefoy is also a distinguished translator of English poets, such as Donne and Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats. His books of criticism include Rimbaud par lui-même ; Rome 1630: l’horizon du premier baroque ; Le Nuage rouge ; L’Improbable et autres essays ; La Verité de parole . He is the editor of the Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des Religions des sociétés traditionelles et du monde antique and of the forthcoming Dictionnaire des poétiques. He received the French Prix Goncourt for poetry in 1987 and the Bennett Award in 1988. John Naughton is associate professor of romance literatures at Colgate University. He is the author of a critical study of Yves Bonnefoy called The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy and the editor of a volume of Bonnefoy’s essays in translation entitled The Act and the Place of Poetry . His translation of Bonnefoy’s Ce qui fut sons lumière and his book on Louis-René des Forêts will appear in 1991. (shrink)

Eric Nord's book is required reading for all those interested in resource allocation. It is largely a book on health economics, but the importance of the issues discussed and the clarity of this book mean that it is relevant to all those involved in resource allocation. One of the more common objections to QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) is that they focus on maximising the benefit produced by health care without paying attention to other factors relevant to allocation. One of (...) the basic theses of Nord's book is that there is something right about this line of criticism and he sets out to correct cost-effectiveness studies by building into them societal concerns for the way in which health care resources are distributed. In chapter four he argues that the standard approach to QALYs is inconsistent with two major societal concerns about fairness. First it violates the strength with which people wish to give priority to the severely ill over the less severely ill at the expense of the total amount of health produced. Second, …. (shrink)

Publié en Allemagne sous le titre Wehrmacht und Prostitution im besetzten Frankreich (éditions Temmen, 2002), ce livre est la version remaniée et traduite de la thèse soutenue par Insa Meinen, historienne allemande aujourd’hui chercheuse à l’université de Konstanz. Parce que les guerres engagent de manière globale et totale les sociétés, elles interrogent aussi profondément le genre, les relations hommes/femmes et les représentations du masculin et du féminin. L’épreuve de la guerre est port...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:American Memory in Henry James: Void and ValueMartin WarnerAmerican Memory in Henry James: Void and Value, by William Righter, edited by Rosemary Righter ; xi & 220 pp. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2004. $79.95.The perennial debate about what Arnold termed "culture and anarchy" was both enriched and rendered more subtle by the work of Henry James. The late William Righter's fine and discriminating intelligence helps us to think this (...) through. This is no standard monograph on Henry James. While well-aware of the critical traditions of Jamesian scholarship (and the knowledgeable will be able to detect in his sensitive and often enlightening readings of the texts his engagement with those traditions), Righter sits lightly to this scholarship, ploughing his own furrow, using the later work of Henry James as a lens to question "void and value" in twentieth-century and, by extension, contemporary culture. American Memory in Henry James is elegantly, and indeed sometimes elusively, written, as befits a work on a man whose own stylistic stringency is, alas, so often not emulated by academic writings on his work. The flipside of this, of course, is that a reasonably educated background, including some acquaintance with James's texts, is assumed.Righter is concerned to explore the capacity of the novel form as represented by James to apprehend, through formal arrangement, the apparent incommensurability of the forces that drive history, culture, and human psychology on the one hand, and the frameworks of intelligibility and value within which we seek to live and by means of which we seek to exercise some control over them, on the other. James is apt for this purpose since he focuses on cultural dislocations, between America and Europe, and between past and present. America, for James, represents the overcoming of a late nineteenth-century tradition of civility (primarily, in his case, transcendentalist and Unitarian) by big business and the criteria of capitalism. This precipitates a split between "wasp" culture and an alienated, urban culture, both in danger of losing touch with their roots. Europe, of course, stands for continuity, in this specifically cultural sense, rather than rupture, and the project of importing European culture into America through museums (The Golden Bowl is very much in point here) is one of the ambiguities to which the text recurs.The first part, "America Deconstructed," sets the stage, using James's The [End Page 447] American Scene to analyze his notions of historical change and progression, and their implications for a sense of stable American identity. How is a society so committed to change and progress to honor its past creatively? Part two, "The Note of Europe," engages with The Ambassadors, seeing the victory of Wollett as an indication of the insubstantiality of a certain type of expatriate community, of Americans seeking to take on European culture. The main weight of the text is taken by the engagement with The Golden Bowl, to which the next two parts are dedicated. "Amerigo in American Nowhere" explores the way in which the central characters operate in a sort of void, with social context stripped away to reveal the dynamics of their failed equilibrium. In this, "America" and "England" have become virtually typological symbols. In the light of this reading of the text, Part four, "A Dark Fable of Love and Power," explores the implications for our shaping intelligence, especially ethical intelligence. In suggestive dialogue with Putnam and Nussbaum, Righter points to the difficulty of seeing the relevance of anything like the Categorical Imperative to The Golden Bowl. Rather, in this novel "the language of morality has been examined, picked up, turned over, taken to pieces. But this very process has in the end indicated its unsuitability as an ultimate explanatory scheme." He argues that James poses the possibility that the novel "adds up to a total story which is intelligible beyond the possibilities of a conceptual sorting out" (pp. 154-55).But this raises the question of what the criteria for intelligibility could be in such a case, if beyond the conceptual lies the imaginative. The final part, "Form and Contingency," engages with this issue. James's difficulty here, it is argued with respect to the late... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes”Cristiano Castelfranchi (bio) and Maria Miceli (bio)Keywordsgrief, suffering, attachment, agent architectureThis paper is significant in many respects: its approach (the design-based analysis); its proposed architecture; its description of grief; and its self-control/perturbance theory. We would offer some remarks on each of these aspects.AI: Back to the FutureAfter some years of crisis, AI seems now to have recovered its original challenging attitude (...) and its identity. In particular all the original ambitions of AI have been renewed under the label of “autonomous agents” (see, for example, Russell and Norvig 1995; Wooldridge and Jennings 1995). This paper and its authors are good representatives of this challenging attitude. Of course, the AI appearing at century’s end is different from, say, the AI of the 1980s. AI systems and models are now conceived for reasoning and acting in open unpredictable worlds, with limited and uncertain knowledge, in real time, with bounded (both cognitive and material) resources, with hybrid architectures, interfering—either co-operatively or competitively—with other systems. The new password for the AI of the 1990s is interaction (Bobrow 1991): interaction with an evolving environment; among several, distributed and heterogeneous artificial systems in a network; with human users; and among humans through computers.This renewed AI, however different though it is in some ways, can be understood as returning to its original aim of modeling “intelligence”: not only static and isolated sub-functions of intelligence but the integrated and pragmatic functioning of autonomous agent architectures as against algorithms. Our renewed AI, based on architectures, can again have important exchanges with other (psychological and social) sciences. This paper is a good example of the fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas which may result from such exchanges. It was indeed just this which originally gave rise to cognitive science.The ArchitectureThe proposed architecture, although quite speculative, and—as the authors themselves emphasize—very much a first sketch, is directly relevant to this new AI. In fact, recent research efforts in the agent-architecture domain are focused exactly on the problem of “goal dynamics” [End Page 129] or “motive processing,” which is the core of this architecture, and on the problem of integrating reactivity and deliberation. Compared with current AI architectures (for example, BDI systems) it is important to note that this “motive-processing” architecture is not yet formalized or implemented to the same extent. On the other hand, it is more interesting from a psychological point of view, and is already able to give us some important insights into human emotions, in particular those emotions (like grief) that involve all or total loss of control of management processes.The Report-Based Analysis of GriefThe report-based description of grief provides a persuasive and rich basis for both modeling and discussing the model. The relevant features of this emotion are well characterized with reference to the self-control problem and motive-processing (though, as we shall see, to use grief as an example of those emotions that involve all or total loss of control of thought processes may provide a partially distorted view of grief itself). In particular, we would stress the relevance of the “intrusive” character of grief-related contents; the rejection of certain beliefs due to the psychic pain they cause; the coping strategies people describe; and the second order motivations related to the control of the emotional state. We believe that psychological models especially of these aspects are usually less specific and explanatory.Let us now try to synthesize some criticisms one could advance of this analysis. We will first address two core notions of the model—perturbance and self-control—and then consider more specifically the treatment of grief.PerturbanceThis notion is potentially very interesting, unless it is reduced to an information processing perspective (e.g., perturbance of attentive processes). An information processing perspective is much more limited than a motive-processing one—at least in the limitative sense of the term, as it is generally used in the psychology of cognitive processes—and is in our view insufficient for understanding human emotions and their role. This limiting interpretation of perturbance fails... (shrink)

[143 pages] This special edition of International Communication of Chinese Culture bears the title “Spectra of Cultural Understanding”. Just as the spectral decomposition of light produces seven pure unmixed colours, the theme of cultural understanding has been reflected here from seven different and genuine angles. The edition contains seven articles by distinguished international scholars from the perspective of divergent cultural backgrounds and different academic subjects and respective subtopics. Another closer look at each contribution reveals that each essay represents a certain (...) genuine micro-spectrum in the reflection of cultural understanding in itself. For this reason, the plural “spectra” is used here to indicate a family resemblance of all seven perspectives on one hand but also their respective partial thematic autonomy in the totality of a collection of texts which is supposed to transcend habitual limits of outdated perspectives. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 16 This paper looks at modern philosophy of history in the sense of the German concept of “Geschichtsphilosophie”. “Geschichtsphilosophie”, as it was formulated since the heydays of German Idealism, always implied the belief that it is possible to make true statements about the future. I will take a closer look at such a version of philosophy of history by reconstructing Odo Marquard’s arguments against “Geschichtsphilosophie” and Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner’s defense of it. These two authors were asking (...) precisely the same question about the essence of “Geschichtsphilosophie”, but came to totally different conclusions. I will defend Marquard’s position and thus will come to the position that history cannot be made or at least cannot be made in the way agents want it to be made. However, my insistence on the inevitable limits of any project to make history as it has been constitutive for modern philosophy of history, in no way precludes the possibility of making politics. Thus, at the very end of my paper, I argue for the fundamental difference between the making of history and the making of politics. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 16 This paper looks at modern philosophy of history in the sense of the German concept of “Geschichtsphilosophie”. “Geschichtsphilosophie”, as it was formulated since the heydays of German Idealism, always implied the belief that it is possible to make true statements about the future. I will take a closer look at such a version of philosophy of history by reconstructing Odo Marquard’s arguments against “Geschichtsphilosophie” and Heinz Dieter Kittsteiner’s defense of it. These two authors were asking (...) precisely the same question about the essence of “Geschichtsphilosophie”, but came to totally different conclusions. I will defend Marquard’s position and thus will come to the position that history cannot be made or at least cannot be made in the way agents want it to be made. However, my insistence on the inevitable limits of any project to make history as it has been constitutive for modern philosophy of history, in no way precludes the possibility of making politics. Thus, at the very end of my paper, I argue for the fundamental difference between the making of history and the making of politics. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 17 Many people like to identify as belonging to one church or another. Previous studies have explored the process of switching from one religious group to another, and this process has identified various factors that determine the likelihood and reasons for switching. Although this has been explored, little is known about the factors that influence switching among charismatic Christians in Ghana, and the potential implications of such switching on mental well-being. Our study therefore explored the reasons (...) given by members of selected neo-Pentecostal/charismatic churches in Ghana for their decision to switch to these churches. The study was conducted in six neo-Pentecostal churches in Accra and Kumasi through the use of individual and focus group interviews as well as observations of church activities. A total of 86 respondents cited reasons such as geographic mobility, marriage, answers to prayer, as well as miracles and prophecies as their determining factors. These are discussed with emphasis on the potential implications for mental health such as psychological distress, blind faith, and individual agency. (shrink)

" _On Friendship_, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."—Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601 Matteo Ricci is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship—the first book to be written in Chinese by a European—that instantly became a late Ming best seller. _On Friendship_ distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure and (...) provocative Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true. Available for the first time in English, _On Friendship_ matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, _On Friendship_ is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation. (shrink)

Fundamental Theory has been called an "unfinished symphony" and "a challenge to the musicians among natural philosophers of the future". This book, written in 1944 but left unfinished because Eddington died too soon, proved to be his final effort at a vision for harmonization of quantum physics and relativity. The work is less connected and internally integrated than 'Protons and Electrons' while representing a later point in the author's thought arc. The really interested student should read both books together.The physical (...) and mathematical reasoning are very deep, but it is possible to enjoy much of the flavor of the book even without following everything. The tidbits given below illustrate Eddington's beautiful and mellifluous English style. This edition contains a clickable table of contents and some interesting illustrations.WARNING: Due to the complexity of the mathematical typesetting, the only way to reproduce this book has been as a series of scanned page images. We believe this work is scientifically and culturally important, and despite a few imperfections and the inevitably small print, have brought it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of Eddington's work. On a portable electronic reader the pages come out pretty small, but they are legible. On a desktop computer running the Amazon app, they are perfectly fine. We appreciate your understanding, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.TIDBITS:The number of protons and electrons in the universe would, in itself, be merely a matter of idle curiosity. But N has a more general significance as a fundamental constant which enters into many physical formulae. Its special interpretation as the number of particles in the universe arises in the following way. If we consider a distribution of hydrogen in equilibrium at zero temperature, the presence of the matter produces a curvature of space, and the curvature causes the space to close when the number of particles contained in it reaches a certain total; that number is N. The present investigation seeks to determine N directly from the principles of measurement. We have to show, not that there are N particles in the universe, but that anyone who accepts certain elementary principles of measurement must, if he is consistent, think there are. We have to express in mathematical symbolism what we think we are doing when we measure things; for if we had no conception of what we were doing, the results of the measurements would not persuade us to believe anything in particular. All our results are derived from the condition that the conceptual interpretation which we place on the results of measurement must be consistent with our conceptual interpretation of the process of measurement.If we play about with a pin and a meter standard, we do not become aware of any number in particular unless the standard has been graduated, or unless we use a process of displacement which we interpret as adding pin-extensions. The fact is that, although measurement is primarily a process involving four entities, the conceptual interpretation of measurement postulates in addition the existence (in the structure contemplated) as something referred to as Z. The existence of Z is the condition that makes graduation an exact concept. In the actual universe there exists a basis which is uniform to a very high approximation, and this serves for almost all purposes; but to the much higher approximation required in the calculation of N the ideal exact basis of uniformity does not exist. The finitude of N is, in fact, the cause of the failure of the approximation.It must be remembered that we are now working to what would ordinarily be considered a fantastically high approximation. For ordinary purposes a measurable has 16 eigenvalues; but under the super-magnification here employed (which is not content to overlook 1 part in 10E39) there is a fine structure which splits each of them into 16 components. (shrink)

"_On Friendship_, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."—Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601 Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship—the first book to be written in Chinese by a European—that instantly became a late Ming best seller. _On Friendship_ distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure and (...) provocative Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true. Available for the first time in English, _On Friendship_ matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, _On Friendship_ is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation. (shrink)

Fundamental Theory has been called an "unfinished symphony" and "a challenge to the musicians among natural philosophers of the future". This book, written in 1944 but left unfinished because Eddington died too soon, proved to be his final effort at a vision for harmonization of quantum physics and relativity. The work is less connected and internally integrated than 'Protons and Electrons' while representing a later point in the author's thought arc. The really interested student should read both books together.The physical (...) and mathematical reasoning are very deep, but it is possible to enjoy much of the flavor of the book even without following everything. The tidbits given below illustrate Eddington's beautiful and mellifluous English style. This edition contains a clickable table of contents and some interesting illustrations.WARNING: Due to the complexity of the mathematical typesetting, the only way to reproduce this book has been as a series of scanned page images. We believe this work is scientifically and culturally important, and despite a few imperfections and the inevitably small print, have brought it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of Eddington's work. On a portable electronic reader the pages come out pretty small, but they are legible. On a desktop computer running the Amazon app, they are perfectly fine. We appreciate your understanding, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.TIDBITS:The number of protons and electrons in the universe would, in itself, be merely a matter of idle curiosity. But N has a more general significance as a fundamental constant which enters into many physical formulae. Its special interpretation as the number of particles in the universe arises in the following way. If we consider a distribution of hydrogen in equilibrium at zero temperature, the presence of the matter produces a curvature of space, and the curvature causes the space to close when the number of particles contained in it reaches a certain total; that number is N. The present investigation seeks to determine N directly from the principles of measurement. We have to show, not that there are N particles in the universe, but that anyone who accepts certain elementary principles of measurement must, if he is consistent, think there are. We have to express in mathematical symbolism what we think we are doing when we measure things; for if we had no conception of what we were doing, the results of the measurements would not persuade us to believe anything in particular. All our results are derived from the condition that the conceptual interpretation which we place on the results of measurement must be consistent with our conceptual interpretation of the process of measurement.If we play about with a pin and a meter standard, we do not become aware of any number in particular unless the standard has been graduated, or unless we use a process of displacement which we interpret as adding pin-extensions. The fact is that, although measurement is primarily a process involving four entities, the conceptual interpretation of measurement postulates in addition the existence (in the structure contemplated) as something referred to as Z. The existence of Z is the condition that makes graduation an exact concept. In the actual universe there exists a basis which is uniform to a very high approximation, and this serves for almost all purposes; but to the much higher approximation required in the calculation of N the ideal exact basis of uniformity does not exist. The finitude of N is, in fact, the cause of the failure of the approximation.It must be remembered that we are now working to what would ordinarily be considered a fantastically high approximation. For ordinary purposes a measurable has 16 eigenvalues; but under the super-magnification here employed (which is not content to overlook 1 part in 10E39) there is a fine structure which splits each of them into 16 components. (shrink)

This book is a total joy to read. Thi Nguyen’s energy radiates from every page – the prose is truly delightful, with all sorts of poetic turns of phrase enliven.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Against Ethical CriticismRichard A. PosnerOscar Wilde famously remarked that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” He was echoed by Auden, who said in his poem in memory of William Butler Yeats that poetry makes nothing happen (though the poem as a whole qualifies this overstatement), by Croce, and by formalist critics such as (...) Cleanth Brooks, a doyen of the New Critics, who insisted that edification was the function of religion but not of poetry. 1 George Orwell, though himself a didactic novelist, was of this view as well, 2 and it is one that most critics adopt when the issue is censorship. I accept Wilde’s thesis—the creed of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake—if understood to mean that the moral content and consequences of a work of literature are irrelevant to its value as literature; or as the critic Helen Vendler has put it, that “treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.” 3 This is not to deny that reading can have consequences, including moral and political ones. Information affects people’s outlook and behavior, and reading is a source of information. Imaginative literature conveys ideas, opinions, and information, often with great power. Think of the role that novels by Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), Dostoevsky (The Possessed), Conrad (The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes), Koestler (Darkness at Noon), Orwell (Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four), and, of course, Solzhenitsyn played in exposing the horrors of anarchism and communism. Of A Passage to India it has been said that “as an account of the social conditions of British India it was powerful enough to have influenced events.” 4 Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle is thought to have incited federal regulation of food processing; and few doubt the effect of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on the abolitionist cause. [End Page 1]At the core of the aesthetic tradition, which I shall be defending in this essay particularly against its opponents in the “law and literature” movement, are three theses. First, immersion in literature does not make us better citizens or better people. One might be able to pick out some works of literature that would have such an effect because of the information they convey or the emotional state they induce, but they would constitute a skewed sample of literary works. Second, we should not be put off by morally offensive views encountered in literature even when the author appears to share them. A work of literature is not to be considered maimed or even marred by expressing unacceptable moral views; by the same token, a mediocre work of literature is not redeemed by expressing moral views of which we approve. The proper criteria for evaluating literature are aesthetic rather than ethical. Third, authors’ moral qualities or opinions should not affect our valuations of their works.The insistence, in short, is on the separation of the moral from the aesthetic—but with two qualifications. Some literature has little interest or value apart from the didactic and for it the proper criticism is didactic. And the separation of moral from aesthetic values is not a rejection of the former. The aesthetic outlook is a moral outlook, one that stresses the values of openness, detachment, hedonism, curiosity, tolerance, the cultivation of the self, and the preservation of a private sphere—in short, the values of liberal individualism.The counter tradition in literary criticism to the aesthetic originates with Plato and insists upon the importance, in some versions to the near or even total exclusion of anything else, of the ethical or political content and effects of works of literature, and less commonly of the author’s own morality. Martha Nussbaum, for example, deems Greek tragedies and Anglo-American realistic novels a part of moral philosophy. 5 Reading novels, she argues, “develops moral capacities without which citizens will not succeed in making reality out of the normative conclusions of any moral or political theory, however excellent.” 6 Wayne Booth, disagreeing with his illustrious... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:120 A WORD ON BEHALF OF DEMEA Little attention has been given to the a priori argument for God's existence espoused by Demea in Hume's Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. This circumstance is neither surprising nor unjustified. Given Hume's well-known theological sympathies, certainly no one would be tempted to regard Demea as Hume's spokesman. Demea's argument plays so small a role in the Dialogues as to suggest that Hume does (...) not take it at all seriously. He may present it only to establish that he is aware of alternative arguments for God's existence, but thinks them even less successful than the design argument and hence undeserving of extensive critique. Yet, if a philosopher criticizes an argument he deems unworthy of respect, he should still provide sound, not spurious, reasons for rejecting it. This is exactly what D. C. Stove has argued that Hume fails to do in Part IX of the Dialogues, assuming, as is generally done, that the speeches of Cleanthes and Philo present reasoning that Hume would personally endorse. Stove argues that most of the criticisms of Demea's argument are "extremely defective, and that they even include an inconsistency" (Stove, p. 300). This contention has been challenged by Donald Stahl, who has published a succinct point by point rebuttal of Stove's contentions.3 The Stove-Stahl controversy only deals with the reasoning presented in paragraphs 5, 6, 7, and 10 of Part IX because those are the contentions Stove attacks. He has "nothing to say against" the criticisms presented in paragraphs 8 and 9, which he assumes will be generally agreed to be 121 less important than the others (Stove, p. 308). He totally ignores the argument of paragraph 11. However, I am not convinced that the criticisms of these paragraphs are less important and I do have something to say against them. Consequently, instead of intervening directly on either side of the dispute between Professors Stove and Stahl, I shall attend principally to the argumentation of paragraphs 8, 9, and 11. I shall (1) summarize Demea's argument, (2) argue for the significance of the criticisms of paragraphs 8-9, (3) examine those criticisms, and (4) assess the role of Philo's concluding remarks in paragraphs 10-11. 1. Demea's Argument Early on Hume has Demea speak so obviously inconsistently as to make the reader wonder whether this character is supposed to think at all about the implications of the claims he espouses. At the beginning of Part II, he proclaims that God's existence is surely not at issue, since no one of common sense... ever entertained a serious doubt with regard to a truth so certain and self-evident." The nature of God is the only proper object of theological inquiry, and that is "altogether incomprehensible and unknown to us" (D 141)! Given such a radically apophatic position (Hume calls it "mystical"), it is hardly surprising that the sceptical Philo readily concurs, once he specifies that he takes 'God' to mean just "the original cause of this universe (whatever it be)" (D 142). But Demea immediately buttresses his alleged self-evident truth by appealing to the authority of Father Malebranche and the whole tradition of Christian theology, apparently oblivious to the impropriety of 122 supporting an indubitable truth by citing authorities (D 141-142). Further, scarcely more than a page later, after Cleanthes has sketched out the design argument, this same Demea is horrified that Cleanthes gives no abstract arguments or a priori proofs and calls for a "demonstration of the being of a God" (D 143). When, in Part IX, Demea himself undertakes to provide the "simple and sublime argument a priori" (D 188) he expected from Cleanthes, he characterizes the argument as "the common one," which suggests he is more engaged in paraphrasing authority than in thoughtfully arguing. The argument, in fact, as has been generally recognized, closely follows one given by Samuel Clarke in the Boyle Lectures of 1704. 5 Demea begins by assuming that "whatever exists must have a cause or reason of its existence," (D 188) since nothing can cause itself to exist. He then states a dilemma: in tracing the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Religion and the Body in Medical ResearchCourtney S. Campbell (bio)AbstractReligious discussion of human organs and tissues has concentrated largely on donation for therapeutic purposes. The retrieval and use of human tissue samples in diagnostic, research, and education contexts have, by contrast, received very little direct theological attention. Initially undertaken at the behest of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, this essay seeks to explore the theological and religious questions embedded (...) in nontherapeutic use of human tissue. It finds that the “donation paradigm” typically invoked in religious discourse to justify uses of the body for therapeutic reasons is inadequate in the context of nontherapeutic research, while the “resource paradigm” implicit in scientific discourse presumes a reductionist account of the body that runs contrary to important religious values about embodiment. The essay proposes a “contribution paradigm” that provides a religious perspective within which research on human tissue can be both justified and limited.The retrieval and use of human tissue samples for diagnostic, therapeutic, research, and educational purposes represent further developments in scientific study of the human body as a source of medical information. Following the completion of its examination of the ethical and policy issues pertaining to human cloning in the spring of 1997, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) returned to the set of questions for which it had been originally constituted, including ethical issues that arise in human subjects research. One issue that proved controversial for the human genetics subcommittee of NBAC was the scientific, philosophical, and legal status of tissue and other body parts (usually surgical specimens) that had been retrieved from patients (not research subjects) who had given general consent to the use of their body materials for research and educational purposes. The subcommittee addressed questions about the adequacy of general versus specific [End Page 275] consent, the scientific merits of identifiable versus anonymous samples and claims about patient confidentiality, and the justification for patient refusals and requests that the materials be returned to the patient or discarded rather than made available for scientific research. In an effort to better understand the ramifications of research on human tissue, the subcommittee commissioned several background papers that examined these questions from ethical, legal, research, and religious perspectives. What follows is a modified version of the report on religious considerations originally presented to the genetics subcommittee of NBAC.The central question examined in this article is whether tissue banking for purposes of research presents distinctive theological issues or prompts objections from religious communities or scholars. Religious discussion of human organs and tissues has focused largely on donation for therapeutic purposes (what I describe as the “donation paradigm”); hence, there is very little direct consideration of nontherapeutic uses of such tissue. It is possible, however, to describe implications and suggest inferences by considering (1) religious attitudes to the human body and to organs, tissues, and cells removed from the body, and (2) religious discussions of modes of transfer of body parts, such as donations, offerings, sales, and abandonment. By and large, this discussion will reflect themes that emerge from the central Western religious traditions, with some attention given to Eastern and Native perspectives.The Body: Religious Holism, Scientific Reductionism, Private PropertyThe human body as an organic totality has long been the subject of theological reflection and a symbol for religious communities. However, much less attention has been devoted to the religious status of organs, tissues, cells, and DNA. The reflection of religious scholars and communities on the status of body parts has been prompted by the necessity to confront practical questions in personal and public health and in communal life, such as justifications for surgery, autopsies, organ donation, or burial. Scientific and research interest in parts of the body can sometimes conflict with religious values about bodily integrity. Indeed, E. Richard Gold cites the “disparate claims of scientific investigation and religious belief on the body” as the exemplary case of incommensurate values regarding the body. According to Gold (1996, p. 149), “The body, from a scientific viewpoint, is a source of knowledge of physical development, aging, and disease. From a religious perspective, the body is understood [End Page 276] as a sacred object, being created in the image... (shrink)

1. The Real Claim of the Chicago School If anything dramatic has happened in economic theory over the last one hundred years – namely, since the advent of marginalism – then, everyone agrees, it was not the rise of the Chicago neo -classical school which, after all, only synthesized the various versions of marginalism, but the Keynesian Revolution. Assessments of this revolution were repeatedly invited, particularly by opponent, chiefly from Chicago. F. A. von Hayek has explicitly and bitterly blames Keynes (...) for all our economic troubles; Harry Johnson has repeatedly declared the most revolutionary work of Keynes, his General Theory of 1936, so poor that but for its author's name on its title page it would have totally flopped. Can such a flop cause so much damage? Are these two assessments – of Hayek and of Johnson – in conflict or no t? Don Patinkin has raised a different question: how different is Keynes from his Chicago opponents, say, Milton Friedman? How many heads need roll, to use his metaphor, before a revolution may be declared? Patinkin sees Keynes as slightly deviant but stil l a member of the mainstream – the mainstream of the mainstream being Friedman and his Chicago followers, of course. Now, can a minor deviant be a flop? Can minor deviations from the true blue doctrine be to blame for all of our economic woes? I do not kno w. Joan Robinson sees in Keynes a minor deviation from classical theory because he said once his correction of classical theory is implemented, that theory takes over once again. Moreover, Samuelson and Friedman have endorsed a (poor) version of Keynes' theory of shortterm relative price and ignored his general theory of price and money. (shrink)

1. The Real Claim of the Chicago School If anything dramatic has happened in economic theory over the last one hundred years – namely, since the advent of marginalism – then, everyone agrees, it was not the rise of the Chicago neo -classical school which, after all, only synthesized the various versions of marginalism, but the Keynesian Revolution. Assessments of this revolution were repeatedly invited, particularly by opponent, chiefly from Chicago. F. A. von Hayek has explicitly and bitterly blames Keynes (...) for all our economic troubles; Harry Johnson has repeatedly declared the most revolutionary work of Keynes, his General Theory of 1936, so poor that but for its author's name on its title page it would have totally flopped. Can such a flop cause so much damage? Are these two assessments – of Hayek and of Johnson – in conflict or no t? Don Patinkin has raised a different question: how different is Keynes from his Chicago opponents, say, Milton Friedman? How many heads need roll, to use his metaphor, before a revolution may be declared? Patinkin sees Keynes as slightly deviant but stil l a member of the mainstream – the mainstream of the mainstream being Friedman and his Chicago followers, of course. Now, can a minor deviant be a flop? Can minor deviations from the true blue doctrine be to blame for all of our economic woes? I do not kno w. Joan Robinson sees in Keynes a minor deviation from classical theory because he said once his correction of classical theory is implemented, that theory takes over once again. Moreover, Samuelson and Friedman have endorsed a (poor) version of Keynes' theory of shortterm relative price and ignored his general theory of price and money. (shrink)

The hoax perpetrated by New York University theoretical physicist Alan Sokal in 1996 on the editors of the journal Social Text quickly became widely known and hotly debated. (See Physics Today January 1997, page 61, and March 1997, page 73.) "Transgressing the Boundaries -- Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was the title of the parody he slipped past the unsuspecting editors. [1] Many readers of Sokal's article characterized it as an ingenious exposure of the decline of (...) the intellectual standards in contemporary academia, and as a brilliant parody of the postmodern nonsense rampant among the cultural studies of science. Sokal's paper is variously, so we read, "a hilarious compilation of pomo gibberish", "an imitation of academic babble", and even "a transformative hermeneutics of total bullshit". [2] Many scientists reported having "great fun" and "a great laugh" reading Sokal's article. Yet whom, exactly, are we laughing at? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol "God" 1 Gordon D. KaufmanHarvard UniversityI am a Christian theologian. This does not mean, however, that I understand my work as being essentially a matter of explaining and defending Christian faith and the Christian set of symbols for interpreting human life and the world. The task of the Christian theologian is rather, as I understand (...) it, to scrutinize carefully, critically evaluate, and reconstruct (in whatever ways seem appropriate and necessary) the central Christian symbols, so they will encourage and support a faith and life appropriate for today. 2 In our time it is no longer sufficient for theologians simply to take it for granted that the basic structure and commitments of traditional Christian faith are--in all of their main lines--right and proper; and to proceed, then, to expound and reinterpret them in whatever ways seem intelligible and persuasive. Whatever may have been the value and justification of this sort of theologizing in the past, the crises of the twentieth century (to many of which Christian symbols, institutions, and practices have themselves contributed) have made it clear that thorough reassessment of the traditional Christian symbol-system, with an eye to its (possibly drastic) reconstruction or even to the total rejection of some of its principal features, is required--if it is to continue to contribute to human well-being, and to the well-being of the rest of life, on planet Earth. It is with this thoroughly critical and open understanding of the task of Christian theologians today that this contribution to our Buddhist-Christian dialogue has been prepared. And I hope a similar spirit will animate the responses to this paper, whether offered from the Christian or the Buddhist side of our conversation. I My assignment here is to examine the topic of "Christianity and Ecology." This is, of course, a very broad topic, much too large for a paper of this sort. I have taken the liberty, therefore, to confine my discussion to only one of the many questions that might be considered under this heading. The central symbol in terms of which Christian faith and Christian life (as well as most other western religious traditions) understand and order themselves is God, usually thought of as designating the creator and governor of the world, the only One to whom unqualified devotion, love, [End Page 3] and service are due. If we can come to some understanding of how this symbol has functioned in the past, and might be conceived properly to function today with respect to ecological concerns, we will have made a large step toward understanding the overall topic of Christianity and ecology. I am devoting this paper, therefore, to the question of "Ecological Consciousness and the Symbol 'God.'"Throughout my professional life I have been concerned with the problem of the continuing viability (or lack of viability) in our contemporary world of the symbol "God," as that symbol has been understood through most of western history (not only by Christians and Jews, but also by many humanists and secularists). And for the last thirty years or so, I have been reflecting on the issues which our growing ecological consciousness poses for our understanding of--and our ordering of life in terms of--this symbol. My earliest writing directly concerned with this question is in a paper entitled "The Concept of Nature: A Problem for Theology" published in the Harvard Theological Review in 1972. 3 In that paper I attempted to show that there is a fundamental tension--indeed, a conceptual and logical incompatibility--between, on the one hand, the understanding of God, and of the intimate relation of humanity to God (as seen in our western religious and philosophical traditions), and on the other hand, our growing awareness that human existence is essentially constituted by, and could not exist apart from, the complex ecological ordering of life that has evolved on planet Earth over many millennia. 4The main emphasis in that paper remains largely correct in my view. Hence, I would like to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Capitalism as Religion and Religious Pluralism:An Approach from Liberation TheologyJung Mo Sungreligious pluralism and the struggle of the godsReligious pluralism as a social fact, namely, the coexistence of different religions within a social system, be it a country or an empire, is not anything new. The mere contact with other people and their various religions, for example, through commerce, still does not indicate religious pluralism. In this case, each (...) group of people has its religion and its gods, and recognizes that other groups of people exist with other religions and other gods. Religious pluralism occurs when, because of immigration or the conquest of one people over another, groups of people with different religions live together in the same social space.Whether by immigration or by conquest, the resulting religious pluralism does not occur in an egalitarian or harmonious manner. Immigrants are forced to live out their religion within their group as a marginal religion in society, or even in hiding when it is not accepted in the society where they went to seek a livelihood. In the case of conquest or expansion of empires, the conquering power imposes its cultural values and religion on the conquered peoples. The empire can try to extinguish the religions of conquered peoples and impose their own as if it is the only one acceptable, or tolerate them as long as these religions do not question the imperial order. This means that the coexistence of different religions within the empire takes place in a hierarchical relationship: The religion of the empire is the ultimate and the others are tolerated provided they accept their place as subordinate. The Roman Empire was an example of an empire that tolerated the religions of subject peoples as long as they didn’t question the absolute power of the empire, with its own empire religion and emperor worship.In this historical context, it is empirically impossible to live out a third way: recognizing the otherness of the other and respecting their religion as we respect our [End Page 155] own. That’s because the “encounter” between religions takes place in a situation of colonial conquest and domination. Expecting that there could be a relationship of respect and dialogue among equals would ignore the role of religion in premodern societies, especially in the processes of domination.In these societies, religion has the function of being the foundation of the world-view that legitimized the existing social order, as well as the process of external conquest. Religion fulfills the function of legitimizing and justifying the conquest and consequent exploitation and oppression of the conquered people. Therefore, religion performs a key task for systems of oppression, the reversal of evil into good: conquest as peace; exploitation as the path to salvation or integration into civilization. Furthermore, religion transcendentalizes the imperial system of oppression and presents it as eternal or as an expression of divine will. Therefore, how to classify religions and manage their coexistence is not just a problem for religious leaders, but also a matter of the state, a matter of interest for the king or emperor. The limits of religious tolerance are determined by the interests of the dominant social system, even when they are often discussed in religious or theological language.Of course, no religion, even those that perform the function of legitimizing an empire, is totally homogeneous. Within a religion, there is or can be a certain “theological pluralism.” The figure of Las Casas in the Spanish conquest of America is an example of the contradictions that are in all religions. But the defense of the Indians and their religion that was made by Las Casas had to be made in the court of the king of Spain. The means of evangelization and the ways of seeing the culture and religion of the Indians (i.e., the other) is a problem of the state, and not just the Church.Before thinking about the ideal of a religious pluralism that makes possible “a fraternal living together of religions as also a covenant of all those in favor of Peace and the Common Good of Humanity and the Planet,”1 we must also remember that the Bible... (shrink)

Londres, 1945. Giles est declare heritier du titre et de la fortune de son pere Hugo Barrington. Au detriment de son ami - et peut-etre demi-frere - Harry Clifton, mais aussi au grand soulagement de celui-ci qui peut dorenavant epouser Emma, la soeur de Giles. Tandis que Harry et Emma s'installent a Bristol avec Sebastian, leur fils, et Jessica, une petite fille qu'ils adoptent, Giles, devenu membre de la chambre des Lords, se retrouve pris au piege de haines ancestrales dans (...) sa lutte pour le pouvoir. Une decennie plus tard, c'est Sebastian, representant de la nouvelle generation, qui fera basculer la carriere politique de son oncle. Secrets trop longtemps enfouis, vengeances longuement meditees, amours enfin possibles ou alliances interessees, une saga qui se devore d'une traite. Tout est reuni pour rendre cette lecture totalement addictive. Un excellent page-turner. Version Femina. (shrink)

Simple versions of Reliabilism about justification say that S's believing that p is justified if and only if the belief was produced by a belief-forming process that is reliable above some high threshold. Alvin Goldman, in Epistemology and Cognition, argues for a more complex version of the view according to which it is total epistemic systems that are assessed for reliability, rather than individual processes. Why prefer this more complex version of Reliabilism? Two reasons suggest themselves. First, it seems (...) that the interaction of various processes of belief formation is often important. The more complex version appears to account for the interaction of processes. Second, one might doubt whether individual processes will have determinate truth-ratios. If not, the simple version of Reliabilism is a nonstarter. In this paper I argue that, despite these two apparent advantages, the complex version of Reliabilism is untenable. I conclude by arguing that the simple version is actually fine as it is.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.RELIABILISM: HOLISTIC OR SIMPLE?Volume 9, Issue 3Jeffrey DunnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.12Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. RELIABILISM: HOLISTIC OR SIMPLE?Volume 9, Issue 3Jeffrey DunnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.12Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. RELIABILISM: HOLISTIC OR SIMPLE?Volume 9, Issue 3Jeffrey DunnDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.12Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bearing the Other and Bearing Sexuality: Women and Gender in Levinas’s “And God Created Woman”Deborah Achtenberg (bio)Much ink has been spilled on the question of the role of women for Levinas’s ethics in accounts containing a gamut of claims, from Stella Sandford’s that woman is aligned with sexual difference in such a way that Levinas’s attempts to install her within the human fail,1 to Diane Perpich’s that one reason (...) Otherwise than Being is preferable to Totality and Infinity is that the ethics in the former does not rest on a failed narrative of family life and woman’s role in it as ethics does in the latter,2 to Claire Katz’s that there is a rich, positive ethical component to women’s role for Levinas since he uses maternity as an example of being-for-the-other.3This essay complements those accounts by giving a detailed analysis of the discussion of women in Levinas’s talmudic commentary, “And God Created Woman.”4 Specifically, I ask whether Levinas is right, in his commentary, that, according to Talmud Berakhot 61a, women are not ultimately inferior to men because both men and women are human and their humanity precedes the division of humanity into male [End Page 137] and female. I pursue the question by reading the talmudic passage the way Levinas, in his commentary, tells us that we should read Talmud, namely, by situating texts quoted in it in their broader textual context in Torah rather than treating them as proof texts.When I put quotations cited in Berakhot 61a in their textual context, I find that the male figures treated in the texts from Torah are dismayingly dismissive of women in distress, suggesting that women are treated as inferior, but then learn their mistake and treat the women as equal or even superior, suggesting that Talmud does see them as having a humanity that precedes sexual difference. Nonetheless, I go on to argue, though the talmudic passage does not see women as ultimately inferior to men, it nonetheless treats them as inferior on the day-to-day level and such treatment belies the attempt to treat them as human.I go on to ask about Levinas’s stance toward this problem in the talmudic text, Does he accept the treatment of women as inferior? I argue, to the contrary, that Levinas sees the problem and attempts to overcome it by criticizing two ways the talmudic passage treats women as inferior on the day-to-day level: he rejects the passages’ prohibitions on certain types of male contact with women—such as looking at them!—and he reinterprets its association of women with makeup and deception. His stance is more complicated, though, because he goes on to find a kernel of truth to preserve in each of the problematic talmudic positions: in the first, the fundamental ethical ambiguity of sexuality, since sexuality points toward the other as other but also toward one’s own satisfaction; in the second, what we might anachronistically call women’s ways of knowing that, for Levinas, have a certain ethical superiority over the ways men know. The two resolutions have their own problems, I maintain, since if Levinas is to avoid gender norming and gender hierarchy, he needs to make it clear that both the problematic ethical ambiguity of sexuality and also the ways of knowing he thinks are ethically superior are not essentially associated more with women than with men. [End Page 138]1Reading Levinas’s way, I search out the context of quotations, taking them not as proof texts, but as invitations to interpret. In “And God Created Woman,” he says, “each time a biblical verse is brought in as proof it is not likely that the sages of the Talmud are looking in these texts, squeezed every which way in spite of grammar, for a direct proof of the thesis they are upholding. It is always an invitation to search out the context of the quotation” (NT 166/DSS 130–31). As a feminist, when I search out the context of the quotations Levinas refers to in his reading of Berakhot 61a, I... (shrink)

I learned very early, perhaps even before 1933 and certainly after Hitler’s huge success at the time of his election to the Reichstag, of Heidegger’s sympathy toward National Socialism. It was the late Alexandre Koyré who mentioned it to me for the first time on his return from a trip to Germany. I could not doubt the news, but took it with stupor and disappointment, and also with the faint hope that it expressed only the temporary lapse of a great (...) speculative mind into practical banality. It cast a shadow over my firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance forever separated the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by Evil on the pages of Mein Kampf from the intellectual vigor and extreme analytical virtuosity displayed in Sein und Zeit, which had opened the field to a new type of philosophical inquiry.Could one question the incomparable impression produced by this book, in which it immediately became apparent that Heidegger was the interlocutor and equal of the greatest—those very few—founders of European philosophy? that here was someone, this seemed obvious, all modern thought would soon have to answer? Emmanuel Levinas has been professor of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure Israélite de Paris and at the University of Paris I . Among his books that have been translated into English are Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity, and Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Paula Wissing, a free-lance translator and editor, has recently translated Paul Veyne’s Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Sexual Difference as Model: An Ethics for the Global FutureGail SchwabIn Éthique de la différence sexuelle (1984), Luce Irigaray targeted language and love—for her, inseparable from each other—as the two areas of focus for the elaboration of an ethics of sexual difference. The heterosexual couple seemed to have taken on a new, and somehow inappropriately central, importance in Irigaray’s thought in the early eighties; however, the projected mutations in (...) language and love theorized in Éthique did not exclusively concern the heterosexual relationship, even though many readers of Irigaray expressed just such reservations about the book. Éthique foregrounded the couple in the love relationship in order to rethink the philosophical basis of ethics in general, to develop new paradigms, beyond or outside of Western totalizing phallo- and logocentrism, for human relations—not only relations between women and men, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, relations among women and relations among men. Irigaray carried on this project in subsequent works, in Sexes et parentés (1987), which as the title explicitly indicates, opens up the ethical debate to familial and genealogical issues and broadens her focus to include children and the ethical basis of their relationships to parents and more generally to adults of both sexes, and in Sexes et genres à travers les langues (1990), a cross-cultural report on her empirical studies of gender differences in language usage, which sheds new light on the linguistic and communicational issues she had presented in Éthique and even before, in several seldom read and even more rarely analyzed works of the late seventies and early eighties. J’aime à toi (I Love to You) (1992) returns specifically to the more traditionally philosophical approach to the problems of language and love and their intertwining, and carries on the work projected in Éthique, but it goes much further in both the theoretical and the practical development of the concept of sexual difference as the foundation for a new ethics, a new culture of universal validity. J’aime à toi can be read as a follow-up to Éthique and as a founding text for the construction of an ethics of difference modeled on sexual difference, an ethics for the future of humanity in all of its diversity.Western Feminism and the Global FutureIrigaray is very much aware of the limits of the various Western political and academic feminisms, of the need to broaden their scope, both horizontally across cultures and vertically within specific cultures, before they can serve as the basis for a new ethics. Irigaray expresses the concern that Western feminists, rather than represent the exploited women of the world, may exploit them ideologically for their own personal or political purposes, at the risk of preventing them from coming to a feminism of their own making, appropriate to their own cultures and historical moments. “Certain women do implement power strategies—including the power of the media—but not solely for the benefit of the exploited women they use as an alibi. They thus run the risk of clouding the issues and [End Page 76] preventing their consciousness from being raised” [Irigaray, J’aime à toi 15]. 1 Irigaray calls this “egological” feminism (Dare I invent a new term here? Now we have “egofeminists” as well as “ecofeminists”...) and demonstrates its totally undemocratic orientation, despite its representative claims.Certain militants..., practicing direct democracy or an egological feminism, based on their own real, or imagined, needs and desires, rather than on those of all women, leave women subject to existing legislation. Indifferent to the rights necessary for all women—including the little girls of the present and the future, and the women of other cultures—they make decisions that perpetuate, and even aggravate, through unnecessary misunderstandings, the injustices done the female gender.[J’aime à toi 13]As a feminist, in general, it always pains me to read criticisms of feminism, even cogent and theoretically valid criticisms, and I am even now painfully aware of the political dangers of criticizing feminism myself in a public forum such as this one. However, if I have managed to learn anything from the works of Western feminists of color and from Third World feminists, it is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wellspring or Circuit?Commentary on Dewey and the Aesthetic UnconsciousnessFrank X. RyanEditor's note: This article contains material similar to a book review by the same author previously published in The Pluralist, vol. 18, no. 2, pp 114–21. The present article represents a further critical use of this material that we deem worthy of publication.in this vital and splendidly crafted work, Bethany Henning recovers a philosophy of aesthetic wisdom far richer (...) than the narrow epistemological lens dominant today. From its start, American philosophy looked beyond Europe's atomistic empiricism toward a continuity between our thought and nature's aesthetic splendor. Jonathan Edwards found beauty in the structure of being reflected in relations among ideas. For Emerson, each of us is a "transparent eyeball" in which nature's beauty fortifies our moral and spiritual agency. At the apex of this tradition is John Dewey, for whom "aesthetic experience [is] the highest mode of human experience" (Henning 55).Although aesthetic theory is usually associated with the cognitive evaluation of art, Dewey explores a broader non-reflective or unconscious dimension. Henning's appropriation of "unconscious"—the cradle of Freud's infantile id—is intentionally provocative. American culture, reflected in academic thought, has largely resisted appeals to subterranean urges and drives. In doing so, however, we perpetuate a myth of rational and moral exceptionalism masking a history of colonialism, oppression, and crass commercialism. In accepting the unconscious, European thought has taken strides to acknowledge and address such ills. Henning wonders whether America might accept "a dynamic unconscious, were it presented with an alternative mythology" (10) and finds a viable candidate in Dewey's underappreciated notion of qualitative immediacy: an "aesthetic (directly felt) connection between ourselves and [End Page 77] the world" (Henning 5). In affirming the unconscious depth of experience, this American reconfiguration welcomes "aesthetic experience back into our philosophical lives" (Henning 5).When embodied meaning supplements cognitive reflection, we come to champion "the sensuous, lived body" as "the primary reality" of qualitative immediacy—a felt aesthetic unity punctuated by "impulsions" arising from an organism's needs (Henning 69). As "a site of adaptive adjustments," Henning continues, "the body is responsive to the brink of coalescence at the point of contact with the world, in which things that are 'outside of it' belong to it" (71). "To move adeptly into aesthetic experience means to be skilled at loosening focal consciousness" so as to cultivate "the essential porousness of the world" (130).With this, the body-mind relation becomes a problem of normative aesthetics, not epistemology. The Cartesian detachment of intellect from nature perpetuated our cultural alienation from our bodies, our environments, and one another (Henning 81–84). With the re-emergence of the body, however, we can begin to acknowledge and heal this trauma.In tapping the significance of qualitative immediacy, of "having" beyond "knowing," Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious strives to recover Dewey's remarkable insight into our essential situatedness in the world. This alone establishes its importance. But Henning's book is equally ambitious in suggesting how Dewey's aesthetic understanding can(1). reconfigure the shadowy daemons of Freud's id;(2). replace the myth of American exceptionalism with authentic relationships rooted in pluralist values;(3). rehabilitate the body as an authentic vehicle of expression and communication;(4). vindicate the bold claim that all unified experience is aesthetic; and(5). identify and promote connections forged in shared human experiences.These aims are of inestimable value. I pledge to do whatever I can to defend and advance them. At the outset, however, I feel we must shore up the relationship between two different approaches to thinking about our situatedness in the world: (1) of organic beings existing in a porous world they dynamically interact with, and (2) a phenomenology of experience wherein nonreflective having is an unanalyzed totality from which thought and thing, subject and object, organism and environment, functionally emerge in what Dewey calls the pattern of inquiry. [End Page 78]The general consensus that Dewey failed to reconcile these two approaches—of existence with experience—was dubbed the "deep crack" in Dewey's thought, by Richard Bernstein in 1961. Bernstein laments Dewey's being caught between (1... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Extramarital Contraception in the Catholic Faith:A Call to Action from a Physician and EthicistCara BuskmillerIntroductionDefinitionsBefore proceeding to a discussion of extramarital contraception, it is relevant to lay a foundation of definitions and limitations of this essay. Here, "sex" and "sexual act" will refer to acts of penile–vaginal intercourse and acts meant to lead to such intercourse, respectively. Other acts which are rightly called "sexual" are not relevant to this (...) essay, as the focus here is on encounters that could result in fertilization.The traditional natural law theory with its analysis of object, intention, and circumstances is at play in this essay, with a hylomorphic understanding of nature and ethics. In this understanding of ethics, the names of many acts include not only an object but an intention and circumstances (e.g., murder specifies an illegal type of killing with premeditation). Likewise, "contraception" here refers to the use of any drug or device which temporarily lowers fertility (object), to prevent fertilization (intention) due to presumed-fertile sex (circumstance). Such drugs or devices are called "contraceptives" in this essay. In this essay, "contraception" is not committed solely by intending to avoid fertilization, so acts such as trying to avoid fertilization by timing sex during infertile parts of a menstrual cycle are not contraception, and the pastoral term "contraceptive mindset" does not apply. "Contraception" is also not solely defined by the use of particular medical products, since the intention to avoid fertilization is part of the definition in this essay. Thus, [End Page 1245] prescribing or taking a birth control pill for polycystic ovarian syndrome, in the words of Pope St. Paul VI in his 1968 landmark encyclical Humanae Vitae (HV), is not at all illicit, here because such treatment is not contraception, and the problems of contraception do not apply (§15)."Marriage" in this essay refers principally to sacramental matrimony, made by the consent of a baptized man and a baptized woman.1 Civil marriage, cohabitation, long-term affairs, sex in dating, short-term hookups, prostitution, and sexual assault represent a spectrum of falling away from matrimony. This essay assumes that matrimony is God's one true plan for sex, fertilization, and childrearing. This essay also makes heavy use of the Scholastic-personalist perspective of HV on the unitive and procreative dimensions of sex. As sexual relationships "fall away" from matrimony, they lose resemblance to these dimensions."Consent" is here defined as a free act in which a person agrees to do, accept, or reject something.2 Consent is an act of the will, and it may be partial or total. Only when consent is total is a person held fully responsible for his or her actions; for example, only when consent is total can a person commit a mortal sin. Consent is different from assent, which is not of the will, but of the mind.3 In this paper, sex without consent is termed "sexual assault"—the status of the act as an assault is solely determined by consent. These definitions allow for a sexual assault in which a victim withholds consent and yet does not resist an attack,4 which is different from past legal and colloquial definitions.5 This definition also allows for assault victims that have positive emotional responses to or physical arousal from an attack. These responses from a victim do not make the assault consensual or desired, [End Page 1246] and in fact make post-traumatic recovery more difficult.6 Simply put, consent is of the will, and this is not diminished by whether the body follows suit; this differs from some legal definitions of consent in canon law, where the will of the person agreeing to a contract is signified by externals, even if there was no intention to fulfill the duties of the contract.7 Consent will be central to this essay, since it helps make the spectrum of relationships that "fall away" from marriage intelligible in two sets: one with consent, and one without."Intellectual disability" in medical and ethical literature refers to a large spectrum of differences in mental and behavioral performance, but this essay is only considering intellectually disabled persons who would be unable to... (shrink)

A group of the last notebooks that Nietzsche wrote from 1888 to the final notebook of 1889. -/- Translator Daniel Fidel Ferrer. See: "Nietzsche's Notebooks in English: a Translator's Introduction and Afterward". pages 265-272. Total pages 390. Translation done June 2012. -/- Nietzsche's notebooks from the last productive year of life, 1888. Nietzsche's unpublished writings called the Nachlass. These are notebooks (Notizheft) from the year 1888 up to early January 1889. Nietzsche stopped writing entirely after January 6, 1889. -/- (...) The German notebooks of Nietzsche's included in these English translations: 12[1-2] Anfang 1888 13[1-5] Anfang 1888 - Fruhjahr 1888 14[1-227] Fruhjahr 1888 (first note says: Nizza, den 25. Marz 1888) 15[1-120] Fruhjahr 1888 16[1-89] Fruhjahr - Sommer 1888 17[1-9] Mai - Juni 1888 18[1-17] Juli - August 1888 19[1-11] September 1888 20[1-168] Sommer 1888 21[1-8] Herbst 1888 22[1-29] September - Oktober 1888 23[1-14] Oktober 1888 24[1-10] Oktober - November 1888 25[1-21] December 1888 - Januar 1889. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 3: Transgressive Utopianism and Direct ActivismHeather AlberroThis is an important time to revisit questions concerning the historical underpinnings of utopianism as a mode of praxis and theoretical endeavor, its potential oversights and where it ought to venture in the decades to come. The multidisciplinary Hispanic utopian project Histopia discussed by Ramirez-Blanco offers a helpful starting point for this discussion. Especially noteworthy, in my view, is Histopia’s recognition of (...) and interest in engaging with manifestations of utopianism beyond academia and examining the full spectrum of the utopian imaginary, from texts to social movements. Similarly important is what Ramirez-Blanco alludes to as Histopia’s laudable attempts to “decenter” the discipline toward the Spanish-speaking world. This recalls the wider, vital work of decolonizing utopian studies highlighted by Edwards and others in this piece so that it is inclusive of the immeasurably diverse array of utopian imaginaries and modes of praxis around the globe. To reduce such diverse manifestations to the lens of a single medium or cultural-historical context would be a profound intellectual and ethical misdeed.A related example of such decolonial work is Histopia’s emphasis on history as opposed to the canon’s traditional emphasis on texts. Here, I was [End Page 550] wondering if you (Ramirez-Blanco) could elaborate further on what this entails. That is, what is Histopia’s conceptualization of history vis-à-vis the now and “to-come,” and their relation more generally to the utopian impulse? Is this conceptualization akin to the (Western) utopian conception of time as a linear progression from an archaic past toward a radiant future toward some “advanced” end state?1 Or does it depart from this modernist construct and, if so, in what ways? What is the role of prefigurative (utopian) activist movements in the history of social transformation, in your view?With movements like 15M in Spain that you discuss, what do you see as the transformative utopian potential of their denunciations of the status quo, however fleeting? What of their annunciations? That is, what were they gesturing toward, and what did their imaginings of “a better” consist of? How do public assemblies as “performances” factor into these visions? I’m curious to know what patterns, if any, can be traced across contemporary left-social movements. My own research with radical environmental activists has found that they exhibit the former aspect of the utopian mode—denunciation—with immense power and potency. Like the 15M movement, their direct activism is postparliamentary given their profound disaffection with the capitalist state and its perceived collusion with extractive industries driving ecological breakdown. The aspect of annunciation for them, however, is much more complex and fragmented. They are similarly engaged in constant deliberations over the relative strengths and weaknesses of alternative modes of political organization and participation, particularly concerning which actors may be excluded. However, they do exhibit a consensus on certain things—especially their fervent desire for a renewed abundance of terrestrial life forms and an equally fervent refusal of the worst of possible worlds consisting of substantially diminished other-than-human life forms.The question raised by Antonis concerning blueprints, or utopian modalities that provide fleshed-out visions of better worlds, is a similarly pertinent one for two key reasons: (1) in connection with the aforementioned vital work of decolonizing the utopian canon and imaginary, and (2) as a possible response to the mounting socio-ecological depredations of late-stage capitalism and the theft of the now and to-come from growing portions of the earth’s inhabitants. As Antonis highlights, some have suggested that utopianism’s pursuit of human and societal perfectibility—especially “blueprint” modalities aiming to implement a particular conception of “the good society”—harbor seeds of totalitarianism and intolerance of difference.2 [End Page 551] Indeed, inklings toward domination can be seen within some totalizing/blue-printing utopias and their cultural-historical links to Enlightenment projects of universal conquest, namely the hegemonic “utopias” of Western modernity in the form of colonial-capitalism.3 These totalizing visions of progress and “the good life” have been systematically ending other-than-Western worlds for centuries, leading to our present state of ruination.Hence why subsequent modalities... (shrink)

This paper aims to suggest a new approach to Plato’s theory of being in Republic V and Sophist based on the notion of difference and the being of a copy. To understand Plato’s ontology in these two dialogues we are going to suggest a theory we call Pollachos Esti; a name we took from Aristotle’s pollachos legetai both to remind the similarities of the two structures and to reach a consistent view of Plato’s ontology. Based on this theory, when Plato (...) says that something both is and is not, he is applying difference on being which is interpreted here as saying, borrowing Aristotle’s terminology, 'is is (esti) in different senses'. I hope this paper can show how Pollachos Esti can bring forth not only a new approach to Plato’s ontology in Sophist and Republic but also a different approach to being in general. -/- Keywords Plato; being; difference; image; pollachos esti; pollachos legetai 1. Being, Not-Being and Difference The three dialogues where the notion of "difference" attaches to the notion of being, namely Parmenides II, Sophist and Timaeus,and specifically the first two we try to discuss here. In these dialogues, Plato is going to achieve a new and revolutionary understanding of being which is not anymore based on the notion of "same" as it was before in Greek ontology. It was his discovery, I think, that the notion of being in the Greek ontology is attached to the notion of the "same" and it is because of this attachment that there have always been many problems understanding being especially after Parmenides. That being has always been relying on the "same" can be found out from the way most of the Presocratics understood it. It was based on such a relationship between being and "same" that a later Ionian, Heraclitus of Ephesus, rejected Being by rejecting its sameness: unable to be the same, being cannot be being anymore but becoming. Heraclitus’ criticism of his predecessors’ understanding of being was due to his discovery that what they call being is not the same but different in every moment. The relation of being and sameness reaches to its highest point in Parmenides. What Plato does in using the "difference" is nothing but the establishment of a creative relation between being and "difference". In this new relation, although he is in agreement with Heraclitus that being is not the same but different, he does not do it by use of becoming. He disagrees, on the other hand, with Parmenides that such a relation between being and difference leads to not being. At Parmenides 142b5-6 it is said that if One is, it is not possible for it to be without partaking (μετέχειν) of being (οὐσίας), which leads to the distinction of being and one: -/- So there would be also the being of the one (ἡ οὐσία του̑ ἑνὸς) which is not the same (ταὐτὸν) as the one. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be its being, nor the one would partake of it. (142b7-c1) -/- The fact that what is (ἔστι) signifies (σημαῖνον) is other (ἀλλο) than what One signifies (c4-5), is being taken as a reason for their distinction. The conclusion is that when we say 'one is', we speak of two different things, one partaking of the other (c5-7). Having repeated these arguments of the otherness of being and one at 143a-b, Parmenides says that the cause of this otherness can be neither Being nor One but "difference": -/- So if being is something different (ἕτερον) and one something different (ἕτερον), it is not by being one that the one is different from being nor by its being being that being is other than one, but they are different from each other (ἕτερα ἀλλήλων) by difference (τῷ ἑτερῳ) and otherness (ἄλλῳ). (143b3-6) -/- The fifth hypothesis, 'one is not' (160b5ff.) is also linked with the notion of difference. When we say about two things, largeness and smallness, that they are not, it is clear that we are talking about not being of different (ἕτερον) things (160c2-4). When it is said that something is not, besides the fact that there must be knowledge of that thing, we can say that it entails also its difference: 'difference in kind pertains to it in addition to knowledge' (160d8). Parmenides explains the reason as such: -/- For someone doesn’t speak of the difference in kind of the others when he says that the one is different from the others, but of that thing’s own difference in kind. (160e1-2) -/- Although the theory of being as "difference" is not fulfilled yet, an exact look at what occurs in Sophist can make us sure that this was the launching step for "difference" to get its deserved role in Plato’s ontology. The notion of the "difference" is not yet well-functioned in Parmenides because we can see that being is still attached to the same: -/- For that which is the same is being (ὄν γὰρ ἐστι τὸ ταὐτόν) (162d2-3). -/- The notion of difference in Sophist is the key element based on which a new understanding of being is presented and the problem of not being is somehow resolved. The friends of Forms, the Stranger says, are those who distinguish between being and becoming (248a7-8) and believe that we deal with the latter with our body and through perception while with the former, the real being (ὄντως οὐσίαν) with our soul and through reasoning (a10-11). Being is then bound with the "same" by adding: -/- You say that being always stays the same and in the same state (ἣν ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὡσαύτως ἔχειν) but becoming varies from one time to another (δὲ ἄλλοτε ἄλλως). (248a12-13) -/- That the theory of the relation of being and capacity (247d8f., 248c4-5) matches more with becoming than with being (248c7-9) must be rejected because being is also the subject of knowledge which is kind of doing something (248d-e). It does, however, confirm that 'both that which changes and also change have to be admitted as existing things (ὄντα) (249b2-3). I believe that this is what Socrates would incline to do at Theaetetus 180e-181a, that is, putting a fight between two parties of Parmenidean being and Heraclitean becoming and then escaping. The solution is that becoming is itself a kind of being and we ought to accept what changes as being. This is what must be done by a philosopher, namely, to refuse both the claim that 'everything is at rest' and that 'being changes in every way' and beg, like a child, for both and say being (τὸὄν) is both the unchanging and that which changes (249c10-d4). This kind of begging for both is obviously under the attack of contradiction (249e-250b). For both and each of rest and change similarly are (250a11-12) but it cannot be said either that both of them change or both of them rest, being must be considered as a third thing both of the rest and change associate with (250b7-10). The conclusion is that 'being is not both change and rest but different (ἕτερον) from them instead' (c3-4). The notion of difference helps Plato to take being departed from both rest and change because it was their sophisticated relation with being that made the opposition of being and becoming. Plato is now trying to separate being from rest and, thus, from "same" by "difference". Such a crucial change is great enough to need a 'fearless' decision (256d5-6). The possibility of being of not being is resulted (d11-12) comes as the answer to the question 'so it’s clear that change is not being and also is being (ἡ κίνησις ὄντως οὐκ ὄν ἐστι καὶ ὄν) since it partakes in being?' (d8-9). It is then by the notion of difference that becoming is considered as that which both is and is not. This coincidence of being and not being about change is apparently similar to Socrates’ paradoxical statement at Republic 477a about what both is and is not. -/- Introduction The Republic 476-477 has always been a matter of controversy mainly about two interwoven points. The first problem is the meaning of being here; that whether what he has in mind is a veridical, existential or propositional sense of being. The second problem is his distinction between the objects of knowledge and opinion which seems to lead, some believe, to the Two Worlds (TW) theory. The crucial point in Republic is that what is considered between knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) and ignorance (α͗γνοιας), namely opinion, must have a different object that leads Socrates to draw the distinction of knowledge and opinion between their objects. The problem of understanding being in the fifth book of the Republic is that when it is said that the Form of F is F but a particular participating in F, both is and is not F, it sounds too bizarre and unacceptable. It cannot be imaginable how a thing can be existent and non-existent at the same time. At the first sight, the only solution seems to be the degrees of existence which is called by Annas (1981, 197) a 'childish fallacy' and a 'silly argument'. Kirwan (1974, 118) thinks that Republic V does not attribute 'any doctrine about existence' to Plato and Kahn (1966, 250) claims that the most fundamental value of einai when used alone (without predicate) is not "to exist" but "to be so", "to be the case" or "to be true". The problems of understanding being in Republic and Sophist besides the difficulties of the existential reading led scholars to the other senses of being, mostly related to the well-known Aristotelian distinctions between different senses of being. In the predicative reading, Annas, for example, refers this difference to the qualified and unqualified application. Whereas the Form of F is unqualifiedly F, a particular instance of F can be F only qualifiedly (1981, 221). Vlastos’ well-known substitution of 'degrees of reality' for 'degrees of being/existence' must be categorized as a predicative reading. Kahn thinks that the basic sense of being for Plato is 'something like propositional structure, involving both predication and truth claims, together with existence for the subject of predication' (2013, 96). Believing that the complete-incomplete distinction terminology is misleading about Plato, he thinks that semantic functions are only second-order uses of the verb and it is the predicative or incomplete function which is fundamental. Suggesting a veridical reading, Fine (2003, 70 ff) thinks that while both existential and predicative readings separate the objects of knowledge and belief, it is only her reading which does not force such separation of the objects and thus does not imply TW. Stokes (1998, 266) thinks that though Fine is right saying that Plato does not endorse TW in book V, she is wrong in rejecting existential in favor of the veridical reading. The reception of existential reading can be seen more obviously in Calvert who thinks, in agreement with Runciman, that 'it would be safer to say that Plato’s gradational ontology is probably not entirely free from degrees of existence' (1970, 46). At Sophist 254d-e Plato singles out five most important kinds (or Forms!?) in which the same (ταὐτὸν) and difference (θάτερον) are regarded besides being, rest and change. They are, therefore, neither the same nor the difference but share in both (b3). Being (τὸ ὄν) cannot be the same also because if they 'do not signify distinct things' both change and rest will have the same label when we say they are (255b11-c1). We have then four distinct kinds, being, change, rest and same, none of them is the other. The case of difference is more complicated. When the stranger wants to assess the relation of being and difference, he can say simply neither that they are distinct nor that they are not. He has to make an important distinction inside being to get able to draw the relation of being and difference: -/- But I think you'll admit that some of the things that are (τῶν ὄντων) are said (λέγεσθαι) by themselves (αὐτὰ καθ’ αὑτά) but some [are said] always referring to (πρὸς) other things (ἄλλα) (255b12-13) -/- The difference is always said referring to other things (τὸδέγ’ ἕτερον ἀεὶ πρὸς ἕτερον) (255d1). It pervades all kinds because each of them should be different from the others and is so due to the difference and not its own nature (253e3f.) After asserting that change is different from being and therefore both is and is not (256d), the difference is described as what makes all the other kinds not be, by making each different from being. Given that all of them are by being, this association of being and difference is the cause of their being and not-being at the same time, the issue that its version at RepublicV made all those controversies we discussed above: -/- So in the case of change and all the kinds, not being necessarily is (Ἔστιν ἄρα ἐξ ἀναγκης τὸ μὴ ὄν). Τhat’s because as applied to all of them, the nature of the difference (ἡ θατέρον φύσις) makes each of them not be by making it different from being. And we’re going to be right if we say that all of them are not in the same way. And conversely [we’re also going to be right if we say] that they are because they partake in being. (Sophist 256d11-e3) -/- Plato’s new construction of five distinct kinds and the role he gives to thedifference among them is aimed to resolve the old problem of understanding being which has always been annoying from the time of Heraclitus and Parmenides. Both the ontological status of becoming and that of not being were, in Plato’s mind, based on the absolute domination of the notion of the Same over being. Now, not only becoming is understandable as being but also not being which is not the contrary of being anymore but only different (ἕτερον) (257b3-4). Though I agree partly with Frede that the account of not being which is needed for false statements is more complicated than just saying, as Cropsey (1995, 101) says, that Plato is substituting 'X is not Y' with 'X is different from Y', I totally disagree with him that when we say X is not beautiful, Plato could not have thought that it is not a matter of its being different from beautiful because 'it would be different from beauty even if it were beautiful by participation in beauty' (1992, 411). Conversely, as we will discuss, it is exactly the relation of the beautiful thing, X, and the beautiful itself, in which X shares that is to be solved by the notion of not being as difference. Though it is beautiful because of sharing in beauty, X is not beautiful because it is different from beautiful itself. What the difference is to do is to show how something can both be and not be the same thing. The difference is what makes one thing both be and not be a certain other thing. This equips the difference with the ability to explain a certain thing’s not-being when it is. Thanks to the notion of difference, it is now possible to explain not only not being but also the simultaneous being and not being of a thing: 'What we call "not-beautiful" is the thing that ἕτερόν ἐστιν from nothing other than του̑ καλου̑ φύσεως' (257d10-11). The result is that not beautiful happens to be (συμβέβηκεν εἶναι) one single thing among kinds of beings (τι τῶν ὄντων τινὸς ἑνὸς γένους) and at the same time set over against one of the beings (πρός τι τῶν ὄντων αὖ πάλιν ἀντιτεθὲν) (257e2-4) and thus be something that happens to be not beautiful (εἶναί τις συμβαίνει τὸ μὴ καλόν); a being set over against being (ὄντος δὴ πρὸς ὄν ἀντίθεσις) (e6-7). Neither the beautiful is more a being (μα̑λλον ... ἐστι τῶν ὄντων) nor not beautiful less (e9-10) and thus both the contraries similarly are (ὁμοίως εἶναι) (258a1). This conclusion, it is emphasized again (a7-9), owes to θατέρου φύσις now turned out as being. Therefore, each of the many things that are of the nature of the difference and set over each other in being (τῆς τοῦ ὄντος πρὸς ἄλληλα ἀντικειμένων ἀντίθεσις) is being as being itself is being (αὐτοῦ τοῦὄν τοςοὐσία ἐστιν) and not less. They are different from, and not the contrary of, each other (a11-b3). This is exactly τὸμὴὄν, the subject of the inquiry (b6-7). Hence, not being has its own nature (b10) and is one εἶδοςamong the many things that are (b9-c3). Such far departing from Parmenides’ ontological principle is done on the basis of the nature of the difference. It was the discovery of such a notion that made the stranger brave enough to say that not being is each part of the nature of the difference that is set over against being (258d7-e3, cf. 260b7-8). That the relation of being and difference is difference is the key element of the new ontology. The difference is, only because of its sharing in being, but it is not that which it shares in but different from it (259a6-8). Not being is exactly based on this difference: ἕτερον δὲ τοῦ ὄντος ὄν ἔστι σαφέστατα ἐξ ἀνάγκης εἶναι μὴ ὄν (a8-b1). 2. Difference and the Being of a Copy We discussed above that the sense of being of particulars in Republic V made so many debates that whether being is there used in an existential sense or not. Particulars in Republic are regarded as images in the allegories of Line and Cave. The being of an image/copy makes, thus, the same problem. Plato’s analogy of original -copy for the relation of Forms and their particulars in Republic has obviously a different attitude to being. The main question is that what is the ontological status of a copy in respect of its original? Are there two kinds of being, 'real being' versus 'being' as Ketchum says (1980, 140) or only one kind? What is the difference of being in an original and its copy? Is it a matter of degrees of being or reality as some commentators have suggested? Is it a matter of being relational? By reducing the ontological issue to an epistemological one, Vlastos’ suggestion of degrees of reality in an article with the same name does neither, I think, pay attention to the problem nor resolve it. He agrees that Plato never speaks of "degrees" or "grades" of reality (1998, 219). What allows him to entitle it as such are some of Plato’s words in Republic as well as Plato’s words in some other dialogues (1998, 219). When Plato states that the Forms only can completely, purely or perfectly be real he means, Vlastos says, they are cognitively reliable (1998, 229); an obvious reduction of the issue to an epistemological one. He thinks that when in Republic we are being said that a particular’s being F is less pure than its Form, it is because it is not exclusively F, but it is and is not F and this being adulterated by contrary characters is the reason of our confused and uncertain understanding of it (1998, 222). Ketchum rightly criticizes Vlastos’ doctrine in its disparting from ontology thinking that 'to understand Plato’s talk of being as talk of reality is to obscure the close relation that exists between "being" and the verb "to be"' (1980, 213). He thinks, therefore, that οὐσία must be understοοd as being rather than reality, τὸὄν as "that which is" and not "that which is real" and … (ibid). His conclusion is that degrees of reality cannot interpret Plato correctly and we must accept degrees of being. Allen believes that a 'purely epistemic' reading of the passage in Republic is patently at odds with Plato’s text (1961, 325). He thinks that not only degrees of reality but also degrees of reality must be maintained (1998, 67). What Cooper suggests gets close to this paper’s solution: -/- Plato does not I think wish to suggest that existence is a matter of degree in the way in which being pleasant or painful is a matter of degree. Rather there are different grades of ontological status. (1986, 241) -/- A more ontological solution for the problem of understanding the being of a copy and its relation with the being of its original is suggested by the theory of copy as a relational entity. Based on this interpretation, 'the very being of a reflection is relational, wholly dependent upon what is other than itself: the original…' (Allen, 1998, 62). As relational entities, particulars have no independent ontological status; they are purely relational entities which derive their whole character and existence from Forms (ibid, 67). Although these relational entities are and have a kind of existence, we must also say that 'they do not have existence in the way that Forms, things which are fully real, do' (ibid). Allen (1961, 331) extends his theory to Phaedo where it is said that particulars are deficient (74d5-7, 75a2-3, 75b4-8), 'wish' to be like (74d10) or desire to be of its nature (75a2); an extension that, like F.C. white (1977, 200), I cannot admit. He correctly states that Plato did not start out with a doctrine of particulars as images and semblances but come to such a view after Phaedo, or perhaps after Republic V (1977, 202). Though we may not agree with him about Republic V, if we have to consider its last pages also, we must agree with him that not only the ontology of Phaedo but also that of Republic II-V (except the last pages of the latter book) are somehow different from (but at the same time appealing to) the ontology of original-copy which should exclusively assign to Sophist, Timaeus and RepublicVI-VII besides the last pages of book V. The answer to the problem of Plato’s sense of being in RepublicV can be reached only if we read Republic V based on and as following Sophist. We can find out his meaning of that which both is and is not only by the ontological status he assigns to a copy in Sophist. The kind of being of a copy in Sophist reveals as Plato’s key for the lock of the problem of not being. Let’s see how the ontological status of a copy is the critical point of Plato’s ontology. In the earlier pages of Sophist, we are still in the same situation about not being. To think that that which is not is is called a rash assumption (237a3-4) and Parmenides’ principle of the impossibility of being of not being is still at work (a8-9). At 237c1-4, the problem of "not being" is noticed in a new way which shows some kinds of a more realistic position to the problem of not being. Nevertheless, not being is still unthinkable, unsayable, unutterable and unformulable in speech (238c10). Soon after mentioning that it is difficult even to refuse not being (238d), the solution to the problem appears: the being of a copy (εἴδωλον) (239d). A copy is, says Theaetetus, something that is made referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν) but still is 'another such thing (ἕτεροντοιου̑τον)' (240a8). Nevertheless, this 'another such thing' cannot be another such real or true thing. In answer to the question of the Stranger that if this 'another such thing' is the true thing (240a9), Theaetetus answers: οὐδαμῶς ἀληθινόν γε, ἀλλ’ ἐοικὸςμὲν (240b2). A copy’s being 'another such thing' does not mean another true thing but only a resemblance of it. Not only is not a copy another true thing besides the original, but it is the opposite of the true thing (b5) because only its original is the thing genuinely and being a copy is being the thing only untruly. The word ἐοικὸς is opposed to ὄντως ὄν in the next line (240b7): 'So you are saying that that which is like (ἐοικὸς) is not really that which is (οὐκ ὄντως [οὐκ] ὄν)'. But still a copy 'is in a way (ἔστι γε μήν πως)' (b9). While it is not really what it is its resemblance, it has its own being and reality because it really is a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως) (b11). The Stranger asks: -/- So it is not really what is (οὐκ ὄν ἄρα [οὐκ] ὄντως ἐστὶν) but it really is what we call a likeness (ὄντως ἣν λέγομεν εἰκόνα)? (b12-13) -/- This is Plato’s innovative ontological solution to the problem of not being. Theaetetus’ answer confirms this: 'Maybe that which is not is woven together with that which is' (c1-2). Therefore, a copy neither is what really is nor is not-being but only is what in a way is. Thanks to the ontological status of a copy, the third status intermediate between being and not being is brought forth. The essence of an image, in Kohnke’s words, does not consist 'solely in the negation of what is genuine and has real being' because otherwise 'it would be an ὄντως οὐκ ὄν,essentially and really a not being' (1957, 37). The characteristics of a copy can be summed up as folows: i) A copy is a copy by referring to a true thing (πρὸς τἀληθινὸν). ii) A copy is different from that of which it is a copy (ἕτερον). iii) A copy is not itself a true thing (ἀληθινόν) as that of which it is a copy but only that which is like it (ἐοικὸς). iv) It is not really that which really is (ὄντως ὄν) but only really a likeness (εἰκων ὄντως). The conclusion is that: v) A copy in a way (πως) is that means it both is and in not, the product of interweaving being with not being. This leads to the refutation of father Parmenides’ principle, accepting that 'that which is not somehow is (τό τε μὴ ὄν ὡς ἔστι)' and 'that which is, somehow is not (τό ὄν ὡς οὐκ ἔστι) (241d5-7). Besides copies and likenesses (εἰκόνων), we have also imitations (μιμημάτων) and appearances (φαντασμάτων) as the subjects of this new kind of being and thus false belief (241e3). In Timaeus, the world of becoming which cannot correctly be called and thus we have to call it "what is such" (τὸ τοιου̑τον) (49e5) or "what is altogether such" (τὸ διἀ παντὸς τοιου̑τον) (e6-7), consists solely of imitations (μιμημάτα) (50c5) which are identifiable only by the things that they are their imitations. The word τοιου̑τον which had been used to determine the situation of a copy in respect of its original, now becomes the definition of the world of becoming in which everything is an image of another thing, a Being, that stays always the same and is different and separated from its image. Cherniss, in my view rightly, draws attention to the very important point about the ontological status of an image that can at the same time be considered a criticism of the relational theory. What we are being said in Timaeus, he thinks,cannot be explained by saying that an image is not self-related and making its being relational. What is crucial about an image is that it 'stands for something, refers to something, means something and this meaning the image has not independently as its own but only in reference to something else apart from it' (1998, 296). This function finds its best explanation in the theory we are to suggest in the following. 3. πολλαχῶς ἔστι The best way to understand the ontological status of an image in Plato is to see first how his most clever pupil, Aristotle, resolved the same problem that Plato brought his theory of image for its sake. Aristotle’s theory of pollachos legetai is a brilliant and, at the same time, deviated version of Plato’s theory that is able, however, to help us read Plato in a better way. We discuss Aristotle’s theory to reach to a full understanding of Plato’s theory because it is, firstly, constructed in Aristotle in a more clear way and, secondly, it can also be taken as an evidence that our reading of Plato is legitimate. The phrase τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, a so much repeated phrase in Aristotle’s works, is his resolution for some of the ontological problems of his predecessors all treating being as if it has only one sense. Aristotle is right in his criticism of the philosophical tradition specially Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato since all did presuppose only one sense for being and his theory is, thus, a creative and revolutionary solution for many problems that all the past philosophers were stuck in. But it is at the same time somehow a borrowed theory. As we will discuss, both the structure of the doctrine and the problems it tries to resolve are the same as Plato’s doctrine (and even is comparable in its phraseology) though it is in Aristotle, as can be expected, a more clear and better structured doctrine. 1) Associated with the theory of pros hen and the theory of substance, the theory of several senses of being provides a structure which, I insist, is the best guide to understand Plato’s theory of Being in Sophist, Timeaus and Republic. a) Although the theory of pollachos legetai is not necessarily based on the theory of pros hen, they become tightly interdependent about being: -/- Being is said in many ways/senses (τὸ δὲ ὄν λέγεται μὲν πολλαχῶς) but by reference to one (πρὸς ἕν) [way/sense] and one kind of nature (μίαν τινὰ φύσιν). (Metaphysics 1003a33-34) -/- The doctrine of pros hen which is Aristotle’s initiative third alternative besides the homonymous and synonymous application of words, is primarily a linguistic theory that tries to provide a new theory to explain the different implementations of the same word. The pros hen implementation of being is to provide an alternative for the theory of the synonymous (in Plato: homonymous) implementation of being which says being is said in one sense (kath hen) (1060b 32-33). That both the pros hen and the kath hen implementation of a word has one thing (hen) as what is common, makes them in opposition to the homonymous implementation which does not consider anything in common. Whereas both pros hen and kath hen assume a common nature, with which all the implementations of the word have some kind of relation, their difference is that while kath hen takes all the implementations of the word as the same with the common nature, pros hen makes them different. Substance is called πρῶτον ὄν because it is said to be primarily: -/- For as is (τὸ ἔστιν) is predicated of all things, not however in the same way (οὐχ ὁμοίως) but of one sort of thing primarily and of others in a secondary way. So too τὸτί ἐστιν belongs simply (ἁπλῶς) to substance but in a limited sense (πῶς) to the others [other categories] (1030a21-23). -/- The word ἁπλῶς standing against κατὰ συμβεβηκός tries to make substance different from the accidents. When we are being said that τὸ ὄν πολλαχῶς λέγεται, it means that only the substance that is simply (ἁπλῶς) the ἕν, the common nature, τὸὄν. When we use the word 'being' about a substance, the being is said differently from when we use 'being' about an accident. The distinction between the substance and the other categories is a distinction between what simply is said to be and what only with reference to (pros) the substance is said to be. The doctrine of pros hen, changing kath hen to pros hen in respect of to on, makes a distinction that wants to show that while there is a kind of implementing the word being that is simply being, there is another kind which is called being only by reference to that which is simply being. In the doctrine of pros hen it is not so that all the things that are said to be are only by reference to a common one thing, but that while one thing is called being because it is that thing itself, the other things are called so without being that thing itself but only by referring to it. At the very beginning of book Γ, it is said that: -/- Being is said in many senses but all refer to one arche. Some things are said to be because they are substances, others because they are affections of substances, others because they are a process towards substances or destructions or privations or qualities of substances … (1003b5-9, cf. 1028a18-20) -/- Substance is what really is said to be and all other things that are said to be are said only in favor of it. This difference of substance from all other senses of being is what is, I believe, primarily aimed in Aristotle’s interrelated theories of pollachos legetai,pros hen and the theory of substance. b) The difference of the implementation of being in the case of substance and the accidents goes so deep that while substance is considered as the real being, the accidents are almost not being. An accident is a mere name (Metaphysics 1026b13-14) and is obviously akin to not being (b21). Aristotle adds that Plato was 'in a sense not wrong' saying that sophists deal with not being (τὸ μὴ ὄν) because the arguments of sophists are, above all, about the accidental (1026b13-16). At the beginning of book , he says about quality and quantity (which look to be more of a being than other accidents) that they are not existent (οὐδ̕ ὄντα ὡς εἰπεῖν) in an unqualified sense (ἁπλῶς) (1069a21-22). The two above-mentioned points, Aristotle’s (a) interwoven theories of pollachos legetai, pros hen and the theory of substance and (b) taking accidents almost as not being, comparedwith substance, brings forth a structure that I shall call Pollachos Legetai (with capital first letters). What is of the highest importance in this structure for me is the difference of substance from accidents and the kind of relation which is settled between them. There is a substance that without any qualification is said to be and the accidents that are said to be only by reference (pros) to it. Adding Aristotle’s point about accidents that they are nearly not being to this relation and difference, we can obviously see how much this structure is close to Plato’s original-copy ontology. We spoke of the relation of being and difference in Plato’s model and the way Plato construes the being of a copy. A copy is a copy only by referring to (pros) a model; it is different from (ἕτερον) that of which it is a copy; it is not itself a true thing as its model and not really that which is (ὄντως ὄν) but only is in a way (πῶς). If we behold the difference of substance and accident in the context of the theory of pollachos legetai and pros hen, we can observe its fundamental similarity with Plato’s original-copy theory in its structure. Allen draws attention to the fact that the relation between Forms and particulars in Plato’s original-copy model is 'something intermediate between univocity and full equivocity' (1998, 70, n. 24) and the same as what Aristotle calls it pros hen (ibid). What made us compare the two structures was not, of course, the complete similarity of two structures (we have to agree with many possible differences of the two theories) but exactly the specific relation between an original and its copy on the one hand, and a substance and its accident on the other hand. As substance and accident do not share a common character and the substance -accident model hints that they stand in a certain relation, there is no common character between the original and copy in Plato’s model as well. Furthermore, their similarity is not confined to their structure only; they are also aimed to solve the same problem. The central point of the theory is that all the predecessors took being in one sense and this was their weakness point. Besides the mentioned above passages about the relation of pollachos legetai and presocratics’, as well as Plato’s, ontology, the relation of the theory with the problem of not being is clear in several passages. In Metaphysics, it is said: 'Being is then said in many senses… It is for this reason that we say even of not being that it is not being' (1003b5-10). Discussing the accidental sense of being, Aristotle points that it is in the accidental way that we say, for example, that not-white is because that of which it is an accident is (1017a18-19, cf. 1069a22-24). We mentioned that he thought Plato was right saying that sophistic deals with not being because sophistic deals with accidental, which is somehow not being (1026b14-16). Plato turned sophistic not-being to what both is and is not and Aristotle to what accidentally is said to be. What helps Aristotle to resolve the problem of not being is his distinction between ἁπλῶς and κατὰ σθμβεβηκός. Aristotle’s "qua" (ᾕ) which is directly linked with his distinction between καθ’ αὑτο λέγεται and κατὰ συμβεβηκός λέγεται, is used to resolve the old problem of coming to be out of not being (Physics 191b4-10). He strictly asserts that his predecessors could not solve the problem because they failed to observe the distinction of "qua itself" from "qua another thing" (b10-13). He then continues: -/- We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said simply (ἁπλως) to come from not being (μὴὄντος). But nevertheless we maintain that a thing may come to be from not being in an accidental way (κατὰ συμβεβηκός). For from privation which ὅ ἐστι καθ’ αὑτο μὴ ὄν, nothing can become. (Phy. 191b13-16, cf. b19-25) . (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)

"Nous sommes en guerre", déclare au soir du 13 novembre 2015 le président de la République. Mais quelle est cette guerre au juste? La contre-histoire du capitalisme que nous proposons ici vise à recouvrer la réalité des guerres qui nous sont infligées et déniées : non pas la guerre idéale des philosophes, mais les guerres de classe, de race, de sexe ou de genre, les guerres de civilisation et environnementales, les guerres de subjectivité qui font rage au sein des populations (...) et constituent le moteur secret de la gouvern731933ementalité libérale. En nommant l'ennemi (le réfugié, le migrant, le musulman), les nouveaux fascismes établissent leur hégémonie sur les processus de subjectivation politique réduits à des mots d'ordre racistes, sexistes, xénophobes qui attisent la guerre entre les pauvres et entretiennent la philosophie de guerre totale du néolibéralisme. Parce que la guerre et le fascisme sont le refoulé de la pensée post-68, nous n'avons pas seulement lu l'histoire du capital à travers la guerre, mais également cette dernière à travers l'étrange révolution de 68 qui seule rend possible le passage de la guerre aux lierres - et de celles-ci à la construction de nouvelles machines de guerre contre la financiarisation contemporaine. Il s'agit donc de pousser la "pensée 68" au-delà de ses propres limites et de la réorienter vers une nouvelle pragmatique des luttes, en prise sur la guerre continuée du Capital. C'est dire qu'il s'agit surtout de nous préparer à ces batailles que nous devons mener si nous ne voulons pas être toujours vaincus."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Strangeness of AlterityJolanta Saldukaitytė (bio)The problem of strangeness can be approached from different angles: aesthetic, sociological, psychological, cultural, etc. Strangeness can be found as well in the strangeness of experience: I as stranger to myself, or the strange place I find myself, or the strange people who surround me. These would enable us to uncover the uncanny (Freud, Heidegger), or discuss sociological notions of alienation (Marx) or the (...) aesthetic method of ostranienie (Shklovsky, Brecht), just to mention a few additional accounts of strangeness. The goal of the present essay, however, is not to show various forms and aspects of strangeness, horizontally, as it were, but to address the very meaning of strangeness, intensively or vertically. Even more specifically, the present essay discusses the strange as at once that which comes from the outside and as that which addresses me.In the first part, I present a general notion of strangeness, mainly concentrating on strangeness as what is peculiar or weird. Some studies by Bernhard Waldenfels will be considered here. In the second part, the problem of strangeness is examined in the context of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, primarily in terms of his notion of personal otherness and the question of the link between strangeness and such [End Page 95] alterity. For the latter point of view, juxtaposing the difference and relatedness of strangeness and Levinasian alterity, we ask the question of if and of how alterity is strange.Relative StrangenessFirst let us clarify what we usually or generally call strange. No doubt different languages uncover slightly different aspects, but in most cases in searching for the strange we bring up similar images: distant, unseen places — something like the lands of Gulliver’s Travels — with their unusual inhabitants and weird customs or distant times, past and future, with their unfamiliar communities and peculiar customs. We may even conjure aliens from undiscovered galaxies or fantastical creatures and monsters — unicorns, nymphs, vampires, dragons — or unusual and peculiar animals — a platypus, albino cave-dwelling fish, elephants. Perhaps unexplained earth phenomena, like Stonehenge, or seemingly paranormal events that are the inspiration for cults and imagination. We may encounter David Lynch’s Elephant Man or Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, or conjure the holy fool, madmen, the third little brother fool Ivan from the European fairytale, or even Prince Myshkin of Dostoyevsky. No doubt all these images do not coincide or cohere. They unveil various different aspects of strangeness: on one hand, we see that strangeness belongs to the realm of the imaginary while, on the other hand, it is part of the world; or, one may say, the latter has existence, or a more stable existence, while the former does not. What gives them a commonality, however, is that in each instance there is some disruption of order, of discourse, a shaking of the established conception of the world and knowledge, going beyond what is familiar, ordinary, and normal. In each case, there is something unusual, weird, peculiar. In each case, there is a putting into question of our aesthetical sensibilities, moral norms or practices, and epistemological knowledge. In other words, using Levinas’s vocabulary, this kind of the strange is a rupture in [End Page 96] the discourse of totality. By “totality” here we understand universalizing order, system, a way of thinking that does not allow otherness, exteriority, anomaly, differences, or, in some sense, strangeness. The univocal discourse of totality, of coherence and consistency without exception, is a discourse of violence because it must suppress even the possibility of ruptures in continuity: the other must be reduced to the same. Totality allows nothing discontinuous: everything must have a place, within, a part, not an exception.The strange as the weird and peculiar, however, opens such a closed universe to discontinuity, variety, and heteronomy. According to Waldenfels, who has developed a phenomenology of the alien/strange with careful precision, strange as weird and peculiar applies to the order of things, to various forms of life and to forms of experience.1 Strangeness understood as difference in kind, as the peculiar, according to Waldenfels, might appear in various forms: (1) everyday strangeness that belongs to or occurs within... (shrink)