Schofield’s Essay may be regarded as a mixture of two essays. One is about mind and matter according to Anaxagoras. It is excellent. The other is about Anaxagoras the dogmatist. It is just about worthless. Happily, the good predominates; and the mixture is such that one can take the good without the bad. Sadly, the bad predominates in the beginning, so that one finds, at first, little reason to read on.

How is it possible that a thing singled out not exist? How is it possible that two things singled out be numerically identical? How is one to understand the relationship between, say, a quality of a thing and what this quality is? And how is one to understand the relation between this quality and the thing which happens to be thus qualified? Trying to answer these four questions involves investigation of the four senses of the verb "to be," or of (...) the concepts of existence, identity, essential and accidental predication. Butchvarov’s thesis is that these four questions admit of a common answer, that the cornerstone of this comprehensive theory is an answer to the second question, and that this crucial answer depends on making some such distinction as his between "objects" and "entities." The bare bones of his argument are these: We commonly make statements of the form "a is b" where "a" and "b" are used referringly. A "material identity" statement of this form may be true. If true, it is about one thing; yet what it is about appears to be distinct things. This distinctness is not a real distinction among existents, nor does it arise solely or primarily from features of language. Butchvarov’s account is based on a distinction "of reason" between objects and entities. An entity is an existent, a constituent of the world. An object is whatever can be singled out once, and only once, in perception or imagination or in "thought". Entities as such cannot be singled out, yet they may be recognized through applications of a conceptual apparatus to objects. A material identity statement, then, states that two objects are one entity. If true, it is both about two distinct objects and about the one entity which each is. When two objects are judged to be one entity, then indiscernibility is enforced. Seeming counterexamples to the indiscernibility of identicals are explained in terms of the distinction between objects and entities. Though some applications of the concept of identity are relative to sortal characteristics, others are not. The latter are prior to the former. These primary judgments constitute the backbone of "thought" and discourse. They are governed by impersonal, nonhuman "paradigms." There are entities, of course; and there are objects, though as objects none exists. Some objects are entities, some are not. The notion of existence, like the notion of identity in its material role, is then a principle of classification, a concept. Butchvarov examines nine objections to this claim, and elaborates his distinction between objects and entities. He concludes that identifiability, hence indefinite reidentifiability, is the logically sufficient condition of applicability of the concept of existence. A statement such as "Socrates is white" is a disguised conjunction, viz., "Socrates has this color, and this color is white." The second conjunct is an "essential" statement; it says of an object singled out that it is a certain entity; or, to allow for essences of nonexistent objects, it states what entity the object would be were it an entity. An essential statement is not a material identity statement, for only one of its terms is used referringly. The essence of an object is not a property of it, for it is what the object is or would be. Whereas logically prior consciousness of objects is intentional and non-conceptual, consciousness of entities is conceptual and nonintentional; it consists in recognizing that a thing can be identified by oneself or by others. What is accidentally white, say, cannot be a material substance or bare particular; therefore it is a "cluster" of qualities. The Resemblance Theory, according to which qualities are particulars, is not a coherent alternative to the Identity Theory; therefore the qualities an individual happens to have are themselves universals. The Bradleyan critique of ontological atomism is cogent; therefore an individual is a cluster of qualities each of which depends for its "formal identity" on its being together with the rest. An individual’s having qualities is then to be understood in terms of the necessary togetherness of the qualities constitutive of it. Since in addition each of these qualities is essentially a universal, and specific universals are contingently coinstantiated, the predication in question is properly regarded as accidental. The problem of identifying quality-clusters through space and time is discussed. (shrink)

It seems that the Timaeus is independent of the Critias, that the Critias is incomplete, and that the two dialogues are parts of a tetralogy contemplated but not completed by Plato. As Welliver remarks, most commentators have taken these seeming facts to be facts; some have proffered outlines of the supposed tetralogy; some have explained its supposed incompleteness by making Plato old and weary. Welliver believes that the Timaeus-Critias is a complete dramatic work, and most of his book represents an (...) attempt to justify this belief. (shrink)

A result of a conference on Hellenistic philosophy held at Oxford in 1978. Most of its eleven chapters are indeed about Hellenistic epistemology. All are excellent.

The sixth volume in the Melbourne International Philosophy Series, this book has two principal parts. The first is about criteria of identity for material objects. The second is about personal identity.

Dombrowski's major aim is the positive one of showing that Plato had a philosophy of history, and of exhibiting its content. His minor aim is the negative one of showing that Karl Popper's interpretation of that philosophy is grossly mistaken.

Miller begins by contrasting two ways of regarding Plato’s Statesman. According to "the standard view," this late work is more a treatise than a dialogue. Here Plato’s doctrinal intent clearly overwhelmed his flair for dramatic invention. His positive teaching is presented by a stranger; Socrates the questioner is given a minor role. According to Miller, on the other hand, the Statesman is no less than any other Platonic dialogue a unity whose form and content, dramatic situation and argument, communicative function (...) and "philosophic substance," are internally related. Furthermore, the doctrine it presents is adequately understood only if one regards it both as a mean between truth and ignorance about what is in question and as a means to the truth still in question. The dialogue’s "surface" and "subsurface" content, too, are internally related. (shrink)

The title of McClain’s book suggests that its theme is Plato’s seeming Pythagoreanism; yet it contains no commentary on the Philebus or the Phaedo. Its subtitle suggests that the theme is rather the five mathematical disciplines which may constitute a propaedeutic to dialectic ; yet it contains almost no account of the first four, and little account of the fifth as propaedeutic in this way. McClain’s book is rather an "adventure in musical imagination" whose proximate aim is a detailed and (...) coherent display of Plato’s musical imagination. (shrink)