The question of what constitutions should do is deeply connected to what constitutions are. In the American founding conception, a constitution was a fundamental law, hierarchically superior to the decisions of the legislature, and intended to act as a restraint on legislative action. Despite the massive gulf between the ancient Greeks and the Americans, classical Athens offers an important lesson about how the failure to recognize fundamental laws can lead to catastrophic consequences. The evidence suggests that the Athenians understood the (...) need for conceptual, procedural, and institutional distinctions between the fundamental laws and the more specific decrees of the governing institutions. The Athenian and American experiences also suggest that certain philosophical positions conditioned their understanding of their fundamental laws, and guided the practices that followed from that understanding. (shrink)

In comparison to Aristotle, Plato's general understanding of law receives little attention in legal theory, due in part to ongoing perceptions of him as a mystic or a totalitarian. However, some of the critical or communitarian themes that have guided theorists since Aristotle find strong expression in Plato's work. More than any thinker until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Plato rejects the rank individualism and self-interest which, in his view, emerge from democratic legal culture. He rejects schisms between legal norms (...) and community values, institutional separation of law from morals, intricate regimes of legislation and adjudication, and a culture of rampant litigation. He rejects the alienation of individuals, from each other and from their communities, that is so easily bred within highly complex political and legal systems. An understanding of his approach to some of the classic questions of legal theory provides insight not only into some central ideas of his own thought, but also into the roots of critical and communitarian critiques of law. (shrink)

At Sophist 253d-e the Eleatic Visitor offers a notoriously obscure description of the fields of one-and-many that the dialectician “adequately discerns.” Against the readings of Stenzel, Cornford, Sayre, and Gomez-Lobo, I propose an interpretation of that passage that takes into account the trilogy of Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman as its context. The key steps are to respond to the irony of Socrates’ refutations at the end of the Theaetetus by reinterpreting the last two senses of logos as directed to forms and to recognize (...) their correlation with the two different modes of diairesis practiced by the Eleatic Visitor. These steps position us to recognize in the Visitor’s remarks at Sophist 253d-e a schematic description of the two kinds of eidetic field that the two modes of diairesis trace. (shrink)

Research on the capacity to understand others' minds has tended to focus on representations ofbeliefs,which are widely taken to be among the most central and basic theory of mind representations. Representations ofknowledge, by contrast, have received comparatively little attention and have often been understood as depending on prior representations of belief. After all, how could one represent someone as knowing something if one does not even represent them as believing it? Drawing on a wide range of methods across cognitive science, (...) we ask whether belief or knowledge is the more basic kind of representation. The evidence indicates that nonhuman primates attribute knowledge but not belief, that knowledge representations arise earlier in human development than belief representations, that the capacity to represent knowledge may remain intact in patient populations even when belief representation is disrupted, that knowledge (but not belief) attributions are likely automatic, and that explicit knowledge attributions are made more quickly than equivalent belief attributions. Critically, the theory of mind representations uncovered by these various methods exhibits a set of signature features clearly indicative of knowledge: they are not modality-specific, they are factive, they are not just true belief, and they allow for representations of egocentric ignorance. We argue that these signature features elucidate the primary function of knowledge representation: facilitating learning from others about the external world. This suggests a new way of understanding theory of mind – one that is focused on understanding others' minds in relation to the actual world, rather than independent from it. (shrink)

Here I interpret a central passage in Plato's Sophist by focusing on understudied elements that provide insight into the fit of the dialogue's parts and the Sophist-Statesman diptych as a whole. I argue that the Eleatic Stranger's account of what the dialectician "adequately views" at Sophist 253d1-e3 involves both division and the communion of ontological kinds, not just one or the other as has been typically argued. I also consider other key passages and the turn throughout the dialogue from imagistic (...) opining toward noetic understanding. (shrink)

In the language of second-order logic, first- and second-order variables are distinguished syntactically and cannot be grammatically substituted. According to a prominent argument for the deployment of these languages, these substitution failures are necessary to block the derivation of paradoxes that result from attempts to generalize over predicate interpretations. I first examine previous approaches which interpret second-order sentences using expressions of natural language and argue that these approaches undermine these syntactic restrictions. I then examine Williamson’s primitivist approach according to which (...) second-order sentences are not offered readings in a previously understood language. I argue that the syntactic restrictions alone do not block the derivation of the paradox, unless they are backed by a principled reason that the language cannot be expanded to allow the grammatical substitution of first- and second- order variables. I argue that there is neither a syntactic nor a semantic principle that prohibits such an expansion. (shrink)

Ignorance is commonly assumed to be a lack of knowledge in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. I challenge that assumption. In the Protagoras, ignorance is conceived to be a substantive, structural psychic flaw—the soul’s domination by inferior elements that are by nature fit to be ruled. Ignorant people are characterized by both false beliefs about evaluative matters in specific situations and an enduring deception about their own psychic conditions. On my interpretation, akrasia, moral vices, and epistemic vices are products or forms of (...) ignorance, and a person who lacks knowledge is not necessarily ignorant. (shrink)

In the Gorgias, Socrates claims that painful bodily punishment like flogging can improve certain wrongdoers. I argue that we can take Socrates’ endorsement seriously, even on the standard interpretation of Socratic motivational intellectualism, according to which there are no non-rational desires. I propose that flogging can epistemically improve certain wrongdoers by communicating that wrongdoing is bad for oneself. In certain cases, this belief cannot be communicated effectively through philosophical dialogue.

The word excellence is derived from the Latin word excellentia, and it means the quality of being extremely good. Human excellences could be defined as those human qualities that make a person outstanding, exceptional, superior, or, in one word, the best of one's kind in any field of human activities. Frequently, it is synonymously used with the word virtue, narrowly meaning moral excellence.

In the chapter on ‘Plato and Aristotle’ of theLectures on the History of PhilosophyHegel praises Aristotle's work for displaying a principle of ‘pure subjectivity’ in a manner that he considers to be largely absent from the Platoniccorpus:In general, Platonic thinking [das Platonische] represents objectivity, but it lacks a principle of life, a principle of subjectivity; and this principle […], not in the sense of a contingent, merely particular subjectivity, but in the sense of pure subjectivity, is proper to Aristotle. Elsewhere, (...) Hegel refers to Aristotelian conceptions of organic life and of thinking as to the earliest speculative insights of Western philosophy. In § 378 of theEncyclopaedia he calls theDe Anima‘the best or even only work of speculative interest ever written on the philosophy of spirit’. In yet other places, however, Hegel attributes at least ‘intuitive’ forms of speculation to Plato as well.In a preliminary way, a 'speculative relation’ in Hegel's acceptation is instantiated by a subject's theoretical and practical relation to itself — that is, theoretical self-knowing and practical self-will. ‘Speculative’ is any concept which grasps as a unity what other kinds of cognition keep asunder: for example, the subjective and objective dimensions of a phenomenon or state of affairs. But even independently of a detailed analysis of what ‘the speculative’ entails, one is struck by the apparent inconsistency of these claims regarding Plato or Aristotle with Hegel's overall view of the logical necessity of philosophy's historical development. This view is synthetically expressed in the 1820 Introduction to these sameLectures. (shrink)

New work is used as a general term to summarize professional developments in contemporary work style, structure and modus of organizations and society—this means collaborative work and flexible working hours on individual levels, and flat hierarchies and participatory decision-making on organizational levels. Contemporary corporations strive to orient toward the concept of new work to keep up with stakeholder demands, for instance in their branding strategies as an employer. However, studies on organizational practices indicate that alongside explicit values and agendas, organizations (...) tend to slyly exert power to secure their interests. Constructive dismissal is one such instance where contractually protected employees are made to resign their positions because the work environment is altered to become increasingly unbearable. This research analyzes two case studies to explicate routine dismissal procedures at the managerial level in two internationally operating German corporations. Both corporations explicitly profile as new work environments and are structured according to democratic principles including flat hierarchies, feature institutionalized diversity management including control committees for equal opportunities, and emphasize values such as workplace dignity, employee agency, and equality. The data contain long-term participatory observation collected over a 6-month period from two managers of 5 and 8 years of experience in managerial duties. The content analysis of data reveals characteristics of everyday processes in these organizations especially in terminating managers. The findings are presented as the ‘model of the silent dismissal,’ containing seven types of managerial termination carried out by implicit power and symbolic conventions that circumvent subject participation and litigation in an effortless manner. After exposing the model’s mechanisms, we turn to discuss its meaning for both terminated and surviving subjects against a critical theoretical framework of neoliberalism, democracy, and power. (shrink)

This article seeks to expose some of the implications of certain versions of pacifism for matters of criminal punishment, arguing that the plausibility of these versions of pacifism depend on the extent to which their implicit denials of certain central punishment-related concepts are themselves reasonable.

A lot of scholarly attention has been given to Aristotle’s account of how and why animals are capable of moving themselves. But no one has focused on the question, whether self-change is possible in plants on Aristotle’s account. I first give some context and explain why this topic is worth exploring. I then turn to Aristotle’s conditions for self-change given in Physics VIII.4, where he argues that the natural motion of the elements does not count as self-motion. I apply those (...) conditions to natural change in plants. Then I explore the reasons for and consequences of Aristotle’s argument that plants are incapable of sensation. I argue that for Aristotle plants cannot possess the directing faculties for self-change, namely, desire and phantasia. My goal is to show why growth, metabolism, and reproduction in plants would not count as self-change for Aristotle, despite many of these natural changes appearing as autonomous as the analogous changes in animals. This sheds light on how, for Aristotle, self-change differs from natural change. (shrink)

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

When I raise my arm, what makes it the case that my arm's going up is an instance of my raising my arm? In this paper, I discuss Aristotle's answer to this question. His view, I argue, is that my arm's going up counts as my raising my arm just in case it is an exercise of a certain kind of causal power of mine. I show that this view differs in an interesting way both from the Davidsonian ‘standard causal (...) account’ of action and from accounts put forward by recent critics of Davidson, such as Hornsby, Alvarez and Hyman. (shrink)

A summary of The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States is presented: I claim that a convincing account of the emotions requires a rethink of how the mind as a whole is structured. I provide this reconceptualization by introducing a fundamental type of mental concept called “valent representation" and then systematically elaborating this fundamental type in stages. In this way, accounts are provided of the various sorts of affective states ranging from pains and pleasures to character traits.

Scientific realism does not view theoretical terms as mere instruments of experimental predictions; it grants referential status to natural kind terms with 'epistemic access' and view scientific theories and terms as corresponding to physical phenomena and entities which exist independently of observation, and as thereby being the source of objective -approximate and not absolute- knowledge of the physical realm. As a result, scientific realism is accused of ontologising the unobservables. Against this charge, scientific realism posits the idea of the dialectical (...) relation between theoretical terms referring to the unobservables and scientific methods. The second argument made by realism is the ‘no miracle’ thesis. These arguments stand challenged by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The aim of the paper is to examine the relevance of the two arguments of scientific realism in countering the idea that the existence of quantum states in the microphysical world renders realism obsolete. (shrink)

Given that it seems uncontroversial that Socrates displays considerable contempt towards rhetoric in theGorgias,the title of this paper might strike one as an oxymoron. Indeed, a reading of the text has more than once encouraged scholars to posit an Opposition between the elenctic procedures championed by Socrates and the rhetorical procedures of his interlocutors. At least three features have been highlighted that seem to indicate this contrast:1.the Socratic interest in short questions and answers versus his interlocutors’ use of long speeches;2.the (...) Socratic interest in truth regardless of the opinion of the many, the latter seeming an important concern of the rhetorician;3.the supposed Socratic appeal to the intellectual powers of the interlocutor, which is usually contrasted with the appeal to the emotions which is distinctive of rhetoric. (shrink)

I argue that Plato believes that the soul must be both the principle of motion and the subject of cognition because it moves things specifically by means of its thoughts. I begin by arguing that the soul moves things by means of such acts as examination and deliberation, and that this view is developed in response to Anaxagoras. I then argue that every kind of soul enjoys a kind of cognition, with even plant souls having a form of Aristotelian discrimination (...) (krisis), and that there is therefore no completely unintelligent, evil soul in the cosmos that can explain disorderly motions; as a result, the soul is not the principle of all motion but only motion in the cosmos after it has been ordered by the Demiurge. (shrink)

This article is detective work, not philosophy. J. S. Mill's Autobiography records that at the age of seven he read, in Greek, ‘the first six dialogues of Plato, from the Euthyphron to the Theaetetus inclusive’. Which were the other dialogues? On the arrangement common today, it would be Crito, Apology, Phaedo, Cratylus. On the arrangement common then, Theages and Erastai replace Cratylus, which makes seven dialogues. I show that this must be the answer by the evidence of James Mill's commonplace (...) books and his writings on Plato. These reveal which collected edition of Plato he owned and which he would want to own. Conditions for studying Plato in the original were much harder than we are used to. The inquiry highlights both the ideological purity of the education James Mill designed for his son, and the difficulties he faced in realizing his plan. (shrink)

Despite its many strengths, Engelhardt’s After God displays two surprising features: an affinity for voluntaristic ethics and a tendency to oppose Eastern Orthodoxy to philosophy. Neither of these is in keeping with the mainstream of Eastern Orthodox tradition. Here, I offer a modest corrective. I begin with the figure of Socrates as presented in the Apology and Phaedo, highlighting the role that faith plays for Socrates and the reasons why he was widely admired by the early Church. I then describe (...) more broadly the attitude of the Greek Church Fathers to philosophy, showing that, although they were cautious of its potential errors, they nonetheless embraced the ideal of philosophy as a way of life dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. For many, in fact, Christianity is itself simply the true philosophy, an attitude that led many of the most eminent patristic and Byzantine theologians to draw extensively on philosophical sources. Finally, I discuss the Euthyphro dilemma, contrasting the voluntaristic approach favored by Engelhardt with the Platonic approach adopted by the mainstream of Orthodox tradition. (shrink)

I begin by retracing an argument from Aristotle for final causes in science. Then, I advance this ancient thought, and defend an argument for a stronger conclusion: that no scientific explanation can succeed, if Naturalism is true. The argument goes like this: (1) Any scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity. Next, I argue that (2) any explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves no element that calls out for explanation but lacks (...) one. From (1) and (2) it follows that (3) a scientific explanation can be successful only if it crucially involves a natural regularity, and this regularity does not call out for explanation while lacking one. I then argue that (4) if Naturalism is true, then all natural regularities call out for explanation but lack them. From (3) and (4) it follows that (5) if Naturalism is true, then no scientific explanation can be successful. If you believe that scientific explanation can be (indeed, often has been) successful, as I do, then this is a reason to reject Naturalism. (shrink)

This paper attempts to determine what laws’ most fundamental normative property is for Plato. After examining the Hippias Major and the pseudo-Platonic Minos, I argue that in the Laws this property is correctness (orthotês) which is understood as maximizing the citizens’ happiness. I argue that laws failing to do so are defective as laws because they’re not partially grounded in the relevant ethical facts and that Plato is thus a natural law theorist. The last section provides further justification for the (...) claim that laws failing the correctness criterion are defective as laws by appealing to Plato’s understanding of practical rationality. (shrink)

Socrates’ official answer to Meno’s question about the value of knowledge, near the end of Plato’s Meno, is that knowledge is stable. I argue that both the answer and the question have been widely misunderstood. The question has been taken to be why knowing at a time is better than true belief at that time, and Socrates’ answer has been taken to point to the greater persistence of knowledge over time. I argue instead that, given the broader context of the (...) question and answer in the Meno, together with what Plato has to say about stability elsewhere, Meno’s question is better understood as a more difficult question – and Socrates’ answer as a good solution to it. This also involves arguing that Socrates’ analogy to the statues of Daedalus is not intended as the simple illustration of Socrates’ official answer for which commentators have taken it. (shrink)

The four frescoes by Raphael in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Museum visually embody close approximations of several numerical ratios that are of deep significance in the material grounding of musical harmonies in the physics of natural harmonics. Of special significance is the Pythagorean musical frequency ratio of 9:8, the whole tone interval, which in Plato's Timaeus is called the epogdoôn.

Plato’s demiurge makes a series of questionable decisions in creating the world. Most notoriously, he endeavors to replicate, to the extent possible, some of the features that his model possesses just insofar as it is a Form. This has provoked the colorful complaint that the demiurge is as raving mad as a general contractor who constructs a house of vellum to better realize the architect’s vellum plans (Keyt 1971). The present paper considers the sanity of the demiurge’s reasoning in light (...) of Timaeus 32c5-33b1, where he invokes considerations of wholeness, completeness, uniqueness, and eternality in deciding to build the body of the world from all of each of the simple bodies. Since the passage makes no appeal to the demiurge’s intelligible model, one can mine it for indications of the value that the demiurge takes those features to have independent of mimetic goals. I argue that, for Plato, those features are intrinsically good-making and, thus, that it is not only appropriate for them to characterize Forms qua Forms but also that it is appropriate for the demiurge to aim at replicating them, to the extent possible, in his creation. In particular, I argue that the demiurge’s success in instilling a circumscribed version of each feature in his creation helps to qualify it as a genuine being despite the fact that it comes to be. (shrink)

In this manuscript I explore an example of an over-privileged white woman who encounters two young Black men in a parking garage stairwell. Two related axioms are central to the oppressive script that lies before these subjects: the hetero-patriarchal axiom that women are not safe alone at night and the racist axiom that Black men, especially young ones, are dangerous. These axioms are intended to ensure a practical conclusion—white women and Black men are supposed to avoid each other—thereby conferring legitimacy (...) on the white male, hetero-patriarchal order. If this is a performance of oppression, we must ask, what is the performance of freedom? Freedom, I argue, is the practice of allowing and encouraging a subject's multiple selves to interact so that one may devise and pursue courses of action that have been strategically hidden by systems of domination designed to cultivate pliant agency. My project augments accounts of multiplicitous subjectivity wherein our multiple social worlds socially constitute persons as both oppressor and oppressed, empowered and pliant. The practice of freedom conceived here acknowledges multiplicity while positioning us to seek feminist and antiracist futures that are not configured by oppression. (shrink)

Platonic arguments often have premises of a particular form which is misunderstood. These sentences look like universal generalizations, but in fact involve an implicit qua phrase which makes them a fundamentally different kind of predication. Such general implicit redoubled qua predications (girqps) are not an expression of Plato's proprietary views; they are also very common in everyday discourse. Seeing how they work in Plato can help us to understand them.

This paper argues that international citizens can retain their obligations to past states and societies, and that this obligation has implications for their state of residence. While some people remain in the same state for their entire lives, international individuals generate relationships with more than one state. The paper presents the argument that individuals are obligated to their state for at least one reason. One particularly relevant implication of this obligation is the duty to pay taxes. In regard to international (...) individuals, these considerations apply to states with which they had historic relationships as well as the state in which they currently reside. The paper offers a rough proposal as to how to calculate the relative relationship that an international individual has with their past and present states and societies. This can be used to determine what proportion of a person’s total lifetime tax revenue should be shared. Although the analysis here is presented in terms of the duty of the individual towards past states, the individual need not change their behaviour to discharge the duty. The duty impacts on current states, which should acknowledge the duty of their international resident, and make sure that this is discharged appropriately to the other relevant states. (shrink)

Epistemic trespassers judge matters outside their field of expertise. Trespassing is ubiquitous in this age of interdisciplinary research and recognizing this will require us to be more intellectually modest.

In Republic 1, Thrasymachus makes the radical claim that being just is ‘high-minded simplicity’ and being unjust is ‘good judgment’ (348c–e). Because injustice involves benefiting oneself, while justice involves benefiting others, the unjust are wise and good and the just are foolish and bad (348d–e). The “greedy craftsperson” argument (1.349b–350c) attempts to show that the unjust person's desire to outdo or have more than ( pleon echein) everyone is a symptom of her ignorance. Many commentaries have found the argument problematic (...) and unclear. However, this paper argues that the greedy craftsperson argument defends plausible constraints on the nature of justice and wisdom. (shrink)

This paper explores the political thought and literary devices contained in the pseudo-PlatonicEighth Letter, treating it as a later response to the political thought and literary style of Plato, particularly the exploration of the mixed constitution and the mechanisms for the restraint of monarchical power contained in theLaws. It examines the specific historical problems of this letter, and works through its supposed Sicilian context, its narrator's assessment of the situation, and the lengthy prosopopoeia of the dead Syracusan politician Dion, before (...) concluding with a consideration of its contribution to our knowledge of Greek political thought after Plato. (shrink)

This essay discusses Socrates' use of hypothetical choices as an early version of what was to become in the twentieth century the discipline of decision theory as expressed by one of its prominent proponents, F. P. Ramsey. Socrates' use of hypothetical choices and thought experiments in the dialogues is a way of reassuring himself of an interlocutor's philosophical potential. For example, to assess just how far Alcibiades is willing to go to attain his goal of being a great Athenian leader, (...) we employ Ramsey's concept of Mathematical Expectation. Mathematical Expectation operates on the assumption that it is not enough to measure probability; we must also measure our belief to apportion our belief to the probability. In other words, it illustrates how strongly or to what degree a person holds a particular belief. If a person's belief in X lacks enough doubts to cancel the belief out, the probability of his acting on this belief is higher than if his belief in X was plagued by a greater number of doubts. (shrink)

The Hard Question of memory is the following: how are memory representations stored and organized so as to be made available for retrieval in the appropriate circumstances and format? In this essay, I argue that philosophical theories of memory should engage with the Hard Question directly and seriously. I propose that declarative memory is a faculty performing a kind of cognitive triage: management of information for a variety of uses under significant computational constraints. In such triage, memory representations are preferentially (...) selected and stabilized, but also systematically modified and integrated into generalized, model-like representational structures. Further, I propose a hybrid theory of remembering, which takes into account both the nature of the cognitive processes underlying remembering and the norms that govern representational success in relevant cognitive/epistemic contexts. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Mohism has been called the most religious of all Chinese philosophies. Living up to that name, it developed unique proofs for the existence of the spiritual realm within a distinctly Chinese context. The Mozi uses testimonies from China’s mythic history to prove the existence of spirits. But beyond these cultural proofs, the Mozi also introduces a logical argument that is very similar to Pascal’s wager. Beyond these four explicit arguments, the Mozi also contains a fifth proof based on the (...) existence of a supernatural order that exists in the structure of the world. (shrink)

Recent critiques of veritistic value monism, or the idea that true belief is unique in being of fundamental epistemic value, typically invoke a claim about the surplus value of knowledge over mere true belief, in turn traced back to Plato's Meno. However, to the extent Plato at all defends a surplus claim in the Meno, it differs from that figuring in contemporary discussions with respect to both its scope and the kind of value at issue, and is under closer scrutiny (...) fully compatible with veritistic value monism. Consequently, contrary to what seems to be supposed in the literature, the critics of monism have little to gain from turning to the Meno for support. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The extant attempts in the literature to refute the greatest difficulty argument in the Parmenides have focused on denying the parallelism between the pros relations among Forms and those among particulars. However, these attempts are unsatisfactory, for the argument can reach its conclusion that we cannot know any Forms without relying on this parallelism. I argue that a more effective strategy is to deny the more essential premise that the knowledge-object relation is a pros relation. This premise is false (...) because pros relations require definitional and ontological codependence between the relata, and the knowledge-object relation does not satisfy this reciprocity condition. RÉSUMÉ Les tentatives existantes dans la littérature de réfuter l'argument de la plus grande difficulté dans le Parménide ont surtout entrepris de nier le parallélisme entre les relations de type pros entre les Formes et celles entre les particuliers. Par contre, ces tentatives sont insatisfaisantes, parce que l'argument peut mener à sa conclusion selon laquelle on ne peut connaître les Formes sans s'appuyer sur ce parallélisme. Je soutiens qu'une stratégie plus efficace consiste à nier la prémisse plus essentielle selon laquelle la relation objet-connaissance est une relation de type pros. Cette prémisse est fausse parce que les relations de type pros requièrent une codépendance définitionnelle et ontologique entre les relata, et la relation objet-connaissance ne satisfait pas à cette condition de réciprocité. (shrink)

The nature and value of autonomy has long been debated in diverse philosophical traditions, including moral and political philosophy. Although the notion dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that autonomy drew much attention. Thus, as may be known, moral philosophers tended to emphasize self-regulation, particularly one’s own will to abide by universal moral laws, as the term “autonomy” originates from the Greek words “self” (auto) and “rule” (nomos). In parallel, modern epistemologists supposedly espoused (...) the idea of intellectual autonomy as self-reliance. In this classical view, an intellectually autonomous explorer of knowledge must not depend on a belief that is obtained from another’s testimony, until one can justify it to oneself. However, accompanying the growing focus on the importance of social dimensions of acquiring knowledge and understanding, recent epistemologists have doubted the classical view and have since reconsidered intellectual autonomy from distinct approaches such as social and virtue epistemology. This paper propounds an interpersonal-epistemic approach to intellectual autonomy. First, it is argued that thinking through questioning both individually and with other epistemic peers is an interpersonal-epistemic practice. Second, it is demonstrated that with particular cognitive features inherent within us, an intellectually autonomous person must think through questioning in necessary situations. This interpersonal account of intellectual autonomy can conceptually enrich intellectual autonomy by considering its relationship with not only responsibility but also with vulnerability. Specifically, regarding responsibility, an intellectually autonomous person must be responsible for his or her own actions throughout questioning processes. Regarding vulnerability, our intellectual autonomy lies in retaining autonomy with vulnerability in the plastic control of the questioning processes. (shrink)

In much of pre-Qin political philosophy, including those thinkers usually labeled Confucian, Daoist, or Mohist, at least part of the justification of the political state comes from their views on morality, and the vision of the good ruler was quite closely tied to the vision of the good person. In an important sense, for these thinkers, political philosophy is an exercise in applied ethics. Han Fei, however, offers an interesting break from this tradition, arguing that, given the vastly different goals (...) of moral theory and political theory, it would be disastrous to rely upon the former to undergird the latter. He develops a distinctly amoral political philosophy that avoids many of the problems he sees as arising from a reliance on particular virtues on the part of the ruler or others within the state. In this paper, I analyze the source of normativity in Han Fei’s political philosophy, arguing that he demonstrates a keen understanding of the problems inherent in any system that relies upon moral standards to develop a strong, stable, and prosperous state. Rather, he demonstrates how an understanding of human nature, along with a recognition of facts about the natural world, allows for the development of a non-moral political philosophy that relies on a systematic bureaucracy and an inviolate system of law, one which will be much more successful, he believes, than anything his competitors can construct. (shrink)

In this paper the author will assess Plato’s tripartite psychology in the light of his metaphysical account of μέγιστα γένη and One and Many, in order to further clarify the structure of his “dualism”. By doing so, the author will try to show that the tripartition is not a metaphysical conundrum of Plato’s thought and that it cannot be read in the light of Cartesian substance dualism, which is a noticeable approach in contemporary discussions. Aside of that, Plato and Descartes (...) are often understood as the main advocates of the substance dualism. Since the author finds the approach misleading, the aim of the paper is to point out the fundamental differences between the two, foremost by paying attention to the role of body in conceptual determination of soul. (shrink)

This article explores Spinoza's distinctive contribution to the eudaimonistic tradition, which considers happiness (eudaimonia) to be the highest good. Most (if not all) ancient eudaimonists endorse some sort of hierarchy between mind and body, where one is always dependent on, or subordinate to, the other. In particular, many of them endorse ethical intellectualism, where mental things are considered more valuable than bodily ones. I argue that Spinoza, in contrast, considers mind and body ontologically and ethically identical and equal, thereby bringing (...) something new to this ethical tradition. (shrink)

The paper is an effort to better understand, through a comparison, how Confucius and Socrates initate their ethical inquiries that have laid down, respectively, the foundations of Chinese and Western ethics. Since both Confucius and Socrates claim to have a divine mission to undertake their investigations, the paper focuses on the issue about how religion and rational philosophy are related when ethics begins. It shows that both have serious religious belief, yet each has secular rational grounds for doing what he (...) is doing. Finally, each philosopher has a different view about how human beings are related to the divine being, and the difference determines their different approaches to ethics. (shrink)

In this article, I begin by saying something about what metacognition is and why it is desirable within education. I then outline how Plato anticipates this concept in his dialogue Meno. This is not just a historical point; by dividing the cognitive self into a three-in-one—a ‘learner’, a ‘teacher’ and an ‘evaluator’—Plato affords us a neat metaphorical framework for understanding metacognition that, I contend, is valuable today. In addition to aiding our understanding of this concept, Plato’s model of metacognition not (...) only provides us with a practical, pedagogical method for developing a metacognitive attitude, but also for doing so through doing philosophy. I conclude by making a case for philosophy’s inclusion in our school systems by appeal to those aspects of philosophy that are metacognitive or that are conducive to developing metacognition, as revealed by the insights afforded us by Plato’s Meno and Theaetetus. (shrink)

Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a practitioner of doing philosophy in primary and secondary school classrooms, I will describe and attempt to justify two broad, over-arching principles, presence and absence: the extent to which a facilitator influences or deliberately refrains from influencing philosophical enquiry. While it is expected that the facilitator will and should be present in the discussion, this paper pays special attention to the extent to which a facilitator judges that presence appropriate. I revisit the notion (...) of open and closed questions but, instead of considering the structural aspect, I address the psychological dimension of open and closed questioning, what I have called ‘Open Question Mindset’ and its opposite ‘Closed Question Mindset’. I consider two of the main ways in which teachers commonly demonstrate CQM: ‘Guess-what’s-in-my-head’ questioning and ‘Guess-what’s-in-your-head’ questioning/inferring. OQM, together with the notion of ‘intentional sensitivity’—sensitivity to the student’s intentions rather than only to the surface-meaning or logical implications of their utterances—allows me to suggest ways in which one may practically meet the requirements of presence and absence. One particular aspect of facilitation that I consider, and recommend being mindful of, is paraphrasing or interpreting, especially with regard to hidden premises that might be thought implied by things children say. I recommend consciously refraining from interpreting children’s contributions, and instead working hard to elicit or ‘excavate’ children’s intentions and meanings through careful OQM questioning. (shrink)