In this paper, I consider the difficulty of distinguishing between science fiction and philosophy. The boundary between these genres is somewhat vague. There is a “neutral zone” separating the genres. But this neutral zone is often transgressed. One key distinction considered here is that between entertainment and edification. Another crucial element is found in the importance of the author’s apparent self-consciousness of these distinctions. Philosophy seeks to edify, and philosophers are often deliberately focused on thinking about the question of the (...) borders that distinguish genres. Science fiction is more interested in entertainment, and narrative authors tend to care less about policing the border. This distinction is a pragmatic one. And canonical authors often violate the boundary. I examine key authors to make this point, including Plato, Kant, and H.G. Wells. My discussion shows that these canonical authors wandered into the neutral zone in their own work, reminding us that the boundaries we draw around genres are arbitrary and subject to transgression. (shrink)

The Consequence Argument is the classic argument for the incompatibility of determinism and our ability to do otherwise. Daniel C. Dennett objects that the Consequence Argument suffers from the same error as a clearly unconvincing argument that there are no mammals. In this paper, I argue that these arguments do not suffer from the same error. The argument that there are no mammals is unconvincing as it takes the form of a sorites, whereas the Consequence Argument does not. Accordingly, Dennett's (...) objection misses its mark. (shrink)

La dialectique, un processus qui nous conduit à la connaissance des Formes et finalement à la Forme la plus élevée du Bien, à travers la discussion, le raisonnement, les questions et l'interprétation, a préoccupé les philosophes depuis les temps anciens. Socrate pratiquait la dialectique par la méthode du dialogue oral, qu'il appelait l'art de « la naissance des âmes » (méthode aussi appelée maya, ou méthode d'Elenchus), qui pouvait conduire, selon l'intention de Socrate, à confirmer ou infirmer déclarations, ou à (...) la soi-disant « aporie » dans laquelle aucune conclusion définitive n'a été tirée. Chez Platon, la dialectique est un type de connaissance, avec un rôle ontologique et métaphysique, auquel on accède en confrontant plusieurs positions pour dépasser l'opinion (doxa), un passage du monde des apparences (ou « sensible ») à la connaissance intellectuelle (ou « intelligible ») aux premiers Principes. Il implique également l'ordonnancement des concepts en genres et espèces par la méthode de la division, et embrasse la multiplicité dans l'unité, étant utilisé pour comprendre l'ensemble du processus d'illumination, par lequel le philosophe est éduqué afin d'atteindre la connaissance du bien suprême, le Forme du bien. -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30743.85925 . (shrink)

L'ensemble de l'œuvre de Platon est restée intacte jusqu'à ce jour, influençant de manière décisive la culture occidentale. Pour Platon, le dialogue est le seul outil capable de mettre en évidence le caractère de recherche de la philosophie, élément clé de sa pensée. Certes, l'écrit est plus précis et approfondi que le discours, mais le discours oral permet un échange de vues immédiat sur le sujet en discussion. Le principal protagoniste des dialogues est Socrate, à l'exception des derniers dialogues où (...) il se voit attribuer un rôle secondaire, disparaissant complètement dans Lois et Épinomis. Les dialogues platoniciens ont été regroupés par de nombreux commentateurs dans diverses classifications. Selon certains, un classement serait chronologique : les premiers dialogues seraient caractérisés par la forte influence de Socrate, ceux de la maturité dans lesquels il aurait développé la théorie des idées, et la dernière période dans laquelle il éprouvait le besoin de défendre son propre conception des attaques contre l'adresse de sa philosophie, réalisant une profonde autocritique de la théorie des Idées. -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10198.32327. (shrink)

La principale source biographique sur Platon, selon le témoignage du néoplatonicien Simplicius, a été écrite par le disciple Xénocrate, mais malheureusement elle ne nous est pas parvenue. La première biographie de Platon à ce jour, De Platone et dogmate eius, est d'un auteur latin du IIe siècle, Apulée. Toutes les autres biographies de Platon ont été écrites plus de cinq cents ans après sa mort. L'historien grec Diogène (IIe et IIIe siècles) est l'auteur d'une série de biographies de philosophes grecs (...) (Les vies des philosophes) dans lesquelles il se réfère à la vie de Platon. Il a également écrit une louange funèbre pour Platon. D'autres premiers biographes de Platon sont Olympiodore le Jeune au VIe siècle et une source anonyme. Une source importante sur la vie de Platon est ses dialogues philosophiques, ses treize lettres (peut-être fausses, à l'exception peut-être des Lettres VII et VIII), les écrits d'Aristote, un extrait de l'épicurien Philodème dede Gadara, l'Histoire des philosophes (Syntaxis ton philosophon), Ier siècle av. J.-C., les écrits anonymes de Prolégomène sur la philosophie platonicienne traditionnellement attribués à Olympiodore, Suda, Xe siècle, et La vie de Dio de Plutarque, Ier-IIe siècle. -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18219.92969 . (shrink)

Platon s'est inspir? des travaux philosophiques de certains de ses pr?d?cesseurs, en particulier Socrate, mais aussi Parm?nide, H?raclite et Pythagore, pour d?velopper sa propre philosophie, qui explore les domaines les plus importants, notamment la m?taphysique, l'?thique, l'esth?tique et la politique. Avec son professeur Socrate et son ?l?ve Aristote, il pose les bases de la pens?e philosophique occidentale. Platon est consid?r? comme l'un des philosophes les plus importants et les plus influents de l'histoire humaine, ?tant l'un des fondateurs de la religion (...) et de la spiritualit? occidentales. La philosophie qu'il a d?velopp?e, connue sous le nom de platonisme, est bas?e sur la th?orie des Formes connues par la raison pure comme une solution au probl?me des universaux. La philosophie de Platon s'inscrit dans la lign?e des pr?socratiques, des sophistes et des traditions artistiques qui sous-tendent l'?ducation grecque, dans un cadre nouveau, d?fini par la dialectique et la th?orie des Id?es. Pour Platon, la connaissance est une activit? de l'?me, affect?e par des objets sensibles, et par des processus internes. Dans La R?publique de Platon, la forme la plus ?lev?e est consid?r?e comme la Forme du Bien, la source de toutes les autres Formes qui pourraient ?tre connues par la raison. Le th?me central du livre est la justice, argument?e ? l'aide de plusieurs th?ories platoniciennes, dont le mythe all?gorique de la caverne, la doctrine des Id?es, la dialectique, la th?orie de l'?me et la conception d'une cit? id?ale. Sa dialectique est un type de connaissance, ? r?le ontologique et m?taphysique, qui s'atteint par la confrontation de plusieurs positions pour d?passer l'opinion (doxa), un passage du monde des apparences (ou ? sensible ?) ? la connaissance intellectuelle (ou ? intelligible ? ) aux premiers principes. Le mod?le ?ducatif de Platon (paid?ia) diff?rencie le niveau d'?ducation selon les comp?tences des ?l?ves. Selon les principes socratiques, pour faire justice, il faut savoir ce qui est bien, et c'est ce que le philosophe sait le mieux. Platon a d?taill? ce concept en soulignant la distinction entre le philosophe (qui cherche les principes de v?rit? sans pr?tendre les poss?der) et le sophiste (qui se laisse guider par l'opinion comme seul param?tre valable de la connaissance). (shrink)

In this article, I vindicate the longstanding intuition that the Stoics are transitional figures in the history of ethics. I argue that the Stoics are committed to thinking that the ideal of human happiness as a life of virtue is impossible for some people, whom I dub ‘hopeless fools.’ In conjunction with the Stoic view that everyone is subject to the same rational requirements to perform ‘appropriate actions’ or ‘duties’ (kathēkonta/officia), and the plausible eudaimonist assumption that happiness is a source (...) of normative reasons only if it is in principle attainable, the existence of hopeless fools demonstrates that the Stoics were pluralists about the ultimate justificatory basis of rational action. Hopeless fools are required to behave just like their non-hopeless counterparts, not because doing so is conducive to their happiness, but because doing so conforms with the dictates of Right Reason. (shrink)

An overview of the ancient philosophers and their philosophical system (divided into the fields of logic, physics, and ethics) comprising the living, organic, enduring, and evolving body of interrelated ideas identifiable as the Stoic perspective.

This essay presents an account of what it takes to live a philosophical way of life: practitioners must be committed to a worldview, structure their lives around it, and engage in truth‐directed practices. Contra John Cooper, it does not require that one’s life be solely guided by reason. Religious or tradition‐based ways of life count as truth directed as long as their practices are reasons responsive and would be truth directed if the claims made by their way of life are (...) correct. The essay argues that these three conditions can be met by progressors as well as sages. Making progress in how one acts in the world, and improving one’s understanding and direction through being part of a community is living a philosophical way of life. The offered view acknowledges more ways to develop the art of living and enables a broader range of people to count as living philosophically. (shrink)

Carine Defoort, Mario Wenning, and Kai Marchal offer three ways of engaging with Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought and the philosophical, hermeneutical, and historical issues it attempted to articulate and address.1 This work is historical with a contemporary philosophical intent: to reexamine a tumultuous contested epoch of philosophy’s past in order to reconsider its existing limitations and alternative possibilities. One dimension of this book is the investigation of constellations and entanglements of historical forces and concepts for (...) the sake of articulating critical models and alternatives for the present.2 In the book, I contested the modern self-image of philosophy... (shrink)

This paper focuses on the importance of wonder in human flourishing and is orientated towards the dynamics between the two, but with an emphasis on how the former is important for illuminating the latter. It begins with a preliminary sketch of both wonder and human flourishing and subsequently moves on to highlight three aspects of human flourishing: 1) ‘Individuality’, 2) ‘Relations’ and 3) ‘The political’, and why these play to wonderment.

This article reassesses Hobbes’s place in the history of ethics based on the first systematic analysis of his various classifications of formal goodness. The good was traditionally divided into three: profitably good, pleasurably good, and morally good. Across his works, Hobbes replaced the last with pulchrum—a decidedly non-moral form of goodness on his account. I argue that Hobbes’s dismissal of moral goodness was informed by his hedonist conception of the good and accompanied by reinterpretations of right reason and natural law. (...) By dispensing moral goodness and insisting on the hedonist and relational nature of the good, Hobbes moreover recast and rendered more urgent the question of why we should be moral. Hobbes is commonly thought to have raised this question so starkly because of his general insensitivity to the demands of justice. My analysis suggests that it may also, or rather, have been due to his restrictive conception of the good. A comparison with other moral philosophers from the period—including Suárez, Gassendi, Locke, and Pufendorf—indicates how unusual Hobbes’s jettisoning of moral goodness was. (shrink)

Philip Pettit has identified some interesting apparent commonalities among core human values like love, friendship, virtue, and respect. These are all, Pettit argues, ‘robustly demanding’: they require us to provide certain benefits across ranges of alternative scenarios. Pettit also suggests a general ‘rationale’ for valuing such goods, which draws on his work on freedom. In this paper, I zoom in on love in particular. I critically assess whether Pettit’s schematic account of love’s value adequately captures what we typically value in (...) valuing love. And I scrutinize the analogy Pettit suggests between the rationale for valuing freedom and his rationale for valuing love. My conclusion is that whereas Pettit’s account of love and its value does not strictly speaking contain false propositions, it ends up being a somewhat skewed account of love’s value. Finally, I bring up some widely discussed aspects of love’s value not captured by Pettit’s account. (shrink)

Richard Shusterman's Philosophy and the Art of Writing suggests something vital about the tension between philosophical discourses that cannot capture or be the full meaning of living a life in relation to wisdom, and lived philosophies that cannot do away with discourses to deepen a lived experience beyond them: that philosophy as “an embodied way of life” is a sub-creation that emerges from the tension between them. This paper uses several different moments and ideas from Philosophy and the Art of (...) Writing as points of departure for further inquiry. Some “memories,” repurposed, reorganized, and manipulated, take up these starting points to further the investigation. The present work was a spiritual exercise for the author and, one hopes, will be for the reader in what it means to practice philosophy as a way of life. By doing so, we may find more forgiveness and appreciation for our philosophical vocation that creates something more than what we say or are now. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to argue for the cognitive unity of the mathematical results ascribed by ancient authors to Thales. These results are late ascriptions and so it is difficult to say anything certain about them on philological grounds. I will seek characteristic features of the cognitive unity of the mathematical results ascribed to Thales by comparing them with Galilean physics. This might seem at a first sight a rather unusual move. Nevertheless, I suggest viewing the process of (...) turning geometry into an axiomatic-deductive science as a process of idealization in mathematics that is parallel to the process of idealization in physics. In Kvasz I offered an epistemological reconstruction of the process of idealization in physics during the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In the present paper I try to employ these epistemological insights in the process of idealization in physics and propose a reconstruction of the cognitive unity of the mathematical results ascribed to Thales, who can, on the basis of these ascriptions, be seen as one of the initiators of idealization in mathematics. (shrink)

Beginning the nineteenth-century and continuing down to the present, many authors writing on the history of geology and paleontology have attributed the theory that fossils were inorganic formations produced within the earth, rather than by the deposition of living organisms, to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Some have even gone so far as to claim this was the consensus view in the classical period up through the Middle Ages. In fact, such a notion was entirely foreign to ancient and medieval (...) thought and only appeared within the manifold of ‘Renaissance episteme,’ the characteristics of which have often been projected backwards by some historians onto earlier periods. This paper endeavors to correct this error, explain the development of the Renaissance view, describe certain ancient precedents thereof, and trace the history of the misinterpretation in the literature. -/- . (shrink)

The paper outlines several forms of ethical attitude to good life and good death in the Socratic literature of the fourth century BCE. A model for the Socratic discussions could be found in Herodotus’ story about the meeting between Croesus and Solon. Within their conversation, Solon shows the king of Lydia that death is a place from which the life of each man can be seen as the completed whole. In his Phaedo, Plato depicts Socrates’ last day before his death (...) in a similar spirit, as the completion of his beautiful life. However, there is no consensus regarding opinions on death among the Socratics. The final part of the paper outlines various meanings of death in the writings of the first generation of the Socratic authors, which arise from different attitudes that the individual philosophers hold regarding the soul as well as other topics. This part puts the principal emphasis on Aristippus, who is considered as the most controversial figure of the Socratic movement. Aristippus makes an interesting opposite to Plato concerning death, since he associates the philosopher’s endeavour for a good life solely with that which is here and now. (shrink)