In Republic II Glaucon assigns to Socrates the task of praising justice for itself. What it means to praise justice for itself is unclear. A new interpretation is offered on the basis of an analysis of Glaucon's division of goods. A distinction is developed between criterial benefits, those valuable consequences of a thing which provide a standard for evaluating a thing as a good instance of its type, and fringe benefits, valuable consequences which do not provide such a standard. Socrates (...) is expected to praise justice by describing the benefits it constitutes as a valuable activity of soul. He may also use the criterial benefits of justice but not its fringe benefits. This account of Socrates' task is superior to those interpretations which rule out all use of valuable consequences in praising justice and to those interpretations which fail to preserve the distinction between the second and third classes of goods. (shrink)

In Archytas of Tarentum, Carl Huffman reconstructs Archytas’ theory of definition by linking definitions to the mathematical study of ratios and proportions. This paper considers whether and how Archytas used definitions and whether he possessed a theory of definition. Our evidence does not support the claim that Archytas has a theory of definition, and his approach to the science of harmonics suggests that he relied on analogies and proportions in the practice of inquiry. We understand sounds and other entities by (...) placing them in a network of relations governed by mathematical proportions. Although he does not seem to have formulated definitions of sound, Archytas pursued inquiry into motion and rest by formulating definitions in such a way that they fit into a larger network of causal explanations. (shrink)

Socrates in the Lysis discusses philia and the conditions under which two or more people can be said to engage in this relationship. Many commentators take Socrates to be attempting to discover how human beings enter into the relationship of friendship, a relationship characterized by reciprocal affection, altruistic concern and personal intimacy. Other readers of the Lysis see in the dialogue’s investigation of philia a discussion of desire and attraction at the most general level. On this view, philia is one (...) species of the general human desire for good. The present paper develops a third reading of philia. Philia is a type of partnership or fellowship where affection and intimacy are not central features of the relationship. The fellowship involves at least one party who possesses wisdom while other members of the fellowship seek to benefit from wisdom. Thus philia is a characteristically human response to the need for wisdom. The members of such a fellowship share a common desire for a good which gives purpose to their association, and because of their common desire to benefit from this good the members can be described as fellows or partners in the pursuit of this good. (shrink)

Plato’s Symposium offers an enticing range of topics for the critical-guide treatment of philosophical classics now in vogue. The current volume contains thirteen essays of consistently high quality devoted to such issues as the nature of erotic desire and its orientation toward the forms, the ethical question of how best to live in the pursuit of wisdom, Plato’s engagement with poetry, and his use of dramatic interaction between speakers to advance his philosophical agenda.An admirable feature of the volume is the (...) close attention that is paid to all parts of the Symposium. Many discussions of the dialogue focus exclusively on Socrates’s speech, but Destrée and Giannopoulou have taken care to avoid this narrowly... (shrink)

This book explores a variety of teleology present in Plato's Republic, in which actions are carried out for the sake of an end that is not the intended goal. Payne draws on examples from Republic to demonstrate that performing some actions can help produce unintended results, which qualify as ends or purposes of human action.

: Socrates in the Apology takes an adventurous approach to belief. Although he lacks knowledge, he holds strong beliefs about virtue and the human good. These beliefs count as wisdom only if they are supported by the ability to explain why they are true, and Socrates lacks this ability. To understand why Socrates holds these beliefs, Gorgias 481c–482c is examined. He claims there always to say the same thing and to agree with himself. His beliefs allow him to maintain a (...) stable core of harmonious beliefs. This provides some evidence of the truth of his beliefs and forms one aspect of his human wisdom. (shrink)

Emerson's Representative Men reveals his awareness of the dangers of the tyranny of the majority and his admiration for figures of great genius. These trends of thought, which led Emerson's contemporaries Carlyle and Nietzsche to reject democracy, are combined in Emerson with support for democracy. To understand and justify Emerson's combination of fear of the tyranny of the majority, admiration for genius, and support for democracy, it is helpful to examine his portrait of Socrates in Representative Men. Emerson's Socrates is (...) a figure of genius who, by his ironic profession of ignorance and demonstration of moral truths, is capable of freeing the citizen of a democracy from the tyranny of the majority. (shrink)

The article argues that in the Symposium, but also the Phaedrus and the Protagoras, Plato instructs us on the correct way of engaging in discourse by adducing examples from the activities of drinking and singing (/performing poetry). By presenting Socrates as grappling with the use of wine, rhetoric and poetry, almost failing at times, but always able to recollect himself and identify the faults in his methods (as well as of others), Plato recognizes the difficulties of the process, while acknowledging (...) Socrates’ extraordinary intellect. (shrink)

Payne's commentary on Republic I–VII is not advanced as a sustained argument for the new type of teleology he finds there but is structured by themes in the text. It engages with selected previous scholarship on the Republic and is written with care and deliberation. Payne begins with an overview of the types of teleology, or end-directed action, found in Plato's corpus, but does not address contemporary philosophy of action. Payne's own "functional teleology of action" accounts for (...) how agents act for the sake of ends of which they are unaware, as when mathematical study is directed to the Form of the Good... (shrink)

Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late-appearing technologies. Yet by taking these as paradigm cases, researchers unhelpfully lump together different ways that culture accumulates. This article has two aims: (a) to distinguish four types of cultural accumulation: adaptiveness, complexity, efficiency, and disparity and (b) to highlight the epistemic implications of taking complex hominin technologies as paradigmatic instances of cumulative culture. Addressing these issues both (...) clarifies the cumulative culture concept and demonstrates the importance of further cumulative culture research into non-human animals and ancestral hominins. (shrink)

One objection to the principle of public reason is that since there is room for reasonable disagreement about distributive justice as well as about human flourishing, the requirement of reasonable acceptability rules out redistribution as well as perfectionism. In response, some justificatory liberals have invoked the argument from higher-order unanimity, or nested inclusiveness. If it is not reasonable to reject having some system of property rights, and if redistribution is just the enforcement of a different set of property rights, redistribution (...) is legitimate if chosen democratically. This article explores two problems with this response. First, there are different ways to describe the set of possible policies, and so different ways to specify the noncoercive default that obtains in the absence of conclusive justification. Second, if the coercive exercise of political power must be conclusively justified, policies that are more coercive ought to require conclusive justification as against policies that are less coercive. These problems about the baseline with respect to which we require public justification raise the question of how we measure coercion, and whether or in what sense there is a presumption against coercion. The article distinguishes and argues against three such presumptions. (shrink)

In an important piece of work Derek Parfit distinguishes two different forms of egalitarianism, ‘Deontic’ and ‘Telic’. He contrasts these with what he calls the Priority View, which is not strictly a form of egalitarianism at all, since it is not essentially concerned with how well off people are relative to each other. His main aim is to generate an adequate taxonomy of the positions available, but in the process he draws attention to some of the different problems they face. (...) I shall argue that there are forms of egalitarianism overlooked by Parfit which avoid the problems encountered by Deontic and Telic Egalitarians. (shrink)

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder (...) theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems. (shrink)

In this book about metaphysics the author defends a realistic view of universals, characterizing the notion of universal by considering language and logic, the idea of possibility, hierarchies of universals, and causation. He argues that neither language nor logic is a reliable guide to the nature of reality and that basic universals are the fundamental type of universal and are central to causation. All assertions and predications about the natural world are ultimately founded on these basic universals. A distinction is (...) drawn between unified particulars and arbitrary particulars ; unified particulars are the terms of causal relations and thus the real constituents of the world. The world is not made up of events but of unified particulars and basic universals. (shrink)

This article discusses the emergence of a patenting culture in university science. Patenting culture is examined empirically in the context of the increasing commerciali zation of science, and theoretically within debates over scientific "credibility." The article explores the translation of academic credit into patents, and vice versa, and argues that this process raises new questions for our understanding of scientific recognition and of scientists' networks. In particular, the analysis suggests that scientists must move between two distinct social worlds to manage (...) the rewards that academic and patent cultures carry. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on internal dimensions of moral responsibility. I argue that if such dimensions are real -- and it seems they are -- then moral responsibility is compatible with determinism.

This paper advances two arguments about environmental problems. First, it interrogates the strength and limitations of empiricist accounts of problems and issues offered by actor-network theory. Drawing on the work of C.S. Peirce, it considers how emerging environmental problems often lead to abductive inferences about the existence of hidden causes that may or may not have caused the problem to emerge. The analysis of environmental problems should be empiricist in so far as it is sceptical of the claims of those (...) who know in advance what the problem is, but it should also be alert to processes and things that are not readily traceable or perceived. Secondly, the paper’s contention is that environmental problems almost invariably involve an encounter between unlike or disparate materials or processes. In such circumstances, the challenge is to develop a form of inquiry that is alert to both the specificity of such encounters and to the specificity of the political situations in which they come to matter. (shrink)

This paper examines how the intercultural conception of human rights, fueled by the modes of reciprocal recognition associated with Hegel’s social philosophy, draws on traditional understandings of human dignity while avoiding the essentialism associated with those understandings. Part 1 summarizes core elements of an intercultural theory of human rights while addressing the general question of how that theory accommodates an understanding of the relationship of human dignity and human rights. Part 2 presents the intercultural approach as committed to a view (...) of human dignity focused on the intrinsic worth of individuals, but understood, not—with Kant—as an anthropologically inherent property, but as one forged in relations of intersubjective recognition. Part 3, critically engaging arguments of C Beitz and J Habermas, claims that an intercultural approach entails a status-based conception of human dignity, one that construes the latter, not as a metaphysically conceived inherent quality, but as a function of membership in a social order supportive of both liberal right claims and a republican commitment to rights systems generally. Drawing on the work of Hegel and critically engaging the position of A Sangiovanni, Part 4 construes human dignity in terms of a doctrine of human rights expressive of a common humanity, one understood, however, not as an essential attribute of human beings, but in terms of a globally realized legal-political order whose members are dispositionally committed to the worth of all members of the human community and the value of human community itself. Critically appropriating the work of H Arendt for the intercultural theory, Part 5 considers the centrality of actual politics to a dignitarian account of human rights. Part 6 construes human dignity, again with Kant, in terms of the principle of autonomy, but one understood, not abstractly, but—engaging Pico della Mirandola—as the fallibilistically conceived process of social learning on the part the members of the human community. Part 7 considers how the intercultural view, with the idea of social practice expressive of collective human agency, accommodates a concept of human dignity understood as the “foundation”—nuanced and variegated—of human rights. Part 8 details the specific normativity of an intercultural conception, asserting that despite and even because of its attention to the empirical realities of social, historical, and political life, that conception remains committed, as with essentialist views, to context-transcending norms capable of calling into question actual practices and policies. Here, recourse is had to a concept of recognition understood both as a principle of evaluation and as a social practice encompassing the activity of individuals and groups engaged in the discourse on human rights. (shrink)

In these essays, Andrew Cunningham is concerned with issues of identity - what was the identity of topics, disciplines, arguments, diseases in the past, and whether they are identical with topics, disciplines, arguments or diseases in the present. Historians usually tend to assume such continuous identities of present attitudes and activities with past ones, and rarely question them; the contention here is that this gives us a false image of the very things in the past that we went to (...) look for. (shrink)

_A penetrating and provocative exploration of human mortality, from Epicurus to Joan Didion_ For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable (...) demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life. (shrink)

The early publication history of the very short Breviarium of Guillaume Budé's De asse et partibus eius is analysed and clarified, and the earliest versions are dated to c. 1520. Though short, it was an influential little work, and in particular its links with Cuthbert Tunstall's De arte supputandi are explored. It is argued that Bude himself was the author of the Brevianum, and that it may have a relevance to the Budé/Porzio controversy about the 'sestertius' and 'sestertium'.

Knee proprioception deficits and neuroplasticity have been indicated following injury to the anterior cruciate ligament. Evidence is, however, scarce regarding brain response to knee proprioception tasks and the impact of ACL injury. This study aimed to identify brain regions associated with the proprioceptive sense of joint position at the knee and whether the related brain response of individuals with ACL reconstruction differed from that of asymptomatic controls. Twenty-one persons with unilateral ACL reconstruction of either the right or left knee, as (...) well as 19 controls matched for sex, age, height, weight and current activity level, performed a knee joint position sense test during simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging. Integrated motion capture provided real-time knee kinematics to activate test instructions, as well as accurate knee angles for JPS outcomes. Recruited brain regions during knee angle reproduction included somatosensory cortices, prefrontal cortex and insula. Neither brain response nor JPS errors differed between groups, but across groups significant correlations revealed that greater errors were associated with greater ipsilateral response in the anterior cingulate, supramarginal gyrus and insula. This is the first study to capture brain response using fMRI in relation to quantifiable knee JPS. Activated brain regions have previously been associated with sensorimotor processes, body schema and interoception. Our innovative paradigm can help to guide future research investigating brain response to lower limb proprioception. (shrink)

Eric Schwitzgebel, Fiery Cushman, and Joshua Rust have conducted a series of studies of the thought and behavior of professional ethicists. They have found no evidence that ethical reflection yields distinctive improvements in behavior. This work has been done on English-speaking ethicists. Philipp Schönegger and Johannes Wagner replicated one study with German-speaking professors. Their results are almost the same, except for finding that German-speaking ethicists were more likely to be vegetarian than non-ethicists. The present paper devises and evaluates eleven psychological (...) hypotheses (along with one from Schönegger and Wagner) aimed at explaining why ethical reflection might have motivational influence for this topic but not for others. Three hypotheses are judged to be plausible at this initial stage: generic emotional support, perception of cost as a source of emotional obstacles, and social categorization. (shrink)

By considering situations from the paradox of the twins in relativity, it is shown that time passes at different rates along different world lines, answering some well-known objections. The best explanation for the different rates is that time indeed passes. If time along a world line is something with a rate, and a variable rate, then it is difficult to see it as merely a unique, invariant, monotonic parameter without any further explanation of what it is. Although it could, conceivably, (...) be explained by the flow of something, it is better explained by the passing of a point present, which faces the problem that there is no absolute simultaneity in special relativity so that the present for an object is confined to just that object. This raises problems about presentism, eternalism, simultaneity, and special relativity. These issues are addressed first by giving accounts of presentism and eternalism and then an account of existence and times for objects relative to world lines. Finally, an analogy between a world of relativistic objects and Leibniz’s ontology of monads. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a parallel between Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus and Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological account of revelation. By connecting Climacus’ notion of the paradox with Marion’s saturated phenomenon, I both defend what I see as similar in the two accounts and attack the clarity of Marion’s notion of saturated phenomenon. I first explicate Marion’s accusation of subject-centeredness against Husserl’s Cartesians Meditations which the transcendental ego receives from Descartes and Kant. I then look at how Marion uses this (...) to motivate his concept of the saturated phenomenon. Finally, I argue that Climacus’s paradox accomplishes the same in a more philosophical way. (shrink)

Are the characteristics and relationships among spatio-temporal entities "real" or are they simply conventional terms that note similarities among things in the world but lack any reality of their own? Or if they are real, what sort of reality do they have? Do we live in a world of causes and effects, or is this relation a useful contrivance for our convenience? What is the nature of this "I" that we invoke when referring to ourselves? Is it body? Mind? Both? (...) Neither? And once its nature is understood, what can be said of the choices it makes? Are they really ours, freely made by an independent will? Or is each choice determined more by the internal makeup of the "I" we happen to be and the social/environmental circumstances in which this "I" finds itself, rather than by any act of will? But if each of us "could not have chosen otherwise" than we have, are we no better than the machines we construct? Then again, maybe some of our more advanced machines should be considered conscious entities? Introduction to Metaphysics: The Fundamental Questions presents these and other intriguing questions, many of which have challenged philosophers from antiquity to the present in their efforts to speculate on the nature of what is real. Often filled with twists and turns, dark corners and hidden recesses, this journey of discovery is an exciting excursion into the depths of human understanding. As guides for this intellectual journey editor Andrew Schoedinger has chosen an impressive array of creative and thought-provoking philosophers: Peter Abelard, Aristotle, Renford Bambrough, George Berkeley, Joseph Butler, Rudolf Carnap, Roderick Chisholm, R.G. Collingwood, Arthur Danto, Donald Davidson, Rene Descartes, C.J. Ducasse, Alvin I. Goldman, Keith Gunderson, David Hume, John Locke, Alasdair MacIntyre, A.I. Melden, John Stuart Mill, D.F. Pears, Hilary Putnam, Anthony Quinton, Bertrand Russell, Michael Scriven, Sydney Shoemaker, P. F. Strawson, Richard Taylor, and others. This volume is a unique invitation to join a distinguished group of theorists as they tackle tough questions concerning the existence of universals, the nature of causation, understanding personal identity, the tangled web of free will, and the challenges posed by the advent of artificial intelligence. (shrink)