The encounter between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Republic I is notoriously baffling. Most of what is said seems straightforward, and the issues at stake are ones of common concern, but the argument remains elusive. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature and grounds of this elusiveness, and to show that some of it can be dispelled by a sufficiently free-ranging exegesis that bears in mind the general character of Plato’s writing.

In a lengthy article E. Scerri and J. Worrall put forward the case for a novel ‘accommodationist’ version of the events surrounding the development of Mendeleef's Periodic Table 1869–1899. However these authors lay undue stress on the fact that President of the Royal Society of London Spottiswoode made absolutely no mention of Mendeleef's famous predictions in the Davy Medal eulogy in 1883 and undue stress on the fact that Cleve's classic 1879 Scandium paper contained an acknowledgement of Mendeleef's prior prediction (...) of eka-boron.They also fail to analyse in any detail the so-called ‘rare earth problem’ which, in the opinion of this author, causes problems for their account but not for a predictivist account. (shrink)

Debates over the causes and consequences of the “Axial Age” – and its relevance for understanding and explaining “modernity” – continue to rage within and across a wide variety of academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, archaeology, history, social theory, and cognitive science. We present a computational model that synthesizes three leading theories about the emergence of axial civilizations. Although these theories are often treated as competitors, our computational model shows how their most important conceptual insights and empirically based causal claims (...) can be integrated within a single computational architecture. The plausibility of the latter is supported by the results of our simulation experiments, which were able to simulate the emergence and growth of an axial civilization. The model shows how the relevant theories can be rendered consistent, while challenging the claims of any one to comprehensiveness. (shrink)

In responding to Ms Rowell’s commentary on her original paper the author points out that the job of all bioethicists, namely, speaking truth to power, is a daunting task which is unlikely to succeed “if we do not learn to ask for and to accept, to offer and to provide, moral support and meaningful help.”In my article “The Olivieri debacle: where were the heroes of bioethics?”1 I make four comments about Ms Rowell’s involvement in the case. In my first comment (...) relating to Ms Rowell, I suggest that a careful reader of the Naimark report could reasonably conclude “that the role of bioethics in helping to resolve the controversy was, at best, very limited”. In reaching this conclusion, I relied on the findings of the two official reports/inquiries about this case. Though the two reports reach different conclusions about the case, there appears to be agreement on the very limited role of bioethics. As noted in my original article, in the 160 page Naimark report there are but a few paragraphs about bioethics and Ms Rowell’s role in the Olivieri case. This is surprising, and I say as much in my article. In the 540 page report of the Committee of Inquiry, which Ms Rowell describes as “a review that I believe to provide a public report of integrity”, little more detail is provided regarding Ms Rowell’s role. I included all references to Ms Rowell from the first report in the original article. I did not do so with the second report. This was not done to diminish any contribution Ms Rowell might have made. In my view, no new evidence germane to the points I wanted to make was provided in the text that I did not include in my article.In …. (shrink)

Cet article explore le moment où le thème de la formation professionnelle des femmes, longtemps négligé, s’invite dans le débat public sous la pression d’organisations internationales et nationales. À partir d’un corpus de documentaires et reportages filmés diffusés à la télévision française entre 1958 et 1973 et de différents fonds d’archives, il analyse l’émergence d’une figure de femme en formation professionnelle féminine, celle d’une femme au foyer souhaitant (re)trouver un travail après une longue interruption pour raison familiale. Cette figure en (...) vient à éclipser toute autre image, notamment celle de la salariée en formation. Les documents filmés sont pris ici comme des révélateurs des manières de penser la formation et son public dans une période de transition historique, celle d’une remise en question des rôles socio-sexuels en particulier vis-à-vis du travail. (shrink)

Much of Essler''s work has been devoted to bringing science andphilosophy together for the purpose of conceptual clarification. Oneparticularly interesting area for such cooperation between science andphilosophy has been relativity theory. In this paper I will consider oneinstance of such interplay: the transformation that our notions of rotationand rigidity have undergone in general relativity and what this process canteach us. I will start by saying a little about the physics of the situation andthen go on to some philosophical observations about (...) meaning and theory. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Ontology, Reality and Construction in Niklas Luhmann’s Theory” by Krzysztof C. Matuszek. Upshot: The question of whether contingency can be limited concerns the foundations of sociological systems theory as a theory of cognition. This commentary argues that while such limits may seem plausible and apparent at first, they would consequentially give rise to an ontological notion of society within society. Rather, the commentary proposes to understand the limits identified in the target article as social (...) functions structuring expectations in situations of double contingency. (shrink)

We initiate the study of computable presentations of real and complex C*-algebras under the program of effective metric structure theory. With the group situation as a model, we develop corresponding notions of recursive presentations and word problems for C*-algebras, and show some analogous results hold in this setting. Famously, every finitely generated group with a computable presentation is computably categorical, but we provide a counterexample in the case of C*-algebras. On the other hand, we show every finite-dimensional C*-algebra is computably (...) categorical. (shrink)

This paper discusses the important paper by Paul Thagard on the pathway version of mechanistic explanation that is currently used in chemical explanation. The author claims that this method of explanation has a respectable pedigree and can be traced back to the Chemical Revolution in the arguments used by the Lavoisier School in their theoretical duels with Richard Kirwan, the proponent of a revised phlogistonian theory. Kirwan believed that complex chemical reactions could be explained by recourse to affinity tables that (...) catalogued the attraction that various simple bodies possessed towards each other. To explain was in effect to make a delayed prediction, it is not enough just to show how a phenomenon fits into the discernible patterns of the world. Lavoisier, Fourcroy and their colleagues used pathway reasoning, although disguising this fact by suggesting that affinities varied when subjected to n-body situations. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley was the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist school, which came to prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century and remained influential into the first half of the twentieth. Bradley, who was influenced by Hegel and also reacted against utilitarianism, was recognised during his lifetime as one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation, and was the first philosopher to receive the Order of Merit, in 1924. In this major work, originally published in 1883, Bradley (...) discusses the basic principles of logic: judgment and inference. He rejects the idea of a separation between mind and body, arguing that human thought cannot be separated from its worldly context. In the second edition, published in 1922 and reissued here, Bradley added a commentary and essays, but left the text largely unaltered. Volume 1 contains Book 1 on judgment and Book 2 on inference. (shrink)

The role played by objectivity in continuum physics is reexamined in an attempt to establish fully its deep connection with classical and relativistic time derivatives. The way of distinguishing one element in the class of objective time derivatives may depend on the particular problem of interest; this is emphasized in conjunction with material relaxation phenomena described via hidden variable evolution equations.

This article explores the relationship between utility and justice in the ancient Epicurean tradition, and as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries following the revival of Epicureanism in the writings of Pierre Gassendi. It focuses on the significance of various allusions to a line from Horace, ‘utilitas, justi prope mater et aequi’, which appeared in writings of Hugo Grotius, David Hume, and Jeremy Bentham, and was used to give utility a prominence in modern hought that it had not (...) hitherto received. The article attempts to provide the context for Hume’s belief in the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals that the foundation of justice was utility and for Bentham placing utility at the foundation of his system. (shrink)

§ 1. The dates for Peisistratus’ reigns and exiles in the Athenaion Politeia, as given in the papyrus, which is the sole authority for the text, are as follows.