This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

In this paper, the author attempts to explore some of the problems connected with the formulation and application of international biomedical ethical guidelines, with particular reference to Africa. Recent attempts at revising and updating some international medical ethical guidelines have been bedevilled by intractable controversies and wrangling regarding both the content and formulation. From the vantage position of relative familiarity with both African and Western contexts, and the privilege of having been involved in the revision and updating of one of (...) the international ethical guidelines, the author reflects broadly on these issues and attempts prescribing an approach from both the theoretical and practical angles liable to mitigate, if not completely eliminate, some of the problems and difficulties. (shrink)

"It is the purpose of this article to attempt to re-examine the account of Thrasymachus' doctrine in Plato's Republic, and to show how it can form a self-consistent whole. [...] In this paper it is maintained that Thrasymachus is holding a form of [natural right]".

Recent observations of ultra high energy cosmic rays and gamma rays suggest that there are small violations of Lorentz symmetry. If there were no such violations, then the GZK cut off would hold and cosmic rays with energy ∼1020 eV or higher would not be reaching the earth. However some such events seem to have been observed. This has lead to phenomenological models in which there is a small violation of the Lorentz symmetry or the velocity of light. However recent (...) approaches which no longer consider a differentiable spacetime manifold already predict such violations. Similarly there are other theoretical reasons which also point to this. We briefly discuss some of these approaches and observe that Lorentz Symmetry violations can be tested by data from NASA’s GLAST satellite due for launch. (shrink)

In conveying experiences of meditation, the question of what exceeds or should resist description has been a recurrent topic of commentary in a wide array of literature -- including religious doctrine, meditation guides, and contextual accounts written by historians and social scientists. Yet, to date, this question has not significantly informed neuroscientific studies on the effects of meditation on brain and behaviour, in large part -- but not wholly -- because of the disregard for first-person accounts of experience that still (...) characterizes neuroscience in general. By juxtaposing perspectives from non-neuroscientific accounts on the tensions and questions raised by what is and is not expressed or expressible in words, this article paves the way for a new set of possibilities in experimental contemplative neuroscience. (shrink)

In response to the recent antitheory movement which has called into question the relevance of theory itself, this paper seeks to defend the practice of theory. Taking hermeneutical theory as its model, it seeks to show how a properly postmodern conception of the role and function of theory eludes the criticisms elaborated by various antitheorists. In formulating a new way of envisaging the relation betweeen theory and practice, it seeks not only to defend the theoretical enterprise but to demonstrate as (...) well its importance for the discursive practices of the human sciences and for sociopolitical praxis. (shrink)