In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plato's Essentialism: Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms by Vasilis PolitisTravis ButlerPOLITIS, Vasilis. Plato's Essentialism: Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021. x + 251 pp. Cloth, $99.99The reinterpretation of the theory of forms to which Politis refers in this book's subtitle is accomplished by foregrounding the conception of forms as essences—the kinds of beings we must countenance if we (...) pose, pursue, and believe we can answer the "What is F?" question. Politis argues that some of Plato's arguments for introducing forms have been distorted by the assumption that he is primarily interested in the Aristotelian question about substance or a Parmenidean quest for stable objects of thought and knowledge. By focusing on forms as the targets of the "What is F?" [End Page 154] question, we can dispel these misconceptions and bring the Platonic theory more clearly into view.Chapter 1 includes the cornerstone of Politis' interpretation—an original reading of a brief passage in the Hippias Major. Hippias is an important interlocutor for the project because he holds that the "What is F?" question can be answered by asking instead, "Which things exemplify F?" Let's call the claim that "What is F?" can be answered by examples "The Exemplar Doctrine" (ED). Politis argues that Hippias' commitment to ED leads him to deny the existence of a single exemplar for all cases—a denial he is forced subsequently to rescind. Thus, by endorsing the search for exemplars over the search for essence, Hippias sows the seeds of his own refutation.Readers might wonder how an account of a brief passage in the Hippias Major, apparently innocent of transcendent metaphysics, could serve as the cornerstone of a reinterpretation of the theory of forms. The initial answer in chapter 2 is that the rejection of ED is taken to imply that forms are imperceptible. The implication follows because Politis takes the supposition that F is definable by example to be biconditionally related to the claim that the essence of F is perceivable by the senses. When Socrates gets Hippias to reject ED, then, he gets him (tacitly) to accept that the essence of F is not perceivable by the senses. A central tenet of Platonism, the imperceptibility of forms, thus follows from an initial point about the proper way to answer the "What is F?" question.Chapter 3 continues in a similar vein, arguing that many special features attributed to forms in the Phaedo and Republic, such as their unity, uniformity, and incompositeness, follow from facts about inquiry into essences. Politis argues that these features belong, in the first instance, to defining accounts of forms and only secondarily to the forms themselves. Skeptical readers might observe that the focus in the Phaedo is much more on the forms than on defining accounts of them. In addition, it should be noted that the list of special features on which Politis focuses is somewhat selective. Chapters 2 and 3 include no discussion of the divinity and purity of forms or their status as alone by themselves. The divinity of forms is crucial for their role in Plato's ethics, but it seems unlikely to be explained by anything related to the "What is F?" question.In chapter 4, Politis defends a novel account of the epistemology of the Phaedo. He argues that it should be viewed through the lens of the account of inquiry in that dialogue, though not the central notion of inquiring with the soul by itself. Instead, we should focus on the passage in which Socrates claims that sense perception of deficiently equal sticks puts us in mind (ennoēsai) of the equal itself (74c–75b). Politis takes this claim to imply that sense perception plays a justificatory and not merely causal role in acquiring knowledge, though the textual arguments of this chapter fall short of establishing that striking claim.Chapter 5 takes on arguments in the Phaedo and Republic that appear to distinguish forms from sensibles on the grounds that the latter but not the former suffer the compresence of opposites (for example, appearing [End Page 155] both equal and unequal). Politis argues that scholars... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Interpretation of Plato's Parmenides: Zeno s Paradox and the Theory of Forms R. E. ALLEN PLATO'S Parmenides is divided into three main parts, of uneven length, and distinguished from each other both by their subject matter and their speakers. In the first and briefest part (127d-130a), Socrates offers the Theory of Forms in solution of a problem raised by Zeno. In the second (130a-135d), Parmenides (...) levels a series of objections against Socrates' theory, objections putatively meant as refutation. Then, after an interlude to explain an unfamiliar method of dialectic (135d-137c), that method is applied in the third part by Parmenides, with the help of the young Aristoteles (137c-166c). This final part forms more than two-thirds of the whole. I propose here to examine the first part of the dialogue, the interchange between Zeno and Socrates, and to examine it with special attention to the bearing which questions of dialectical structure and dramatic characterization may have upon its interpretation. It is perhaps here proper to indicate the general view of the dialogue which this discussion will help serve to recommend. Briefly, it is this. The Parmenides is a sustained examination of Plato's Theory of Forms, and the manner of examination is Socratic: the student is presented, not with a body of conclusions, but with a series of arguments whose implications he is left to think through for himself. When he has done so, he will realize that the Theory of Forms is proof against the objections here brought against it: the Parmenides provides no direct support for the thesis, currently popular, that Plato in later life ceased to believe that Forms exist. But though sound as far as it goes, the Theory of Forms does not go far enough: the Parmenides demonstrates that there is a range of problems, bound up with the application of unrestricted predicates, which Forms do not solve but are prey to. A broader theory is required, though a theory which may well contain the Theory of Forms as a part. The Parmenides, whose purpose is critical, leaves unanswered the question of what that theory may be. Zeno's Paradox and the Theoryof Forms (127d-130a) It is Zeno who begins the dialectic of the Parmenides,and fittingly, he begins it with a paradox. If there are many things, the same things must be both [143] 144 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY like and unlike. But this is impossible: unlike things cannot be like, nor like things unlike. Therefore, there cannot be many things (127e). Socrates' reply begins with a solution, and ends with a challenge. There exists, alone by itself, a Form of Likeness, and also a Form of its opposite, Unlikeness. The things we call 'many' are both like and unlike; but in this they differ from the Forms in which they partake. For things which are just alike (abr& r& 6uoLa)1 cannot be unlike, nor things just unlike alike. But it is no more surprising that the same things should partake both in Likeness and Unlikeness than it is that a thing should be both one and many by partaking in both Unity and Plurality. Still, Unity itself is not many, nor Plurality one. And so with other Forms: Socrates would be filled with wonder if someone could show that Likeness and Unlikeness, Unity and Plurality, Rest and Motion, and the other Forms, can be combined with (~v'rK~p&vvwOaO and separated from (SLaKotp~0a,) each other. Forms cannot be qualified by their opposite. 2 Socrates' denial is a conjunction. Several translators, including Cornford and Taylor, have rendered ~v3,~p&vvvaOa~ ~as &aKps as though it were a disjunction, 'combined or separated'. The reason for this was no doubt stylistic; but the Greek means, not 'or' but 'and', and logically, the difference is important. Zeno and Parmenides are challenged to prove, not one of two alternatives, but both together. This conclusion rests on more than a Kas In the Sophist, knowing how to separate (&a~ps 253e 3) according to kinds is equivalent to distinguishing (&a~m~a0a~ 253d 1) according to kinds, and both are equivalent to not believing that the same Form is different or a different Form the same (253d 1... (shrink)

A LTHOUGH the notion of a Form is important to Plato's theory, it is difficult to understand what these Forms are supposed to be and why Plato is convinced they exist. So I'll try, first, to help you make sense out of the doctrine of the Forms. Then I will try to show that this abstract doctrine is responsible for some concrete implications.

The paper aims to show that by abstracting from a specific mythical historical- stylistic context and “ideation” of the notion of the Proto-Slavic deities Perun and Veles, especially in Croatian tradition, symbolic archetypes and abstract notions of form and primordial matter (materia prima) can be extracted from mythical content. We refer to mythical texts and contents according to the reconstructions and materials brought by Radoslav Katičić, and comparative analysis by Mislav Ježić. We distinguish form (1) as that in which (...) identity and possibility of a thing consists, (2) as the reasonableness of judgment and the form of existence, and (3) as the specific structure of a thing, which unites its parts and aspects as a whole and constitutes its internal necessity. These formative notions are relativized and nullified in Veles’ appearances, in which the archetypal notion of primordial matter is encoded. Examples of Platō’s dialogues historically confirm certain aspects of decoding myth as constitutive of philosophy. The above approach also opens a view of the roots of Croatian philosophical thought, which in its genesis can be traced back to Proto-Slavic mythical archetypes. With the implementation of Christianity, the questions of identity, reason and the structure of the whole are raised radically and sharply, as shown by the text of Trpimir’s grant (852). (shrink)

Grabowski, a self-described Platonic realist, argues against the "standard interpretation" of Plato's Forms as abstract universals in favor of the view that they are concrete particulars. He explains that the mistaken standard interpretation arises from a deeply ingrained habit of reading Plato's texts through the hermeneutical lens of the universals. Universals undoubtedly play a major role in the history of philosophy, though they were not Plato's primary concern in elaborating a theory of the Forms. "It is not (...) that the problem of universals gives rise to the Forms, but that the Forms give rise to the problem of universals" .According to Grabowski, if it can be shown that Plato never expunged the "model of acquaintance" from his theory of knowledge, then, strange as it seems, we can reasonably believe that Plato posited, or should have posited, the Forms as concrete particulars similar to those that exist in the sensible world, albeit bereft of any of the latter's "ontological deficiencies" .Grabowski begins the task by constructing an argument for the "standard interpretation," only to show that this interpretation proves unpersuasive, if for no other reason than the paucity of evidence supporting it in Plato's texts. In chapter 2, Grabowski summarizes. (shrink)

In a Realist ontology relations are subsisting or existing entities distinct from ordinary things. Idealists claim that the notion of relations is subject to a vicious infinite regress. Nominalists claim that relations are particularized instances. In an attempt to search for the roots of a Realist conception of relations and to meet these challenges I investigate Plato's conception of relations in the Phaedo. ;Against the current of a majority of Plato scholars, Castaneda finds evidence for a distinction between relations and (...) properties at Phaedo 102 b-d. I enter the debate on Castaneda's side and find support for his interpretation of the passage in the context of the dialogue as a whole. The relation--quality distinction resolves the paradox of Simmias being both taller than Socrates and shorter than Phaedo at the same time, since Plato possesses relational characteristics of tallness and shortness, which are not contraries unlike the the contrary properties of hot and cold which could not coexist in an individual. Gallop offers the alternative essence--accident distinction which also resolves the paradox since tallness and shortness as accidents may coexist. The latter distinction however Aristotelianizes Plato. I have shown how the essence--accident distinction is incompatible with Plato's theory of Forms, as it leads to such odd conclusions as the admittance of accidental Forms. ;Castaneda claims that Plato reduces relations to Form-chains in which individuals participate in pairs. I offer the alternative of Plato's positing of relational Forms as distinct from monadic Forms. I survey the corpus of Platonic dialogues in search of support for the distinction between relations and properties. I find that in the Statesman there is a distinction between two types of Forms which generates the distinction between monadic Forms and relational Forms. ;I conclude that there is ample evidence in Plato's dialogues and in Aristotle's assessment of Plato to ascribe this distinction to Plato. Plato's explanation of relations in terms of Forms, which have the highest grade of reality for him, sets up the basis for any Realist theory of relations--for reductionist theories reducing relations to relational properties or some other subsisting entities, as well as for the irreducible concept of relations as abstract subsisting entities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.4 (2003) 553-554 [Access article in PDF] Ruby Blondell. The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 452. Cloth, $75.00. Plato's dialogues were written before audiences distinguished philosophy from literature. Recently scholars have argued that the dialogues should be read as philosophy that is literature, and no one makes the case better than Blondell (...) does in this splendid work. Her argument compels by focusing on character in the relevant senses: as the dramatis personae of the dialogues, as that which individuates them and prompts them to act in ways that affect their very souls, and as "the effects of literary characterization on the moral character of the audience" (2). Character connects the dialogues as "literature," "philosophy," and paideia.In Plato's careful delineation of the characters of his dramatis personae, Blondell finds a tension between the existence of human particularity and the search for generic types. Socrates is a prime example of the dialectical movement between particularity and its attempted transcendence. Plato's choice to write dialogues is also "an assertion of human plurality" (49) that exhibits the pathos of trying to transcend human experience. "Dramatic form... becomes a medium for exploring the limits of transcendence, and the multiple tensions—between ideal and particular, mind and body, original and image, one and many, being and becoming, divine and human, deduction and persuasion, reason and emotion—which pervade the works of Plato" (50). Blondell's discussions of how dramatic form serves epistemological and pedagogical aims in Hippias Minor, Republic, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman are so rich in insight and nuance that one hesitates to suggest they could be improved upon. Still, greater emphasis on the historical and cultural contexts shared by characters, author, and audience might add to our understanding of Plato's preoccupation with these specific philosophical tensions as well as his choice to address them through dramatic form.Blondell's discussion of Theaetetus is especially good in showing how "abstract epistemological issues... play themselves out in the world of specific, particularized human beings.... [I]t is this personal dimension of epistemology—the fact that we are particular, embodied individuals—that generates most of the problems in this dialogue (especially the reliability and subjectivity of sense perception)" (252). That philosophy, epistemology, and pedagogy come to be identified with Socrates also generates problems. Can there be philosophy without Socrates? To become a philosopher, must one resemble Socrates? If philosophy cannot go on without Socrates, how can it realize its aim of transcending human particularity? If philosophy can go on without him, will its practice and pedagogy nonetheless require dialectical discussion among embodied inquirers?No character in the dialogues appears a more likely successor to Socrates than Theaetetus. He resembles Socrates in appearance and character, and Blondell notes that repeated references to the younger man's gentleness and courage, and to his training in geometry, recall nothing so much as the guardians of the Republic. Theaetetus is the right kind of interlocutor, and one that allows Plato to portray—and defend—the elenchic Socrates, who merges with the "productive" Socrates in this dialogue. Before meeting Socrates, Theaetetus's attempts at philosophy were unsuccessful because he needed someone like himself to help him realize his philosophical potential. Socrates offers himself as [End Page 553] an intellectual midwife, yet Blondell observes that, his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, he sometimes assumes the position and privileges of a father, and at other times is identified with philosophy as the object of desire. As an intellectual parent, Socrates demonstrates his superiority to Theodorus as the orphan's guardian. That Theodorus was Protagoras's pupil suggests one line of descent for Theaetetus: Protagoras—Theodorus—Theaetetus. Socrates' invocation of Parmenides suggests another: Parmenides—Socrates—Theaetetus. Different lines of descent bring different kinds of pedagogy: passive transference from Sophist to pupil versus active learning through dialectical discussion.But there is more to being a philosopher than what is found in Socrates or Theaetetus, for the ideal philosopher as Socrates describes him lacks... (shrink)

From descriptive interpretation of "understanding" to abstract-gnosiological understanding of mentality. The historical deconstruction of the existential understanding introduced as ontologic property of constantly becoming stable "Being-in-the-World" allows us to interpret this concept as mentality. Through theprism of existential philosophy in general and its interpreters such as Jacque Le Goff it allows us to make a conclusion that mentality is one of complete formations of public consciousness. But in the course of such interpretation of mentality it is important to avoid (...) the methodological situation in which Plato deadlocked, when he had decided to find out, what was beautiful itself. For the way out from this situation he had to introduce independently existing ideas and special space of ideas which define all the things and even gods. We, unfortunately, do not have such an opportunity which the history gave to Plato. Somehow to define structural and historical conditions for breaking out of mentality we shall be limited to the instruction that it is more complex, compound, but in the same time integrally complete formation historically actualized, unlike traditionally allocated kinds and forms of consciousness. Another important question is whether the concept "mentality" is acceptable for analysis of the current modern processes or it can only be used for the reconstruction of the completed formations. The mentality cannot be analyzed from inside. And we are inclined to consider that to operate the concept "mentality" in relation to a modern representative of civilization is inappropriate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dialectic as "Philosophical Embarrassment":Heidegger's Critique of Plato's MethodFrancisco Gonzalez (bio)Philosophie ist ein Ringen um die Methode.(GA58, 228)Hans-Georg Gadamer has expressed the following debt to the thought of Martin Heidegger: "The philosophical stimuli I received from Heidegger led me more and more into the realm of dialectic, Plato's as well as Hegel's."1 It is therefore surprising to discover that Heidegger himself did not see his thought as leading him (...) into the realm of dialectic. On the contrary, in Being and Time we find a curt and unexplained dismissal of dialectic, specifically Plato's, as a "genuine philosophical embarrassment" (Verlegenheit).2 This dismissal is repeated in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics course of WS 1929/30 where Heidegger asserts that "all dialectic in philosophy," and thus that of Hegel as well as Plato, "is only the expression of an embarrassment."3 Only with the publication of Heidegger's earlier lecture courses from the 1920s, are we in a position to understand and evaluate this surprising dismissal. We are also in a better position to understand why even the later Heidegger failed to reassess his rejection of dialectic, despite the existence of strong incentives for doing so: incentives recognized not only by Heidegger's students but, as will be shown, by Heidegger himself. What will emerge are not only the oft-observed limitations of Heidegger as an interpreter of Plato, but also, and more importantly, their source in certain limitations of Heidegger's own thinking. [End Page 361]1. Heidegger's Critique of Dialectic in the 1920sHeidegger's most detailed account of Plato's dialectic, and thus the one that best explains his curt dismissal of dialectic in later works, is to be found in the Sophist lectures of 1924/25.4 This account begins with a description of the pervasiveness and potential obstructiveness of. Though ordinarily and most immediately pervades all forms of disclosing (GA19, 196), "[a]ccording to its original sense and original facticity, is not at all disclosing (aufdeckend), but is, if one may speak in an extreme way, precisely concealing (verdeckend)" (197).5 In other words, is initially and for the most part "idle talk" (Gerede), the kind of speech that is bandied about concerning anything whatsoever and that "has the facticity of not allowing the things themselves to be seen, but producing instead a self-satisfaction in resting content with what 'one says'" (197). Thus speech at first presents itself as self-sufficient and autonomous; one hangs onto what is said without being directed beyond it to the things themselves.This tendency of to conceal is a theme to which Heidegger returns repeatedly in the courses of the 1920s. In a course from WS 1923/24 he argues that deception has its origin in the very facticity of language.6 In the unpublished course from SS 1924 ("Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie"), the one that immediately preceded the Sophist lectures, Heidegger characterizes language as the proper domain of "Das Man" (18, 22) and describes the dominance of as leading to Gerede (7, 112).7 Heidegger therefore claims that because the Greeks lived in speech they were also imprisoned by it, with the result that a tremendous effort was needed for them to overcome their imprisonment and thus make science possible (41, 106 ).In the Sophist lectures, Heidegger assigns to dialectic an important role in this effort. Given both the pervasiveness and the concealing character of, philosophy, in its attempt to disclose the things themselves, must both begin with and break through it by means of a "speaking for and against" (Für- und Gegensprechen) that destroys the autonomy and self-sufficiency that has in Gerede and in this way "leads more and more to the matter under discussion and lets it be seen" (GA19, 197). What is needed, in short, is dia-lectic: a speaking that passes through speech.Already, however, one can see the tension that characterizes dialectic on Heidegger's account. Though dialectic is a, a speaking, it seeks to be more. Its aim is to disclose the things themselves of which it speaks, to see these things in a "pure seeing" uncontaminated by the... (shrink)

This excellent book consists of a translation of Plato's Euthyphro, plus "interspersed comment" intended "partly as a help to the Greekless reader in finding his way, and partly as a means of embedding the discussion of the earlier theory of Forms which follows it." That subsequent discussion is a series of sections aimed at establishing "that there is an earlier theory of Forms, found in the Euthyphro and other early dialogues as an essential adjunct of Socratic dialect" and (...) that it is not the same as the theory of Forms found in the Phaedo, Republic and other middle dialogues. In the Euthyphro Socrates' question of what holiness is assumes that there is a Form of holiness, "that this Form is a universal, the same in all holy things;... that that Form may be used as a standard, by which to judge what things are holy and what are not...; that it is an essence, by which or in virtue of which holy things are holy." As essences Forms are causes--formal, not efficient. They are "causes in the sense that they are that by which things are what they are. They therefore affect the career of the world, in that if they did not exist, the world would not be what it is." They "are not identical with their instances and [are] prior to their instances" and, hence, they are not in their instances. In fact, "Forms are as 'separate' from their instances in the early dialogues as they are" in the later ones. Do they not differ, then, from these latter Forms? Yes, because "of the way in which separation is conceived." In the Phaedo and other middle dialogues separation "involves something more than... nonidentity, independence, or priority. It involves the claim that instances of Forms are deficient imitations or resemblances of Forms.... To that theory was later conjoined, as a natural corollary, the theory that sensibles and Forms differ in their degree of reality, that Forms are more real than their instances." There are, in fact, "Two Worlds, Visible and Invisible.... The objects of the Visible World... are in a perpetually changing mortal realm, never the same with respect to each other or themselves. By contrast, Forms, the reality of whose existence we render an account in questioning and answering, exist always in the same way with respect to the same things, single in nature, alone by themselves, never in any way under any circumstances admitting alteration." This contrast between the Two Worlds is not drawn in the Euthyphro and earlier writings. Hence, between them and the middle dialogues there is a development in the theory of Forms. Of course, there also is "a unity to Plato's thought; but it is not the unity of a monument. It is the unity of growth and development, the unity of life." In these splendid pages one point remains unclear: how can a Form be universal and thus distinct from its instances and yet be their formal cause? Allen leaves no doubt that this is his position: "In Plato's early dialogues Forms are not the being of that of which they are Forms. A universal, being one, cannot constitute the being of a plurality--precisely why Aristotle was led to distinguish substantial form from universal. The Euthyphro does not imply that holiness is the being of any given holy thing or action as holy; it implies only that holiness is that by which holy things are holy. It implies, to borrow another bit of Aristotelian vocabulary, that holiness is a cause." But precisely in what way is a Form "that by which" something is what it is? Plato subsequently answers by distinguishing the Form itself, its character as participated by a particular thing, and the participant : the Form is that by which some thing is what it is through the participated character which the thing has. Is this answer implied in the Euthyphro? Or in what sense is a Form distinct from particular things? In what sense a formal cause? That puzzlement, though, is minor in the context of the entire book, which is valuable not only for the interpretation Allen gives of the early and middle dialogues but also for all sorts of unexpected bonuses. These are points either newly made or brilliantly reiterated--for example, the influence of Anaxagoras on Plato re the notion of essence and in philosophical vocabulary; Aristotle's abandonment of the contrast made in the Categories between primary and secondary substance; the crucial difference between genus/species in Aristotle and in Plato (enriched/impoverished; the analogy of a Platonic definition to mapping a field; the evaluation of Aristotle's interpretation of Plato's Forms, of his report on the "unwritten doctrines," of esoteric and exoteric teachings. This last culminates in a paragraph which all students of Plato should reflect upon constantly: "It is possible to treat Plato's text, not as evidence for something else, but as itself the primary object of historical understanding. The aim of the inquiry is then to interpret a set of literary documents, not to fathom the entertained beliefs of their author. It is reasonable, of course, to assume that the documents are a reliable index to the beliefs; but the connection, after all, is contingent, and as far as interpretation is concerned, unimportant. If Plato, in his heart of hearts, had been a nominalist, an atheist, a sceptic about immortality, and a hedonist, and had yet gone on to write the dialogues which he wrote for some obscure motive now unknown, this would not change the proper interpretation of what he wrote and privately disbelieved by one iota: when a man says what he does not believe, we may still perfectly well understand what it is he has said. The question, then, of whether Plato had beliefs he did not express, or beliefs contrary to what he did express, may be left to those with skill in the arts of divination; the historian may more reasonably limit himself to the study of texts and their meaning. If inquiry is construed in this way, it is self-referentially inconsistent to prefer the testimony of Aristotle to the evidence of Plato's text in the interpretation of Plato."--L. S. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Discussions ARISTOTLE'S ALLEGED "REVOLT" AGAINST PLATO Hermippus' most conspicuous contribution to Aristotle's biography probably was his determined effort to depict Aristotle as the founder of an original school of philosophy which was wholly independent of Plato and Platonic teachings. Among the several and, in all likelihood, fanciful stories about Aristotle he invented or propagated, the most startling was the account, subsequently widely accepted (and widely exploited (...) by the detractors of Aristotle), that after having been a disciple of Plato for a while, he seceded from the Academy and from Plato's philosophic teachings while Plato was still alive. 1 Accordingly, he owed little to Plato and to the Academy. This story, invented and propagated by an inveterate Peripatetic (Hermippus), was intended to demonstrate the original philosophic genius of Aristotle which developed in complete independence of Plato and necessitated a break with the master's teachings. In devising his argument, Hermippus might have made use of a report, found in some of Aristotle's ancient biographers, that a few brash young men (members of the Academy?) revolted against Plato and, in a spirit of independence, defiance and antagonism, attempted to start a school of their own which would rival the intellectual standing of the Academy. 2 Hermippus, it appears, subsequently identified these young "rebels" with Aristotle, a substitution convenient to Hermippus" aim to depict Aristotle as a wholly independent and totally original philosopher who owed nothing whatever to Plato and his teachings. In all likelihood, Diogenes Laertius' statement that Aristotle "seceded from the Academy while Plato was still alive," a is just an echo either of a statement made by Hermippus himself or is a conclusion drawn from the several unpleasant stories about Aristotle invented and reported by some of Aristotle's detractors. According to these derogatory stories, there existed many serious personal as well as doctrinal 4 disagreements or rifts between Plato and the Stagirite--disagreeDiogenes Laertius, V. 2. See also Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, XV. 2. 3, and ibid., XV. 2. 13 (Aristoxenus); Aelian, Varia Historia, IV. 9; Theodoretus, Graecorum Affectionum Curatio, IV. 46; St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, VIII. 12; Philoponus, Comment. in Aristotelis Analytica Posteriora, CIAG, vol. XIII, part 3, pp. 133, 30 ft. 2 See Aelius Aristides, Oratio XLVI, 249. 10. See also note 1, supra. s Diogenes Laertius, V. 2. See also Vita Aristotelis Marciana 9; Vita Aristotelis Latina 9. 9 See, for instance, Plutarch, Adversus Coloten 14 (Moralia, III5A); Cicero, Academica I. 9. 33; Eusebius, op. cir., XV. 2, passim; Diogenes Laertius III. 37; Justin Martyr, Cohortatio ad Graecos 5 (Migne, PG. vol. VI. p. 247); Cyrillus, Contra Julianum II. 47; Proclus, [91] 92 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ments whichmarred the relations between these two men and which were indicative of Aristotle's ingratitude, bad taste and unwarranted conceit. The report of Diogenes Laertius, in an oblique manner, may also refer to the fact that already during his active association with the Platonic Academy (367-348 B.c.), that is, in his On (the) Ideas and On the Good, Aristotle had begun to disagree with, and criticize, some of Plato's fundamental teachings. It may also, in a distorted form, refer to the following specific incident which, however, cannot be verified: According to Aristoxenus, during the absence of Plato in Syracuse (and while Heracleides of Pontus was the "acting scholarch" of the Academy),5 some unnamed young members of the Academy, or "students" or, perhaps, some "outsiders " attempted to start a rival school (within the Academy?).6 As a matter of fact, Aelian, who apparently dramatizes this incident, reports that during Plato's last years, that is, some time after Plato's return from his third and last voyage to Syracuse, a serious conflict or confrontation arose within the Academy. Aristotle, together with some of his friends, or "conspirators," we are told, harrassed and molested the aging Plato by constantly putting questions to him, by arguing with him in an insolent manner, by contradicting him on every point, and by attempting to involve him in hair-splitting dialectics. At the time Xenocrates was in Chalcedon, and Speusippus was gravely ill. Hence, neither of them could come to the succor of Plato. In... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:REFLECTIONS ON GADAMER'S NOTION OF SPRACHLICHKEIT by Deborah Cook The works of Hans-Georg Gadamer recall the works of Martin Heidegger as those of Plato memorialize Socrates. The history of philosophy is constituted in such iterations. Indeed, die relationship between Gadamer and Heidegger offers us a paradigm for the understanding of die history of philosophy, manifesting as it does how this history is less marked by change than by (...) a ceaseless repetition of the same. Nevertheless, whUe Gadamer reappropriates the Heidegger of Being and Time, he does so with a different aim in mind; an aim very similar to that of Wilhelm Dilthey: to give to die human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) a solid epistemological foundation for their judgments of cultural artifacts. This foundation would also unsetde the truth value of scientificjudgments about natural objects by reinterpreting them. Heidegger's goal, on die odier hand, was to understand why diere is somediing radier dian nodiing. This led him to propose a fundamental ontology in Being and Time which he later based on die word (verbum). From the beginning, Gadamer could see in the word die power and importance Heidegger had neglected in Being and Time. Thus, on die basis of a philosophy or phenomenology of language, Gadamer pursues his end with the aid of Heidegger's original and ontologically significant formulation of die hermeneutic circle. For Gadamer, the hermeneutic circle of understanding (Verstehen), interpretation (Auslegung), and application (Anwendung) is a movement inscribed primarily in language. Using the literary text as the prototype for any object understood in the circle, he accounts for our appropriation of 84 Deborah Cook85 objects by attributing it to the power diat dwells in language. Gadamer terms this characteristic ofunderstanding its Sprachlichkeit or linguisticality. In our dealings with die world, we understand everytiring in it linguistically. As Heidegger suggested in his Letter on Humanism, language is the house of Being. It is language and language alone which accounts for die fact that we understand die world. Gadamer takes up this view diat language is die house of Being and claims diat understanding, interpretation, and application must be interpreted as linguistic phenomena because diey embody a unified whole — die understanding must not be divorced from interpretation — and because our traffic with objects takes a form analogous to mat of dialogue. It is my aim in mis discussion to consider this Sprachlichkeit as described in Truth and Method first in relation to the Heidegger ofBeing and Time and the later Heidegger and then with respect to our understanding of texts in reading. The Heidegger of Being and Time portrays the much celebrated hermeneutic circle in an original and ontologically significant way. The circle is, for Heidegger, an existentiale characterizing Dasein's very mode of being in the world and its meaning structures. It is no longer primarily a mediod. What is originally meaningful is not language but die structures of significance (the Zeichen ofequipment and the Bedeutsamkeit ofdie world) which are prior to language and from which language is derived. The circle is first and foremost a prelinguistic understanding of tiiose structures of significance toward which Dasein always transcends itself in its projects. The world and equipment are meaningful because Dasein invests diem with meaning. It is thus Dasein diat is responsible for die meaning of the world and equipment. Nonedieless, this meaning is not, for all that, arbitrary ; what underlies it, or makes it possible, is Being. Being (Sein) is die ontological foundation of pre-linguistic significance. It is that upon which meaning is grounded. While objects, dien, do not have meaning, meaning is bestowed on them by the Dasein diat seeks to render diem intelligible to itselfon die basis ofits immediate and pre-ontological understanding of Being. The hermeneutic circle characterizes die way in which diis prelinguistic and pre-ontological relationship to the world and to objects is deployed. In Heidegger's words, "To every understanding of die world, existence is understood with it and vice versa. All interpretation, moreover, operates in the forestructure which we have already characterized. Any interpretation which is to contribute to understanding must already have understood what is to be interpreted." Heidegger then goes on to claim that even the "... derivative ways... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 475-477 [Access article in PDF] A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life, by André Comte-Sponville, trans. Catherine Temerson; x & 352 pp. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001. Of two minds, I mirror the two sorts of audience this book's twenty-four translations have sought: "students" and "readers" (p. 5), those for whom the scholarly content and apparatus (...) may be of interest and those hopefully many more who wish to become better, to become virtuous. Although "students" will not find sustained engagement with this book rewarding, its bright virtues will raise "readerly" smiles among them.Reasons for Small's great popularity since its 1995 PUF release derive not from essaying eighteen virtues in its eighteen chapters. Its allure is its dance with love's piquant absences, a dance with virtues as "feeble approximations of love" (p. 98). Indeed, chapter 1 teaches that politeness "is not a virtue but a simulacrum that imitates virtue (in adults) and paves the way for it (in children)" (p. 13). And since love, "the alpha and omega of all virtue" (p. 226), is not itself clearly a virtue, then perhaps at most fifteen virtues are treated. For as all readers will pleasurably discover, purity (chapter 14) is really refractions of love's qualities.The virtues are multiply interconnected, not unified as Socrates thought. This idea finds graceful expression, among other places, at the conclusion of "Generosity" (chapter 7). "Combined with courage, it turns out to be heroism. Joined by justice, it becomes equity. Coupled with compassion, it becomes benevolence. In league with mercy, it becomes leniency" (p. 102). And chap-ter 9's mercy? "Because hatred is a sadness, mercy (like the process of mourning, which it resembles and might even require, since to forgive is to bid farewell to our hatred) is on the side of joy. When it is not yet joyous, it is forgiveness; when it already is, it is love" (p. 131). Simone Weil's meditations on God's absence, or "withdrawal," occasion insights into authentic parental love. [End Page 475] God does not fill the world since "were he to do so, there would be only God and no world"; similarly, "more often than one might think, parents withdraw, step back, cede their space to their children, and refrain from exercising all the power at their disposal. Why? Because they love them" (p. 274).Unfortunately, love's flowers, potted in this garden of Adonis (Phaedrus 276b), must contend with "student" scrutiny from without and a suffocating lack of concision from within. This "student's" efforts failed to disentangle ambivalences about the loving ego in the long, concluding love chapter. Organized into three sections—eros, philia, agape—the first has no patience for subtleties of the Symposium's eros. "Have I begged the question?... So be it," since Plato confuses "love—in all its forms—with [ego's] want" (p. 243). Philia "is a different way of [ego's] possessing, of enjoying" (p. 277). Finally, agape, universal and disinterested love, is simply one's genuine conatus, one's true power of existing (pp. 270f). So ego loves three ways—desire, possession, power—but each is about ego. Eros "usually" (p. 262) intermixes with philia: "we are forever hesitating, oscillating, fluctuating between the two affects [desire and joy] and the two truths (Plato's and Spinoza's), between want and capacity, hope and gratitude, passion and action, religion and wisdom, between the love that desires only what it does not have and wants to possess (ero \ s), and the love [philia] that, since it desires only what is, has everything it desires and finds pleasure and joy in it" (p. 253). Nevertheless, philia without excess Platonic eros is about and for ego, not alter. For the friend per se gives ego joy: ego's joy is the definiens of philia (pp. 249ff). Disconcertingly, there are a few contrary formulations of philia as loving "the other for the other's benefit" (p. 262). If "metaphysics is the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Leo Strauss on Plato's Euthyphro ed. Hannes Kerber, and Svetozar Y. MinkovColin David PearsKERBER, Hannes, and Svetozar Y. Minkov, editors. Leo Strauss on Plato's Euthyphro. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023. vii + 231 pp. Cloth, $74.95; paper, $22.95Leo Strauss is an enigmatic figure in the landscape of political philosophy, deeply committed to the restoration of political philosophy as the premiere discipline in academia. He spent (...) his career working to reopen le querelle des anciens et des modernes and the theologico-political problem underlying those tensions. Though, as the editors of this volume point out, Strauss's motivations were not merely historiographic and the evolution of his thought was not without significant, if fruitful, setbacks.Strauss's early thought is defined by his engagement with Maimonides, and especially Philosophy and Law (1935). Without fully abandoning the [End Page 550] traditional interpretation of Maimonides as reconciling Jewish and Aristotelian philosophy, Strauss advances Maimonides as an esoteric thinker with a more complex and nuanced philosophic perspective. Strauss later turned to al-Farabi, who like Maimonides grapples with the complex interrelation of reason, revelation, and the role of philosophy. It was during this era that Strauss, having just fled Nazi Germany in 1938, confirmed his view of esoterism in philosophic writing and jettisoned limited traditional interpretations.However, these phases of Strauss's early development prove short-lived. In 1946, Strauss "suffers" his famous "shipwreck," a profound philosophic crisis, which compelled him "to begin again from the beginning" (Strauss to Löwith, 1946). Al-Farabi had led Strauss back into a study of Plato and to the crisis of reason laid out in Plato's dialogues, the crux of which is the possibility that there may exist permanent limits on what philosophy or science can know about the fundamental nature of things. The implications this has regarding the legitimacy of divine revelation led to the "second sailing" suggested in the Phaedo, and to Strauss's complete reevaluation of the theologico-political problem.The present volume provides a view of Strauss's evolving thought immediately following his "shipwreck" and as he begins to critically elaborate on his view of the relationship between philosophy and religion. Included are Strauss's notebook on Plato's Euthyphro and Crito (1948), a draft of his first lecture on the Euthyphro (1950), notes for his second lecture on the Euthyphro and the text of the lecture itself (1952), as well as marginalia and selections from his copy of Plato's dialogue. Together, these materials make up the several layers surrounding the heart of Strauss's thought on the problems of justice and piety, or "whether the right and necessity of philosophy are completely evident."Reading this volume is an exercise in flipping back and forth between one section and another to the point where one is tempted to break the spine, separate the sections, and lay them out side by side. Strauss's notebook provides his line-by-line interpretation of the Platonic dialogues and forms the basis for both the draft of his first lecture, his notes on the second, and his 1952 lecture itself. Astute readers may already notice in the notebook how Strauss subtly opens up his view of piety, for example by taking seriously Euthyphro's first but formally flawed definition of piety and gradually refusing to position Euthyphro as a fool. Strauss's draft of his first lecture picks up the notebook's themes but still presents a view of piety more in line with the pro-philosopher stance presented early in the notes. By contrast, the 1952 lecture presents a more elegant formulation of Strauss's position, both in words and actions. That is, not only does the second lecture closely follow the notebook's nuanced exegesis, but it is also designed to stimulate the reader's thinking on the problems of justice and piety, rather than resolve these didactically.Strauss appears to have abandoned the approach he took in the first lecture in favor of an approach that echoed Plato's own presentation in the Euthyphro. He closes the 1952 lecture with two especially salient [End Page 551] points. Returning to his early claim... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 218-219 [Access article in PDF] David Roochnik. Beautiful City: The Dialectical Character of Plato's Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 159. Cloth, $35.00. Plato makes no general assertions, certainly none about "universals" (108). The Republic does not advocate the creation of an ideal state (78, 93) but transcends utopias to acknowledge the merits of democracy and democratic (...) diversity (92). Nor does Plato hold the tripartite psychological theory associated with the Republic (18-20). Such theories are impossible for human souls with their essentially temporal natures (104). The Republic is a dialectical work (2). Its movement shows without Plato's saying it that diversity is a social good; that the psychological theory of Book 4 "is preserved in its partiality as a moment of the dialectical development of the dialogue" (3); and so on.David Roochnik belongs in the tradition of Leo Strauss, unearthing an odd and unknown Republic from beneath the dialogue familiar to hordes of readers (beginning with Aristotle) who evidently read it wrongly. Roochnik brings intelligence to his project, clear writing, and a mind inclined toward originality. Nevertheless Strauss's influence is everywhere. E.g.: The Republic is "a conversation that twists and turns, develops, and at times revises what was earlier said. In its totality it gives voice to the truth about the human soul" (131).Roochnik's main subject is that truth about the soul. He says that the Republic corrects Book 4's tripartite analysis with the temporally oriented psychology told in the anecdotes of Books 8 and 9. The wise reader respects both approaches. The soul is "erotic and therefore necessarily diverse, but... desires arithmetical simplicity," and both diversity and simplicity "must be included in an adequate psychology" (120). "Our souls are... suspended between... time and eternity, the divine and the beastly" (108). The erotic and the arithmetical serve as poles between which Plato navigates. Book 4 proposes a mathematical psychology, but Eros increasingly dominates the Republic and the rigid arithmetic designed to harness Eros fails. Book 4's arithmetical account of the soul is "inadequate, and... it is meant to be inadequate" (19). One should see the soul as arithmetical in one respect, irrepressibly erotic in another.Number plays a defining role in the Platonic city, too (38). Kallipolis battles Eros with an arithmetical ideal but loses (44-45). The failure of arithmetic amounts to the failure of utopia. The Republic "teaches that perfect justice is neither possible (the marriage number fails) nor desirable (we don't really want to exile everybody over ten)" (93). Notice: because "we"—Roochnik and his friends?—don't want to found a city among impressionable children, the Republic teaches that Kallipolis is not desirable.To similar effect: "if Kallipolis were to come into being, then the Republic could not. But since Kallipolis requires the Republic in order to come into being, it contains in itself the seeds of its dissolution" (69). Nonsense! Kallipolis needs the Republic in order to come into existence but not to remain existent. The dialogue's disappearance implies nothing about the city's dissolution.Straussians routinely deny that the Republic constructs its city. Though typical, Roochnik claims not to be (7 n. 4, 75). His reading "is not ironic": "the... revisions I have discussed take place on the surface of the dialogue itself, and the kinds of negations that follow are dialectical ones which... preserve what is negated in its partiality" (91).But garble about surfaces and dialectic will not rescue a hermeneutical method if one begins (Roochnik does, all Straussians do) by calling every flaw in a Platonic argument intentional. That Platonolatry is implausible in itself; it is methodologically shoddy for other reasons too. In the first place, it yields meager results. When every argumentative failure is intentional the Republic becomes platitudinous. Thus Roochnik's dialectical meaning is less memorable than the laziest reader's understanding of the Republic (Forms, cave, archons). He dismisses radical claims as unworthy of Plato but replaces them with the mealy... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Politics to Philosophy and Theology:Some Remarks about Foucault's Interpretation of Parrêsia in Two Recently Published SeminarsCarlos LévyAt the beginning of his seminar entitled Le courage de la vérité, Foucault gives a first definition of parrêsia (2009, 10–12), which I take as my point of departure.Parrêsia is a fundamental political concept; it denotes outspokenness, and Foucault distinguishes between two versions of it, one negative, the other positive. The (...) first meaning implies the articulation of everything, "n'importe quoi" (whatever), an expression that in French is indeed derogatory. For Foucault this meaning finds an illustration in a passage from Plato's Republic in which the philosopher describes the appalling state of the democratic city, where everyone tries to impose their own desires on others.1 The positive meaning implies that truth will be stated "without dissimulation, reservation, set clause, or rhetorical ornament that could encode or hide it" (2009, 11). But Foucault says that to effectuate this positive meaning it is not enough to merely state everything and state it truthfully. It is also necessary for the speaker of parrêsia, the parrêsiastês, to personally involve himself in what he says and to take a risk. As Foucault says himself, this is to speak "truth while taking the risk of violence" (2009, 12). [End Page 313] This risk is nonetheless attenuated by what Foucault calls "the parrêsiastic play," that is, the capacity of the interlocutor (assembly, tyrant) to tolerate outspokenness.Even though Foucault never sets the problem out in these terms, one may construe parrêsia as both a passion, since it entails an emotional investment, and a virtue, insofar as it is still linked to courage. It is common to say that somebody has "a passion for the truth" or that he has "the courage of his convictions." However, Foucault uses the term "passion" very sparingly. An analysis of word frequency in his seminars for the period 1982 to 1984 reveals that the term "virtue" occurs often, while "passion" is almost entirely absent, except about tragedy (2008, 105–35). By refraining from speaking of the "passion of truth," Foucault rejects the possibility of analyzing the concept of parrêsia in a more unitary way. For him, there is a good and a bad parrêsia, a situation that emphasizes the difficulties usually inherent in dualism: how can two opposite realities coexist, especially within the same concept? These difficulties are carefully analyzed in the seminars, but there is also a methodological difficulty: do historical sources force us to accept the dualistic interpretation or, better, the reconstruction proposed by Foucault in such a persuasive way? Or do they prompt us to introduce the notion of passion, somehow or other, as being present even in the "good" parrêsia?In my view, one does not compromise Foucault's position by saying that, for him, the dualism inherent in political parrêsia has a functional nature. It is linked to what he calls the right functioning and the worsening functioning of democracy, as they are articulated in his seminar of 2 February 1983 (2008, 157–69). In his exposé some postulates are expounded using the metaphor of the rectangle: the existence of parrêsia requires democracy, and thus democracy forms the first vertex of this rectangle. But one of the most interesting elements in Foucault's subsequent seminars is his effort to demonstrate that parrêsia can nevertheless exist under tyranny without its most essential features being undermined.Democracy, in Foucault's opinion, can't be lively and dynamic without the second vertex, which he calls "le pôle de l'ascendant"—the pole of ascending leadership; that is, in his own words, "the problem of those who, speaking before others and above them, are heard by them, persuade them, lead them, and have control over them" (2008, 157). Foucault's use of the term "problem" is itself somewhat... problematic. It is not clear why the existence of this ascendancy is a problem to the extent that it can be seen as the condition of a democratic and parrêsiastic functioning. In Foucault's [End Page 314] own words, the... (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently treat several topics and show their connection to each other. The Phaedrus is a model of that skill because of its seamless progression from examples of speeches about the nature of love to mythical visions of human nature and destiny to the essence of beauty and, finally, to a penetrating discussion of speaking and writing. It ends with an examination of the love of wisdom as a dialectical activity in the human mind. Phaedrus lures Socrates outside the (...) walls of Athens, where he seldom goes, by promising to share a new work by his friend and mentor Lysias, a famous writer of speeches. This dialogue provides a powerful example of the dialectical writing that Plato uses to manifest ideas that are essential to human existence and to living a good life. The Phaedrus shows how oral and written forms of language relate to each other and to philosophy. It simultaneously embodies the entire process in some of the greatest poetry ever written. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:256 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The book is both stimulating and provocative, and rather worth the reading, particularly by those who find Plato less philosophically "sophisticated" than Aristotle, less alert and relevant for some contemporary philosophical tastes. And it may be, of course, that some such readers will be led on to a larger sampling of the Platonic dialogues, with the result-doubtless pernicious---that their reading of Plato may corrupt (...) their "understanding" of Aristotle, rather than as currently the other way round. Differently oriented philosophers will find Runciman's essay, as well as others of the same vein, worth a careful reading at least as the proverbial reminder of what the interpreter can take along with him when he seeks to clothe his ancestors in the habiliment of a more recent fashion. In his discussion of the Theaetetus, Runciman rightly argues that the acquiring of knowledge, for Plato, is rather by acquaintance, than a matter of knowing that or how. His interpretation of the dream-theory (p. 202) suggests that Plato does not therefore distinguish between "intellectual knowledge" and knowledge by acquaintance (pp. 15-16). The "whole passage from 184B to 186C offers clear evidence [of this]," says Runciman (p. 15). But, in this treatment of the arguments brought against Protagoras, particularly that perception is not knowledge because it is not of "truth" and thus not of "ousia," Runciman wants additionally to argue that Plato, perhaps for him unfortunately, comes close to saying that simples become knowable in propositions and that knowledge is essentially propositional What Plato has argued is that "truth and existence are taken to entail each other" (p. 15), but what he has shown is the propositional nature of knowledge. There is thus surprisingly a failure on Plato's part to distinguish between kinds of knowing. Perhaps. But the dream-theory may easily enough be read as showing only that physical objects are alone knowable. To take "ousia" as meaning "existence," as Runciman does, is perhaps also to remake rather than to restate the argument at 186E. Runciman's arguments for his treatment of the Sophist seem to come off rather more convincingly, and of the two dialogues which he treats, the Sophist appears to be far more interestingly contrived in his interpretation than the Theaetetus. For Runciman, the Sophist, while more "sophisticated" in content, shows still that Plato has not disabused himself of the view that the highest knowledge consists in the apprehension of the Forms, and that Plato's emphasis now on the method of Division continues to assume the "preexistence of an ontological structure, which the true philosopher can ascertain" (p. 60). Indeed, Runciman adds (p. 62), "all its [i.e., the Sophists's] questions are, for Plato ultimately ontological questions." This is an interesting comment and one to bear in mind when following Runciman further in the discussion of how Plato seeks to determine the nature, properties and relations of "certain selected Forms." There is a variety of suggestion in his treatment of several themes found in the Sophist. And while they are not all of equal force or equally penetrating, the book and its treatment of the Sophist reads well, It may be that Runciman is most convincing in his argument that Plato distinguishes the identity sense of "to be," while he assimilates both the existential and copulative senses (pp. 86ff.). Although this reader would not call Runciman's book "good Plato" (or "good history"), it is perhaps---"good philosophy"? J. L. SAUNI)ERS University of California, San Diego A Portrait of Aristotle. By Marjorie Grene. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Pp. 271. $5.00.) Harold Cherniss, in his review of the first edition of Robinson's translation of Jaeger's •ristoteles (AJP, 1935, pp. 261-271), says that when the whole body of Aristotle's writings "consists of lectures that were repeatedly delivered and bound together by backward and BOOK REVIEWS 257 forward references which may have been added at various times, it is apparent that the author looked upon the whole corpus as forming a self-consistent, unified system, and philosophically his work must be judged as such, if it was such that he intended it to be" (p... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.2 (2001) 179-181 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism. James L. Kastely. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 293. $30.00. In Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition, James Kastely presents an alternative to the "standard" rhetorical tradition; he calls this alternative skeptical rhetoric, describes its characteristic activity (...) as refutation, and claims for it special relevance in negotiating postmodern challenges to rhetoric, specifically, that it can serve as a "refutation of postmodernism" (23). This alternative tradition inheres in a canon of works somewhat different from the standard canon, and an examination of key works organizes most of the chapters in this book. To establish and articulate this tradition in the classical era, Kastely examines Plato's Gorgias and Meno, Sophocles' Philoctetes, and Euripides' Hecuba; he then moves to the modern era, and to two works that address themes central to ancient rhetorical skepticism: Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818) and Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature? (1949). Finally, Kastely turns to the two prongs of the postmodern reappropriation of traditional rhetoric, the tropological formalism of Paul de Man and the ideological approaches of Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton, challenging both of them with the comic skepticism of Kenneth Burke.The skeptical tradition begins with Socrates, of course. It takes as its central problem, not the impossibility or contingency of knowledge, but the existence of injustice. In a political community, the unavoidability of doing inadvertent injury both requires rhetoric and at the same time makes it party to continued injustice: "[D]oing injury is an inescapable aspect of a being who is born into a world that is shaped by a language and by conventional practices that embody a particular set of values" (42). It is these prior commitments and conventional practices that, Kastely argues, lead us to cause injury. Thus, the positive task of rhetoric is not to persuade others away from injustice or to promote remedies; it is to keep us constantly open to refutation, to the possibility of seeing an alternative to the inadvertent wrong we commit. The inherency of injustice is what makes rhetoric a philosophical problem, but refutation is what rhetoric can offer to philosophy (a claim that might surprise philosophers). And in his reading of the Meno, Kastely argues explicitly for a rhetorical, rather than philosophical or logical, understanding of refutation.Overall, Kastely offers us a Plato who is not the enemy of rhetoric, but rather "the most sophisticated and profound rhetorical theorist" (30), who dramatizes in dialogue the philosophical dilemma of rhetoric. In [End Page 179] Sophocles and Euripides, he finds dramatists who illustrate practical forms the dilemma can take, specifically the problem of the unavailable audience. In the Philoctetes, the problem is how to regain the trust and confidence of the marginalized and disenfranchised, how to restore the status of rhetorical audience to one who no longer believes that justice is possible. In the Hecuba, the problem is how a disempowered rhetor can speak to the powerful. In both plays, but especially in Hecuba, the proximity of rhetoric to violence is a practical consequence of the unsolved philosophical problem.Kastely admits that the skeptical legacy from classical rhetoric has had little effect since antiquity. His argument that this alternate tradition deserves recognition is made primarily by his chapters on Austen and Sartre. He sees the works he examines here as raising a question central to rhetorical skepticism: "Can there be a way of speaking and writing that can effectively challenge the marginalization and dehumanization of people in a world in which traditional structures of authority that made discourse coherent have vanished or, at least, are seriously and irretrievably eroded?" (139-40). Both question Enlightenment assumptions about universality and at the same time confront the vacuum left by the erosion of local communal and authority structures. Austen's "active exploration" of a "crisis in discursive practice" (141) and Sartre's concern with the "social responsibility of the writer" and the loss of a public... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:An Interdisciplinary Proposal for Employing Film to Release the Imaginations of Preservice TeachersHaroldo Abraam Fontaine (bio)IntroductionQuestions regarding the proper role of the arts in education have occupied many thinkers throughout the ages, no less than the likes of Plato and Rousseau. Like them, several have argued that paintings, for example, are mere re-presentations of and certainly not, to borrow a term from Kant, the "thing-in-itself." From a Platonic (...) and Rousseauian perspective, those who behold images and conclude that the "thing-in-itself" (on all occasions) and its rendition on canvas in sundry lines and colors are indistinguishable—indeed, they cannot be—would be led astray from the truth in pursuit of shadows, or worse still, would contribute to the moral collapse of the polis. Yet, that's what I propose in this essay. More precisely, I want to reject Plato's claim that art is imitation of what is. Like Parmenides before me, I argue that his heroic pursuit of the form of the Good depends on a set of unproven assumptions concealed in the cloak of an infinite regress. In the absence of such an unhypothetical first principle—and the cornerstone of the Republic—Plato's lofty fortress collapses, and we are left to our Sisyphean tasks, yet hopeful in the power of our imaginations to set us free to pursue our self-appointed ends. Indeed, imagination's province is the arts, now emancipated from mere imitation and free to lay claim to what is. To their company the twentieth century added the cinema, which soars from the Republic's rubble and steads the identity-constructing enterprise in a manner without historical precedent, thus becoming a legitimate object of rational analysis regarding the "reminiscences of the suffering and … complaints" of the downtrodden.1 For reasons I will discuss below, professors [End Page 58] of education should help preservice teachers to develop their skills and capacities to support such analysis, lest the latter's future students assimilate images uncritically at their peril.The Arts, UnleashedPlato's theory of Forms is arguably the lynchpin of his metaphysical vision. As I understand it, the Good is the fundamental (ethical) principle toward which all social activity points, including education. Given the ethical nature of the Good, education is necessarily character education, in which the student's rational moral personality, and hence his felicity, is fashioned accordingly. As such, a student's (and a city's) success depends on his or her rational insight into the true nature and scale of the Good—that is, s/he must be able to distinguish between the apparent and the real. At these extremes lie national dissolution on the one hand, and the nation's integrity on the other.At the pinnacle of Plato's city sit the philosopher-kings, who administer justice in conformity with the Good. Having transcended the supposed illusions of the physical world, they are said to commune with the Forms directly. The Good, Plato might say, is the Form in, of, and by which all other forms participate. Socrates's (or rather Plato's, or is it Socrates's, or is it Plato's …) method is "to set down some one particular form for each of the particular 'manys' to which we apply the same name,"2 for example, "tree." The form, or rather the universal, precedes and is the metaphysical pattern after which the "manys"—that is, the particulars—are fashioned. What, then, is it that the philosopher-kings commune with? What treeness, if you will, is it that the many trees participate in? Enter Parmenides' twofold objection.In his article on Plato in the 2004 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Jonathan Barnes noted:(Plato's) doctrine of participation … does not really reconcile unity with plurality since it leads to a perpetual regress. It says that the many things that have a common predicate, or characteristic, participate in, or imitate, a single Form. But the Form itself also admits of a common predicate, and therefore a second Form must exist, participated in alike by the sensible things and the first Form, and so on, endlessly. Second, a graver difficulty is that the relations between... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:260 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and 8, although hc proposed no emendation of the text. [Raven's work is nowhere mentioned by Loenen, not even in connection with fr. 4 where he and Raven are in agreement, yet where he says "... all present-day authors assume this passage to refer to the material world," Raven believes with Loenen that the passage does not refer to the material world.] With regard (...) to Loenen's sensu stricto ~ar~, all commentators realized that Parmenides was at least some of the time using ~a~Lto denote necessity of existence and essence. Loenen does valuable work in emphasising this, but the observation is not revolutionarily original. Vlastos, following yon Fritz, argued (in Gnomon [1953]) that, for Parmenides, nothing exists but thought. Vlastos' arguments were not on as many fronts as are Loenen's, and Loenen develops the interpretation much further. Aristotle and Simplicius were the first of many who believed Parmenides to be a dualist, to have posited two worlds, fa ata~ra and ~& ~a~a, between which there was no causal relationship. Although there is much originality in Loenen's development and argument for his theses, it is nevertheless true that on the three grounds on which he lays claim to originality (introduction, pp. 3-5), his views have considerable precedents. M. C. SCHOLAR St. John's College, Cambridge Plato and the Individual. By Robert William Hall. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. Pp. 224.) Professor Hall's main thesis is that Plato's ethical thought underwent a gradual and significant development and that in the face of this fact the mature Plato is neither a halfhearted moral philosopher, nor a utilitarian, but completely committed to the substantiality and immortality of the soul. The first issue is raised so that the claim that Plato reserved the ethical ideal only for the specialists in philosophical reflection can be dismissed as groundless. The second problem is discussed in order to demonstrate beyond doubt that Plato's later moral views went beyond the limited ethics of consequences that dominates the early Socratic dialogues. But it is the third issue that constitutes the core of Hall's book, and the discussion here is undertaken in order to identify the metaphysical principle to which Plato appealed when he reconstructed his ethics from an initially quite aristocratic affair into a publicly available ideal that was rendered universal in scope and attainment. Dr. Hall argues that if knowledge of the Forms is unconditionally required for genuine morality, then only the philosophically gifted can rise to the lofty occasion. Being himself a strong advocate of a moral ideal open to all human beings, Dr. Hall does not hesitate to challenge Plato's views with this formidable problem: If we suppose Plato's views grant to the ordinary individual nothing more than a second class morality, he hardly deserves his reputation as a great ethical thinker. In line with this question the author devotes the entire first chapter to an interesting discussion on the sources of modern democratic individualism as supported by the best in the Christian tradition and then uses his findings to test the strength of Plato's moral fiber. But the author knows all along that Plato will emerge unscathed. His purpo~ then is not so much to show that Plato actually held that view as it is to take the reader through the meandering paths only the modem scholar and erudite interpreter of the dialogues know how to travel best and by which it is believed Plato himself must have been able to reach the summit of the superb answer. Since Dr. Hall discerns two different available moralities in Plato, an "aristocratic" and a "demotic," he also finds it necessary to distinguish between the morality of the excellences of the individual man and the excellence of the philosopher. When all is told, it turns out that Plato's development as an ethical philosopher moves from a high-minded kind of utilitarianism based on arete, inherited from Socrates, to a non-utilitarian conception of virtue which is Plato's own discovery and contribution. The pivotal point is found to be in the Republic where the central problem is to justify the inherent value of... (shrink)

For various reasons several authors have enriched classical first order syntax by adding a predicate abstraction operator. “Conservatives” have done so without disturbing the syntax of the formal quantifiers but “revisionists” have argued that predicate abstraction motivates the universal quantifier’s re-classification from an expression that combines with a variable to yield a sentence from a sentence, to an expression that combines with a one-place predicate to yield a sentence. My main aim is to advance the cause of predicate abstraction while (...) cautioning against revisionism. In so doing, however, I shall pursue a secondary aim by conveying mixed blessings to those who hold the view that in the logical sense of “existence” some existing object is such as to exist contingently. Advocates of this view must concede Williamson’s recent contention that the domain of unrestricted objectual quantification could not have been narrower than it is actually, but predicate abstraction affords them some hope of accommodating this concession. (shrink)

The history of "evidence of the existence of God" is closely intertwined with the history of classical philosophy. Most philosophers, beginning with Plato and ending with Hegel, were very careful about these ancient creatures of religious thought, and even if they destroyed them, like Kant, then immediately, in another form, they restored. The proposed article is intended to emphasize this content of "philosophical" philosophy, expressed in a theological form, and to show that "proof of the existence of God" (...) in the language of philosophy means certain logical arguments that, if properly processed, could constitute a philosophical speculative method. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics by Philipp W. RosemannJohn InglisPhilipp W. Rosemann. Omne Agens Agit Sibi Simile: A “Repetition” of Scholastic Metaphysics. Louvain Philosophical Studies, Vol. 12. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996. Pp. 368. Paper, BF 1,450.The technical sounding title of this volume could mislead the reader into thinking that it concerns some obscure point of Latin medieval thought, rather than an (...) issue central [End Page 131] to medieval metaphysical speculation. In fact, Philipp Rosemann charts the metaphysical theology of a significant number of intellectuals, ranging from Plato to Aquinas, in a dense and perceptive historical narrative that reaches its telos in Aquinas’s view of the emanation from, and return to, God. Too often historians and philosophers atomize specific medieval issues by treating them apart from the textual, historical, and metaphysical context. The classic case of this occurs when the wider web of metaphysical and monastic concerns is neglected in presentations of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God. Rosemann supplies much of this context in a concise yet detailed discussion of Hellenistic and medieval views on causal similitude, i.e., the degree of similarity that must exist between every cause and effect.The book is divided, as it were, into three equal parts: the first is devoted to the ancient philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus; the second to Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Eriugena, Peter the Lombard, Avicenna, Averroes, and Albert the Great; and the third to Aquinas. These figures were included for two reasons: first, for contributing views of causal similitude that take into account either a Neo-Platonic emanational causality between different types of beings or/and a peripatetic efficient causality between individual substances; and second, to provide the background for Aquinas’s reconciliation of both types of causality.In the second part of the book, Rosemann presses his thesis that there is a Trinitarian context to Western metaphysical reflection which must be understood if we are to be clear about the history of Latin medieval thought. His point is that within this context intellectuals produced detailed accounts of a hierarchy of beings each of which stands on a scale closer to or farther away from a single divine “being” (111). Individual beings, including physical objects, both replicate and exteriorize various qualities of the divine (115). From this perspective, Latin medieval inquiry into issues concerning causality and the human mind form at the same time an inquiry into the interior character of a triune God (145, 349). For example, it becomes clear why Eriugena claims that a human being has no direct knowledge of his or her individual essence (125). In imitation of the divine, one reasons about one’s concerns, and only then is one able to reflect on this reasoning. Such reflection yields self-knowledge (124–27). Since human self-knowledge reflects divine self-knowledge, human self-knowledge is required in order to inquire into the mind of God. According to Rosemann, the medievals extend to the divine Socrates’ dictum regarding the unexamined life.Recent writers have devoted attention to the Neo-Platonic framework of Aquinas’s project. For example, in his important God in Himself (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Wayne Hankey has clarified the two emanations that structure the first part of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae: the first a procession of three persons internal to God, and the second the procession of creation. The first plays a causal role in regard to the universe while the second mirrors the metaphysical structure of the first. Rosemann places this intellectual achievement in a more precise historical context, carefully isolates Aquinas’s types of causal relations (280–88), and offers a splendid account of the role played by causal similitude in the emanation and return of individual substances to God (262–77). Individual beings bring about effects that are species-specific to the point that they both lead to the flourishing of the species and represent [End Page 132] the divine. The higher the type of being, the more elevated and individual the degree of representation. For example, while a stone might express external physical characteristics of strength, a human being can obtain a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Erictho and Demogorgon: Poetry against Metaphysics DAVID QUINT Epic without the gods? The Roman poet Lucan (39–65 ce) created a secular counter-epic inside classical epic, removing the genre’s usual pantheon of Olympian deities and replacing them with Fortune. His Bellum civile (titled De bello civili in manuscripts, alternately titled Pharsalia) a poem about the conflict between Julius Caesar and Pompey, thereby delegitimizes the emperors who succeeded the dying (...) Roman republic, including Nero, the reigning emperor of Lucan’s day.1 They are not part of a divine plan: no such plan has ever existed. In an epic where the gods are silent or refuse to speak, Pompey’s son, Sextus, anxious to know the future, has to seek other means. In Book 6, he consults the Thessalian witch Erictho about the outcome of the approaching battle in Pharsalia. She reanimates the corpse of a dead soldier on Pompey’s republican side and makes it talk (BC 6.419–830).2 Lucan’s scene of necromancy gave birth to a major antimetaphysical strain in the European literary tradition. Among others, Dante, Cervantes, Marlowe, Spenser, Goethe, and Shelley confronted this episode of the Pharsalia and pondered its implications. Erictho’s magic is a figure for poetic making itself. It turns the supernatural into theater— the divine machinery of epic exposed as a deus ex machina— and these authors’ responses to Erictho will shift from epic into dramatic forms. In place of the gods, in place of the epic visit to the underworld, particularly in place of and in response to Aeneas’s trip to the realm of the dead arion 28.2 fall 2020 2 erictho and demogorgon in the corresponding Book 6 of the Aeneid, Lucan presents Erictho’s macabre performance: human witchcraft and intimations of an alternate, eerie numen residing in the earth, a force of nature. Subsequent readers would give this latter power a name: Demogorgon.3 Lucan links republicanism and freedom to a kind of atheism and to historical contingency. He unmasks and strips the props of religion from Caesarism and monarchy. (In vain for the poet: Lucan was forced to commit suicide in 65 ce, after he was implicated in the failed Pisonian conspiracy against Nero.) Lucan desacralizes poetry itself, which here confesses its limits, which are the limits of human mortality, even as Erictho seems, however briefly, to overcome them. No, poetry cannot literally raise the dead: it is a magic trick that makes the words on the page form into images, take life, and speak to us. Lucan answers the criticisms the philosopher and theologian make to poetry by openly acknowledging the false bottom of the hat from which poetry pulls its rabbits. It has no access to a real bottom, an underworld beyond death; it is all representation.4 The philosopher and the theologian may be poets no less than he is, but they do not want to know it, too busy, perhaps, in supporting tyranny over human minds and bodies. Plato and Augustine are two such critics on either historical side of Lucan, and they help us to understand the stakes of the Roman poet’s project. Both were dissatisfied with literature and they wanted to be something more than the great rhetoricians that they were. In the Symposium, Plato demystifies the archetypal myth of poetry, the singing of Orpheus that sought to bring Eurydice back from death: the gods sent Orpheus away from Hades empty-handed and showed him the mere shadow [eidolon] of the woman he had come to seek: Eurydice herself they would not let him take, because he seemed, like the mere minstrel that he was, to be a lukewarm lover, lacking the courage to die as Alcestis died for love, and choosing rather to scheme his way, living, into Hades. And it was for this that the gods doomed him, and doomed him justly, David Quint 3 to meet his death at the hands of women. (179d)5 Behind the words of his shallowly sentimental speaker Phaedrus we can detect Plato’s familiar hostility to poetry, his objection in Book 10 of the Republic that the poet merely imitates the appearances of things and is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Berel Lang PLOTTING PHILOSOPHY: BETWEEN THE ACTS OF PHILOSOPHICAL GENRE When Hegel wrote that philosophy's Owl of Minerva takes wing only at the falling of dusk, he did not mean that philosophy is always tardy, only that it comes late in the day. It may, however, seem both late and tardy to call attention now to the role of genres in philosophical writing, and still more beside the (...) point to assess the importance of philosophical genres to our philosophical and not only to our literary understanding. Even if we find a way past the varieties of aesthetic nominalism for which any allocation to genres is a snare and a trap— recall here Croce's declaration of"eternal war" against the obscurantism of genres1—we confront the growing skepticism of literary theory as it now disputes not only the formalism presupposed in the taxonomic distinctions of genre, but also the mimetic or representational function of discourse more generally.2 If texts as such can no longer rely on a mimetic ground, it would be impossible for the formal features ofgenre, rooted in the then archaic distinction between form and content, to represent a literary (or indeed any kind of) idea; that is, it would be impossible for them to be philosophically significant. This difficulty only intensifies, of course, for philosophical writing: philosophy, we learn, ought no longer to delude itself with hopes for success as a "mirror of nature" (in Rorty's phrase of opprobrium),3 and it would then be delusion added to delusion to believe that the genres of philosophical discourse might, at another remove, mirror an object which philosophy had mistakenly been supposed to represent in the first place. That original "representation" turns out now to represent nothing at all—and Plato's attack on the deceptions ofart thus discovers a new and finer object in philosophy itself: his indictment of art at least 190 Berel Lang191 supposed that there was something for art to be deceptive about. On this postmodernist account, then, there could be no philosophical point in plotting the course of philosophical genres; and indeed there could hardly be any other point except perhaps for antiquarians intent on finding a place for genres among the other historical curiosities which philosophers, quite inexplicably, once took seriously, like Descartes's piece of wax or Plato's aviary or Berkeley's tar water. Such intimations of the death of genres, however, may be not only premature but misdirected in rather a special way. For even in a less suspicious age, when the prima facie claims for the existence of genres might have been accepted at face value, their role was shadowy, fixed in a rhetorical limbo. Evidently (or so I would argue), there have existed generic conventions of which philosophical writers have been aware and to which their writings conformed. But even among writers in whom this pattern is most explicit and self-conscious, it is not as though the writer, after first reviewing a list of genres, would then simply choose the one among them that most recommended itself. No doubt, a writer's style—including the genre of his writing—is deliberate, in some sense a matter of choice. But the conception of "choice" in this context is an unusual one. Plotting genre could not be like trying on suits until one finds a likely fit— because this would imply that when the philosopher is trying out various possibilities, what he measures them by exists in his own mind as a philosophical Ur-genre, something which itself transcends the requirements of genre. We might suspect the presence here of the genre of all genres that is not itself, however, the member of a genre. And although it is possible that such a philosophical bedrock exists—this would be, in a way, a true philosopher's stone—all that philosophers have turned up in their history as a matter offact is a considerable number and variety of—well, we have to say it—philosophical genres. Genres, in other words, have rarely been read or written as "natural kinds," and yet they have surely been read and written. The distinctions among them and even the broad tide... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What's Wrong with These Cities?The Social Dimension of sophrosune in Plato's CharmidesThomas M. TuozzoThe Dramatic Setting and the dramatis personae of the Charmides strongly evoke the world of late fifth-century Athenian politics. The discussion Socrates narrates takes place the day after his return from a battle at Potidaea at the very start of the Peloponnesian War;1 his two main interlocutors in that discussion, Critias and Charmides, will play (...) leading roles in the bloody oligarchic regime that rose to power after Athens' defeat nearly three decades later.2 Furthermore, the virtue the three of them discuss, sophrosune (temperance, moderation, sound-mindedness), also has strong political associations: it was a central element in the self-understanding and propaganda of the oligarchic faction to which Critias and Charmides belonged.3 The philosophical discussion of the various definitions proposed of sophrosune in the course of the dialogue, however, for the most part avoids explicitly addressing the social and political dimensions of this virtue. Much of the discussion seems, rather, to concern epistemological issues at some remove from the public sphere.4 [End Page 32l]At two critical moments in the dialogue, however, the social dimension of sophrosune does irrupt into the discussion. At the culmination of his discussion with Charmides, and again at the culmination of his discussion with Critias (which forms the culmination of the dialogue as a whole), Socrates abruptly shifts to the social level in order to evaluate a proposed definition of sophrosune. These definitions are put to the test by considering a city governed by sophrosune (as in either case defined). In both cases the examination of Socrates' hypothetical city has the effect of discrediting the associated definition of sophrosune—in the first case, because the city governed by it would not be "well governed"; in the second, because, although the citizens of the hypothetical city may be happy, their happiness would not result from the city's sophrosune as such. In both cases, then, it is the failure of sophrosune (as defined) to conduce to the well-being of the city, in a way that both parties to the discussion agree that it should, that leads to the rejection of the proposed definition.The social context in which Socrates places the most important definitions offered by his two interlocutors does more than allow Socrates to consider, on a social scale, the benefits of sophrosune as so defined. It also enables him to raise the question of the proper social relationship between sophrosune and the other crafts or kinds of knowledge practiced in a city. This question is first raised in Socrates' discussion of the first hypothetical city with Charmides. When Critias takes over as interlocutor, Socrates continues the investigation into the relationship between sophrosune and other kinds of knowledge, but for the most part in purely epistemological terms that abstract both from social context and from all considerations of benefit. The discussion of the second hypothetical city at the end of that conversation returns the question to its social context: the relations between the different sorts of knowledge are investigated via their reflection in the social relations existing between the persons that practice them. The two hypothetical cities thus allow Socrates to consider, within a social context, both questions concerning the benefit sophrosune produces (and for whom) and questions concerning its relation to other sorts of knowledge. It is in these discussions, then, that we find the dialogue's most direct contribution to some of the most important questions of Plato's earlier dialogues.It is my purpose in this essay to examine the treatment of the social dimension of sophrosune in the Charmides in order to sketch the answers to these questions that, I hope to show, the dialogue provides. This sketch will necessarily be incomplete; a more nearly complete account of this dialogue's contribution to these questions would need to integrate the present study's results with [End Page 322] an interpretation of the abstract epistemological and metaphysical arguments that loom so large in the dialogue. Indeed, it is my hope that the results of this study may provide a useful orientation for the study of these famously perplexing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 478-480 [Access article in PDF] The German Aesthetic Tradition,by Kai Hammermeister; xv & 259 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; $60.00 cloth; $22.00 paper. In some ways, aesthetic theory has become a thing of the past. With the exception of a kind of fascination with works such as T. W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, as a project, as a tradition, aesthetics has surrendered its (...) once monolithic and grandiose position as the philosophical contemplation of art and the notion of artistic beauty to more diminutive fields such as literary theory, poetics and cultural studies. In some ways, this is due to the very function of aesthetics: the philosophical investigation not simply of what is beautiful, but the formulation of prescriptive ideas about works of art and the judgement them according to these prescriptive ideas. This, in turn, has been looked upon with a certain degree of scorn with the rise of a more pluralistic art world and the bold denial that art needs the guidance of philosophy let alone have any prescriptive function or be able to be classified as "good" or "bad."But Kai Hammermeister's The German Aesthetic Tradition takes a very different view. A bold and difficult project, Hammermeister traces the complex and oftentimes abstruse contours of German aesthetic philosophy from its inception with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century through Adorno in the twentieth. In the process, he not only provides us with an excellent historical-philosophical account of the development of German aesthetic philosophy, he also implicitly argues for the relevance of aesthetics as a way not only of comprehending art, but of understanding the cohesive links between art, society, culture and philosophy.The German aesthetic tradition, as Hammermeister refers to it, was a prolonged intellectual argumentation with classical conceptions of art and beauty inherited from classical Greek thought during the eighteenth century. Classical aesthetics was dominated by two opposing conceptions of art and its function. For Plato, art mirrored the outside world (mimesis) and the judgement of good works of art was based on how well this mirroring of the objective world was carried out. Aristotle's idea was that art served a purgatory function (katharsis), cleansing the emotions of the individual through the identification of the observer with the work of art. All of the thinkers in the German tradition wrestle with this dual conception of art in some form privileging one over the other or, more often than not, combining them and extending their explanatory reach. But as in any tradition, they also struggle with the ideas and philosophies of previous thinkers within the tradition itself making Hammermeister's task more complex, one that he handles with adroitness and precision.The book's overarching argument and structure is triadic. Hammermeister sees the eighteenth century through German Idealism and Romanticism as [End Page 478] articulating a set of different paradigms for interpreting art. These are subsequently attacked in post-Hegelian philosophy and are then revived in different ways in the twentieth century as a reaction to Nietzsche's aestheticization of philosophy. Two paradigms emerge as central for the subsequent unfolding of the tradition. First, there is Immanuel Kant's conception of art as wholly separate from epistemology and from morality. For Kant, the work of art is centered in the experience of the subject and, in terms of form, exists outside its social context. This Hammermeister calls the "first strong paradigm of aesthetics" (p. 40). Next, there is the position of Friedrich Schiller who sees a connection between the work of art with culture, thought and morality. "[T]he culture of beauty demonstrates the freedom of man to turn himself into whatever being he envisions while remaining under the law of morality" (p. 57). For Schiller, there exists a kind of spillover effect of art into other domains of human thought and action—specifically in morality and politics—and this represents a crucial deviation from Kant's paradigm and another tendency within the tradition of German aesthetics, i.e., the aestheticization of other domains of human existence.Schelling and Hegel represent two other... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a NovelChristopher PerriconeThe Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, by George Santayana; edited by H. J. Saatkamp and W. G. Holzberger; xli & 744 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, $50.00.In 1936, Irwin Edman reviewed The Last Puritan for the New York Times. It was a sympathetic review. However, Edman was not blind to the (...) novel’s fundamental weakness: it is driven by ideas, “essences,” rather than characters, ones you might hate or love: “... this is a poet’s novel and philosopher’s tale.... If the characters do not come to life, they live as themes dramatized and as ‘human persuasions.’”This year Harold Bloom wrote in The Western Canon that canonical works are those works which deserve re-reading. As a novel, The Last Puritan does not deserve re-reading, as Tom Jones, The Trial, or Huckleberry Finn, do. But as a philosophy “not argued but presented as a picture” (Edman), The Last Puritan may be among Santayana’s best works. Yes, one reads and re-reads The Last Puritan because one wants to know the ideas of America’s great philosophical poet. Without the philosophy to support the novel, I am not sure it would have a reason for being. One is not interested per se in Santayana’s plot or characters, their friendships and failures, Oliver and Jim, their deaths, or Mario, his paganism and love of life. Rather one wants to be enchanted by [End Page 186] Santayana’s poetic voice; one wants to know what Santayana thinks about the play of spirit and matter and how “the genteel tradition” had so much promise and yet had gone bad. And these are, indeed, in principle, the very same reasons why one reads and rereads Plato, Lucretius, or Dante.The critical edition, put together by Saatkamp and Holzberger, with an introduction by Irving Singer, is a first-class piece of work. It is everything a Santayana scholar would want or need. Singer’s introduction provides the reader with a sound and well-researched background on Santayana and Oliver’s story, and anticipates some problems of aesthetics the reader will face, e.g., the problem of character development. Unlike me, Singer thinks Santayana’s “idealizations” bring vitality to character: “Far from being desiccated types, the great characters in fiction give one a sense of individuality that often seems more natural to us than what is found in nature itself” (p. xix). Notwithstanding my disagreement with Singer, his presentation is well thought-out and plausible.The “Editorial Appendix,” written by Saatkamp and Holzberger, is impeccable. In the “Notes to the Text” they provide the scholar or the curious reader with a marvelous wealth of information. They run down and support with convincing evidence every allusion in the novel. In the “Textual Commentary,” they provide a statement of textual principles and procedures, a description and development of the text, and an explanation of how the critical text was established; in effect, after one has read the product, one can then read about the process by which the product was brought about. Naturally, there are also lists of emendations and variants.As a philosophical novel, I recommend The Last Puritan to anyone who believes that “... what the realm of essence, in its mute eternity, chiefly adds to our notion of nature is the proof that nature is contingent. An infinite canvas is spread before us on which any world might have been painted. The actuality of things is sharpened and the possibilities of things are enlarged. We cease to be surprised or distressed at finding existence unstable and transitory. Why should it have been otherwise? Not only must our own lives be insecure, as earthly seasons change, but perhaps all existence is in flux, even down to its first principles. Dum vivimus, vivamus. Everything, so long as it recognizably endures, is free to deploy its accidental nature, and we may lead the life of reason with a good grace, harmonizing as well as possible our various impulses and opportunities, and exploring the realm of essence as our genius may prompt” (Santayana, “A General Confession... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION MICHAEL POTTS Methodist Callege Fayetteville, North Carolina I. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW A. The Influence of Plato HE SPATIO-TEMPORAL theory of individuation has long history in the philosophical tradition. Its roots go ack to Aristotle's theory of individuation by matter,1 and ultimately back to Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato struggled with the problem of how forms are instantiated in the phenomenal world. Besides " (...) a model form (paradeigmatos eidos), intelligible and ever uniformly existent" and "the model's copy (mimeta paradeigmatos), subject to becoming and visible," Plato postulated a third thing, a " receptacle " (hupodochen), "the nurse of all becoming." 2 It is wholly indeterminate:... while it is always receiving all things, nowhere and in no wise does it assume any shape similar to any of the things that enter into it. For it is laid down by nature as a moulding-stuff for everything, being moved and marked by the entering figures, and because of them it appears different at different times. And the figures that enter and depart are copies of those that are always existent, being stamped from them...8 1 I recognize that this is a controversial claim. Since I am tracing the spatio-temporal theory of individuation from Aristotle through St. Thomas Aquinas, for the purposes of this paper I will follow St. Thomas's interpretation of Aristotle and accept the view that Aristotle took matter to be the principle of individuation. 2 Plato, Timaeus 49a. The version used is the Loeb edition by R. G. Bury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966). a Timaeus 50b-c. 59 60 MICHAEL POTTS The receptacle, then, is like formless wax upon which the forms are stamped. It is " apprehensible by a kind of bastard reasoning (logismo tini notho), barely an object of belief." 4 B. Aristotle It may seem on the surface unusual that the idea of the receptable would later be modified and used to explain individuation. Plato himself was concerned with the universal, the form. The instantiations of the forms in the phenomenal world do not even deserve to be called "this " or " that." 5 With Aristotle, however, the individual gains new importance, since for him forms have their reality only in individuals and individuals are primarily called "substance." If this is the case, then Aristotle has to explain how " humanity " can be the same while " Socrates" and " Callias" are two different individuals. Since form is universal, it cannot individuate, so the source of individuation must be matter-two individuals are different human beings, for example, because they have different lumps of matter.... and when the whole has been generated, such a form in this flesh and these bones, this is Callias or Socrates, and this is distinct from that which generated it because the matter is distinct (hulen, hetera gar), but it is the same in species since the species is indivisible.6 This view raises problems. Matter is indeterminate; it is Aristotle 's modification of Plato's receptacle. How can anything indeterminate itself determine individual substances? More needed to be done to.bring out the meaning of individuation by matter, and St. Thomas Aquinas developed a more detailed and satisfactory position. 4 Timaeus 52b. 5 Timaeus 49d-50a. 6 Aristotle, Metaphyscis 28 (1034a5-8). The Greek text used is Metaphysica, ed. by Werner Jaeger (Oxonii : E Typographaeo Clarendoniano, 1957). The English translation is by Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1979). THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION 61 C. St. Thomas Aquinas Aquinas, recognizing that prime matter is indeterminate and therefore not something that can individuate, argues that the principle of individuation is " signate" or " designated" matter. "Materia signata" is defined as matter as " sub determinatis dimensionibus consideratur," " considered under determinate dimensions." 7 While the exact meaning of this is unclear, it seems to refer to matter under determinate spatial dimensions or coordinates. While the form determines what sort of thing an entity is, what determines it to be this individual is this matter with a particular set of spatial coordinates. Henry Veatch puts Aquinas's view into more modern terms: In fact, matter as determined by dimensive quantity guarantees ontologically nothing more nor less than the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ideas in the Brain: The Localization of Memory Traces in the Eighteenth CenturyTimo KaitaroPlato suggests in the Theaetetus that we imagine a piece of wax in our soul, a gift from the goddess of Memory. We are able to remember things when our perceptions or thoughts imprint a trace upon this piece of wax, in the same manner as a seal is stamped on wax. Plato uses this (...) metaphor to explain the errors which arise when we mistake something for something else: we connect the perception of an object with the trace belonging to another. The metaphor can also be used in explaining differences in people’s mnestic capacities: rapid learning and forgetting correspond to soft wax, impure wax results in muddled traces, etc.1 If we locate the traces in the brain instead of in the soul, Plato’s metaphor gains consistency and turns into a testable hypothesis. This move was already made by Quintilian.2So, the metaphor of memory as traces in the brain is evidently not a modern invention. This is easy to understand. To frame the hypothesis one needs only to reflect on how we use objects outside our brains for mnemonic purposes. We conserve ideas by tracing or printing letters and words on paper. We are also able to conserve images in drawings, paintings and prints. What could be more natural than to think of memory as the formation of traces in the brain? The development of even better information storage techniques in the form of pictures, symbols, and signs provides the metaphor extra plausibility. Plato’s seal allows us to imagine the imprint of a person’s likeness, but modern techniques of information storage and retrieval make it even easier to imagine memory in general as the formation of material traces.Explaining memory in terms of material traces could, of course, be taken [End Page 301] to mean that the formation of material traces in the brain is merely a necessary condition of memory. But one could also take a more reductionistic stance which identifies memory with the formation of material traces. Furthermore, one could identify specific mental items (sensations, ideas, memories) with specific physiological events or anatomical entities in the brain. This seems especially plausible if we imagine that the traces in the brain are as discrete and separate as ideas or memories are in our minds. Since the traces we form or print on paper consist of discrete letters and words, the thought that the traces in the brain are equally discrete and separate comes easily. Plato, in fact, made separateness a condition for the memory to work properly: it is not easy to read signs printed on one another.3 Of course, no traces are actually visible in the brain. But they are easy to imagine, as it is to imagine explanations of psychological phenomena, such as association, based on these traces.At the end of the seventeenth century, explanations of mental phenomena referring to material traces in the brain were used by writers, from Platonists to materialists, who supported widely different theories about the nature of the human mind.4 In fact, as I will show later in this paper, the question of the possible identity of mental entities, like ideas or sensations, with material entities or traces in the brain is relatively independent of the question of the existence of an immaterial soul. Or rather, if there is a systematic connection between the answers proposed to these two questions in the eighteenth century, it is not the connection one would expect. Nowadays we often tend to think of a prototypical materialist as someone who makes radical reductionistic claims about the identity of mental phenomena with brain states. We also tend to think of the eighteenth-century French materialists as “mechanistic.”5 In view of this reputation, it may come as a surprise to find that some eighteenth-century materialists, notably Denis Diderot, were in fact consistent anti-reductionists and opposed to mechanical or mechanistic explanations of the mental.6 In fact, the epithet “mechanistic” is misleading even when applied to the philosopher who is traditionally presented as the paradigmatic example of a “mechanistic materialist,” Julien Offray... (shrink)

The Peri ide^on is the only work in which Aristotle systematically sets out and criticizes arguments for the existence of Platonic forms. Gail Fine presents the first full-length treatment in English of this important but neglected work. She asks how, and how well, Aristotle understands Plato's theory of forms, and why and with what justification he favors an alternative metaphysical scheme. She examines the significance of the Peri ide^on for some central questions about Plato's theory of (...) class='Hi'>forms--whether, for example, there are forms corresponding to every property or only to some, and if only to some, then to which ones; whether forms are universals, particulars or both; and whether they are meanings, properties or both. Fine also provides a general discussion of Plato's theory of forms, and of our evidence about the Peri ide^on and its date, scope, and aims. While she pays careful attention to the details of the text, she also relates it to contemporary philosophical concerns. The book will be valuable for anyone interested in metaphysics ancient or modern. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Scrivere nell'anima: verità, dialettica e persuasione in Platone; and: Oralità e scrittura in PlatoneFrancisco J. GonzalezFranco Trabattoni. Scrivere nell'anima: verità, dialettica e persuasione in Platone. Firenze: La Nouva Italia Editrice, 1994. Pp. 396. Paper, 24000 Lire.Franco Trabattoni. Oralità e scrittura in Platone. Milano: Università Degli Studi di Milano, 1999. Pp. 125. Paper, 16000 Lire.Trabattoni's masterful 1994 book, which the shorter 1999 book supplements in important ways, offers (...) nothing less than a refreshingly new and provocative interpretation of Plato's philosophy as a whole that makes it neither "conclusive-dogmatic" nor "problematic-sceptical" (7, 41-47, 161, 361-3). For Plato, on Trabattoni's account, while objective truth exists, any logos is incapable of fully expressing it and therefore refutable (158). On the other hand, dialectic can arrive at a logos sufficient (hikanos) for persuading a particular interlocutor in the context of a particular discussion (119-120), and thus for ethical and political action (330). Truth is therefore to be found onlyin dialogue (75-6, 338): that is, only where one person persuades another (249, 252, 328-9; 1999, 75). Persuasion and homologia are thus a necessary, though not sufficient condition of truth: only when capable of responding repeatedly to a wide variety of questions and objections does a persuasion deserve to be called "true" (158-9, 252, 329). This view rejects both the sophistical identification of truth with persuasion as such and the dogmatic identification of truth with universal doctrines.Because persuasion and homologia are thus essential to it, philosophy cannot be an objective science but must always be at its core a form of rhetoric (239, and thus protreptic and ad hominem, 165-6, 355, 359), which is what Trabattoni takes the Phaedrus to show (48-99). In 1999 Trabattoni brilliantly demonstrated the unity of the Phaedrus by showing how both the discussion of eros and the critique of writing are closely linked to this conception of philosophy as rhetoric (54-93). Philosophy is not, however, the kind of rhetoric that, focused on words rather than truth, fails to persuade in a way that is stable and enduring (87; 1999, 75-6).In the course of defending his "dialectical-dialogical" interpretation, Trabattoni provides an extraordinarily thorough and insightful critique of another interpretation that claims to offer a new Plato and that has become very influential in Trabattoni's native Italy: the "esotericist" interpretation, according to which fundamental questions left open by the dialogues are answered by a doctrine of principles which Plato communicated only orally. Trabattoni's 1999 book provides a very helpful account of the history and motives of the debate surrounding Plato's unwritten teachings, with regard to both their content and their significance (1-42). I see the following points of Trabattoni's critique as seriously challenging and, if unanswered, even discrediting the esotericist position: [End Page 269]1) While the esotericists interpret the critique of writing in the Phaedrus as arguing for the superiority of oral discourse as such, Trabattoni interprets it as arguing instead for the superiority of the dialogical situation in which interlocutors can be chosen and their questions and objections addressed (19-26; 1999, 83). Fixed oral doctrines would be no more dialogical than written doctrines and thus no more capable of engendering knowledge "in the soul" (63), much less of constituting this knowledge (25). What would be superior to Plato's writings, according to the Phaedrus, is a dialogue with Plato, not what Plato said orally, lifted out of its dialogical context and reported in writing by Aristotle (115; 1999, 84-5, 124). Trabattoni interprets the Seventh Letter, in his complementary accounts of 1994 and 1999, as similarly contradicting, rather than confirming, the esotericist interpretation (210-11; 1999, 116-9).2) Thomas Szlezàk has interpreted those passages where the main interlocutor deliberately leaves something out of the discussion ("Aussparungstellen") as referring to unwritten doctrines. Trabattoni argues that they are instead meant to indicate to the unknown reader, whose possible objections and questions cannot be anticipated, the possibility of proceeding further in the discussion (112-3, 182; 1999, 124). "[W]hen the dialogues are silent, they are silent always where there no... (shrink)

In Republic VI 508e-9b Plato has Socrates claim that the Good is the cause (αίτίαν) of truth and knowledge as well as the very being of the Forms. Consequently, as causes must be distinct from and superior to their effects, the Good is neither truth nor knowledge nor even being, but exceeds them all in beauty (509a), as well as in honour and power (509b). No other passage in Plato has had a more intoxicating effect on its readers. To (...) take just one example, James Adam was moved to quote St. Paul when he remarked about this passage that, 'it is highly characteristic of Plato's whole attitude that he finds the true keystone of the Universe — the ultimate fountain from which both Knowledge and Existence flow — in no cold and colourless ontological abstraction, like Being, but in that for which "all creation groans and labours". (shrink)

The article discusses the causes for the formation of the polysemanticity of the Latin word virtus (virtue; strength, valor, masculinity) and term virtual, which was derived from virtus. The emergence of the polysemantic character of virtual became possible due to the unique semantics of the word virtus, in which there are two dominant meanings – virtue and strength. According to Ekaterina Taratuta, there are two lines of constructing the meanings of concepts based on the root vir(t) – “Platonic” and “Aristotelian.” (...) We believe that on the basis of the first semantic “dominant” of the word virtus (virtue) a “Platonic” group of meanings of the word virtual was formed, and on the basis of the second “dominant” (strength) the “Aristotelian” group of meanings was formed. The first cause of the existence of the “Platonic” group of the meanings of virtual is the translation of the Greek word ἀρετή using the Latin word virtus in Roman philosophy, Biblical texts and Greek-Byzantine patristic writings, as a result of which the concept of virtus has been enriched with the meanings of the Platonic and Christian concept of ἀρετή. The second cause is that through the Plato’s doctrine of arete-eidos the concept of virtus has been enriched with the meanings of the Platonic concept of εἶδος. As Hans Kremer has shown, in Plato’s doctrine eidos is the source of order and beauty, which is reflected in the empirical world as arete – virtue, goodness; thus, eidos is inextricably linked with arete. As a result, in the “Platonic” sense the virtual is understood as the eidetic, the ideal. The first cause of the existence of the “Aristotelian” group of meanings of virtual is the translation of the Greek word δύναμις using the Latin word virtus in Biblical texts and in Greek-Byzantine patristic writings, as a result of which the concept of virtus has been enriched with the Christian meanings of concept of δύναμις. The second cause is the translation of the Aristotelian concept of δύναμις using the Latin word potentia : the word δύναμις has become the medium, linking the words virtus and potentia and, under the influence of the latter, differences in the meanings of virtus and potentia (and especially their derivatives virtualis (virtual) and potentialis (potential)) have gradually disappeared. As a result, in the “Aristotelian” sense the virtual is understood as the potential, the possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 503 Possibility, Necessity, and Existence: Abbagnarw and His Predecessors. By NINO LANGIULLI. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. Pp. xv + 205. $44.95 (cloth). Although Nicola Abbagnano would agree in some sense with the currently fashionable claim that metaphysics is dead, Nino Langiulli's treatment of Abbagnano's thought constitutes a challenge to that claim. The aim, of Possibility, Necessity, and Existence is "to expound and elucidate (...) historically and analytically the concepts of possibility, necessity, and existence as they are refracted through the thought of the twentieth-century Italian philosopher Nicola Abbagnano." Langiulli characterizes Abbagnano as a bold and original thinker whose defense of "possibility" as the fundamental sense of being is understood by Abbagnano himself as an anti-metaphysical position. In his critical reflections, however, especially in the last chapter, Langiulli shows that Abbagnano is indeed engaged in an inquiry that can only be called metaphysical. Parts I and II are preparatory to the third part in which the concept of possibility and its relation to existence are most directly addressed. Part I provides a historical overview of four phases of the movement of Abbagnano's thought "from a positive existentialism to a radical empiricism." Abbagnano's version of existentialism is "positive" in that it sees in human finitude the very possibility of man's relationship with being. Here Abbagnano is distinguished from other existentialists such as Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and Sartre. His criticisms of these positions are among the most important and interesting parts of the book. Heidegger and Jaspers both begin by apprehending human existence as a structure of possibilities but then reduce human existence to a structure of impossibilities. Christian existentialists such as Marcel really treat possibilities as potentialities to be inevitably realized. For Sartre all possibilities are equivalent, but for Abbagnano "the complete arbitrariness of choice among human possibilities does not imply freedom at all, but the impossibility of choice" (18). Here also Langiulli's comparison of Abbagnano with Quine, Sellars, and Rorty is pertinent and illuminating: Abbagnano would share Rorty's criticism of Quine and Sellars for holding on to vestiges of the old empiricism, but Abbagnano would not accept Rorty's "emptying" of philosophy itself. The influence of Abbagnano on his student Umberto Eco and on Gianni Vattimo and the differences between Abbagnano and Derrida's views of possibility are spelled out by Langiulli. In a section entitled "Dumping Philosophy and the Madness of It That Is Also Folly," Langiulli locates Abbagnano clearly and precisely within the debate over the legitimacy of reason. Abbagnano finds the basis of philosophical madness in the persistent tendency to take one aspect of human life as an absolute determinant, thus marginalizing or ignoring all others. "This privileged status has even been attributed to reason, but only when it 504 BOOK REVIEWS is absolutized or divinized as a superhuman force regulating the whole of nature, humanity included, according to necessary and necessitating laws" (39). So, for example, the order of mathematics or the techniques of verification and control employed in physics are transferred to the human world. But Abbagnano's rejection of absolutized reason is not a rejection of reason as such. He sees the current favoring of the nonrational and irrational aspects of life as a kind of folly and madness, "the vertigo of absurdity." The deliberate and crass ignorance of history and the search for novelty are also forms of madness. Part II consists of four chapters that trace the sources for Abbagnano's concept of possibility. The first of these sources is Plato's treatment of existence and possibility in the Sophist, where Abbagnano finds what he takes to be the antecedent for his own thought and for existentialism in general: the idea that possibility is both the structure and the ground of existing things. The two persistent themes of Greek metaphysics that Abbagnano is concerned to overcome are found most explicitly in Aristotle: the priority of actuality over possibility and the primacy of necessity over possibility. Kant is credited with opening the path for contemporary thought with his concept of real possibility (as distinguished from merely logical possibility). Finally, Abbagnano is indebted to Kierkegaard's criticisms of Aristotle and Hegel in the Philosophical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parmenides: The Road to Reality A New Verse Translation RICHARD MCKIM introduction i. In the history of Presocratic Greek philosophy, the poetry of Parmenides seems to loom up suddenly out of the blue like a spectral mountain peak. Depicting a vision of ultimate reality that transcends the sensory world, his towering verse manifesto revolutionized both how philosophers thought and what they thought about, with profound repercussions that still (...) reverberate today. Parmenides has not, however, been well served by his English translators. He wrote poetry and yet is almost always translated into prose. His poem describes a divinely inspired revelation and yet is persistently translated as if it were an exercise in deductive logic. His Greek can be strange and difficult but is never unintelligible, which is more than can be said for the Anglo-gibberish his translators too often force him to speak. Too many subscribe to the misguided notion that a “literal” translation, as close as possible to word-forword, best represents the original. In fact, the painful English that results, so far from being faithful to the Greek, actually betrays it, creating the obscurities it purports to reflect. Parmenides ’ reputation for being hard to understand is largely his translators’ fault, not his. I’ve undertaken to make amends by translating his poem as a poem, in a loose English approximation of the same meter. My goal is to capture some of what gets lost in prose—to mirror, however dimly, the vital role of poetic form in shaping Parmenides’ vision. The demands of meter make literal translation impossible—not at all a bad thing— while paradoxically freeing the translator to be more faitharion 27.2 fall 2019 ful. I’ve tried to use this freedom to demonstrate that Parmenides is not the obscurantist would-be logician of so many other translations but a philosopher who thinks in poetry, and whose thought is as clear and accessible as it is astonishing. ii. parmenides was a citizen of Elea, a Greek colonial town on the west coast of the ankle of Italy’s boot. Born around 515 BCE, he was an older contemporary of Socrates, who was born in 470 (according to Plato, the two men met when Parmenides was sixty-five). Several other so-called Presocratics were active even later—Democritus for one was Socrates’ junior by a decade. But the label is still useful: while Socrates reoriented philosophy toward moral values and politics, the later Presocratics maintained their predecessors’ focus on physics and cosmology. Their project was to account for the physical workings of the universe—its origins, its elements, and the forces or laws that govern its behavior— without falling back on the gods of traditional myth. But Parmenides splits their story in two. Before him, Presocratics took the reality of the sensory world for granted— a world of multiplicity and variety, motion and change, becoming and passing away. Parmenides radically rejected this assumption. The sensory world, he declared, is an illusion. What really exists is what he calls “being,” whose true nature can be perceived only by the mind. And by clearly perceiving what being must be like, the mind perceives that it can’t be anything like the world as our senses perceive it. Being is the exact opposite of the sensory world in every respect. It is timeless, motionless, changeless and imperishable, an eternal and indivisible One. After Parmenides, the reality of the sensory world needed defending. Subsequent Presocratics had to explain, at a minimum, how it could circumvent his ban on multiplicity and motion. Most notably, he provoked Leucippus and Democri106 parmenides: the road to reality tus into developing their theory of atomism—that the universe consists entirely of atoms in a void. Atoms are microscopic Parmenidean beings insofar as they’re indivisible, indestructible and immutable, but they can be infinite in number, they can move, collide and combine, thanks to the roominess of the infinite void, defined as the absence of being. Never mind that Parmenides ruled out the existence of such an absence—by inspiring atomism, he became, in his otherworldly way, the unwitting godfather of modern physics. As for metaphysics, it may be debatable whether he arrived at the idea... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 84-106 [Access article in PDF] Irony in the Platonic Dialogues Charles L. Griswold, Jr. I INTERPRETERS OF PLATO have arrived at a general consensus to the effect that there exists a problem of interpretation when we read Plato, and that the solution to the problem must in some way incorporate what has tendentiously been called the "literary" and the "philosophical" sides of Plato's (...) writing. The problem is created by the fact that Plato wrote in dialogue form, indeed a specific type of dialogue form. The solution must somehow combine into a coherent theory of the "meaning" of the dialogues, the ways in which these texts work (such as the use of imagery, metaphor, myth, allusion, irony, as well as argument). At the same time, there exists enormous disagreement about how one ought to move from these general observations to interpretation of a particular text. 1The problem of interpretation lies not merely in the fact that Plato wrote dialogues. That alone would not necessarily present any hermeneutical issues of unusual difficulty. Plato's distinctive use of the dialogue form creates the difficulties. The genre that we might call "the Platonic dialogue" is distinguished by several relevant characteristics.First, there is no character called "Plato" who speaks in any of the dialogues; indeed, "Plato" is mentioned twice in the entire corpus, once as being absent (Pho. 59b10), and once as being present (Apol. 38b6). Authorial anonymity is thus an important feature of the dialogues. 2 At least ab initio, we are not justified in identifying Plato with any one of his characters. Indeed, there are positive reasons why he cannot be identified even with Socrates, as I will discuss below. 3 Plato is absent from his own texts; no simple act of reading them will allow us to ascertain what his views are. 4 It does not follow that Plato's views are [End Page 84] entirely absent from the dialogues—say, in the form of some mysterious "esoteric teaching"—and that they cannot be elicited by a complex act of reading. Just how Plato's views are to be extracted has been, again, the subject of a very long debate. 5 I myself think that Plato's views can be so elicited. 6 But the fact of his anonymity as author means that "Plato's meaning" is not ascertainable in the way that, say, "Kant's meaning" may be ascertainable in the Critique of Pure Reason.A second feature of Plato's dialogues contributes to the interpretive puzzle. The dialogues are clearly fictional in character. They are not—they could not be—transcriptions of conversations which took place. Some dialogues could not have taken place even when the interlocutors were historical figures (for example, at the Phaedrus' ostensible dramatic date the real Phaedrus was not in Athens). Not only are many of the characters entirely fictional, there is clear evidence that even "Socrates" is very much a fictionalized version of the historical character. I am referring not just to the famous statement in the (possibly inauthentic) Second Letter, 7 but to the fact that the Socrates of Plato's dialogues is presented as being a super-human character. This is evident from Alcibiades' description of him in the Symposium as well as from a number of subtle fictions. For example, Plato has Socrates narrate the entirety of the Republic from memory, without a single moment of hesitation or (so far as the reader can tell) any lapse of memory. This fantastic feat is complemented by Socrates' equally fantastic stamina in conversation. The lengthy Protagoras, for example, is narrated in its entirety by Socrates immediately after the dialogue itself has occurred. Socrates never shows any fatigue of any sort. It is not just hyperbole to say that Plato's Socrates is heroic; he is carefully compared, in passages I cannot examine here, to both Achilles and Odysseus. Socrates' absolute calm and self-control before death also evidence his superhuman character. The relation between the historical Socrates and the Platonic Socrates is the source of much fruitful controversy. It suffices for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Place of Touch in the ArtsChristopher Perricone (bio)IntroductionIn Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick- sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging (...) their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.1"The Dance" written by William Carlos Williams in 1944 is one of my favorites. Williams gives us a feel for that life of the kermess (a carnival) in his poem through Breughel's picture, as it were three times removed from the event itself. Of course, unlike Plato, I would argue that the vitality of the kermess is not lost in the poem; it is actually enhanced by a subtle sleight of hand. The poem is not primarily about Breughel's picture. It is about dance, about the dancers who go round, their squeal, the crude music, its rollicking measures, the dancers kicking and rolling and swinging, their hips, bellies, and butts. Reading this poem, I "see" those ordinary folk of Breughel's great picture. I "hear" their music. I "move" to their dance. The poem seems a condensation, a summary of the fine arts. Perhaps the poem is about poetry's power to reinvigorate imaginatively what we hear and see. Perhaps I think of festivities at which I have danced, how such festivities are essential to the human experience. Perhaps William Carlos Williams in 1944, World War II coming to a close, was anticipating similar good times.Tactile ValuesThe fine arts do much to educate our senses. One need only recall the many essays and books written on art, on how to look and hear, how various [End Page 90] critics draw our attention to the power of imagery and song. The well-formed visual and auditory sensations we gain from the arts are, as it were, the melody of those experiences. They are the pictures we store away, the tunes we whistle. However, here I want to draw attention to an overlooked sense—touch. I want to argue that touch is the bass line to the melody of sight and hearing in the arts, that is, that touch keeps the artwork coherent and grounded.This is an old idea. Bernhard Berenson had the idea when he was examining the painters of the Italian Renaissance. In a sense this article is a resurrection of Berenson's idea of "tactile values." Berenson was on to something both about painting and about the arts in general. However, he lacked the scientific evidence about touch and its role in human relationships needed to develop his idea of tactile values to any great extent.The idea of tactile values is first mentioned at the beginning of the essay "The Florentine Painters." Berenson is discussing the art of Giotto. However, prior to plunging into his subject, he says that we need to know what is essential to figure painting before we can appreciate its real value. What is essential are the "tactile values" we give to our retinal impressions, "a test of reality."2 Painting stimulates touch in order for it to stimulate our "tactile imagination."3 Giotto was a genius in stimulating the tactile imagination. Like other medieval masters, Giotto was a fine story teller and had great compositional skills. However, unlike Giotto, other medieval masters "never painted a figure which has artistic existence."4 Giotto's predecessors crafted "highly elaborate, very intelligible symbols, capable, indeed, of communicating something, but losing all higher value the moment the message is delivered."5 If such medieval symbols communicated anything at all, it was only some residue of what one might touch; whatever reality those symbols might have possessed was virtually eviscerated by the artists' emphasis on form and cognitive content. Giotto's predecessors were driven merely by ideas and, one might add, not altogether consistent and coherent ones. On the contrary, Giotto's work seemed to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Genealogies of OppressionA Response to Ladelle McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A GenealogyChloë TaylorLadelle McWhorter introducesRacism and Sexual Oppression inAnglo-America with an account of her experiences during the days between the attack on and the death of Matthew Shepard. On sabbatical near Pennsylvania State University in October 1998, McWhorter describes following these events as they were covered by the media and discussed on a Penn State (...) University LGBT listserv. A day and a half after Shepard’s death, McWhorter attended a candlelight vigil organized by Penn State students. It was raining, only thirty people were present, their voices could scarcely be heard over the sounds of traffic, and the event risked being more disheartening than consoling. An attempt was made to salvage the vigil through song, and someone suggested singing “We Shall Overcome,” but none of the students knew the words. McWhorter realized that she was the only person present who could lead the group in a song that might bring a sense of hope and closure to the otherwise depressing gathering. However, as she describes, she was wary of calling “upon the memory and power of African American movements for justice and freedom in order to further the rights and interests, or at least comfort the fearful souls of nonheterosexual people” (10). She writes,It was important for Matthew Shepard to remain Matthew Shepard and Emmett Till to remain Emmett Till, two separate individuals whose living and dying are different events in human history. I believed it was important [End Page 207] to remember the differences between black and queer struggles, subcultures, and experiences of oppression.(9)McWhorter thus did not sing, and thegathering disintegrated without closure. Each one of us wandered away, carrying with us, not a sense that despite the violence and injustice all around us life can go on and love and respect do still exist—which is, I suppose, what the candlelight shining in the darkness at such vigils is intended to instil in us—but rather with that sense of futility and hopelessness that drizzle and senseless death inspire.(5)Despite her decision to not sing, McWhorter goes on to discuss not only the danger of Sameness that prompted her decision—the danger of homogenizing or identifying oppressions—but also the “twin danger” of Difference. As McWhorter argues, “If we maintain radical distinctions between political events, we may fail to see important overarching patterns and as a result miss opportunities to form and consolidate alliances that might counter the networks of power that oppress so many of us” (10–11).Although there are risks involved in emphasizing either Sameness or Difference, McWhorter notes that she had always been more worried by the dangers of Sameness. She attributes this intuition to her attraction to Foucault. The genealogical method is concerned with revealing discontinuities between experiences in diverse historical periods, undermining histories that impose homogeneity on the past. Pointing out historical disparities kindles hope for a different future and is thus an emancipatory task. McWhorter notes that Foucault is a “splitter” and not a “lumper” like Hegel or Plato. Despite her Foucauldian aversion to lumping, McWhorter writes that in the wake of that candlelight vigil and the more general political climate of the late 1990s in which allegiances between civil rights movements were being disavowed, she came to worry about that other danger, the danger of too much splitting. She wonders “whether, despite all the differences in experience and effect, it might not be the case that somehow these things are joined together, part of the same matrix of power, employing the same means, serving the same ends, shaping the same lives” (11). She notes, “It is that other danger and that other set of possibilities that have moved me to write this book, despite the risks such an enquiry inevitably runs” (11).The dangers of Difference are practical but also factual since, McWhorter argues, there are real similarities between the deaths of Shepard and Till that risk being overlooked. Most significant of these is that both young men were murdered for their sexual deviance: one for his homosexuality, the other for his insistence that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS At the Origins of Modern Atheism. By MICHAEL J. BucKLEY, S.J. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987. Pp. viii+ 445. Writing ostensibly a history of the philosophical origins of 18th century atheism in 17th century theism, Michael Buckley, S.J., has contributed a learned, subtle, and provocative hook whose length is significantly increased and whose focus is considerably enlarged by a running commentary about the (...) metatheory (Richard McKeon's philosophical semantics) that structures his reading of the chosen theists and atheists. Buckley provides the best summary of his own historical conclusion: "... theology generated apologetic philosophy and philosophy generated Universal Mechanics, and these in turn co-opted theology to become the foundations of theistic assertions... [But] when the contradictions between Cartesian and Newtonian mechanics were further negated... god became a deus otiosus" [pp. 358-359]. This conclusion rests on a philosophical principle whose elements are taken from Plato's Seventh Epistle: " The name, the definition, and the instance for the atheistic negations are all set by the current theism " [p. 15]. In turn, this principle is justified by a cluster of meta-theses that are not easily summarized, although one stands above the rest: " Much more may he involved in such a process of ideas [from 17th century theism to 18th century atheism] than their· own internal necessity, hut internal necessity remains and governs inherently " [p. 334]. The latter meta-thesis asserts that there is a dialectic of ideas and it is from this point of view that Buckley reads the conceptual history of modern atheism. Dialectical necessity is a bugbear for many contemporary philosophers, hut Buckley argues, convincingly I think, that some kind of conceptual necessity links theism and atheism. Atheism is, essentially, the negation of a particular form of theism. In Hegelian terms, atheism is a determinate negation which draws all of its conceptual content from what it negates. Buckley, however, puts an even greater Hegelian spin on the same point. If the theism carries within itself a contradiction, it negates itself and, thereby, dialectically generates its contradiction-atheism [cf. p. 17]. " Modern atheism took not only its meaning hut its existence from the self-alienation of religion " [p. 359]. A theism that believes in the existence of an intelligent, personal God, Who creates and orders the universe, but that attempts a rational 144 BOOK REVIEWS 145 justification of this belief apart from the religious experience that alone can embody such a faith contains exactly the kind of inner contradiction that generates the negation of itself. Buckley focuses on the poignant contradiction of a Christian theology abandoning " the religious figure of Jesus as the principal evidence for the reality of God" [p. 41] in favor of some philosophy (whether that of Descartes, Malebranche, or Newton) which provides a different and allegedly more certain kind of evidence for God's existence. This theology, or more precisely the theistic philosophies it spawned, are the sources of modern atheism because, if Descartes and Newton are consistently combined, philosophy can do quite well without God. Laplace's famous reply to Napoleon, although it was not originally an atheistic slogan, captures what Diderot and d'Holbach thought: God is an unnecessary hypothesis in a truly universal mechanics which needs to presuppose only matter and motion. The historical story, of course, is more complicated than this skeleton dialectic can suggest. Buckley richly details the story but I shall rehearse only its opening chapter. Buckley begins with the Jesuit theologian, Leonard Lays (1554-1623), usually known under his Latin name, Lessius, whose De providentia numinis et anima immortalitate (1613) set the pattern for subsequent Catholic theology. Lessius, who was convinced that atheism by eliminating the eternal judge destroys morals and sound politics, revived Stoic arguments, numerous variations on a theme, which show that the universe is everywhere imprinted with a divine design. Lessius's intent, although he referred only to ancient philosophers, was not to replay the classical battle between the Stoics and the Epicureans but to combat the atheism, silent and disguised in contemporary Europe, that Lessius thought to be the inevitable outcome of the wars of religion and theological fights. Lessius, however, paid scant attention to his own insight... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics by Marguerite DeslauriersRosemary TwomeyMarguerite Deslauriers. Aristotle on Sexual Difference: Metaphysics, Biology, Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 376. Hardback, $110.00.Aristotle on Sexual Difference is the latest addition to a growing literature on Aristotle’s views on women and other female animals. Like much of that literature, it surveys both his biological views and his political and ethical commitments. The writing (...) is lucid, and the book is well organized. As described in the introduction, the book defends two overarching theses. First, Deslauriers claims that, unlike some of his predecessors who either saw women as an unalloyed evil (Hesiod, Empedocles, and Plato, among others) or thought of sexual difference as ideally eliminated (Plato again), Aristotle believes that females are valuable, albeit inferior. Second, she finds a biological basis for Aristotle’s description of women’s reason as not authoritative, which she argues is the result not of an intellectual deficit but of a moral one.The first chapter gives an overview of how Aristotle’s predecessors approached questions about sexual difference: How did females first come to exist? What distinguishes them biologically? And how are those differences reflected in the role that women play both in the actual state and in ideal states like Plato’s kallipolis? Here Deslauriers seeks to highlight those accounts according to which women are not only inferior but also bad, since she will later argue that, unlike some earlier thinkers, Aristotle sees females as good.Part of Deslauriers’s case for the significance of females comes from the role they play in reproduction. In chapter 2, she points to the cool heart that Aristotle says is distinctive of females. Their lower body heat prevents them from concocting blood into sperm, but it does allow them to produce katamênia (menses), which is necessary as the material cause of offspring. Deslauriers argues convincingly that Aristotle thought males and females share a form and an end; as such, they are not essentially different. Instead, the difference between them is material: a female fetus is accidentally produced when either the semen or the menses is imperfectly concocted (116). When Aristotle says that females are deformed men, Deslauriers argues that he does not mean that they fail to achieve the end set by the form, but only that they do so to a lesser extent than males do. Both sexes have as an end “generat[ing] another such as itself” (DA II.4, 416b24), which in turn requires that they produce fertile residue. Since the menses that females produce is the material cause of the fetus, it is, she says, a fertile residue, albeit a residue less fertile than the semen acting as the efficient cause of the fetus.In chapter 3, Deslauriers considers the role of women in the city. Here she emphasizes that Aristotle describes rule over women, unlike rule over slaves and children, as constitutional (politikôs). Aristotle notoriously claims that women have the deliberative capacity in a nonauthoritative way, but rather than highlighting his assertion that their deliberative capacity lacks authority, Deslauriers foregrounds the fact that at least he thought that women possess such a capacity. The deliberative capacity’s lack of authority does not imply, she claims, that women are intellectually inferior. Rather, Aristotle thinks that women lack the authority to set collective ends. They “acquire virtue by borrowing the phronêsis of a natural ruler” (169), which Deslauriers describes as a moral rather than intellectual failing. Evocatively, she compares women’s role in the city to that of a nonvoting committee member (183). [End Page 501]Chapter 4 attempts to locate women’s need to borrow the phronêsis of another in their biological nature. One possibility is that Aristotle thinks that women’s coldness affects their perceptual capacity and therefore their rational imagination. Deslauriers thinks that this interpretation is inconsistent with Aristotle’s claim that women do have the deliberative faculty, since it would seem to follow that women would be faulty at practical deliberation more generally, not just at decision-making (230). Instead, she prefers an interpretation according to which women’s relative coldness and moistness weaken their thumos... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:MARITAIN AS AN INTERPRETER OF AQUINAS ON THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUATION }UDE P. DOUGHERTY The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. I T HE MEDIEVAL problem of individuation is not the contemporary problem of "individuals" or "particulars" discussed by P. F. Strawson, J. W. Meiland, and others.1 In a certain sense the problem of individuation originates with Parmenides, but it is Plato's philosophy of science that bequeaths the problem (...) to Aristotle and to his medieval commentators. Its solution in Aquinas is not that of Aristotle, nor is it that of Scotus or Suarez. Aquinas will distinguish between the problem of individuation and what we may call the problem of "individuality" or the problem of "subsistence." The solution to both will draw upon many Aristotelian distinctions but will incorporate key elements of St. Thomas's own metaphysics, including the real distinction between essence and existence and his doctrine of participation. It is Maritain's appropriation of St. Thomas's metaphysics that enables him to produce a realistic philosophy of science, one that he offers as compatible with contemporary scientific enquiry. It also enables him to develop a theory of person and personality. But the story begins with Plato. Although Plato's theory of knowledge may appear fanciful to the modern reader, his analysis of scientific knowledge contains a basic set of observations whose truth remains uncontested even 1 Cf. P.F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen and Co., 1959); J.W. Meiland, Talking About Particulars (New York: Humanities Press, 1970); P. Butchvarov, Resemblance and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966). 19 20 JUDE P. DOUGHERTY though his explanation be faulty. Plato saw clearly that science is of the universal. Things may be particular, but when we consider them as objects of enquiry, the intellect focuses upon the form taken as an exemplar. In Plato's explanation things belong to their various kinds by participating in incorporeal, eternal, and unchangeable archetypes. From a realist's vantage point the problem may be stated simply: Since things are singular, how is it that we intellectually apprehend them as universal? Aristotle's solution is well known and it is one adopted and amplified by St. Thomas. Universals are abstracted from singular things. No one would present Maritain as a medievalist, but, as an interpreter of Aquinas, he has wielded considerable influence in the United States and in Latin America. Many have come to St. Thomas under his tutelage. His knowledge of Aquinas is extensive and is drawn upon throughout his lifelong work, but perhaps nowhere more than in his philosophy of science and in his discussions of the person. The primary text for Thomas's doctrine of individuation is his commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, where he discusses the division and methods of the sciences. Maritain's philosophy is indebted mainly to his reading of Thomistic texts, but he draws heavily, as well, on the works of his contemporaries, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Louis Geiger, and on those of the classic commentators on Thomas, Cajetan, Sylvester of Ferrara, and John of St. Thomas. Though employing St. Thomas, Maritain is always a man of the twentieth century. In books such as the Degrees of Knowledge, Science and Wisdom, Existence and the Existent, and A Preface to Metaphysics, his foe is always some contemporary exponent of a nominalist position.2 "Nominalists,'' he will say, "have a taste for the real, but no sense of being."3 Timeless 2 Degrees ofKnowledge [Les Degres du Savoir(l 932)], trans. G.B. Phelan, 4th ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959); Science and Wisdom [Science et Sagesse (1935)], trans. B. Wall (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940); Existence and the Existent [Court Traite de L:Existence et de L:Existant (1947)], trans. L. Galantiere and G.B. Phelan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1948); A Preface to Metaphysics [Sept Le~ons sur L'Etre et les Premieres Principes de la Raison Speculative (1934)], trans. B. Wall (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939). 3 Degrees of Knowledge, 3. AN INTERPRETER OF AQUINAS 21 metaphysics, he will lament, no longer suits the modern intellect. "Three centuries of empirico-mathematics have so warped the intellect... (shrink)

In Metaphysics M.2, 1077a9-14, Aristotle appears to argue against the existence of Platonic Forms on the basis of there being certain universal mathematical proofs which are about things that are ‘beyond’ the ordinary objects of mathematics and that cannot be identified with any of these. It is a very effective argument against Platonism, because it provides a counter-example to the core Platonic idea that there are Forms in order to serve as the object of scientific knowledge: the (...) universal of which theorems of universal mathematics are proven in Greek mathematics is neither Quantity in general nor any of the specific quantities, but Quantity-of-type-x. This universal cannot be a Platonic Form, for it is dependent on the types of quantity over which the variable ranges. Since for both Plato and Aristotle the object of scientific knowledge is that F which explains why G holds, as shown in a ‘direct’ proof about an arbitrary F (they merely disagree about the ontological status of this arbitrary F, whether a Form or a particular used in so far as it is F), Plato cannot maintain that Forms must be there as objects of scientific knowledge - unless the mathematics is changed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 410-411 [Access article in PDF] S. P. Ward. Penology and Eschatology in Plato's Myths. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002. Pp. v + 295. Cloth, $99.95.In this work the author begins by asking himself the following question: What is an eschatological myth? The adjective "eschatological" indicates that the discourse it qualifies is concerned with the last things; that is, death (...) and the judgment of souls that follows it. Hence, the relation that may be established between eschatology understood in this sense and penology, which refers to the punishments the soul undergoes at the end of its earthly existence. As far as the meaning of 'myth' is concerned, the author, influenced by G. S. Kirk (The Nature of Greek Myths [Penguin, 1974]), adopts a relativist position. He does not think it possible to give a general definition; therefore, he limits himself to pointing out some of the characteristics of this type of discourse, on the basis of passages from the Platonic corpus which are usually considered as myths.Having set his analytical tools in place, the author proposes a commentary on the eschatological myths at the end of the Gorgias (523a-527e), at the end of the Phaedo (107c-115a), at the end of Republic X (614b-621d), in the Phaedrus (246a-249d), in some parts of the Timaeus (42b-d, 91a-92c), and in the Laws (903a-905d). He then examines the relations between penology and eschatology in the dialogues of the first period, the intermediary period, and old age.Although Plato takes his inspiration from traditional myths, those that appear in the dialogues are distinguished from traditional myths by two features: a scientific background, which indicates an influence from the Presocratics; and the role played by elements proper [End Page 410] to the Platonic doctrine. The insertion of considerations of a scientific nature into myths makes them more credible, but is not enough to make them into true discourses. Thus, the question of the relation in Plato between these myths and his philosophical doctrine remains open. Nevertheless, and although it is sometimes difficult to justify particular points in the myths, it is still true that we can note a great deal of coherence between what they recount and the ethical questions developed in the dialogues in which they appear.In spite of this consistency, one observes an evolution in the way these myths are presented. In the Gorgias, the punishments inflicted on the soul by the gods are presented as intended to make the soul better. The idea of reincarnation plays no role here, but it is present in the Phaedo. In this dialogue, however, the question arises of how to harmonize reincarnation with post-mortem punishments which, because of it, no longer seem to be necessary. In the Republic, emphasis is placed instead on the role of individual responsibility in the process of reincarnation. The Phaedrus continues in this direction, but is characterized by its allusions to the theory of intelligible forms. In the Timaeus, by contrast, Plato abandons the theme of a way of life and that of the judgment of souls, for a vision of the process of reincarnation that is integrated, not without difficulty, within a cosmological vision. The Laws continue along this path.This analysis shows that Plato evolved on questions of eschatology and penology, even if he did not radically change his mind. Yet there is one point on which he never varied: even if he did not establish precise frontiers between science and religion, Plato never thought his myths to be true discourses, but he always considered their capacity for ethical edification and their pedagogical value.This work is clear and well structured. It is completed by a bibliography and a general index, is easy to read, and presents a genuine usefulness. One also notes, on the part of the author, a good overall knowledge of the whole of Greek literature, from the origins to the end of Antiquity. Nevertheless, three criticisms may be made: (1) This publication merely reproduces the format... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.4 (2003) 379-383 [Access article in PDF] Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology: Including Texts by Edmund Husserl. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Leonard Lawlor with Bettina Bergo. Trans. Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Pp. 192. $19.95 pbk. The most striking characteristic of this volume is the manner that it presents layers of interpretation to the reader, particularly in that the writing is not (...) intended as a postmodern fête, and has limited value as a hermeneutic enterprise. Ultimately the book's true contribution is the seventy-nine pages devoted to the translation and printing of lecture notes used by [End Page 379] Merleau-Ponty in a class he gave at College de France, shortly before his death. However, the explanation of why this is so will have to be withheld until the end of this review.The course that Merleau-Ponty gave was organized around three essays published by Edmund Husserl. These essays are included in the volume reviewed here and must be briefly dealt with, as they are the core of whatever thinking occurs within and around this book. Interesting essays all, they deal with three longstanding issues of philosophical debate. The first essay challenges the classical notion of a transcendent ideal. Husserl attempts to show, through an examination of geometry, that an ideal is first called into existence when it is called into the realm of human experience, and he does this without ever resorting to the quality of detached being that Plato attributes to ideals. Then, in his second essay, Husserl attempts to defeat modernist cosmology, arguing, against Galileo, that the earth is a fixed point in the universe. Finally, his third essay hearkens back to Heraclitus and Parmenides, examining how human experience is able to extract a sense of atemporal quiddity in a world that is constantly falling into a past. A reader might be baffled that an intellectual could make such claims, but they are made from within the framework of phenomenology, and, within this paradigm as Husserl explains it, the claims he makes do not seem ridiculous at all. "The Origins of Geometry," "The Originary Ark, The Earth, Does Not Move," and "The World of the Living Present,"— these are the three essays that Merleau-Ponty forms his lecture course around. At sixty pages within this volume, they constitute one third of the text itself. For intellectual worth, I would say that these essays are the finest contribution in the text, but that claim is discounted because much of the essay material was already available in English translation. Nevertheless, it only makes sense to have it included in this volume in order to conveniently work back and forth between Merleau-Ponty's notes and Husserl's actual essays.However, that brings us to a significant problem within the text itself. If readers are like me, they will realize that it is often difficult to draw conclusions from the notes of others. Like secretarial shorthand, notes rely on a reader's ability to read both what has been written and what has been withheld in an expressive passage. There is no code that will allow us to recover what Merleau-Ponty recovered as he looked down on his podium at these notes and then raised his head to speak to his class. All that we have are the fragments, and they do not make a coherent argument, lacking both the clarity and the painstaking thoroughness that we find in books [End Page 380] such as The Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible. Certainly one cannot fault Merleau-Ponty for this—he did not write these notes for us, but for himself. His course might have been magnificent, even transcendent, but we will not know that from these fragments.I suppose it could be argued that the ambiguity inherent in such fragments liberates the text and opens it for some sort of radical hermeneutic exegesis; however, I sigh at the very thought of such an argument. Unless we intend to transform... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Aspects of Christian Mystical Rhetoric, Philosophy, and PoetryRyan J. StarkThis is an article about poets and poetic philosophers who make spirited arguments. My purpose in particular is to clarify the nature of mystical rhetoric, which needs to be distinguished from secular rhetoric (i.e., “secular” as nonspiritual). As ways of existing in language, they are ontologically incommensurable, and we should treat them as such. Mystical rhetoric is that (...) into which Spirit enters, conveying to both writer and reader some aspect of providential kairos that cannot otherwise be attained. That is, God completes mystical inferences. God participates, illuminating the hearts of those who open themselves to grace through faith. Or, in other words, writers and readers who want to enter into numinous arguments must shelve the hermeneutics of suspicion. An overly critical stance actually diminishes the possibility of insight, even if it is well intended, much like nervous backseat driving, which—though aimed at producing safety—inevitably works against it. I am not suggesting, however, that skeptics are at a complete loss when approaching mystical rhetorical situations. Rather, they simply do not grasp the metaphysical, enchanted, or occult dimensions of the discourses at work, because they have closed themselves off to Spirit or—more commonly—have attempted to transmogrify Spirit into secular concepts, which distorts spirited language and leads to mischaracterizations of religious experience.1 In contrast, I provide a Christian approach to [End Page 260] mystical rhetoric, one that neither discounts nor sidesteps the real presence of the supernatural.Inspired Rhetoric and HermeneuticsFuror poeticus is a key element of mystical persuasion. The phrase literally means “poetical fury,” and the idea behind it in a Christian framework is that the Holy Spirit aids writers in creating imaginative texts (e.g., sonnets, sermons, essays, novels, blogs, etc.) or, in pernicious instances, demons aid writers.2 In either case, a mysterious force helps the author to compose. Moreover, furor touches readers or listeners, a point seldom emphasized but nonetheless central to this sublime practice of composition. Inspired writing requires inspired reading: furor poeticus needs furor lectoris.3 The Spirit aids readers in understanding mystical rhetoric, as long as those readers participate earnestly in the discourse. John Milton (1674, 7.31), for example, famously envisions such a “fit audience” in the third invocation to the Muse in Paradise Lost (i.e., the “great Argument”), where he calls on the reader for hermeneutical verve, a spirited reading to complement his enthusiastic writing. Søren Kierkegaard also writes to an audience capable of spiritually minded hermeneutics, allowing him to perform various edifying dissimulations through pseudonyms: the despairing aesthete, the unscrupulous seducer, the rigid moralist, and so forth. These inspired writers expect believing readers to contribute to their works, to complete their disputations, in fact, through spirited exegesis. Their methods of composition demand it, which is to say that writers touched by furor leave little room in their arguments for the sustainable disposition of the uninspired reader.Cicero explains spirited rhetoric and hermeneutics in De divinatione, where Quintus talks about how inspired readers experience the same type of furor as inspired writers, seers, and prophets: “Men capable of correctly interpreting all these signs of the future seem to approach very near the divine spirit of the gods whose will they interpret, just as scholars do when they interpret the poets” (1938, 226). Scholarship, in other words, is capable of tapping into mystical energy, making the scholars as prophetic as the vates on which they write. In the second book of On Christian Doctrine (1958, 75–78), Augustine also explains the importance of mystical exegesis as a form of prophecy, where sincere readers undergo the same type of inspiration as mystical writers. For Augustine, spirited reading begins with prayer and ends with revelation. In both accounts of furor, Cicero’s and Augustine’s, [End Page 261] the inspired audience and the inspired writer together experience rapture, a divine vision or illumination, which is precisely the type of communion that occurs during mystical discourses.4Still, the idea of seeking communion with God is potentially unsettling. The notion produces anxieties of psychosis, possession, and self-erasure. Plato famously expresses such concerns in Ion, for example... (shrink)