Plato's views on the nature of the soul, by W.K.C. Guthrie.--Die Erneuerung der Philosophie in der Zeit Ciceros, von O. Gigon.--Gott und Seele im kaiserzeitlichen Denken, von W. Theiler.--Interprétations néo-platonisantes du livre VI de l'Énéide, par P. Courcelle.--Der Platonismus und die altchristliche Gedankenwelt, von J.H. Waszink.--Humanisme et christianisme chez Clément d'Alexandrie d'après le "Pédagogue," par H.I. Marrou.--Some aspects of Platonism in Islamic philosophy, by R. Walzer.

In this paper I provide support for the view that at least some forms of adversariality in argumentation are legitimate. The support comes from Aristotle’s theory of illegitimate adversarial argumentation in dialectical contexts: his theory of eristic in his work On Sophistical Refutations. Here Aristotle develops non-epistemic standards for evaluating the legitimacy of dialectical procedures, standards which I propose can be understood in terms of the pragmatic notion of context as common ground. Put briefly, Aristotle makes the answerer’s meaning in (...) giving assent in dialectical contexts the basis for further moves in the game of dialectic. Moves which subvert the answerer’s meaning or do not solicit the answerer’s consent are marked as eristic, i.e. adversarial in a problematic sense. I conclude with remarks on what Aristotle’s theory may teach us about how semantic features relate to the normative evaluation of argumentation. (shrink)

Modern Studies in Philosophy, we are informed on the page facing the title-page, "is a series of anthologies presenting contemporary interpretations and evaluations of the works of major philosophers." The volumes are "intended to be contributions to contemporary debates as well as to the history of philosophy; they not only trace the origins of many problems important to modern philosophy, but also introduce major philosophers as interlocutors in current discussions." In the first of the two volumes on Plato three of (...) the articles chosen by Gregory Vlastos have not appeared elsewhere: Julius Moravcsik, Learning as Recollection; G. E. L. Owen, Plato on Not-Being; David Higgins, Sentence Meaning, Negation, and Plato's Problem of Non-Being. The other studies in Volume One are reprints: R. Robinson and J. D. Denniston, Plato; H. F. Cherniss, The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas; A. Wedberg, The Theory of Ideas; R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley, Knowledge, Belief and the Forms; R. Robinson, Hypothesis in the Republic; G. Vlastos, Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo; R. E. Allen, Participation and Predication in Plato's Middle Dialogues; Colin Strang, Plato and the Third Man; J. L. Ackrill, Symplokë eidön; J. L. Ackrill, Plato and the Copula: Sophist 251-259. In Volume Two Terry Penner, "Thought and Desire in Plato" has not been published before. The others have: Paul Shorey, Plato's Ethics; David Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic; Raphael Demos, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic?; J. D. Mabbott, Is Plato's Republic Utilitarian?; G. Vlastos, Justice and Happiness in the Republic; F. M. Cornford, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; R. A. Markus, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; Glenn R. Morrow, Plato and the Rule of Law; Wayne A. R. Leys, Was Plato Non-Political?; F. E. Sparshott, Plato as Anti-Political Thinker; Renford Bambrough, Plato's Political Analogies; E. R. Dodds, Plato and the Irrational Soul; W. K. C. Guthrie, Plato's Views on the Nature of the Soul; Harold Cherniss, The Sources of Evil According to Plato; W. J. Verdenius, Plato's Doctrines of Artistic Imitation. Obviously, the above listed articles will be welcome to those debating issues in Plato and to historians of twentieth-century philosophy. There are two difficulties, however. The print is too small in the body of the text and is nearly microscopic in the footnotes and diagrams. Reading thus becomes almost painful. Margins to the left, right, top and bottom of the pages are practically nonexistent. On occasion footnote material is misplaced--for example, the comment on Strang's article as originally published elsewhere should be on p. 184, not on p. 187, of Volume One. But a greater problem is the fact that almost all the articles on metaphysics and epistemology are by linguistic analysts. Vlastos in his introductory remarks admits as much: "Volume One is heavily weighted on the 'analytical' side." He reports the statement of an un-named advocate of conceptual analysis "that these [analytic] methods now enable us to understand Plato better than he was ever understood by anyone in history--better than by any of his own contemporaries, even better than by himself!" He disclaims such euphoria but insists "there is an element of truth in it after all" insofar as analytic tools can alert a student to ambiguity and its consequences in some of Plato's sentences. Hence, "if we come across such sentences in Plato, it would be plainly true to say that we can understand them better than he did and even to add that we can, therefore, understand him better, since we can see both what he meant to say and the logical liabilities of his incautious sentences." All this is true enough, but a warning still is in order. Linguistic analysts tend to read only some of Plato's dialogues and, even within them, to concentrate on some passages only. This is understandable in view of their interests and the capacity of the analytic technique. But that selectivity might lead them to believe that the Plato thus revealed is the complete and authentic Plato, which it is not. Hence, in reading and teaching Plato one must complement language- and concept-analysis with other approaches. Vlastos himself is aware of this necessity : [[sic]] "Once we have made full allowance for what modern semantics and logic can do to make Plato more intelligible and alive for us today, we should be quick to concede that borrowings from this quarter must be used with economy and discretion, and that continuing reliance on older linguistic and historical disciplines is as essential now as it has ever been in the past if the object of our inquiries is Plato himself, instead of some mock-up more pleasing to current taste." One could only wish that Vlastos had fostered that reliance on other disciplines by including articles of that sort among those he actually chose.--L. S. (shrink)

Two of the articles deal with the Apology and the Crito and another two tie in with the themes of these dialogues by focusing on the questions of rhetoric. R. E. Allen in "Irony and Rhetoric in Plato’s Apology" points out the interrelationship between the Apology and the Gorgias in terms of two forms of rhetoric: "base rhetoric, aiming at gratification... and philosophical rhetoric, aiming at the truth." It is the latter form of rhetoric that Allen suggests Socrates uses before (...) the Athenian judges. Betty Sichel argues along similar grounds in "Is Socrates a Sophist?" where she differentiates Socrates’ use of Sophistic logic and rhetoric from the Sophistic use by focusing on the contrasting content and purposes of the two. W. K. C. Guthrie, in contrast, in "Rhetoric and Philosophy: The Unity of the Phaedrus" disagrees with the above two, instead denying to Socrates any interest in rhetoric and arguing that the Phaedrus must be read "not as has been done in the past as a manual of instruction in rhetoric... but a plea to abandon it for philosophy." A. D. Woozley’s treatment of the Apology and the Crito turns from a discussion of rhetoric to "Socrates and the Law," and offers yet another attempt to wrestle with and find compatible the striking contradictions in these two works concerning obedience to the law. Though Woozley wisely concludes that a definitive answer is impossible, he does proceed with considerable care and insight through the various Socratic arguments. (shrink)

On history of Buddhist philosophy; contributed articles.

The topic of biopolitics is a timely one, and it has become increasingly important for scholars to reconsider how life is objectified, mobilized, and otherwise bound up in politics. This cutting-edge volume discusses the philosophical, social, and political notions of biopolitics, as well as the ways in which biopower affects all aspects of our lives, including the relationships between the human and nonhuman, the concept of political subjectivity, and the connection between art, science, philosophy, and politics. In addition to tracing (...) the evolving philosophical discourse around biopolitics, this collection researches and explores certain modes of resistance against biopolitical control. Written by leading experts in the field, the book’s chapters explore resistance across a wide range of areas: politics and biophilosophy, technology and vitalism, creativity and bioethics, and performance. Resisting Biopolitics is an important intervention in contemporary biopolitical theory, looking towards the future of this interdisciplinary field. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Shape of Ancient ThoughtWill S. RasmussenThe Shape of Ancient Thought. By Thomas McEvilley. New York: Allworth Press, 2002. Pp. xxxvi + 732. $35.00.The Shape of Ancient Thought, Thomas McEvilley's magnum opus of over thirty years' preparation, draws together an encyclopedic array of texts and archaeological evidence from Greece and India, which he employs in clearly written arguments toward an answer to a volatile question: just how indebted (...) to each other are India and Greece for their philosophical ideas and techniques? The subject is volatile in that it often arouses the rancor of challenged claims to intellectual property or cultural superiority, and the author shows admirable sensitivity by arguing to his conclusions in a way that explicitly eschews the lesser motives of rivalry and self-aggrandizement; instead he promotes the appreciation of a passion and genius for philosophy that is shared equally in the East and the West. McEvilley has collected for his purposes a treasury of key passages from Greek and Indian philosophy, and this review will seek to give some idea of the vast scope of his work and to assess its contribution to our understanding of philosophy.In his Foreword McEvilley says that his book will challenge a dichotomy, which prevails in Western thinking, that divides the ancient world of thought into Greek and non-Greek. Greek thought is characterized as that which is rational, and non Greek thought as that which is irrational, antirational, or at least nonrational. He faults E. R. Dodds' The Greek and the Irrational for supporting this dichotomy, by which Orphism and even certain elements of Plato become assigned, solely by virtue of their nonrational character, to Oriental provenance. He condemns as "deeply and glaringly false" W.K.C. Guthrie's History of Greek Philosophy for disparaging the comparison of Indian and Greek philosophy on the grounds that their motives, methods, and background of thought are so utterly different. In such a spirit he undertakes to prove by argumentation and a "sea of evidence" the invalidity of so brusque a dismissal of Indian philosophy.The rest of the Foreword explores how the post-Enlightenment "Oriental Renaissance," that is, the discovery by nineteenth-century Europe of India as "the primal [End Page 182] font of wisdom," aroused troubling questions about racial and cultural superiority. McEvilley traces claims and counterclaims made by philologists, historians, philosophers, and art historians who asserted the hierarchical status of India relative to classical Greece as the source of Western culture. He shows how attitudes toward colonialism in India from the eighteenth century up to the present day have further fueled the politicization of scholarship about India. The scope of this controversy ranges from the view that in the second millennium B.C.E. white invaders called Aryans brought into India both Sanskrit and all that is of any cultural value there, to the view that the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion is a racist myth, that there was virtually no foreign intervention in Indian history, and that India was the origin of all the world's civilizations. He commends the attempts since World War II to approach afresh the question of intercultural influence between East and West, including the founding of Philosophy East and West in 1951, and he declares his own view, which forms the main thesis of the book, namely that there were "significant intrusions first from India to Greece in the pre-Socratic period, and then from Greece back to India in the Hellenistic period" (p. xxxi).In chapter 1 McEvilley presents archaeological evidence from as early as the middle of the third millennium B.C.E. of trade between the Near East and India, and between the Near East and Greece. He argues for "full East-West transport of goods" through the intermediary of the Near East around 1500 to 1300 B.C.E. (p. 4). He argues that by the seventh century B.C.E. the activity of Phoenician merchants and the Persian conquests eastward and westward facilitated the transmission of ideas between the Near East and Greece via the "diffusion channels" of merchants, artisans, mercenaries, philosophers, physicians, and seers. He argues for similar diffusion channels between the... (shrink)

The work is aimed at interpreting text and paintings in D. Rubina and B. Karafelov’s book ‘Okna‘. The authors of the article conduct an analysis of episodes with pictorial ecphrasis in the stories from the book and an iconographic analysis of paintings inside the stories. The chosen topic is actual, because it provides an alternative way to solve a problem of word and image relations in the text. The article is aimed at the search for new methods to reflect a (...) protagonist’s character. In this context, the authors of the article compare images in D. Rubina’s texts with B. Karafelov’s paintings, analyze the symbiotical connection of pictorial ecphrasis and reproductions of paintings. The most of the stories are autobiographical what makes them representative in terms of transferring the narrator’s position through the pictorial ecphrasis. In that book, paintings are not just illustrations and not visualization of ecphrasis. Pictures were introduced into the text of novels for presenting main motives and enriching stories by new images and meanings, which could not be represented by text. Colors of paintings are accentuated by color-designation words and are converged to tonality of text. Thereby a reader can interact with a writer and a painter simultaneously. After analyzing of text and pictures, the authors of the article made a conclusion about efficiency of word and picture synthesis for disclosure of the same themes in multiple artistic planes. (shrink)

1.1. Universitet. Chto on myslit? -- 1.2. Universitet. Chto on mozhet? -- 1.3. ... i chego ne mozhet? -- 2.1. Nauka. Zachem ėto nuzhno? -- 2.2. Obrazovanie. Kakoe obrazovanie? -- 2.3. Akademicheskie vobody. Dli︠a︡ chego? -- Zakli︠u︡chenie -- Chto pochitatʹ ob Universitete?

Scholarly papers by Gėlėgzhamt︠s︡yn Luvsant︠s︡ėrėn on Mādhyamika, Buddhist philosophy, Mongolian philosophy and Buddhist studies in Mongolia.

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