In his interrogation of Meletus in Plato’s version of Socrates’ defense speech, Socrates offers an interesting argument that promises to provide important evidence for his views about crime and punishment—if only we can understand how the argument is supposed to work. It is our project in this paper to do that. We argue that there are two main problems with the argument: one is that it is not obvious how to make the argument valid; the other is that the argument (...) seems to rely on a distinction that Socrates himself rejects ––a distinction between voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing. Earlier discussions of the argument require Socrates to be using a premise here that he regards as false. In this paper, we argue that Socrates actually regards the critical premise as true, and thus we end up providing a significantly new interpretation of Socrates’ view that all wrongdoing is involuntary. We claim, that even this position must accommodate the idea that some people really do voluntary harm to others. (shrink)

After he has been condemned to death, Socrates spends a few minutes talking to the jurors before he is taken away. First, he rebukes those who voted against him for resorting to using the court to kill him when they could have waited and let nature do the same job very soon anyhow, for Socrates is an old man. He next contrasts the evils to which his accusers have resorted to his own unbending resolve never to resort to shameful actions, (...) even though in this case such things might have saved his life. Then he prophesies to those jurors that younger men will make their lives far more difficult than ever Socrates did, and thus strips from them any notion they may have had that they gained anything by condemning him. (shrink)

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is said to have held the view, at least at one time, that there is no God, and that, as a result, morality as it existed before this knowledge was achieved no longer has any force or authority. Ivan believed that God or the belief in God was the source of authority for the “old morality” and that the man who recognizes that there is no God “may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers” of that morality (...) and construct a new one. The question in which I am interested is concerned with the sense or senses in which God might be considered to be the source of the authority of morality. In considering this question, I will consider three related views: the view that God is the criterion of moral goodness and makes certain character traits and qualities good by being himself the exemplar of goodness and by esteeming certain character traits and qualities; and that God is the criterion of moral rightness and makes certain actions right by commanding or desiring us to do them, and others wrong by commanding us not to do them; or, alternatively, that the criterion of moral rightness is what God would command or desire us to do; the view that God’s existence is necessary for moral utterances to make proper sense; and the view that the assumption of God’s existence is necessary for moral arguments to have any power to move those to whom they are addressed. I will argue that each of these is incorrect. (shrink)

Cells in the basal metazoan phylum Cnidaria are characterized by remarkable plasticity in their differentiation capacity. The mechanism controlling asymmetric cell divisions is not understood in cnidarians or in any other animal group. PIWI proteins recently have been shown to be involved in maintaining the self‐renewal capacity of stem cells in organisms as diverse as ciliates, flies, worms and mammals. Seipel et al.1 find that, in the cnidarian Podocoryne carnea, the Piwi homolog Cniwi is transcriptionally upregulated when the polyp generates (...) buds, which will develop into medusae. Since transdifferentiation of striated muscle cells to smooth muscle cells also activated Cniwi expression, Cniwi appears to play a crucial role in differentiation events. The discovery should facilitate elucidation of the poorly understood factors that control asymmetric cell divisions at the beginning of animal evolution. BioEssays 26:929–931, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Prudential Paradox The Meno Argument Socrates’ Argument against “The Many” in the Protagoras Knowledge and Belief What Endows an Object with the Power of Appearance? Does Socrates have the Metrētikē Technē? The Moral Paradox Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle Note.

The claim that the citizen's duty is to “persuade or obey” the laws, expressed by the personified Laws of Athens in Plato's Crito, continues to receive intense scholarly attention. In this article, we provide a general review of the debates over this doctrine, and how the various positions taken may or may not fit with the rest of what we know about Socratic philosophy. We ultimately argue that the problems scholars have found in attributing the doctrine to Socrates derive from (...) an anachronistic and erroneous understanding of Socrates as a kind of libertarian. (shrink)

: In her recent paper, “How to Escape Indictment for Impiety: Teaching as Punishment in the Euthyphro,” G. Fay Edwards argues that if Socrates were to become Euthyphro’s student, this should count as the appropriate punishment for Socrates’ alleged crime. In this paper, we show that the interpretation Edwards has proposed conflicts with what Socrates has to say about the functional role of punishment in the Apology, and that the account Socrates gives in the Apology, properly understood, also provides the (...) correct interpretation of what Socrates says in the Euthyphro about the role of instruction for wrongdoers. (shrink)

Basic Cartesian intuitions are directed at simple natures, not truths; but intuitions are also a foundation for propositional knowledge. There are two basic objectives of this chapter: to show how Descartes gets from intuitions to propositional knowledge, and to show how his solution to this problem structures his thinking on the main issues in Cartesian epistemology. I maintain that the solution to is to be found in the principle if we perceive the presence of an attribute A, there must be (...) an actually existing substance to which A is attributed. This principle gets its clearest expression in the Principles of Philosophy but also appears in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind and in the Meditations where, I argue, it appears in the form of the Rule of Truth. I show how this principle is derived from the cogito, understood both as inference and as intuition, how this principle plays a role in Descartes theory of consciousness and self‐knowledge, in the case for substance dualism, and in the theory of clear and distinct ideas. (shrink)

The leading idea of this chapter is that, for Descartes, intellectual ideas make it obvious what metaphysical category the properties they disclose to the mind fall into but not whether they are actually exemplified; sensations make it obvious whether the properties they disclose to the mind are exemplified but not what their metaphysical category is. This idea is worked out through a discussion of three stages in the development of Descartes's doctrine of the material falsity of sensory ideas, the core (...) concept of his error explanation of the senses. Material falsity is a set of three defects that sensations have in comparison with intellectual ideas, ideas that fully discharge the role, which Descartes assigns to ideas in his philosophical system. The first stage, reflected in Meditation III, identifies material falsity with two defects: nonrepresentation and misrepresentation ; the second stage, reflected in the Reply to Arnauld, identifies material falsity with obscure ideas ; the third stage, reflected in the Principles of Philosophy I, sees the terminology of material falsity disappear and the terminology of clear but not distinct ideas appear. Other topics discussed include a special application of the rule of truth and skepticism. (shrink)

Over 300 years ago the father of microscopy, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, observed dried rotifers “coming back to life” upon rehydration. Since then, scientists have been fascinated by the enduring mystery of how certain organisms survive losing essentially drying out completely. Historically sugars, such as the disaccharide trehalose, have been viewed as major functional mediators of desiccation tolerance. However, some desiccation tolerant organisms do not produce this sugar, hinting that additional mediators, and potentially novel mechanisms exist. It has become apparent that (...) a common theme among such organisms is the production and use of intrinsically disordered proteins to mediate survival in this dry state. However, the basic biology of these proteins – which unlike globular proteins lack persistent three-dimensional structure – is poorly understood, as are the functional mechanisms utilized by these enigmatic proteins that allow them to mediate desiccation tolerance. We purpose that probing the biochemical and biophysical nature of stress-related IDPs will provide mechanistic insights into these fascinating proteins. Remarkably, organisms from every kingdom of life can survive losing nearly all their intracellular water. A hallmark of desiccation tolerance is the use of intrinsically disordered proteins, but how IDPs contribute to tolerance is poorly understood. Here, we discuss possible mechanisms and avenues for studying these enigmatic proteins. (shrink)

ABSTRACT For several generations before the First World War, the idea that the British constitution contained a ‘right of asylum' for foreign nationals was commonplace. Though this belief had profound consequences for Britain's treatment of political and religious exiles, its relations with foreign states, and the drafting of its extradition and immigration laws, there has been little enquiry into its origins. This article delineates the emergence of the idea of a constitutional ‘right of asylum', locating it in a series of (...) political clashes over the ‘Alien Act' that took place during the decade after the Napoleonic Wars. This legislation, which established controls over foreigners during the French Revolution and the quarter-century of war that followed, was increasingly challenged by the Whig and radical oppositions after Waterloo, both for its specific arbitrary provisions and as a more fundamental violation of the rights of aliens guaranteed by key constitutional documents like Magna Carta and the Habeas Corpus Act. By the mid-1820s these objections cohered into a conviction that asylum itself could be claimed as a right. This conviction and the arguments that spawned it were repeated for many subsequent decades, forming the basis of the widespread Victorian belief in the ‘right of asylum’. (shrink)

Current work in experimental biology revolves around a handful of animal species. Studying only a few organisms limits science to the answers that those organisms can provide. Nature has given us an overwhelming diversity of animals to study, and recent technological advances have greatly accelerated the ability to generate genetic and genomic tools to develop model organisms for research on host–microbe interactions. With the help of such models the authors therefore hope to construct a more complete picture of the mechanisms (...) that underlie crucial interactions in a given metaorganism (entity consisting of a eukaryotic host with all its associated microbial partners). As reviewed here, new knowledge of the diversity of host–microbe interactions found across the animal kingdom will provide new insights into how animals develop, evolve, and succumb to the disease. (shrink)

Examines the connections among believing, saying, and expressing in situations where the sentence used is a declarative sentence containing at least one proper name. Proposes a new way of understanding these connections. Develops an argument for the thesis that, although we typically believe the singular propositions expressed by our uses of name sentences, we rarely use such sentences because we believe those propositions.

There has been little scholarly attention given to explaining exactly how and why Socrates thinks that wrongdoing damages the soul. But there is more than a simple gap in the literature here, we shall argue. The most widely accepted view of Socratic moral psychology, we claim, actually leaves this well-known feature of Socrates’ philosophy absolutely inexplicable. In the first section of this paper, we rehearse this view of Socratic moral psychology, and explain its inadequacy on the issue of the damaging (...) consequences of wrongdoing. We then go on to provide our own account of the way in which injustice damages the soul, and then draw conclusions about how Socratic moral psychology should be understood. (shrink)