The article suggests that the position ascribed to thrasymachus in book i of plato's "republic" may be confused but need not be self-contradictory. A formal argument is constructed that derives his conclusion from premisses based on things he says, though not always in the language he uses. It is not suggested that plato ascribes this argument to thrasymachus, but only that it is consistent and intelligible in itself and compatible with what thrasymachus does say.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Francis Sparshott TEXT AND PROCESS IN POETRY AND PHILOSOPHY Ir. H. Bradley in an optimistic moment described philosophy as an • unusually intense and sustained attempt to think clearly.1 If that is what it is, it is clearly a process; and, if it is a process, one does not see what a philosophical text could be. A text is surely not a process, though it may be (...) the product of one. A text that purported to be philosophy would deceive, as many of us complain that textbooks deceive, by substituting for the living endeavors of thought a series of slogans and purported conclusions the parroting of which demonstrates that thought has been evaded, not clarified. But there are such things as philosophical texts, and we could not easily do without them. They are, indeed, central to our experience ofwhat philosophy is. They must be doing some work, and it is up to us to establish what that work could be. 2. If philosophy is indeed a process of clarifying thought, it must in each of us be a self-critical monologue, and it must in the world be a manyvoiced conversation among Thaïes and his contemporaries and successors through history. (Similar traditions in other parts of the world constitute different conversations, in other corners of the room, and sometimes we eavesdrop on each other's conversations; but we will not be concerning ourselves witii them here.) A philosophical text should be a record of parts ofthat conversation, a minute ofthe long meeting ofminds. Without such a record the conversation could be no better than a bull session; we would be forever returning to the beginning, not to recover our origins but because memory had stretched to snapping. After all, what use would the clarification of thought be unless die progress won could be preserved? Philosophy begets philosophy as humanity begets humanity; there must be an Aristotelian efficient cause, a form-bearer. 2 Philosophy and Literature 3.As minute of the clarifying conversation, the text might serve the purpose of an interim conclusion, a tentative result. But not necessarily, and not if the clarity sought is indeed clarity in thinking. Minutes of decision-making bodies may record only the motions passed; but deliberating bodies often prefer to include in the minutes the arguments on either side, so that when they come to reconsider a matter on which a motion has been passed they may do so with renewed insight. A progress report may report only where one has progressed to, but it may also retrace the progression whereby die progress was made. So perhaps die best sort of text in philosophy is die sort I shall call a philosophoumenon, a text that recreates in and for the reader the experience ofclarification itself. But if this is to be done the reader must be sucked in: before clarification can be done, unclarity must be re-enacted. Confusion must be induced and its recognition must be enforced: the reader must be enticed not only to recognize but to undergo in person the Socratic elenchus, which for two millennia has ensured that the best philosophers shall be the best hated philosophers. To do its elenctic work, a philosophoumenal text must be deeply ambiguous, internally divided, blatantly self-contradictory. The Platonic dialogues are exemplary in this as in most ways: dramatic denunciations of drama, written disparagements of writing, conclusive proofs of the impotence of reason. But the other masters did the same: Descartes guides the reader of his Meditations step by step through the argument that is to lead the reader to doubt Descartes's existence; Aristotle invents and deploys a highly technical vocabulary which he never uses in the same way twice, and establishes a classification of intellectual methods into which none ofhis own work can be fitted; Wittgenstein obsessively philosophizes to show the folly of philosophizing, and carefully ensures diat his students circulate die content of the texts that he ostentatiously refuses to publish; Kierkegaard stridently claims authorship of his pseudonymous works so that he can repudiate them audioritatively; G. E. Moore accurately defines goodness so as to make it clear exactly what he is saying when he says that goodness is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Francis Sparshott THE CASE OF THE UNRELIABLE AUTHOR Narratology, as the study of narrative in its most general sense, has made great advances in the last decade, ranging from the rhetorical and syntactic study of narrative forms to an interpretation of human life as a fabric of stories we tell ourselves and each other. I do not keep up with these studies, and the intention of die (...) present article is not to add to them. The standpoint from which it is written is not that of the literary theorist, but that of the relatively plain reader. I write as someone who reads stories that people have written for relatively naive people like me to read, though I have fortified myselfwith a handful of appropriately down-to-earth theoretical works to help me out. The article presents some reflections prompted by a novel that I have found disturbing, not as a special sort of being called a reader and correlated with an equally special writer, but as someone who has been reading a book and has had to come to terms with the fact of being transformed into a person who has read it. In 1966, the English novelist Anthony Burgess announced his intention of writing a novel "of Tolstoyan proportions."1 In 1980 it appeared, under the title Earthly Powers, and was duly described by some reviewers as his War and Peace.2 But why? Perhaps it was just the size of it, 649 pages. Perhaps it was the way the novel combined a story of private life with a background of world history. But perhaps what the reviewers found relevant in Tolstoy was not only the length and the epic scale but also the way his novel conveyed a view oflife, partly in the story invented, partly in the opinions of favorably presented characters, and partly in the way he supplemented his story with comments directiy addressed to the reader — or should we rather say, projected into the readerly void. As for Burgess himself, he probably had nothing more specific in mind than the narrowness he elsewhere complains of in English novelists, whose interests remain typically domestic and suburban when they could be "expanding the 145 146Philosophy and Literature resources of literature to find out more about die whole human complex, the roots on which societies are built."3 Suppose we take the parallel with Tolstoy seriously. War and Peace reads as if told in a voice which is that of the implicit author, a distinctive and cranky character represented for us by the name "Tolstoy" on the title page. A distinctive character, but not a character in the book; it is just the putative owner of a voice projected by the tone in which the book is written. However, much of the special effect of War and Peace comes from our tendency to identify this highly personalized voice-bearer with a real person. The authorial voice ofthe book becomes that ofthe person who wrote it, Count L. Tolstoy himself, quite widiout regard to who this person was in real life and what the real life was that he was in. The book reads like a communication, and mat is how many ofus read it. As it happens, the actual person Tolstoy was himselfat least sometimes prepared to read books that way. Our first question to a new author, he said when writing about Maupassant, is: "What sort of a man axe you? Wherein are you different from all die people I know, and what can you tell me that is new, about how we must look at this life ofours?"4 That is, a book is not only a text to exercise our readership on, and a story told for us to follow in delight or suspense, but also a message from a real person who writes, to real people who read, about the world they all share. Note that we do not have to read War andPeace that way. Fielding's Tom Jones is written in a comparably distinctive and insistent authorial voice, as of someone buttonholing the reader and sharing a joke about the world; but I, and many other readers, take mis to be a... (shrink)

The paper demonstrates a fifteen-point structural correspondence between plato's "republic" and aristotle's "nicomachean ethics". The more interesting points of correspondence are discussed, as are the three passages in each work that have no analogue in the other, and that are not explained by aristotle's dealing with politics in a different work. Possible explanations of this detailed correspondence are considered.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant without SadeFrancis SparshottErmanno Bencivenga’s discussion of “Kant’s Sadism” rests on a misrepresentation of Kant’s enterprise. 1 It presents Kantian morality as a matter of motivation, so that reason has to be pitted against desire. But Kant’s whole point is that, because the psychological causes of one’s actions can never be ascertained, they are irrelevant to morality. Morality is entirely a matter of the reasons for one’s actions, no (...) matter what one’s feelings. It is true that moral questions arise, morality exists, only for finite rational beings, who have inclinations that are relatively independent of the dictates of reason. But that independence does not mean that one should always act against one’s inclinations.The morality of an action depends on the agent’s “maxim”—the subjective practical principle on which one acts, the reasons one has and can give for thinking that what one is doing is right. Kant’s whole discussion is in terms of maxims. The word does occur twice in Bencivenga’s paper, but his account makes no use of it. When he says that “It is the motives of the action, the motives the person actually has—never mind what evidence we have for them—that confer moral content on the action” (p. 41), he does so in flat contradiction of Kant.The confusion underlying Bencivenga’s misunderstanding is most familiar to English-language Kantians from Schiller’s joke: “Gladly I serve my friends, but alas I do it with pleasure. / Hence I am plagued with doubt that I am not a virtuous person. // —Surely, your only resource is to try to despise them entirely, / and then with aversion do what your duty enjoins you.” 2 Both participants in the exchange think [End Page 151] the morality of an action depends on its psychological causes, not on the reasons the agent has for thinking the action right and doing it. Both are wrong.What is revolutionary in Kant’s position is his contention that all a maxim requires to be moral is that agents should really make it their principle at the time of action—that the agent should really stand by it. That means, obviously, that at that moment the agent should be able consistently to will that everyone should act on it. Kant argues that it also means, less obviously, that doing the right thing should be one’s paramount principle, which involves treating humanity and human freedom as an end in itself—ultimately, treating oneself and others as “law-making members of a kingdom of ends.” Thus, for Kant, morality is entirely a matter of rational consistency.Since rational consistency is all that morality requires, morality lays down no plan of action, but presupposes the familiar world in which people already have plans and purposes. What one wills is always some particular thing. Morality has to do with the principles to be followed in pursuing these objectives. 3 Bencivenga’s contention that “making the well-being of some other human, or of one’s own community, or of humankind the goal of one’s action would be relegating rationality to (at best) an instrumental role, and thus denying any ethical value to that action” is wrong. Kant insists that finite rational beings inevitably pursue happiness, 4 and it is their duty to do so for others and (in a sense) for themselves. 5 A leading contention of the Critique is that happiness, like duty, is a component of the summum bonum. Making a principle of maximizing happiness does not destroy the autonomy of the will; the principle is a principle and subject to the critique of consistency, like other principles. Kant explicitly denies what Bencivenga asserts, that it is merely an empirical matter that humans are desirous as well as rational. On the contrary, it belongs to their essence. 6 What is empirical, as Kant explains at some length, is the specific content of a person’s desires.Neither of Bencivenga’s examples tends to show that morality is opposed to inclination. It is true that if the reason moral agents treat people well is really only that, on each occasion, this is... (shrink)

People engaged in teaching and research in philosophy departments are under strong and constant -pressure to believe that what they are doing makes sense. Their belief may well be rooted in an initial project, formed autonomously under the guidance of teachers and fellow students; even so, it will continue to be shaped and confirmed by the requirements of peer approval and student satisfaction. The hungry sheep keep looking up. Sheer humanity requires us to show enthusiasm for what we dispense as (...) nutrition, and a convincing display of conviction requires that we start by convincing ourselves. But in retirement all this falls apart. Often, perhaps usually, an element of belief and devotion is maintained, because the formed ego of the retiree is that of self-as-teacher or self-as-philosopher. But if, as may well be, the retiree's philosophizing was undertaken merely as gainful employment, things rapidly come to pieces. In these circumstances, a request for a paper on metaethics or any other loosely defined topic may bewilder. What, really, could be at issue here? Or so it seems. But there is something factitious in this bewilderment. (shrink)

I once characterized philosophy as 'deliberative discourse about meanings.' The point was, first, that in philosophy one is concerned to decide not what is the case but what and how one is to think; and second, that differences in philosophical approach and practice can best be construed in terms of disagreements about what can be said to be meaningful and about what it is to have meaning.