In this article I argue (against the views of Russell Dancy and Gregory Vlastos, but in support of the views of R. E. Allen, Gail Fine, and Francesco Fronterotta) that Euthyphro 5c-d and 6d-e show that Socrates had a metaphysics, early version of the theory of forms. I disagree with Fronterotta only on the separation of the forms in the Euthyphro.

Socrates is one the most important thinkers in western philosophy, yet he remains enigmatic, having left behind no works of his own. Instead, his thought is understood primarily through the work of his followers. In this accessible introduction, William Prior assesses Socrates the man, his famous trial, and the nature of his philosophy.

Originally published in 1991, this book focuses on the concept of virtue, and in particular on the virtue of wisdom or knowledge, as it is found in the epic poems of Homer, some tragedies of Sophocles, selected writings of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. The key questions discussed are the nature of the virtues, their relation to each other, and the relation between the virtues and happiness or well-being. This book provides the background and interpretative framework to (...) make classical works on Ethics, such as Plato’s _Republic_ and Aristotle’s _Nicomachean Ethics_, accessible to readers with no training in the classics. (shrink)

This four volume set is a collection of some of the most significant scholarship published on the philosophy of Socrates in the last half century. The contributors include many of the most prominent scholars in this field. As the growth in Socratic studies in the past three decades is due in large part to the influential work of Gregory Vlastos, articles by him figure prominently in the collection, and works by other authors are generally related to his work. The volumes (...) deal with different areas of Socratic thought. The first volume begins with the question whether and to what degree we can discern a distinctive philosophy of Socrates in the ancient sources. The second volume deals with the trial of Socrates and the philosophical issues that arise from it. The third volume considers the philosophical methodology of Socrates and the fourth his moral philosophy. This collection shares some material with earlier collections on the philosophy of Socrates, but it is more extensive and up-to-date. Unlike other collections, which may offer the reader only a single article on a given topic, this collection offers a conversation in-depth. The reader can thus get a sense of the dimensions of the scholarly debate on these central issues in the philosophy of Socrates. No collection can be complete, but this aims at a representative portrait of Socratic studies in the last fifty years. (shrink)

In this article I argue that "Timaeus" 48e-52d, the passage in which Plato introduces the receptacle into his ontology, Contains the material for a satisfactory response to the third man argument. Plato's use of "this" and "such" to distinguish the receptacle, Becoming, And the forms clarifies the nature of his ontology and indicates that the forms are not, In general, self-predicative. This result removes one argument against regarding the "Timaeus" as a late dialogue.

In this paper I argue against the view of G.E.L. Owen that the second version of the Third Man Argument is a sound objection to Plato's conception of Forms as paradigms and that Plato knew it. The argument can be formulated so as to be valid, but Plato need not be committed to one of its premises. Forms are self-predicative, but the ground of self-predication is not the same as that of ordinary predication.

I argue that it was not Plato's intention in his Socratic dialogues to provide a biography of Socrates. Rather, his intention was to describe and defend the philosophical life against its critics. The Socratic dialogues are "unhappy encounters" between Socrates, defender of the life of philosophy, and those who do not comprehend or who reject that life.

Scholars often assume that when Plato said that Forms are paradeigmata he meant that they were exemplars of the property they represent. I argue that "paradeigma" is better read as "pattern" than "exemplar." This reading is compatible with Plato's use of the term in all passages except Parm. 132d, where Parmenides misinterprets the term to make the theory of Forms susceptible to the Third Man Argument.

I argue that the sentiment of compassion is a factor of the first importance in moral theory. This sentiment, which causes us to act well toward persons in need, is an essential element in the psychology of the morally well-developed person. Moral rationalists such as Epictetus and Kant, who contend that the source of moral value is reason rather than compassion, produce a distorted picture of our moral lives. Hume’s moral psychology gives compassion the place it deserves as a motivating (...) factor in moral action.In the second part of the paper, I study the impact of moral rationalism, as manifested in the work of Peter Singer, on the question of the treatment of mentally handicapped humans. Singer’s advocacy of euthanasia for such people is a consequence of his adoption of rationalist assumptions about the value of human life, and shows the unacceptable implications of those assumptions. (shrink)

In the first part of this paper, I argue that the sentiment of compassion is a factor of the first importance in moral theory. This sentiment, which causes us to act well toward persons in need, is an essential element in the psychology of the morally well-developed person. Moral rationalists such as Epictetus and Kant, who contend that the source of moral value is reason rather than compassion, produce a distorted picture of our moral lives. Hume’s moral psychology gives compassion (...) the place it deserves as a motivating factor in moral action.In the second part of the paper, I study the impact of moral rationalism, as manifested in the work of Peter Singer, on the question of the treatment of mentally handicapped humans. Singer’s advocacy of euthanasia for such people is a consequence of his adoption of rationalist assumptions about the value of human life, and shows the unacceptable implications of those assumptions. (shrink)

This is a brief dictionary entry on the Greek word "techne" (art or skill) as used in ancient Greek philosophy, in particular in the work of Plato and Aristotle. A techne may be a manual craft, such as carpentry, or a science, such as medicine. A techne is based on universal principles and is capable of being taught.

In this paper I examine a much discussed passage of the Timaeus. This passage contains one of the most important descriptions of Plato's ontology to be found in all the dialogues. The ontological scheme there described differs from that presented in the middle Platonic dialogues in that a third sort of entity, the Receptacle or space, is added to the two classes of things familiar to readers of the Phaedo and Republic: Being and Becoming. The introduction of the Receptacle into (...) Plato's ontology enables Plato to clarify the relation between the orders of Being and Becoming in a way not otherwise possible. When the relation between the Forms and their phenomenal counterparts has been clarified, I shall argue, it becomes clear that the Theory of Forms as presented in the Timaeus is in fact a coherent metaphysical theory, one which is not susceptible to the Third Man Argument. This fact in turn bears on the vexed question of the place of the Timaeus in the chronology of Plato's works. (shrink)

Scholars who seek in Plato's early dialogues an accurate account of the philosophy of the historical Socrates place special weight on the Apology as a source of historical information about him. Even scholars like Charles Kahn, who generally reject this historicist approach to the early dialogues, accept the Apology as a ‘quasi-historical’ document. In this paper I attempt to raise doubts about the historical reliability of the Apology. I argue that the claims used to support the historicity of the Apology (...) fall far short of establishing the Apology as an historically accurate record of the trial, and that this conclusion is affirmed even in the words of those scholars who defend the historicity of the dialogue. I urge an interpretation that treats the Apology primarily as a philosophical, not as an historical, document. (shrink)

Scholars who seek in Plato’s early dialogues an accurate account of the philosophy of the historical Socrates place special weight on the Apology as a source of historical information about him. Even scholars like Charles Kahn, who generally reject this historicist approach to the early dialogues, accept the Apology as a ‘quasi-historical’ document. In this paper I attempt to raise doubts about the historical reliability of the Apology. I argue that the claims used to support the historicity of the Apology (...) fall far short of establishing the Apology as an historically accurate record of the trial, and that this conclusion is affirmed even in the words of those scholars who defend the historicity of the dialogue. I urge an interpretation that treats the Apology primarily as a philosophical, not as an historical, document. (shrink)

I argue that, when Alcibiades' encomium to Socrates is interpreted in light of Socrates' presentation of Diotima's speech, which immediately proceeds it, it shows Socrates to be at the top level of Diotima's "ladder of ascent" to Beauty. If Alcibiades is correct, Socrates' pretense of ignorance is an ironic sham. Socrates, as Plato's mystagogos, must have experiential knowledge of the Form of Beauty.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Reliability of our Sources What our Sources tell us about Socrates The Problem of Socrates’ Doctrines.

This is a brief review of Silverman's study of Plato's ontology, in particular his theory of Forms. Silverman writes from an analytic viewpoint. He accepts the developmentalist picture of Plato's thought, but holds that the development is gradual. He focuses on the issue of predication, and especially self-predication. He tends to treat Plato's ontology as a free-standing subject. All of these features are controversial. I wondered in particular whether the analytic approach required more precision than can be found in the (...) dialogues. (shrink)

“Contextual” vocabulary acquisition is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from textual clues and prior knowledge, including language knowledge and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. But what is “context”? Is it just the surrounding text? Does it include the reader’s background knowledge? I argue that the appropriate context for contextual vocabulary acquisition is the reader’s “internalization” (...) of the text “integrated” into the reader’s “prior” knowledge via belief revision. (shrink)

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from context, where “context” includes: (1) the reader’s “internalization” of the surrounding text, i.e., the reader’s “mental model” of the word’s “textual context” (hereafter, “co-text” [3]) integrated with (2) the reader’s prior knowledge (PK), but it excludes (3) external sources such as dictionaries or people. CVA is what you do when you come across an unfamiliar word in your reading, realize (...) that you don’t know what it means, decide that you need to know what it means in order to understand the passage, but there is no one around to ask, and it is not in the dictionary (or you are too lazy to look it up). In such a case, you can try to figure out its meaning “from context”, i.e., from clues in the co-text together with your prior knowledge. Our computational theory of CVA—implemented in a the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system [28]—begins with a stored knowledge base containing SNePS representations of relevant PK, inputs SNePS representations of a passage containing an unfamiliar word, and draws inferences from these two (integrated) information sources. When asked to define the word, definition algorithms deductively search the resulting network for information of the sort that might be found in a dictionary definition, outputting a definition frame whose slots are the kinds of features that a definition might contain (e.g., class membership, properties, actions, spatio-temporal information, etc.) and whose slot-fillers contain information gleaned from the network [6–8,20,23,24]. We are investigating ways to make our system more robust, to embed it in a naturallanguage-processing system, and to incorporate morphological information. Our research group, including reading educators, is also applying our methods to the develop-. (shrink)

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to a (...) new classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

This article presents evidence supporting the claim that ethical reasoning is a skill that can be taught and assessed. We propose a working definition of ethical reasoning as 1) the ability to identify, analyze, and weigh moral aspects of a particular situation, and 2) to make decisions that are informed and warranted by the moral investigation. The evidence consists of a description of an ethical reasoning education program—Ethical Reasoning in Action —designed to increase ethical reasoning skills in a variety of (...) situations and areas of life. ERiA is housed at a public, major comprehensive U.S. university—James Madison University—and assessment of the program focuses on interventions delivered prior to and during orientation for incoming first-year students. Findings indicate that the interventions measurably enhance the ability of undergraduate students to reason ethically. ERiA’s competency-targeted program and positive student learning outcomes offers a promising model for higher education ethics programs seeking to connect classroom learning in ethics to decision-making in everyday life. (shrink)

Preadolescence is an important period for the consolidation of certain arithmetic facts, and the development of problem-solving strategies. Obese subjects seem to have poorer academic performance in math than their normal-weight peers, suggesting a negative effect of obesity on math skills in critical developmental periods. To test this hypothesis, event-related potentials were collected during a delayed-verification math task using simple addition and subtraction problems in obese [above 95th body mass index percentile] and non-obese preteens with different levels of math skill; (...) thirty-one with low math skills and thirty-one with high math skills. No significant differences between weight groups were observed in task accuracy regardless of their mathematical skill level. For ERPs, electrophysiological differences were found only in the subtraction condition; participants with obesity showed an electrophysiologic pattern associated with a reduced ability to allocate attention resources regardless of their math skill level, these differences were characterized by longer P300 latency than their normal-weight peers. Moreover, the participants with obesity with high math skills displayed hypoactivity in left superior parietal lobule compared with their normal-weight peers. Additionally, obese preteens with low math skills displayed smaller arithmetic N400 amplitude than non-obese participants, reflecting difficulties in retrieving visual, semantic, and lexical information about numbers. We conclude that participants with obesity are less able than their normal-weight peers to deploy their attention regardless of their behavioral performance, which seems to have a greater effect on obese participants with low math skills because they also show problems in the retrieval of solutions from working memory, resulting in a delay in the development of mathematical skills. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a novel interpretation of the role of the understanding in generating the unity of space and time. On the account I propose, we must distinguish between the unity that belongs to determinate spaces and times – which is a result of category-guided synthesis and which is Kant’s primary focus in §26 of the B-Deduction, including the famous B160–1n – and the unity that belongs to space and time themselves as all-encompassing structures. Non-conceptualist readers of Kant (...) have argued that this latter unity cannot be the product of categorial synthesis. While they are correct that this unity is not the product of any particular act of category-guided synthesis, I argue that conceptualists are right to nevertheless attribute this unity to the understanding. I argue that it is a result of what we can think of as the ‘original’ synthesis of understanding and sensibility themselves – it is a synthesis, moreover, in which the whole is logically prior to the parts. (shrink)

A study in philosophical logic of the meaning of 'true'. Dr Williams demonstrates the shortcomings of various analyses which interpret 'true' as a predicate or truth as a relational property, and clears up a number of important points about propositions, quantification, definite descriptions and correspondence. This 'deflationary metaphysics' is interwoven with a positive theory of his own, which seeks to develop ideas about the late Arthur Prior. The work is marked throughout by great clarity, precision and thoroughness.

A study in philosophical logic of the meaning of 'true'. Dr Williams demonstrates the shortcomings of various analyses which interpret 'true' as a predicate or truth as a relational property, and clears up a number of important points about propositions, quantification, definite descriptions and correspondence. This 'deflationary metaphysics' is interwoven with a positive theory of his own, which seeks to develop ideas about the late Arthur Prior. The work is marked throughout by great clarity, precision and thoroughness.