In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:just Men and Just Acts in Plato's Republic JEROME SCHILLER I. Introduction Too MUCHhas already been written about Plato's Republic. But this, strangely enough, is why a little more needs to be written. For the book has been worked over so often that an obvious sign of fatigue has set in: critics are beginning to find such elementary flaws in the Republic that one wonders why he (...) should waste time on such a philosophically embarrassing work at all. It is to counter one of these recent criticisms and thus, hopefully, to help offset the fatigue, that this study is written. It purports not only to show the criticism mistaken, but also to sketch a way of looking at the Republic which should send the reader back for a further look at this incredibly rich work. The richness of the Republic is, indeed, a source of embarrassment for anyone writing on it. For because of its structure it is at least misleading to isolate one topic from the myriad others treated there, and because of its complexity, impossible to document interpretations of more than a few topics. I shall follow the time-honored practices here of merely expressing my bias on some topics (such as my non-political interpretation) and leaving it up to the reader to follow up hints of my interpretations of other topics (such as that of the Sun, Line, and Cave). II. Plato's Alleged Fallacy in the Republic David Sachs and A. W. H. Adkins have recently claimed that Plato commits the fallacy of equivocation in the Republic, not in the course of some minor argument, but in answering what is probably the central problem posed by the work: Why be just?1 Simply put, their objection goes like this: In the first book of the Republic, Socrates attempts to prove to Thrasymachus why justice is preferable to injustice. But even Socrates is dissatisfied with this answer and early in the second book, after a brilliantly fashioned defense of the Thrasymachean position by Glaucon and Adeimantus, the brothers ask for a more convincing demonstration from "You, [who have] passed your entire life in the consideration of this very matter." e Socrates seems to accept the challenge and proceeds to a search for the concept of justice writ large in the state. Now, claim Adkins and Sachs, Plato never does answer Glaucon's and AdeiDavid Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato s Republic, Philosophical Review, LX(XII (1963),141158 ;A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, A Study in Greek Values (Oxford,1960),p. 289. Adkins,in developingapolitical interpretation ofthe Republic, doesnot elaborate the criticism as does Sachs; hence I refer in this study primarily to the latter's article. sPlato, Republic 376e 2-3,trans. P. Shorey (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1937-42).All subsequent quotations are from this translation. [1] HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY mantus' request. For though he does eventually purport to show that justice is preferable to injustice, the justice he attempts to prove this of is not at all the same justice that Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind. Plato has simply equivocated on the term "iustice," meaning at one time the set of acts generally considered just,s but at another time a certain order in the individual's soul. He has purported to show that an individual with a well-ordered soul reaps advantages, but unless he can show a clear relation between this "Platonic" notion of justice and the "vulgar" notion of justice, the notion which Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind, he will not have answered the brothers' question, and will thus have avoided the central problem of the Republic. The relation he has to establish is, Sachs claims, that Platonic justice is a necessary and a sufficient condition for vulgar justice. Then he could argue that since he has shown that a man reaps advantages just to the extent that he is Platonically just, (1) a vulgarly unjust individual will not reap more advantages than a vulgarly just one (on the grounds that Platonic justice entails vulgar justice), and (2) a vulgarly just man will reap more advantages than a vulgarly... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:just Men and Just Acts in Plato's Republic JEROME SCHILLER I. Introduction Too MUCHhas already been written about Plato's Republic. But this, strangely enough, is why a little more needs to be written. For the book has been worked over so often that an obvious sign of fatigue has set in: critics are beginning to find such elementary flaws in the Republic that one wonders why he (...) should waste time on such a philosophically embarrassing work at all. It is to counter one of these recent criticisms and thus, hopefully, to help offset the fatigue, that this study is written. It purports not only to show the criticism mistaken, but also to sketch a way of looking at the Republic which should send the reader back for a further look at this incredibly rich work. The richness of the Republic is, indeed, a source of embarrassment for anyone writing on it. For because of its structure it is at least misleading to isolate one topic from the myriad others treated there, and because of its complexity, impossible to document interpretations of more than a few topics. I shall follow the time-honored practices here of merely expressing my bias on some topics (such as my non-political interpretation) and leaving it up to the reader to follow up hints of my interpretations of other topics (such as that of the Sun, Line, and Cave). II. Plato's Alleged Fallacy in the Republic David Sachs and A. W. H. Adkins have recently claimed that Plato commits the fallacy of equivocation in the Republic, not in the course of some minor argument, but in answering what is probably the central problem posed by the work: Why be just?1 Simply put, their objection goes like this: In the first book of the Republic, Socrates attempts to prove to Thrasymachus why justice is preferable to injustice. But even Socrates is dissatisfied with this answer and early in the second book, after a brilliantly fashioned defense of the Thrasymachean position by Glaucon and Adeimantus, the brothers ask for a more convincing demonstration from "You, [who have] passed your entire life in the consideration of this very matter." e Socrates seems to accept the challenge and proceeds to a search for the concept of justice writ large in the state. Now, claim Adkins and Sachs, Plato never does answer Glaucon's and AdeiDavid Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato s Republic, Philosophical Review, LX(XII (1963),141158 ;A. W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, A Study in Greek Values (Oxford,1960),p. 289. Adkins,in developingapolitical interpretation ofthe Republic, doesnot elaborate the criticism as does Sachs; hence I refer in this study primarily to the latter's article. sPlato, Republic 376e 2-3,trans. P. Shorey (2 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Loeb Classical Library, 1937-42).All subsequent quotations are from this translation. [1] HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY mantus' request. For though he does eventually purport to show that justice is preferable to injustice, the justice he attempts to prove this of is not at all the same justice that Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind. Plato has simply equivocated on the term "iustice," meaning at one time the set of acts generally considered just,s but at another time a certain order in the individual's soul. He has purported to show that an individual with a well-ordered soul reaps advantages, but unless he can show a clear relation between this "Platonic" notion of justice and the "vulgar" notion of justice, the notion which Cephalus, Polemarchus, Thrasymachus, Glaucon and Adeimantus have in mind, he will not have answered the brothers' question, and will thus have avoided the central problem of the Republic. The relation he has to establish is, Sachs claims, that Platonic justice is a necessary and a sufficient condition for vulgar justice. Then he could argue that since he has shown that a man reaps advantages just to the extent that he is Platonically just, (1) a vulgarly unjust individual will not reap more advantages than a vulgarly just one (on the grounds that Platonic justice entails vulgar justice), and (2) a vulgarly just man will reap more advantages than a vulgarly... (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2009 in London, England.

Summary This article presents and compares aspects of Charles Taylor's and Hans Blumenberg's seemingly opposing views about agency and epistemology, setting them in the context of the tradition in German ideas called ?philosophical anthropology?, with which both align their thinking. It presents key strands of this tradition, from their inception in the late eighteenth century in the writings of Herder, Schiller and others associated with anthropology to their articulation by thinkers such as Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen and Karl Löwith (...) in the early twentieth century. The main issues here are: man's status as part of nature or as ?radically divorced? from nature; the possibility of objective knowledge of man versus the epistemological status of human ?meaning?; the view of knowledge as abstraction versus ?concrete? or ?lived? experience. Within these parameters the article contrasts Taylor's emphasis on ?engaged? agency, embedded in discourses, bodies and predispositions, with Blumenberg's sense of our ?indirect? relation to reality: ?delayed, selective, and above all ?metaphorical??. It concludes that each position may be traced back to a key strand in philosophical anthropology: the one emphasising man's unique freedom, the other that sees man's grasp of reality as uniquely interwoven with a background of meanings. (shrink)

Argues that educators should help students piece together authentic narratives about themselves and about society, and not to focus so much on teaching students to process information.

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

Is jealousy eliminable? If so, at what cost? What are the connections between pride the sin and the pride insisted on by identity politics? How can one question an individual's understanding of their own happiness or override a society's account of its own rituals? What is wrong with incest? These and other questions about what sustains and threatens our identity are pursued using the resources of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines. The discussion throughout is informed and motivated by the Spinozist (...) hope that understanding our lives can help change them, can help make us more free. (shrink)

Seeing, really seeing, is like meditation. In a world filled with distraction, seeing mindfully is a way to pay attention, to hit pause and find calm by focusing on what’s directly in front of us. See Your Way to Mindfulness is a gift book of inspiration and instruction to help readers open their eyes—and their “I’s.” Written by David Schiller, author of the national bestseller The Little Zen Companion, it’s a collection of quotes, prompts, exercises, meditations—married with photographs and (...) drawings that bring the words to life. The quotes are from artists, Buddhists, philosophers, poets, and more, all centered on the theme of how “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” (Marcel Proust). The short, playful exercises and prompts—like Seeing in the Rain, Eye Spy with My Open I, Spend 30 Minutes Taking a Five-Minute Walk, Get Lost—are designed to disrupt routine and inspire readers to see for themselves. Some of the exercises involve drawing, writing, and taking photographs, opening a path to creativity as well as showing how to engage in the moment. Think of it as the Zen of seeing—a new way to look at the world afresh and rediscover joy in the everyday. (shrink)

Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

Mgr Félix Hedde (1879-1960), o.p., est un personnage-clé de la mission des dominicains de Lyon dans le Haut-Tonkin. Son long ministère au Việt Nam (1926-1960) en fit un témoin privilégié d’une période dramatique de l’histoire du pays. Il a connu les années prospères de la colonisation française jusqu’en 1940, les souffrances de ses compatriotes pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale et la guerre d’Indochine, leur humiliation face à la décolonisation forcée, et enfin la persécution ouverte ou larvée des chrétiens sous le (...) régime communiste. Chez Félix Hedde, l’amour pour la mission du Tonkin, le désir d’y implanter l’Église, se conjuguait à sa volonté d’honorer ses traditions familiales et nationales. L’épreuve de l’occupation japonaise, de la guerre d’Indochine, des défaites de l’armée française, autant que le réconfort de la fidélité des chrétiens vietnamiens de la mission dans une situation de plus en plus critique, détachant Mgr Hedde de ses rêves patriotiques, le conduisirent à l’accomplissement de sa vocation missionnaire. Les conditions particulières de son territoire de mission, où les ethnies montagnardes sont très largement majoritaires, l’amenèrent cependant à proposer pour lui succéder le Français André Jacq, privant ainsi d’évêque les chrétiens du lieu, de 1958 à 1990. (shrink)

I argue that directing is a more fundamental kind of speech act than asserting, in the sense that the conditions under which an act counts as an assertion are sufficient for that act to count as a directive. I show how this follows from a particular way of conceiving intentionalism about speech acts, on which acts of assertion are attempts at changing a common body of information – or conversational common ground – maintained by conversational participants’ practical attitude of acceptance. (...) I suggest that the function of assertion is not to share information, but to signal that we can be relied on to act as though some information is true, and to foster that same reliability in others. (shrink)

This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions- ...

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

Much of our understanding of human thinking is based on probabilistic models. This innovative book by Jerome R. Busemeyer and Peter D. Bruza argues that, actually, the underlying mathematical structures from quantum theory provide a much better account of human thinking than traditional models. They introduce the foundations for modelling probabilistic-dynamic systems using two aspects of quantum theory. The first, 'contextuality', is a way to understand interference effects found with inferences and decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The second, 'quantum (...) entanglement', allows cognitive phenomena to be modeled in non-reductionist ways. Employing these principles drawn from quantum theory allows us to view human cognition and decision in a totally new light. Introducing the basic principles in an easy-to-follow way, this book does not assume a physics background or a quantum brain and comes complete with a tutorial and fully worked-out applications in important areas of cognition and decision. (shrink)

A theory that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a function of our brains and experience, integrating recent findings from biology, ...

Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner's "evolutionary instrumentalism," his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a ...

Henry Sedgewick's The Methods of Ethics challenges comparison, as no other work in moral philosophy, with Aristotle's Ethics in the depth of its understanding of practical rationality, and in its architectural coherence it rivals the work of Kant. In this historical, rather than critical study, Professor Schneewind shows how Sidgewick's arguments and conclusions represent rational developments of the work of Sidgewick's predecessors, and brings out the nature and structure of the reasoning underlying his position.

Does Freud still have something to teach us? The premise of this volume is that he most certainly does. Approaching Freud from not only the philosophical but also historical, psychoanalytical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives, the contributors show us how Freud gave us a new and powerful way to think about human thought and action. They consider the context of Freud's thought and the structure of his arguments to reveal how he made sense of ranges of experience generally neglected or misunderstood. (...) All the central topics of Freud's work, from sexuality and neurosis to morality, art, and culture are covered. (shrink)

L'homme ne se rapporte droitement a lui-meme qu'en se rapportant a la totalite du monde qui l'entoure. Ce monde qui est unique selon Platon, sans qu'il soit double par le monde intelligible dont parlera le neoplatonisme, est rendu possible par la rencontre de l'intelligible et du sensible. Ainsi, le logos, par quoi l'homme a acces aux Formes, est ce qui permet d'operer la deliaison proprement philosophique du corps et de l'ame, selon les termes du Phedon, sans qu'il faille poser un (...) dualisme cosmique qui se retrouverait dans l'homme. De meme que le sensible s'intelligibilise par la Participation et ainsi se maintient comme phenomene stable, de meme l'homme peut avoir un usage harmonieux de son corps et de ses sensations. Deliaison n'est pas rupture. L'enfance, la sexuation, le sommeil, les reves, la mort et la parole, ici interroges, montrent que l'anthropologie de Platon ne condamne ni le plaisir, ni le corps. La vie de la pensee ne s'absente pas des mouvements corporels qu'elle accompagne. C'est pourquoi le corps est le signe de l'ame. (shrink)