‘Game’ means ‘play within the construction of rules’. The sub-category ‘sport’ considers play as competition where the rules are known to the audience, under the following divide: fundamental constructive rules about the game's structure and less important or flexible rules facilitating and monitoring play. These provide athletes and audience with stable knowledge. The excitement of play comes from the vagaries of the actual engagement of the rules in the action of play. The social order can use this as a metaphor (...) of its ideal of civil law in relation to the citizen. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of the logical apparatus of Frege, where his use of Sinn suggests a modification of Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Then, it turns to Strawson's basic particulars with its essentially Kantian orientation. This brings forward the logical ground upon which the Identity Thesis rests. Finally, following Frege with some modifications, the paper suggests that an ontological list where concepts can be treated as objective (materially dependent) subsistent entities would be necessary in order (...) to avoid errors of J. J. C. Smart and other analytic philosophers who hold the Identity Thesis. (shrink)

This paper is a close reading of the first book of the "republic". Plato prepares the reader for what is to come in the work by hinting at the elaboration of justice in its human, political and cosmic aspects. The paper attends to the argumentative, mythic and rhetorical strategies that plato employs to open the discussion and to develop it. In this way the paper is an aid to a competent, and by no means uncritical, reading of the "republic".

Sooner or later, a discussion of wisdom and philosophy brings to mind Socrates as somehow both wise and ignorant. It is not implausible to say that for Socrates the greatness of philosophy is its capacity to free the individual from fate or circumstance and thereby to destroy the two great fears of mankind with which tragedy was unable to deal: the fear of death and the fear of the loss of love or honor.

Kant's ethics demand suppositions where a noumenal freedom does not contradict natural causality. A rational faith in God makes this possible, through a progressive program in nature, including history, through strife, culminating in the doctrine that the republican form of government represents man's essential ethical essence. This captures many traditional religious views but Kant asserts them as a rational exposition in response to modern and contemporary intellectual currents, especially Hume, Rousseau and Herder.