This book offers an introduction to the Sophists of fifth-century Athens and a new overall interpretation of their thought. Since Plato first animadverted on their activities, the Sophists have commonly been presented as little better than intellectual mountebanks - a picture which Professor Kerferd forcefully challenges here. Interpreting the evidence with care, he shows them to have been part of an exciting and historically crucial intellectual movement. At the centre of their teaching was a form of relativism, most famously expressed (...) by Protagoras as 'Man is the measure of all things', and which they developed in a wide range of views - on knowledge and argument, virtue, government, society, and the gods. On all these subjects the Sophists did far more than simply provoke Plato to thought. Their contributions were substantial and serious; they inaugurated the debate on many central philosophical questions and decisively shifted the focus of philosophical attention from the cosmos to man. (shrink)

"It is the purpose of this article to attempt to re-examine the account of Thrasymachus' doctrine in Plato's Republic, and to show how it can form a self-consistent whole. [...] In this paper it is maintained that Thrasymachus is holding a form of [natural right]." Note: Volume 40 = new series 9.

This paper attempts to delineate some of the principal features and tasks of a politics of postmodernity. An attempt is made in the first part of the paper to reflect on the democratic revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe and to discern what lessons they might have to offer. What is called for, it is maintained, is a renewed theory of democracy and, more particularly, a reformulation of traditional liberalism. In the second part of the paper the author seeks to (...) suggest how such traditional liberal concepts as the individual, reason, universality, and freedom can be reformulated in a genuinely postmetaphysical, postmodern fashion. (shrink)

The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Representing Time in Natural Language offers a systematic and detailed account of how we use temporal information contained in a text or in discourse to reason about the flow of time, inferring the order in which events happened when this is not explicitly stated. A new representational system is designed to formalize an appropriately context-dependent notion (...) of situated inference. The Dynamic Aspect Tree, representing temporal dependencies, constitutes a novel and important dynamic temporal logic, one that makes it easy to see "what follows when" from the information given in an ordinary English text. (shrink)

In the article "The Epistemological Nature of Information Modeling" [Gnoseologicheskaia priroda informatsionnogo modelirovaniia], Voprosy filosofii, 1963, No. 10, Academician V. M. Glushkov examines two important methodological aspects of the modeling of natural objects and phenomena in the contemporary natural sciences. The first consists of the informational nature of the models created, and the second of their dynamism. The dynamic nature of today's models in the natural sciences means that it is not so much the material structure of the object that (...) is modeled as its behavior and functions in some sphere of natural phenomena. In this sense, the models under examination may also be termed functional, as distinct from the structural models pertaining to a static description of objects. (shrink)

Anselm: I agreed that Pegasus is a flying horse according to the stories people tell, the paintings painters paint and so on . That is, Pegasus is a flying horse in the understanding of storytellers, their readers and the artists who depict Pegasus. You asked whether flying is not an unmediated causal power . Well, it could be an unmediated causal power if you or I had it, but not if a being with only mediated powers had it. And so (...) poor Pegasus, a being whose powers are only those given him by storytellers and artists, has only the mediated power of flying that they have given him. He flies in the thoughts and depictions of beings with unmediated powers. Still, Pegasus has not only the mediated power to fly but also the mediated power to entertain us, and perhaps even inspire us. Fool: But people could tell stories about you, too, about how you sprouted wings and flew onto the roof of Canterbury Cathedral. Anselm: Alas, if it were only in stories that I could do that, then flying would not be an unmediated causal power of mine. I would still have unmediated causal powers all right, and so would be greater than Pegasus. But flying is not one of my unmediated causal powers. However, something than which nothing greater can be conceived would, and does, as I have proved in my Proslogion, have unmediated causal powers – indeed, much greater unmediated causal powers than any poor mortals like you and me.1 •↵1 For …. (shrink)

In this paper, the author attempts to explore some of the problems connected with the formulation and application of international biomedical ethical guidelines, with particular reference to Africa. Recent attempts at revising and updating some international medical ethical guidelines have been bedevilled by intractable controversies and wrangling regarding both the content and formulation. From the vantage position of relative familiarity with both African and Western contexts, and the privilege of having been involved in the revision and updating of one of (...) the international ethical guidelines, the author reflects broadly on these issues and attempts prescribing an approach from both the theoretical and practical angles liable to mitigate, if not completely eliminate, some of the problems and difficulties. (shrink)