In Plato's Symposium, Diotima ends her speech suggesting that erōs is the key to immortality. This raises two problems. First, if erōs is aimed at one's own immortality, then it seems selfish and not a genuine form of interpersonal love. Second, she argues that erōs leads us to procreate, but procreation is a way of producing others, not ourselves. In this article the author argues that our misunderstandings of erōs and eudaimonia account for the trouble we have in seeing how (...) Diotima succeeds in explaining a reasonable balance between prudent self-care and genuine love of others that leaves room for a genuine, albeit exotic, personal immortality. (shrink)

Socrates’ refutational method in the Charmides is deliberately designed to allow non-experts to test proposals, even if those proposals are put forward by experts. As such, it cannot produce definitive refutations, but it can produce refutations that are worth taking seriously. This is important to Socrates because he thinks that non-experts have not only a right, but a duty to examine self-professed experts before entrusting themselves or their loved ones to them. So if the rulers in a polis are a (...) cognitive elite—as Critias seems to suggest with his Delphic analysis of temperance—it will be equally important to Socrates for commoners to put their rulers to the test before entrusting matters of state to them. If it is a democratic principle that the legitimacy of political authority depends upon the consent of the governed, then we can say that Socrates defends a democratic principle. (shrink)

Don Adams - Plato's Lysis - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 321-322 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Don Adams Central Connecticut State University Terry Penner and Christopher Rowe. Plato's Lysis. Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 366. Cloth, $60.00. Part I of this book is a running commentary on Plato's Lysis. Part II is an explanation and defense of (...) the authors' theory that the dialogue "provides a systematic and coherent, if incomplete, account of a special theory about, and special explanation of, human desire and action." The authors include their own translation of the dialogue that is quite good. This book is an important contribution to Plato scholarship and will.. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the roles of Anakin Skywalker in central story of the Star Wars saga, and that of Achilles in the ancient Greek epic poem The Iliad. When Anakin discovers that his mother has died violently at the hands of Tusken Raiders, his anger is transmuted into blind, hate‐filled rage and he goes on a killing spree in revenge. Like Anakin, Achilles' anger is turned into blind, hate‐filled rage when the person he loves most, Patroclus, is killed by Hector, (...) the prince of the Trojans. Like Anakin, Achilles barely managed to reemerge from the greatest danger and the greatest temptation he ever faced: nihilism. Anakin and Achilles found that going down the dark path of nihilism can cost them dearly. Like Achilles, Anakin barely makes it back from his journey into nihilism. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Apeiron Jahrgang: 47 Heft: 1 Seiten: 48-80.

Because the moral philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas is egoistic while modern consequentialism is impartialistic, it might at first appear that the former cannot, while the latter can, provide a common value on the basis of which inter-personal conflicts may be settled morally. On the contrary, in this paper I intend to argue not only that Aquinas' theory does provide just such a common value, but that it is more true to say of modern consequentialism than of Thomism that it (...) gives in to the partiality of different interests and fails to provide a robust common value on the basis of which disagreements may be settled morally. This is so primarily because the egoism of Aquinas represents a fundamental commitment to personal moral development which is absent from modern teleological theories. (shrink)

When modern ethical contractualists defend their view against “teleology,” they typically have in mind utilitarian or consequentialist theories according to which valuable states of affairs are to be promoted. But if we look to older teleological theories e.g. that found in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas we will find a kind of teleology that can be incorporated beneficially into contractualist ethics. In this paper I argue that Scanlon would be well served, on grounds to which he appeals, to make (...) a teleological modification to his theory of what we owe to each other. Drawing not only on Aristotle and Aquinas, but also on the thought and life of Martin Luther King, I argue that Scanlon's contractualism can and should be modified to incorporate the ancient and medieval teleological emphasis on personal fruition and legitimate self-assertion. (shrink)

Dans l’Apologiede Platon, Socrate affirme quephthonosetdiabolēont conduit Aristophane à devenir l’un de ses accusateurs. Soit Socrate commet une grossière exagération, car clairement Aristophane ne faisait que plaisanter, soit nous avons tort de penser que l’humour d’Aristophane n’est rien d’autre que de la plaisanterie. Dans cet article, je défends la seconde position. Je soutiens qu’Aristophane est un type spécifique de conservateur social et que Socrate était le genre de social-libéral qui dérangeait Aristophane. Je conclus queLes Nuéesn’est pas un texte innocent, mais (...) est, comme Socrate le prétendait, motivé parphthonosetdiabolē. (shrink)

Many scholars find Socratic irony so obvious in the Euthydemus that they don’t bother to cite any textual support when they claim that Socrates does not sincerely mean something he says, e.g., when he praises Euthydemus and his brother. What these scholars overlook is the role of agapē in shaping Socrates’s view of other intellectuals. If we take his agapē into account, it is easy to see that while there is some irony in the Euthydemus, none of it is Socratic.

For Socrates, philosophy is not like Christian conversion from error to truth, but rather it is like the pagan process whereby a young man is initiated into cult mysteries by a more experienced man - the mystagogos - who prepares him and leads him to the sacred precinct. In Greek cult religion, the mystagogos prepared the initiate for the esoteric mysteries revealed by the hierophant. Socrates treats traditional wisdom with scepticism, and this makes him appear ridiculous or dangerous in the (...) eyes of cultural conservatives. Nevertheless, his scepticism is not radical: custom is not something on which we must turn our backs if we are to pursue the truth. Socrates assumes an epistemology and employs a method by which he induces his companions to begin the critical and self-critical process of philosophical inquiry, not ignoring conventional wisdom, but thinking through and reinterpreting it as they make constructive progress towards the truth. He provides conclusive and convincing arguments in support of controversial answers to some of the most important moral questions he poses. (shrink)

This essay argues that the critically neglected work of the American mid-twentieth-century writer Jane Bowles is a rare attempt at realism in modern fiction that takes as its metaphysical premise the reality referred to in Spinoza’s pronouncement, “By reality and perfection I understand the same.” Bowles’ innately allegorical fiction is an effort to reveal the perfect reality of the world by prophetically creating the future rather than mimetically preserving the present and recovering the past, expressing a world that is existentially (...) founded rather than representationally endured. The realism of perfection her prophetic creations strive to apprehend serves as a necessary reproof of the all too actual world reflected in merely mimetic fiction. (shrink)

This essay contends that reality is a creative evolutionary process by which the virtual is transformed into the actual and argues that our critical conception of realism in literature needs to be altered to reflect this purposive and progressive living reality in contrast to the static and dead actuality assumed by the conventional notion of realism as mimesis. Realist fiction writers who are profound creators have strategically employed metaphysically dipolar and ethically earnest literary genres in tandem with mimetic realism, resulting (...) in complexly interactive alternative and prophetic realisms that function as catalytic agents for progressive change in our world. (shrink)