A fluent and accurate new translation of the dialogue that, all of Plato's works, has seemed to speak most directly to the interests of contemporary analytical philosophers. White's extensive introduction explores the dialogue's center themes, its connection with related discussions in other dialogues, and its implication for the interpretation of Plato's metaphysics.

A step by step, passage by passage analysis of the complete Republic. White shows how the argument of the book is articulated, the important interconnections among its elements, and the coherent and carefully developed train of though which motivates its complex philosophical reasoning. In his extensive introduction, White describes Plato's aims, introduces the argument, and discusses the major philosophical and ethical theories embodied in the Republic. He then summarizes each of its ten books and provides substantial explanatory and interpretive notes.

"A complete and unified account of Plato's epistemology... scholarly, historically sensitive, and philosophically sophisticated. Above all it is sensible.... White's strength is that he places Plato's preoccupation in careful historical perspective, without belittling the intrinsic difficulties of the problems he tackled.... White's project is to find a continuous argument running through Plato's various attacks on epistemological problems. No summary can do justice to his remarkable success." --Ronald B. De Sousa, University of Toronto, in Phoenix.

In this brief history, philosopher Nicholas White reviews 2,500 years of philosophical thought about happiness. Addresses key questions such as: What is happiness? Should happiness play such a dominant role in our lives? How can we deal with conflicts between the various things that make us happy? Considers the ways in which major thinkers from antiquity to the modern day have treated happiness: from Plato’s notion of the harmony of the soul, through to Nietzsche’s championing of conflict over harmony. Relates (...) questions about happiness to ethics and to practical philosophy. (shrink)

Community engagement is increasingly promoted as a marker of good, ethical practice in the context of international collaborative research in low-income countries. There is, however, no widely agreed definition of community engagement or of approaches adopted. Justifications given for its use also vary. Community engagement is, for example, variously seen to be of value in: the development of more effective and appropriate consent processes; improved understanding of the aims and forms of research; higher recruitment rates; the identification of important ethical (...) issues; the building of better relationships between the community and researchers; the obtaining of community permission to approach potential research participants; and, the provision of better health care. Despite these diverse and potentially competing claims made for the importance of community engagement, there is very little published evidence on effective models of engagement or their evaluation. (shrink)

BackgroundCommunity engagement is increasingly promoted as a marker of good, ethical practice in the context of international collaborative research in low-income countries. There is, however, no widely agreed definition of community engagement or of approaches adopted. Justifications given for its use also vary. Community engagement is, for example, variously seen to be of value in: the development of more effective and appropriate consent processes; improved understanding of the aims and forms of research; higher recruitment rates; the identification of important ethical (...) issues; the building of better relationships between the community and researchers; the obtaining of community permission to approach potential research participants; and, the provision of better health care. Despite these diverse and potentially competing claims made for the importance of community engagement, there is very little published evidence on effective models of engagement or their evaluation.MethodsIn this paper, drawing upon interviews with the members of a Community Advisory Board on the Thai-Myanmar border, we describe and critically reflect upon an approach to community engagement which was developed in the context of international collaborative research in the border region.Results and conclusionsDrawing on our analysis, we identify a number of considerations relevant to the development of an approach to evaluating community engagement in this complex research setting. The paper also identifies a range of important ways in which the Community Advisory Board is in practice understood by its members to have morally significant roles and responsibilities beyond those usually associated with the successful and appropriate conduct of research. (shrink)

White opposes the long-standing view that ancient Greek ethics is fundamentally different from modern ethical views. He examines the ways in which Greek ethics has been interpreted since the 18th century, and traces the history in Greek ethical thought of the idea of conflict among human aims, in particular the conflict between conformity to ethical standards and one's own happiness.

My account is subject to two important limitations. First, I shall be discussing whether or not Aristotle holds to an essentialistic doctrine with regard to sensible particulars, and shall neglect entirely his views about such things as species, genera, universals, and the like. Secondly, I shall be leaving out of account such chronologically late productions as Metaphysics VI-X and IV. Thus I shall be concentrating on the Categories, the Topics, the Physics, and the De Generatione et Corruptione. I am not (...) convinced that later works show substantial change over the works which I shall be discussing, but the later works do present severe exegetical difficulties which could not be adequately met within the scope of this essay. (shrink)

AS SOME PHILOSOPHERS KNOW, the paradox about inquiry at 80d-e of Plato’s Meno is more than a tedious sophism. Plato is one such philosopher. The puzzle is an obstacle to his project of discovering definitions, and is introduced as such. And it is met with an elaborate response: the theory of recollection, explicitly presented as an answer to the obstacle. But then what of the famous conversation in which Socrates coaxes a geometrical theorem from a slave boy Is the theory (...) not designed to explain the boy’s ability to respond to the coaxing? It is, certainly, but that is not its only purpose. The structure of the passage is this: the theory is there to disarm the paradox, and the conversation is there to support the theory. To see this structure is to understand a notorious and otherwise troubling fact, that Plato is so very quick to take the slave’s behavior—which he might have tried to explain in some other way-to be clear evidence for recollection. The reason why he so takes it is that the paradox has led him to think that only if recollection occurs is fruitful inquiry possible—and he is very anxious indeed to be assured that it is possible. He would not have been so enticed by explanations of the boy’s behavior which did not also seem to him to dispose of the puzzle. Here now is Plato’s setting of the paradox. (shrink)

Chronologically sequenced chapter units give an overall historical perspective in this text on ethics, while chapter introductions include biographical, historical and other information.

In the historiography of Classical Greek ethics over the last two hundred years, and in the employment of Greek ideas by modern philosophers, one story has been standard. Greek ethics, it says, espouses a kind of eudaimonism that Ishall call harmonizing eudaimonism. This story seems to me quite wrong, but it is now so firmly rooted that scarcely anyone ever thinks of questioning it.

_From the Introduction:_ "Stoic philosophy, of which Epictetus (c. a.d. 50–130) is a representative, began as a recognizable movement around 300 b.c. Its founder was Zeno of Cytium (not to be confused with Zeno of Elea, who discovered the famous paradoxes). He was born in Cyprus about 336 b.c., but all of his philosophical activity took place in Athens. For more than 500 years Stoicism was one of the most influential and fruitful philosophical movements in the Graeco-Roman world. The works (...) of the earlier Stoics survive only in fragmentary quotations from other authors, but from the Renaissance until well into the nineteenth century, Stoic ethical thought was one of the most important ancient influences on European ethics, particularly because of the descriptions of it by Cicero, through surviving works by the Stoics Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and also Epictetus--and also because of the effect that it had had in antiquity, and continued to have into the nineteenth century, on Christian ethical views. Nowadays an undergraduate or graduate student learning about ancient philosophy in a university course may well hear only about Plato and Aristotle, along perhaps with the presocratics; but in the history of Western thought and education this situation is somewhat atypical, and in most periods a comparable student would have learned as much or more about Stoicism, as well as two other major ancient philosophical movements, Epicureanism and Scepticism. In spite of this lack of explicit acquaintance with Stoic philosophers and their works, however, most students will recognize in Epictetus various ideas that are familiar through their effects on other thinkers, notably Spinoza, in our intellectual tradition.". (shrink)

This article examines happiness as an activity, modeled on pleasure in NE 10, 1-5. Aristotle is not proposing a choice, but defining the formal nature of happiness. Contemplation, as the activity of wisdom, constitutes happiness in the strict and formal sense. It has all the attributes of happiness, highest, most continuous, most pleasant, most self-sufficient, leisured, and an end in itself. Practical virtues are formally secondary, as including elements outside the activity of the best part and having leisure as their (...) end. Thus, amusements, practical activities and contemplation are integrated in the life of the sage, the contribution of each formally defined. (shrink)

Many recent interpretations of ancient ethics have been devised with systematic philosophical intentions. Their purpose is to tell us not merely what ancient philosophers thought, but what we ought to think. This is true of recent efforts to interpret Aristotle's views about eudaimonia. The interpretation in question I label "inclusivist" and "pluralist". It treats happiness as consisting of a plurality of "parts" or "constituents". These "parts of happiness" are thought of mainly as "activities," in accordance with Aristotle's statement in Nicomachean (...) Ethics I.7 that happiness is "activity of the soul in accordance with virtue." This interpretation assumes that Aristotle's word "activity" here can be taken to cover a compound activity which has various activities as constituents. I shall point out difficulties in the philosophical ideas that fund it. (shrink)

One of the most puzzling things about Stoicism has always been its position concerning the so-called “indifferents”. Let me summarize it. The Stoics seem to hold that all states of affairs other than virtue are indifferent as to goodness. At the same time they seem to think that virtue is partially constituted by a propensity to choose certain such indifferent states of affairs. For they maintain that the end, which they identify with virtue and the sole good, is “to live (...) in agreement with nature”, in a sense that is taken to involve selecting things that are in accord with nature, even though these things, it seems, are indifferent. They make two seemingly evaluative distinctions within the class of indifferents, one between things that are “preferred” and things that are “dispreferred”, and another between “appropriate acts” and others. All of this is well known and uncontroversial. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: The Idea of a Single Measure An Approach to Hedonism in the Gorgias Hedonism in the Protagoras Aristotelian Pleasure Epicurean Hedonism Bentham and Systematic Quantitative Hedonism From Antiquity through Bentham Problems in Deliberating about Pleasure Some Problems for Quantitative Hedonism Problems for Systematization, Hedonist and Otherwise.

Book VII describes a point at which Plato's future rulers have completed their philosophical education. At that point they have a complete grasp of evaluative concepts (esp. of good), in that they can articulate and defend defi nitions of them against all objections. Immediately, without further training, they are charged with applying these concepts in their city. By contrast, Aristotle's ethical and political writings do not envisage any such point. This difference between Plato and Aristotle is no expository accident, but (...) refl ects a fundamental disagreement between their respective views of the relationship between grasping and applying concepts, especially evaluative concepts. Aristotle's view is importantly similar to Wittgenstein's later view of 'how to go on' using a word 'in the same way'. This paper explores some aspects of this similarity between Aristotle's and Wittgenstein's opposition to platonism. (shrink)

Contrary to the hegelian thought that harmonizing eudaimonism was manifested most fully in the Classical period of Greek ethics, it is in fact the Hellenistic period after Aristotle that shows the most forthright attempts to produce ethical views that do not generate conflicts between rational aims. This is partly the result of the Hellenistic attempts to generate positions that, unlike the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, possess a high degree of systematic coherence. Epicurean hedonism is a case in point, as (...) is Stoic ethics, which goes a considerable way toward eliminating the very idea of a distinction between what is good for oneself and what is good in a global, non‐self‐referential way. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Where We Start Where to Go from Where We Start Extensions of Happiness: A Brief Digression A Single Evaluation Platonic Harmony Change and Harmony A Fondness for Conflict But How to Harmonize? Challenges to Happiness.

Kantian and Hegelian responses to Greek ethics have been carried on—against the backdrop of Joseph Butler, J. S. Mill, Henry Sidgwick, T. H. Green, and others—right through the Twentieth Century. Although other philosophical notions have also been important in the historiography of Greek ethics—‘morality’, ‘ethics of virtue’, ‘contingency’—an overriding theme has been the notion that in Greek ethics a way was found to eliminate deliberative conflict, and to show that in the end all rational human aims are reconcilable within a (...) single notion of happiness of eudaimonia. Various harmonizing strategies have been attempted, and ascribed to the Greeks. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Outline: the Development of Dynamic Structure Platonic Structures of Harmony and Nature Aristotelian Nature Stoic Attitude Developments since Antiquity The Kantian Critique of the Concept of Happiness Dynamic Conceptions.

This chapter contains section titled: Discovering Happiness Some Agreement about Happiness and Some Disagreement Empiricism, Science, and Policy Measurement: Happiness and Other Concepts Obstacles to Empiricism about Happiness.

Before Plato there are ample cases in which Greek poets, philosophers, and politicians recognize the possibility that individual and social good can conflict. Nor does Plato think that a full understanding of the notion of one's good must demonstrate that it cannot conflict with standards of justice. On the contrary, Plato holds that such conflicts can occur even in the case of the rulers of his ideal city‐state. This idea is not contradicted by evidence of other works, such as the (...) Meno, the Symposium, and the Philebus. Nevertheless, although Plato's view admits what is normally thought to be a characteristically Kantian conflict of ethical standards with one's good, it still possesses some distinctly eudaimonistic elements that are at variance with the Kantian view. (shrink)

Although Aristotle's ethics is rightly characterized as eudaimonist, in making the happiness of an individual his preeminent aim, it does not adopt the harmonizing eudaimonist position that all constituents of human happiness are consistent with each other. For one thing, he holds that there can be conflicts between friends. In addition, he maintains that conflicts within happiness can break out, between the value of acting in a morally virtuous way and that of pursuing intellectual virtue or contemplation. Aristotle thus admits (...) the possibility of conflict within virtue, and therefore within happiness, which is defined as activity in accordance with virtue. He accordingly does not use the notion of virtue, let alone an ethics of virtue, to construct a harmonizing view of happiness. (shrink)

A common theme in the historiography of Greek ethics says that modern ethics is characterized by imperative notions such as ‘duty’—and with a Judeo‐Christian notion of imperatives or commands issued by god—whereas ancient ethics supposedly deals mainly with ‘attractive notions such as ‘good’ and ‘virtue’. This thought is often juxtaposed with the idea that imperative notions betoken a conflict between one's duty and one's good, because an imperative seems to be required only to command people to do what they do (...) not wish to do, which is felt to be inappropriate to the supposed eudaimonism of Greek ethics. In fact Greek ethics makes substantial use of imperative notions, and does not attempt to show that attractive notions are more basic or preferable in ethics. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: Half Title Title Copyright Contents Preface.

This chapter contains section titled: Plural and Conflicting Aims Note.

Introducción al pensamiento ético de Platón.