Positing that the significance of The Captain and the Enemy, Greene’s last fictional narrative, has been under-appreciated, this essay treats the novel as “a metafictional parable in which he adumbrates the fate of writing in an age no longer attuned to the nuances of ‘mystery.’” The narrator Baxter struggles to position the Captain as a romanticized father-figure and demystify the Captain’s lifelong commitment to his lover, Eliza. The mystery of love sustains itself in the “quotidian manifestations of unselfish constancy” Baxter (...) discovers and cannot explain. Greene hereby explores the enigma of human love and reflects on his career-long preoccupations as a writer and a Catholic. (shrink)

Positing that the significance of The Captain and the Enemy, Greene’s last fictional narrative, has been under-appreciated, this essay treats the novel as “a metafictional parable in which he adumbrates the fate of writing in an age no longer attuned to the nuances of ‘mystery.’” The narrator Baxter struggles to position the Captain as a romanticized father-figure and demystify the Captain’s lifelong commitment to his lover, Eliza. The mystery of love sustains itself in the “quotidian manifestations of unselfish constancy” Baxter (...) discovers and cannot explain. Greene hereby explores the enigma of human love and reflects on his career-long preoccupations as a writer and a Catholic. (shrink)

This book has been written in the hopes of equipping teachers-in-training—that is, teacher candidates—with the skills needed for action research: a process that leads to focused, effective, and responsive strategies that help students succeed.

Most theories of learning consider inferring a function f from either observations about f or, questions about f. We consider a scenario whereby the learner observes f and asks queries to some set A. If I is a notion of learning then I[A] is the set of concept classes I-learnable by an inductive inference machine with oracle A. A and B are I-equivalent if I[A] = I[B]. The equivalence classes induced are the degrees of inferability. We prove several results about (...) when these degrees are trivial, and when the degrees are omniscient. (shrink)

Pandemics challenge the law and often highlight its strengths or expose its limits. The novel strain of influenza A virus that emerged in the spring of 2009 and rapidly spread around the globe was no exception. The H1N1 pandemic prompted the first significant application of a number of international legal and policy mechanisms that have been developed in the last decade to respond to this kind of event. Furthermore, it presented a considerable test for public health systems at all levels, (...) from global to local.Although initial predictions forecasting high morbidity and mortality from this virus overestimated its eventual impact, the human toll of the pandemic was nevertheless significant. The World Health Organization reported approximately 1.5 million people were infected worldwide in 214 countries, resulting in over 25,000 confirmed deaths, but the actual health impact of the outbreak was certainly much higher. (shrink)

Pandemics challenge the law and often highlight its strengths or expose its limits. The novel strain of influenza A virus that emerged in the spring of 2009 and rapidly spread around the globe was no exception. The H1N1 pandemic prompted the first significant application of a number of international legal and policy mechanisms that have been developed in the last decade to respond to this kind of event. Furthermore, it presented a considerable test for public health systems at all levels, (...) from global to local.Although initial predictions forecasting high morbidity and mortality from this virus overestimated its eventual impact, the human toll of the pandemic was nevertheless significant. The World Health Organization reported approximately 1.5 million people were infected worldwide in 214 countries, resulting in over 25,000 confirmed deaths, but the actual health impact of the outbreak was certainly much higher. (shrink)

Historical chapters show how understanding the workings of complex systems allowed statesmen to devise the Concert of Europe and how the collapse of the Concert in the Crimean War was triggered by the tsar's failure to comprehend the indirect impact his strategies would have on British public opinion. Another chapter highlights the feedback processes between domestic politics and the international monetary system that led to the rise and fall of the gold standard and to the creation of the European monetary (...) system. The diplomacy of the Moroccan crisis of 1905 is used to show that conventional wisdom places unwarranted weight on a state's reputation for standing firm in the interconnected international system. The discussions also explore the systemic causes of World War II: Contributors examine how the international financial system unwittingly helped destroy Weimar democracy and offer a challenging reinterpretation of the workings of the balance of power in the 1930s. (shrink)

Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making it Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as opposed to discursive practices (...) as the basic sites of meaning and agency (Dreyfus 1991; Dreyfus 1992; Todes 2001). With strong inheritances from Dewey and Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty has championed a pragmatism whose core emphasis is on the rejection of transcendental truth and high metaphysical theorizing (Rorty 1982), and this anti-theoretical banner has been taken up by several prominent ethicists, among others. For his part, Brandom, who purports to offer a systematic theory of language and meaning grounded on a foundation of pragmatic normative relationships between speakers, looks back instead to Sellars and Quine for his stripe of pragmatism. Near the start of MIE, he writes: The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. (Brandom 1994, xiii) Despite his professed pragmatism, Brandom is no foe of high theory or metanarratives, and he is vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while our bodily encounters with the world in perception and in action serve as language entry and exit points respectively.. (shrink)

Curiously, though he provides in Making It Explicit (MIE) elaborate accounts of various representational idioms, of anaphora and deixis, and of quantification, Robert Brandom nowhere attempts to lay out how his understanding of content and his view of the role of logical idioms combine in even the simplest cases of what he calls paradigmatic logical vocabulary. That is, Brandom has a philosophical account of content as updating potential - as inferential potential understood in the sense of commitment or entitlement (...) preservation - and says that the point of logical vocabulary is to make available the expressive resources to make explicit such semantic structures as arise from discursive scorekeeping practice. Thus, one would expect an account of the updating or inferential potential of sentences involving logical vocabulary, an account which is such as to assign to those sentences the inferential significance necessary for this expressive job. In short, one would expect a semantics of logical vocabulary - &, ν, ∼ → - in terms of the difference an assertion of a sentence involving it makes to the atomic score of a linguistic agent, and a completeness proof for the logic generated by this semantics. Despite this, no such semantics is given in MIE. It is in the current paper. (shrink)

Do we rightly expect a perfectly loving God to bring it about that, right now, we reasonably believe that He exists? It seems so. For love at its best desires the well-being of the beloved, not from a distance, but up close, explicitly participating in her life in a personal fashion, allowing her to draw from that relationship what she may need to flourish. But why suppose that we would be significantly better off were God to engage in an explicit, (...) personal relationship with us? Well, first, there would be broadly moral benefits. We would be able to draw on the resources of that relationship to overcome seemingly everpresent flaws in our character. And we would be more likely to emulate the self-giving love with which we were loved. So loved, we would be more likely to flourish as human beings. Secondly, there would be experiential benefits. We would be, for example, more likely to experience peace and joy stemming from the strong conviction that we were properly related to our Maker, security in suffering knowing that, ultimately, all shall be well, and there would be the sheer pleasure of God's loving presence. As a consequence of these moral and experiential benefits, our relationships with others would likely improve. Thirdly, to be personally related to God is intrinsically valuable, indeed, according to the Christian tradition, the greatest intrinsic good. In these ways our well-being would be enhanced if God were to relate personally to us. Moreover, the best love does not seek a personal relationship only for the sake of the beloved. As Robert Adams rightly notes, "It is an abuse of the word 'love' to say that one loves a person, or any other object, if one does not care, except instrumentally, about one's relation to that object."1 Thus, God would want a personal relationship with us not only for the benefit we would receive from it but for its own sake as well. So, if a perfectly loving God exists, He wants a personal relationship with us, or more accurately, every capable creature, those cognitively and affectively equipped to relate personally with Him.. (shrink)

This collection of essays is dedicated to William Rowe, with great affection, respect, and admiration. The philosophy of religion, once considered a deviation from an otherwise analytically rigorous discipline, has flourished over the past two decades. This collection of new essays by twelve distinguished philosophers of religion explores three broad themes: religious attitudes of faith, belief, acceptance, and love; human and divine freedom; and the rationality of religious belief. Contributors include: William Alston, Robert Audi, Jan Cover, Martin Curd, Peter (...) van Inwagen, Norman Kretzmann, George Nakhnikian, John Hawthorne, Philip Quinn, James Ross, Eleonore Stump, and William Wainwright. (shrink)

Is faith that p compatible with disbelief that p? I argue that it is. After surveying some recent literature on the compatibility of propositional and non-propositional forms of faith with the lack of belief, I take the next step and offer several arguments for the thesis that both these forms of faith are also compatible, in certain cases, with outright disbelief. This is contrary to the views of some significant recent commentators on propositional faith, including Robert Audi and Daniel (...) Howard-Snyder. The primary argument revolves around the possibility of maintaining a single faith through drastic changes in cognitive attitude. I argue that once we allow that propositional faith is compatible with weaker cognitive attitudes than belief, such as acceptance or assent, there is prima facie reason to consider propositional faith as sometimes compatible with disbelief. I then consider objections and offer some final reflections on the significance of the thesis. (shrink)

(2014). Lines of thought: Central concepts in cognitive psychology. Philosophical Psychology: Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 445-449. doi: 10.1080/09515089.2012.732338.

Many philosophers have contended that (traditional) theism or supernaturalism suffers from what can properly be called the Problem of Divine Hiddenness (the PDH ). [See Howard-Snyder and Moser 2002]. Moreover, it is the contention of many proponents of the PDH that this “problem,” if, indeed, not just a component of the “problem of evil,” bears a striking similarity to the latter. Specifically, at the heart of this ostensible difficulty for theism is that Divine “Hiddenness,” like pain and suffering—or at (...) least pain and suffering in the amount that the world contains—is precisely the opposite of what one would expect if there existed a (maximally great) supernatural Person. Accordingly, it is maintained by proponents of the PDH that supernaturalism is disconfirmed by the relevant “problem.” The aim of this essay is to establish that there is more than ample metaphysical warrant (of a sort overlooked thus far) for maintaining that the “hiddenness” of God is exactly what should be expected if theism is true. Thus, the conclusion we hope to secure is that the PDH has considerably less to recommend it than its proponents have thought, and, accordingly, that it fails to constitute an effective threat to supernaturalism. (shrink)

Nietzsche, I once read, used to have nightmares about not being able to speak. My son has nightmares about tornadoes. I have nightmares about issues that can only be resolved by appeal to Hegel’s speculative logic. Stephen Snyder might indeed present us with several such issues, but fortunately his presentation is complex enough that I should be able to distract you by focusing on other things. First, let me review what I take to me the structure of Snyder’s (...) argument. Snyder’s argument, as I understand it, is (1) Danto offers an (essentialist) “definition” of art, where “definition” of course means something like “ontological account.” (2) That definition is borrowed (“directly”) from Hegel. (3) Because it is borrowed from Hegel, Danto’s definition is inherently problematic. (3a) The problem with the definition is that it is the same as Hegel’s. (3b) The problem with the definition is that it is different from Hegel’s. This diagnosis is no dialectical kettle logic, however. Snyder’s claim, rather, is that Hegel’s account comes with difficulties that could only be resolved through some grand “metaphysical” gesture. So Danto, in effect, offers us the cream cheese without the bagel. It’s not clear where Snyder thinks that this leaves us: we could metaphysicalize Danto or get rid of embodied meaning or do something else entirely. The distinctive part of Snyder’s account is accordingly the diagnosis: Danto’s definition of art is troubled because he adopts elements of Hegel’s account without the systematic context, leaving him without the resources to solve its inherent problems. I can therefore grant myself leave to skip over some Hegel and Danto, and focus on the problematic. As far as I can tell, Snyder identifies two problems – alternately called “oppositions”(5) or “contradictions”(1) or “dualisms”(4) or possibly “antinomies”(8) – within the Hegel/Danto complex of art theory. The first is that of Particular and Universal. According to Snyder, the Hegel-Danto theory requires the artwork to be a weird kind of thing, namely: “a particular universal, an impossible object”(1).. (shrink)

En décembre 1897, la journaliste Marguerite Durand a fondé le journal La Fronde. Conçu d'après les quotidiens de masse de l'époque, La Fronde embrassait les domaines de la politique, des sports et de la haute finance. Mais le journal se distinguait plus particulièrement des autres quotidiens par le fait que la publication, la rédaction et aussi la typographie étaient exclusivement faites par des femmes. Dans leur effort d'imiter un quotidien bourgeois, les frondeuses adoptèrent le reportage comme style journalistique. Cette imitation (...) répresentait un double défi lancé par les frondeuses aux rôles attribués à leur sexe. Tout d'abord, en s'engageant dans la vie publique contemporaine, les frondeuses allaient au-delà des limites domestiques conventionnelles établies pour les femmes. Deuxièmement, pour être de vraies reporters, les frondeuses devaient s'aventurer dans le dur monde des faits. Se faisant, elles mettaient en question la notion répandue que les femmes étaient des créatures de fantaisie plutôt que de raison. (shrink)

En décembre 1897, la journaliste Marguerite Durand a fondé le journal La Fronde. Conçu d'après les quotidiens de masse de l'époque, La Fronde embrassait les domaines de la politique, des sports et de la haute finance. Mais le journal se distinguait plus particulièrement des autres quotidiens par le fait que la publication, la rédaction et aussi la typographie étaient exclusivement faites par des femmes. Dans leur effort d'imiter un quotidien bourgeois, les frondeuses adoptèrent le reportage comme style journalistique. Cette imitation (...) répresentait un double défi lancé par les frondeuses aux rôles attribués à leur sexe. Tout d'abord, en s'engageant dans la vie publique contemporaine, les frondeuses allaient au-delà des limites domestiques conventionnelles établies pour les femmes. Deuxièmement, pour être de vraies reporters, les frondeuses devaient s'aventurer dans le dur monde des faits. Se faisant, elles mettaient en question la notion répandue que les femmes étaient des créatures de fantaisie plutôt que de raison. (shrink)

Cet essai a pour motif central le mythe de l'Annonciation, fondateur de l'Europe contractualiste moderne. Il étudie l'importance de l'invasion des " barbares", de la rencontre avec l'Autre et du contrat que l'on passe avec lui, entente étrange d'où naît le sujet politique libre. Il a l'originalité de parler de l'Europe - le dernier continent inexploré -à partir d'un point de vue américain et de parler du politique à partir de textes littéraires: les écrits de Dante, Sade et Aquin. C'est (...) dans une petite barque, une embarcation toute frêle, que nous nous sommes lancé à la découverte d'un continent à peu près inconnu, plus farouche que le continent noir, plus sauvage que les Amériques, et composé de substances plus volatiles, plus inflammables que l'Asie ou l'Orient... Car le continent sur lequel nous avons mis le cap, c'est celui du Verbe. (shrink)

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank Yates (...) and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

Divine Motivation theory is a major contribution both to the philosophy of religion, particularly the philosophy of religious ethics, and to general ethical theory. It is demanding reading, because it is long and complex and about difficult issues. It is also rewarding, because it is suggestive and highly original, written and argued with philosophical intelligence and disciplined care, and rich in systematic connections and explanations of them.

This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) comes at a time when Sellars’s influence on contemporary debates about mind, meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics has never been greater. Sellars was among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and many of his central ideas have become philosophical stock-in-trade: for example, his conceptions of the ‘myth of the given’, the ‘logical space of reasons’, and the ‘clash’ between the ‘manifest (...) and scientific images of man-in-the-world’. This volume of well-known contemporary philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars – Robert Brandom, Willem deVries, Robert Kraut, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, John McDowell, Ruth Millikan, James O’Shea, David Rosenthal, Johanna Seibt, and Michael Williams – critically examines the groundbreaking ideas by means of which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality. Topics include Sellars’s inferentialist semantics and normative functionalist view of the mind; his attempted reconciliations of internalist and externalist aspects of thought, meaning, and knowledge; his novel nominalist account of abstract entities; and a speculative ‘pure process’ metaphysics of consciousness. Of particular interest is how this volume exhibits the ongoing fruitful dialogue between so-called ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, who stress Sellars’s various Kantian and pragmatist defenses of the irreducibility of normativity and rationality within the space of reasons, and ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ who defend the plausibility of Sellars’s highly ambitious and systematic scientific naturalism. (shrink)

This paper examines whether atheists, who believe that God does not exist, can have faith. Of course, atheists have certain kinds of faith: faith in their friends, faith in certain ideals, and faith in themselves. However, the question we’ll examine is whether atheists can have theistic faith: faith that God exists. Philosophers tend to fall on one of two extremes on this question: some, like Dan Howard-Snyder (2019) and Imran Aijaz (2023), say unequivocally no; others, like Robert Whitaker (...) (2019) and Sam Lebens (2023), say unequivocally yes. Here, I take a middle position: I argue that atheists can have action-focused faith (faith in how they act) but not attitude-focused faith (faith in what attitudes they have). (shrink)

For most of the problems that economists consider, the assumption that agents are self-interested works well enough, generating predictions that are broadly consistent with observation. In some significant cases, however, we find economic behavior that seems to be inconsistent with self-interest. In particular, we find that some public goods and some charitable ventures are financed by the independent voluntary contributions of many thousands of individuals. In Britain, for example, the lifeboat service is entirely financed by voluntary contributions. In all rich (...) countries, charitable appeals raise large amounts of money for famine relief in the Third World. The willingness of individuals to contribute to such projects is an economic fact that requires an explanation. (shrink)

One of the most striking clashes between the results of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on language games and Robert Brandom’s normative analysis of pragmatics concerns the pride of place granted by the latter to assertional practices. While Wittgenstein believes that there is no privileged language game, Brandom maintains that the game of giving and asking for reasons is fundamental for the possibility of any linguistic practice to be properly meaningful. Recently, Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance proposed to generalize Brandom’s (...) normative pragmatics in order to provide a more fine–grained analysis of the normativity that governs discursive practices. It is a courageous enterprise that challenges the predominance of the cognitive approach in pragmatics by underpinning a different way to understand the notion of meaning. Their proposal, however, requires to take into account many different sorts of speech acts on a par and, by doing so, it is in tension with Brandom’s approach. This paper explores the shape of this tension in order to see whether or not a unitary characterization of rationality can be envisaged in Wittgenstein’s and Brandom’s way of accounting for the ability to deploy conceptual contents in linguistic practices. (shrink)

Die Fragestellungen der Metaphysik, so scheint es, sind nicht mehr zeitgemäß. Der Begriff erinnert an abgehobene Systeme ohne jeden Realitätssinn. Dabei gibt es kein Denken ohne Metaphysik. Unter Bezugnahme auf die Traditionen der Phänomenologie und der französischen Philosophie versteht Robert Hugo Ziegler Endlichkeit als eine positive Auszeichnung, während der Begriff der Zeitlichkeit die erste Dimension von Sein beschreibt. Sein grundlegender Beitrag zur Reflexion über Mensch und Welt zeigt, wie sich die Philosophie selbstbewusst einer Erneuerung der Metaphysik stellen kann.

One of the most striking clashes between the results of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on language games and Robert Brandom’s normative analysis of pragmatics concerns the pride of place granted by the latter to assertional practices. While Wittgenstein believes that there is no privileged language game, Brandom maintains that the game of giving and asking for reasons is fundamental for the possibility of any linguistic practice to be properly meaningful. Recently, Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance proposed to generalize Brandom’s (...) normative pragmatics in order to provide a more fine–grained analysis of the normativity that governs discursive practices. It is a courageous enterprise that challenges the predominance of the cognitive approach in pragmatics by underpinning a different way to understand the notion of meaning. Their proposal, however, requires to take into account many different sorts of speech acts on a par and, by doing so, it is in tension with Brandom’s approach. This paper explores the shape of this tension in order to see whether or not a unitary characterization of rationality can be envisaged in Wittgenstein’s and Brandom’s way of accounting for the ability to deploy conceptual contents in linguistic practices. (shrink)

The paper offers an analysis of Protagoras’ fr. DK 80 B 1 and rejects the traditional reading of Protagoras as relativist. By considering the ipsissima verba that Protagoras makes use of in his passage, it is argued that alternative interpretations are possible, of which epistemological reism and psychological individualism are proposed. On a more general level, it is discussed to what extent Protagoras’ fragment contains descriptive rather than normative claim.