This handbook provides detailed philosophical analysis of the life and thought of Socrates across fifteen in-depth chapters. Each chapter engages with a central aspect of the rich tradition of Socratic studies and, after surveying the state of scholarship, points the way forward to new directions of interpretation. A leading team of scholars present dynamic readings of Socrates, extracted from the historical context of Plato's dialogues, covering elenchus, irony, ignorance, definitions, pedagogy, friendship, politics and the daemon. Building on these core Socratic (...) topics, this edition includes new accounts of Socrates in the work of philosopher and historian, Xenophon, the comic playwright, Aristophanes, as well as important scholarship on topics such as emotions, the afterlife, motivational intellectualism and virtue intellectualism. Fully revised and updated, the Bloomsbury Handbook of Socrates elucidates the complex landscape of Socratic thought and interpretation. (shrink)

We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for mark-up and interpretation of multi-modal data. Finally, Challenge (...) 3 is to test the utility of these resources for large-scale annotation of data, search and query, and knowledge discovery and integration. As term definitions are tested and revised, harmonization should enable coordinated updates across ontologies. However, the true test of these definitions will be in their community-wide adoption which will test whether they support valid inferences about psychological and neuroscientific data. (shrink)

We discuss recent progress in the development of cognitive ontologies and summarize three challenges in the coordinated development and application of these resources. Challenge 1 is to adopt a standardized definition for cognitive processes. We describe three possibilities and recommend one that is consistent with the standard view in cognitive and biomedical sciences. Challenge 2 is harmonization. Gaps and conflicts in representation must be resolved so that these resources can be combined for mark-up and interpretation of multi-modal data. Finally, Challenge (...) 3 is to test the utility of these resources for large-scale annotation of data, search and query, and knowledge discovery and integration. As term definitions are tested and revised, harmonization should enable coordinated updates across ontologies. However, the true test of these definitions will be in their community-wide adoption which will test whether they support valid inferences about psychological and neuroscientific data. (shrink)

The Developmental Systems approach to evolution is defended against the alternative extended replicator approach of Sterelny, Smith and Dickison (1996). A precise definition is provided of the spatial and temporal boundaries of the life-cycle that DST claims is the unit of evolution. Pacé Sterelny et al., the extended replicator theory is not a bulwark against excessive holism. Everything which DST claims is replicated in evolution can be shown to be an extended replicator on Sterelny et al.s definition. Reasons are (...) given for scepticism about the heuristic value claimed for the extended replicator concept. For every competitive, individualistic insight the replicator theorist has a cooperative, systematic blindspot. (shrink)

The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new chapter in German Leibniz scholarship, with conferences all over the country gearing up to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1946, and participants intent on promoting Leibniz as a pan-European thinker. Just a few years earlier, for obvious reasons, the outlook could not have been more different. To take one example, Oskar Becker, in his lecture, “Leibniz, the German Thinker and Good European,” had divided the different (...) versions of Leibniz up along strictly national lines: “In the international Leibniz literature of today the different aspects of his philosophy… are shown in the views of one nation from this, of another nation from that side. Thus for the West European scholars Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell Leibniz is fundamentally a logician, while for the Germans he is fundamentally a metaphysician.”. (shrink)

The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new chapter in German Leibniz scholarship, with conferences all over the country gearing up to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1946, and participants intent on promoting Leibniz as a pan-European thinker. Just a few years earlier, for obvious reasons, the outlook could not have been more different. To take one example, Oskar Becker, in his lecture, “Leibniz, the German Thinker and Good European,” had divided the different (...) versions of Leibniz up along strictly national lines: “In the international Leibniz literature of today the different aspects of his philosophy… are shown in the views of one nation from this, of another nation from that side. Thus for the West European scholars Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell Leibniz is fundamentally a logician, while for the Germans he is fundamentally a metaphysician.”. (shrink)

The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new chapter in German Leibniz scholarship, with conferences all over the country gearing up to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1946, and participants intent on promoting Leibniz as a pan-European thinker. Just a few years earlier, for obvious reasons, the outlook could not have been more different. To take one example, Oskar Becker, in his lecture, “Leibniz, the German Thinker and Good European,” had divided the different (...) versions of Leibniz up along strictly national lines: “In the international Leibniz literature of today the different aspects of his philosophy… are shown in the views of one nation from this, of another nation from that side. Thus for the West European scholars Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell Leibniz is fundamentally a logician, while for the Germans he is fundamentally a metaphysician.”. (shrink)

A number of commentators on Smith's philosophy have observed that the relationship between his moral theory and his theological beliefs is "exceedingly difficult to unravel". The available evidence, as generally presented, suggests that although Smith was not entirely orthodox by contemporary standards, he has no obvious or significant irreligious commitments or orientation. Contrary to this view of things, I argue that behind the veneer of orthodoxy that covers Smith's discussion in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments there (...) are significant irreligious themes present in his work. Two irreligious themes, I maintain, are especially important. The first is that the impartial spectator, as described in Smith's moral system, serves to sustain and support moral conduct and practice without any reliance on the goodness and justice of God in a future state. By this means, Smith is able to show how moral life is grounded in human nature without collapsing into the scepticism and "licentiousness" associated with the moral systems of Hobbes and Mandeville. On the other hand, related to this first irreligious theme, Smith also points out that there is no perfect match between virtue and happiness in this life. More specifically, he notes that even the mechanism of the impartial spectator cannot protect the innocent person from the miseries associated with unjust condemnation by others in our society. The general force of Smith's observations on this matter is not to justify the credibility of the doctrine of a future state but rather to explain its deep psychological roots in our (human) moral nature. In the final section of this paper I argue that although these two irreligious themes are clearly present in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Smith does not manifest the kind of systematic hostility to the influence of religion on moral life that features prominently in Hume's writings. On this basis, I conclude that Smith's views on ethics should be characterized as "weakly irreligious" in contrast with Hume's "strongly irreligious" ethical views. (shrink)

[First published in Italian as: “L’irreligione e lo spettatore imparziale nel sistema morale di Adam Smith”, in Rivista di Filosofia 3 (3):375-403 (2005). -/- Translated by E. Lecaldano.] -/- A number of commentators on Smith’s philosophy have observed that the relationship between his moral theory and his theological beliefs is “exceedingly difficult to unravel.” The available evidence, as generally presented, suggests that although Smith was not entirely orthodox by contemporary standards, he has no obvious or significant irreligious (...) commitments or orientation. Contrary to this view of things, this essay argues that behind the veneer of orthodoxy that covers Smith’s discussion in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments there are significant irreligious themes present in his work. -/- . (shrink)

It will be the thesis of this paper that there are among our mental acts some which fall into the category of real material relations. That is: some acts are necessarily such as to involve a plurality of objects as their relata or fundamenta. Suppose Bruno walks into his study and sees a cat. To describe the seeing, here, as a relation, is to affirm that it serves somehow to tie Bruno to the cat. Bruno's act of seeing, unlike his (...) feeling depressed, his putative thinking-about-Santa-Claus or his musing, abstractedly, about the tallest spy, has at least two fundamenta: it is, as a matter of necessity, dependent for its existence upon both Bruno himself and the cat that he sees. This idea will naturally raise echoes of Russell's doctrine of knowledge by acquaintance. 'I am acquainted with an object', Russell tells us, 'when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i. e. when I am directly aware of the object itself' (1918, p. 209). And indeed a distinction in many ways like that between acquaintance and description will find a place within the theory here projected, but there are crucial differences. (shrink)

Plato’s Philebus is motivated by a question concerning the relationships among pleasure, wisdom, knowledge, and the good human life. Something of a philosophical tour de force, it also contains discussions of numerous important Platonic subjects like cosmic intelligence, distinctions among intellectual capacities, and the method of dialectical inquiry through division and collection. But the riches of the dialogue are obscured by its exceptional difficulty, a frequent grievance from commentators beginning at least with Galen. Plato’s Philebus: A Philosophical Discussion is an (...) indispensable new contribution to our understanding of this important and challenging dialogue, containing a wealth of new... (shrink)

Plato’s Socrates is often thought to hold that wisdom or virtue is sufficient for happiness, and Euthydemus 278-282 is often taken to be the locus classicus for this sufficiency thesis in Plato’s dialogues. But this view is misguided: Not only does Socrates here fail to argue for, assert, or even implicitly assume the sufficiency thesis, but the thesis turns out to be hard to square with the argument he does give. I argue for an interpretation of the passage that explains (...) the central importance of wisdom for Socrates without committing him to the sufficiency thesis. The result is that the Euthydemus displays a plausible but distinctively Socratic argument for making the pursuit of wisdom the central concern of one’s life. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a novel argument against the claim that classical genetics is being reduced to molecular genetics. Specifically, I demonstrate that reductionists must subscribe to the unargued and problematic thesis that molecular genetics is 'independent' of classical genetics. I also argue that several standard antireductionist positions can be faulted for unnecessarily conceding the Independence Thesis to the reductionists. In place of a 'tale of two sciences', I offer a 'heroic' stance that denies classical genetics is being reduced, (...) yet sees classical and molecular genetics as fundamentally unified. (shrink)

In De Interpretatione 6-9, Aristotle considers three logical principles: the principle of bivalence, the law of excluded middle, and the rule of contradictory pairs (according to which of any contradictory pair of statements, exactly one is true and the other false). Surprisingly, Aristotle accepts none of these without qualification. I offer a coherent interpretation of these chapters as a whole, while focusing special attention on two sorts of statements that are of particular interest to Aristotle: universal statements not made universally (...) and future particular statements. With respect to the former, I argue that Aristotle takes them to be indeterminate and so to violate the rule of contradictory pairs. With respect to the latter, the subject of the much discussed ninth chapter, I argue that the rule of contradictory pairs, and not the principle of bivalence, is the focus of Aristotle's refutation. Nevertheless, Aristotle rejects bivalence for future particular statements. (shrink)

In this article I argue that evolutionary psychological strategies for making inferences about present-day human psychology are methodologically unsound. Evolutionary psychology is committed to the view that the mind has an architecture that has been conserved since the Pleistocene, and that our psychology can be fruitfully understood in terms of the original, fitness-enhancing functions of these conserved psychological mechanisms. But for evolutionary psychological explanations to succeed, practitioners must be able to show that contemporary cognitive mechanisms correspond to those that were (...) selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that these present-day cognitive mechanisms are descended from the corresponding ancestral mechanisms, and that they have retained the functions of the ancestral mechanisms from which they are descended. I refer to the problem of demonstrating that these conditions obtain as “the matching problem,” argue that evolutionary psychology does not have the resources to address it, and conclude that evolutionary psychology, as it is currently understood, is therefore impossible. (shrink)

Are people at bottom motivated entirely by self-interest? Or do they act only sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for other reasons—say, to help out a friend for her own sake, with no expectation of being benefitted in return? Scholars have often thought they could discern in the works of classical Greek thinkers a commitment to psychological egoism, the thesis that one is motivated to act only by considerations of the expected benefits and harms that will accrue to oneself. For (...) instance, a host of influential interpreters have taken Plato to be wedded to psychological egoism throughout his corpus. Often, the commitment is thought to run so deep that Plato rarely, if ever, manages to articulate it explicitly, let alone to examine it critically and defend it. That kind of approach obviously invites challenges, and lately there has been a small but growing resistance to the egoistic interpretation of Plato. The challenges are especially welcome given the general lack of support for psychological egoism in the present intellectual climate: egoistic readings have increasingly seemed to imply a crippling weakness in the Platonic system. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what organisms are and therefore what kinds of biological entities qualify as organisms. For some time now, the concept of organismality has been eclipsed by the notion of individuality. Biological individuals are those systems that are units of selection. I develop a conception of organismality that does not rely on evolutionary considerations, but instead draws on development and ecology. On this account, organismality and individuality can come apart. Organisms, in my view, are as Godfrey- (...) class='Hi'>Smith puts it “essentially persisters.” I argue that persistence is underpinned by differentiation, integration, development, and the constitutive embeddedness of organisms in their worlds. I examine two marginal cases, the Portuguese Man O’ War and the honey bee colony, and show that both count as organisms in light of my analysis. Next, I examine the case of holobionts, hosts plus their microsymbionts, and argue that they can be counted as organisms even though they may not be biological individuals. Finally, I consider the question of whether other, less tightly integrated biological systems might also be treated as organisms. (shrink)

Two studies examined the possibility that instruction in psychological methodology is committed to a philosophy of science, logical positivism, that is not adequately acknowledged and is empirically problematic. Study 1 suggested that psychology departments had more courses in methodology than corresponding physics departments, and psychology departments were far more likely to offer an introductory course in general methodology. Study 2 suggested that psychology had more introductory general methods textbooks than did physics. Both studies suggested psychology still presents itself as the (...) kind of science that was defined by logical positivism. Study 2 suggested psychology does this only implicitly in its texts and without acknowledging problematic features of that philosophy. Psychology methods texts commonly justified the importance of the scientific method by describing human cognitive fallibilities without cautioning that these same fallibilities could be seen alternatively as showing the problematic nature of the positivistic conception of scientific methodology. In several regards, texts conformed to Fleck's notion of “textbook science” and to Kuhn's description of science texts as “tourist brochures.” It was cautioned that an implicit appeal by psychology to logical positivism contradicts its claim that its methods and data are objective, transparent, and little influenced by philosophy, logic divorced from data, or authority. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In the Phaedo, Socrates offers recommendations for living a philosophical life. We argue that those recommendations can be properly understood only in light of Socrates’ account of the soul’s true nature, considered separately from the body. Embodiment causes the soul to diverge from its proper end, the pursuit of knowledge. Bodily pleasures, pains, and desires divert the soul to other ends, distract its attention away from knowledge, and deceive it about what is true. Socrates’ recommended solutions to these obstacles are (...) diverse, reflecting the complexities of human psychology. He recommends avoidance of bodily experiences in many cases as well as reevaluation of the importance of the body, but he doesn’t recommend either the wholesale rejection or embrace of the bodily. We are our souls but, like it or not, we are temporarily embodied, and what happens to the body is thereby experienced by us. Socrates thus exhorts us to live in a way that recognizes both our temporary humanity and our lasting, true nature. Only so can we best pursue knowledge. (shrink)

I argue that the problem of religious luck posed by Zagzebski poses a problem for the theory of hell proposed by Buckareff and Plug, according to which God adopts an open-door policy toward those in hell. Though escapism is not open to many of the criticisms Zagzebski raises against potential solutions to the problem of luck, escapism fails to solve the problem: it merely pushes luck forward into the afterlife. I suggest a hybrid solution to the problem which combines escapism (...) and the claim that God gives enough grace to those in hell to cancel out any bad moral luck. (shrink)