Plato's Parmenides: on Being and Non-Being
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June 2018: Visiting Scholar. Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH
Darren M Gardner Visiting Scholar [email protected] Dartmouth College 646-594-4969 June 2018: Visiting Scholar. Dartmouth College. Hanover, NH. Sept 2017: Lecturer of Philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Jan 2016: PhD: Philosophy New School for Social Research. New York, NY. Dec 2009: M.A: Philosophy New School for Social Research. New York, NY. May 1998: BA: History of Philosophy, History of Math and Science St. John’s College, Annapolis, Md. Area of specialty: Ancient Philosophy, (esp. Plato’s Metaphysics) Areas of competency: History of Philosophy; Early-Modern Philosophy of Music Dissertation: “Exercise and Insight: Gymnastics in Plato’s Parmenides” (Dmitri Nikulin Philosophy, New School, director; Cinzia Arruzza, Philosophy, New School; Phillip Mitsis, Classics, NYU; Mitchell Miller, Philosophy Emeritus, Vassar College) In Plato’s Parmenides, the young Socrates is famously unable to defend his notion of forms under the cross-examination of Parmenides. Socrates, however, is offered advice: exercise. This dissertation examines Plato’s Parmenides as an explicitly pedagogical enterprise, presenting an advanced dialectical training for students. Socrates here is an exemplar of a philosophical student, not yet a mature master. Plato offers the student of the dialogue exercise [gymnastike], as a means to prepare him or her to critically re- evaluate Socrates’ depiction of forms. I show, contrary to dominant readings of the dialogue, that the hypotheses help the student to overcome the problems of an immature notion of forms, one that still attributes to forms qualities that are only proper to sensible or perceivable things. The student is asked to consider “one” [hen], the subject of the hypotheses, through a web of mutually contradictory characterizations. -
Life Without Meaning? Richard Norman
17 Life Without Meaning? Richard Norman The Alpha Course, a well‐known evangelical Christian programme, advertises itself with posters displaying the words THE MEANING OF LIFE IS_________, followed by the invitation ‘Fill in the blanks at alpha.org’. Followers of the course will discover that ‘Men and women were created to live in a relationship with God’, and that ‘without that relationship there will always be a hunger, an emptiness, a feeling that something is missing’.1 We all have that need because we are all sinners, we are told, and the truth which will fill the need is that Jesus Christ died to save us from our sins. Not all Christian or other religious views about the meaning of life are as simplistic as this, but they typically share the assumptions that the meaning of life is to be found in some belief whose truth we need to recognize, and that this is a belief about the purpose for which we exist. A further implication is that this purpose is the purpose intended by the God who created us, and that if we fail to identify and live in accordance with that purpose, our lives will lack meaning. The assumption is echoed in the question many humanists will have encountered: if you don’t believe in a God, what’s the point of it all? And many people who don’t share the answer still accept the legitimacy of the question – ‘What is the meaning of life?’ – and assume that what we need is a correct belief, religious or non‐religious, which will fill the blank in the sentence ‘The meaning of life is …’. -
SGR VERY Final Version
PLATO’S EXPLANATORY PREDICATION A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Saul Gordon Rosenthal January 2011 © 2011 Saul Gordon Rosenthal All rights reserved PLATO’S EXPLANATORY PREDICATION Saul Gordon Rosenthal, Ph. D. Cornell University 2011 One of the most classic puzzles in Plato’s metaphysics is how to interpret his apparently self-predicational language. Plato seems committed, at least in his middle dialogues, to the view that for all forms, the form of F “is F”. For instance, he seems to say that the form of largeness itself “is large”, and to generalize this claim to all forms. Commentators have struggled to find an interpretation of such claims that is consistent with Plato’s text and that attributes to Plato a view with some plausibility. One aim of this dissertation is to show that we have good reason to doubt all of the most influential interpretations offered by commentators. The views discussed include Narrow Self-Predication, the Tautologous Identity view, two Non- Tautologous Identity views, the Pauline Predication view, Broad Self-Predication, and a view distinguishing different kinds of predication. It is doubtful whether any of these interpretations correctly captures Plato’s self-predicational commitments. Another aim of the dissertation is to argue that the textual evidence most often thought to commit Plato to the Self-Predication Assumption (SP), that for all forms, the form of F is itself an F thing, is insufficient to establish such a commitment. One chapter focuses on Plato’s repeated discussion of the resemblance between form and participant. -
The Meaning of Language
01:615:201 Introduction to Linguistic Theory Adam Szczegielniak The Meaning of Language Copyright in part: Cengage learning The Meaning of Language • When you know a language you know: • When a word is meaningful or meaningless, when a word has two meanings, when two words have the same meaning, and what words refer to (in the real world or imagination) • When a sentence is meaningful or meaningless, when a sentence has two meanings, when two sentences have the same meaning, and whether a sentence is true or false (the truth conditions of the sentence) • Semantics is the study of the meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences – Lexical semantics: the meaning of words and the relationships among words – Phrasal or sentential semantics: the meaning of syntactic units larger than one word Truth • Compositional semantics: formulating semantic rules that build the meaning of a sentence based on the meaning of the words and how they combine – Also known as truth-conditional semantics because the speaker’ s knowledge of truth conditions is central Truth • If you know the meaning of a sentence, you can determine under what conditions it is true or false – You don’ t need to know whether or not a sentence is true or false to understand it, so knowing the meaning of a sentence means knowing under what circumstances it would be true or false • Most sentences are true or false depending on the situation – But some sentences are always true (tautologies) – And some are always false (contradictions) Entailment and Related Notions • Entailment: one sentence entails another if whenever the first sentence is true the second one must be true also Jack swims beautifully. -
David Lewis on Convention
David Lewis on Convention Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone Center for Cognitive Science Rutgers University David Lewis’s landmark Convention starts its exploration of the notion of a convention with a brilliant insight: we need a distinctive social competence to solve coordination problems. Convention, for Lewis, is the canonical form that this social competence takes when it is grounded in agents’ knowledge and experience of one another’s self-consciously flexible behavior. Lewis meant for his theory to describe a wide range of cultural devices we use to act together effectively; but he was particularly concerned in applying this notion to make sense of our knowledge of meaning. In this chapter, we give an overview of Lewis’s theory of convention, and explore its implications for linguistic theory, and especially for problems at the interface of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language. In §1, we discuss Lewis’s understanding of coordination problems, emphasizing how coordination allows for a uniform characterization of practical activity and of signaling in communication. In §2, we introduce Lewis’s account of convention and show how he uses it to make sense of the idea that a linguistic expression can come to be associated with its meaning by a convention. Lewis’s account has come in for a lot of criticism, and we close in §3 by addressing some of the key difficulties in thinking of meaning as conventional in Lewis’s sense. The critical literature on Lewis’s account of convention is much wider than we can fully survey in this chapter, and so we recommend for a discussion of convention as a more general phenomenon Rescorla (2011). -
The Poverty of Socratic Questioning: Asking and Answering in the Meno
University of Cincinnati University of Cincinnati College of Law Scholarship and Publications Faculty Articles and Other Publications College of Law Faculty Scholarship 1994 The oP verty of Socratic Questioning: Asking and Answering In The eM no Thomas D. Eisele University of Cincinnati College of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs Part of the Legal Education Commons Recommended Citation Eisele, Thomas D., "The oP verty of Socratic Questioning: Asking and Answering In The eM no" (1994). Faculty Articles and Other Publications. Paper 36. http://scholarship.law.uc.edu/fac_pubs/36 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Law Faculty Scholarship at University of Cincinnati College of Law Scholarship and Publications. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Articles and Other Publications by an authorized administrator of University of Cincinnati College of Law Scholarship and Publications. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE POVERTY OF SOCRATIC QUESTIONING: ASKING AND ANSWERING IN THE MEND Thomas D. Eisele* I understand [philosophy 1 as a willingness to think not about some thing other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes asa flash across a landscape; such things, for example, as whether we can know the world as it is in itself, or whether others really know the nature of one's own experiences, or whether good and bad are relative, or whether we might not now be dreaming that we are awake, or whether modern tyrannies and weapons and spaces and speeds and art are continuous with the past of the human race or discontinuous, and hence whether the learning of the human race is not irrelevant to the problems it has brought before itself. -
Divine Illumination As “Conditio Sine Qua Non” for True Knowledge in the Philosophy of St Augustine
DIVINE ILLUMINATION AS “CONDITIO SINE QUA NON” FOR TRUE KNOWLEDGE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF ST AUGUSTINE Emmanuel OGUNDELE, PhD Introduction St. Augustine in many aspects of his philosophy was preoccupied with the issue of knowledge. This knowledge in the true sense is rather impossible to reach without the divine light which shines on us, for 'in His divine light we see light.' The beaming of the illuminating light of the creator who lives in unassailable light on us makes knowledge possible. For Augustine, true knowledge comes from within, through Divine illumination and not from without. This is theme that will be explored in this article. St. Augustine was born in Tagaste in 354 A.D. of a pagan father by the name Patricius and a devout Christian mother, Monica. His baptism and conversion into Christianity was delayed and he was eventually baptised in 387. He did higher studies first at Madaura and later at Carthage. At this time, he was still committed to Manichaeism. He later started teaching Rhetoric in Carthage and eventually opened a school of Rhetoric in Rome. After a while, he abandoned Manichaeism and scepticism and embraced Platonism. He had a riotous youthful life in which he lost his way into a life of sensuality. In 384 AD, he moved to Milan where he 1 2 met Bishop Ambrose who eventually baptised him on his conversion in 387 AD. His mother died in 388 AD, the year in which he returned to his homeland. In 391, the people of Hippo where he was staying in order to convert a friend acclaimed him a priest and he was finally ordained a priest by Bishop Valerius. -
A Cardinal Sin: the Infinite in Spinoza's Philosophy
Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College Philosophy Honors Projects Philosophy Department Spring 2014 A Cardinal Sin: The nfinitI e in Spinoza's Philosophy Samuel H. Eklund Macalester College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/phil_honors Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Eklund, Samuel H., "A Cardinal Sin: The nfinitI e in Spinoza's Philosophy" (2014). Philosophy Honors Projects. Paper 7. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/phil_honors/7 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy Department at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Cardinal Sin: The Infinite in Spinoza’s Philosophy By: Samuel Eklund Macalester College Philosophy Department Honors Advisor: Geoffrey Gorham Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without my advisor, Professor Geoffrey Gorham. Through a collaborative summer research grant, I was able to work with him in improving a vague idea about writing on Spinoza’s views on existence and time into a concrete analysis of Spinoza and infinity. Without his help during the summer and feedback during the past academic year, my views on Spinoza wouldn’t have been as developed as they currently are. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge the hard work done by the other two members of my honors committee: Professor Janet Folina and Professor Andrew Beveridge. Their questions during the oral defense and written feedback were incredibly helpful in producing the final draft of this project. -
Relations in Categories
Relations in Categories Stefan Milius A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Program in Mathematics and Statistics York University Toronto, Ontario June 15, 2000 Abstract This thesis investigates relations over a category C relative to an (E; M)-factori- zation system of C. In order to establish the 2-category Rel(C) of relations over C in the first part we discuss sufficient conditions for the associativity of horizontal composition of relations, and we investigate special classes of morphisms in Rel(C). Attention is particularly devoted to the notion of mapping as defined by Lawvere. We give a significantly simplified proof for the main result of Pavlovi´c,namely that C Map(Rel(C)) if and only if E RegEpi(C). This part also contains a proof' that the category Map(Rel(C))⊆ is finitely complete, and we present the results obtained by Kelly, some of them generalized, i. e., without the restrictive assumption that M Mono(C). The next part deals with factorization⊆ systems in Rel(C). The fact that each set-relation has a canonical image factorization is generalized and shown to yield an (E¯; M¯ )-factorization system in Rel(C) in case M Mono(C). The setting without this condition is studied, as well. We propose a⊆ weaker notion of factorization system for a 2-category, where the commutativity in the universal property of an (E; M)-factorization system is replaced by coherent 2-cells. In the last part certain limits and colimits in Rel(C) are investigated. -
Descartes' Influence in Shaping the Modern World-View
R ené Descartes (1596-1650) is generally regarded as the “father of modern philosophy.” He stands as one of the most important figures in Western intellectual history. His work in mathematics and his writings on science proved to be foundational for further development in these fields. Our understanding of “scientific method” can be traced back to the work of Francis Bacon and to Descartes’ Discourse on Method. His groundbreaking approach to philosophy in his Meditations on First Philosophy determine the course of subsequent philosophy. The very problems with which much of modern philosophy has been primarily concerned arise only as a consequence of Descartes’thought. Descartes’ philosophy must be understood in the context of his times. The Medieval world was in the process of disintegration. The authoritarianism that had dominated the Medieval period was called into question by the rise of the Protestant revolt and advances in the development of science. Martin Luther’s emphasis that salvation was a matter of “faith” and not “works” undermined papal authority in asserting that each individual has a channel to God. The Copernican revolution undermined the authority of the Catholic Church in directly contradicting the established church doctrine of a geocentric universe. The rise of the sciences directly challenged the Church and seemed to put science and religion in opposition. A mathematician and scientist as well as a devout Catholic, Descartes was concerned primarily with establishing certain foundations for science and philosophy, and yet also with bridging the gap between the “new science” and religion. Descartes’ Influence in Shaping the Modern World-View 1) Descartes’ disbelief in authoritarianism: Descartes’ belief that all individuals possess the “natural light of reason,” the belief that each individual has the capacity for the discovery of truth, undermined Roman Catholic authoritarianism. -
12 Beginning the “Longer Way”
P1: SBT 0521839631c12 CUNY711/Ferrari 0 521 82136 3 April 17, 2007 7:56 mitchell miller 12 Beginning the “Longer Way” I don’t know yet. But we have set sail, and wherever the argument, like the wind, should bear us, there we must go.1 Republic 394d At 435c–d and again at 504b ff., Socrates indicates that there is a “longer and fuller way” that one must take in order to get “the best possible view” of the soul and its virtues. But in neither passage does Socrates take this “longer way.” At 435c–d he accepts Glaucon’s plea to continue with the “methods” they have used so far, giving argu- ments “at that level.” In the text that follows his reminder at 504b ff. he restricts himself to an indirect indication of its goals by his images of sun, line, and cave and to a programmatic outline of its first phase, the five mathematical studies. If we stay within the dramatic con- text of the dialogue, we can see why Socrates offers such a partial and incomplete characterization. As keen and receptive as they are on political and ethical matters, Glaucon and Adeimantus are lim- ited interlocutors on metaphysical issues; they have not undergone the mathematical education Socrates prescribes, and they are not in a position to raise critical questions about the Forms or the structure the Forms imply for city and soul. Accordingly, in his initial will- ingness to forgo the “longer way” (435d) and in his later very intro- ductory account of it, Socrates measures his words to what Glaucon and Adeimantus are prepared to understand. -
The Study of Neoplatonism Today Autor(Es): Gerson, Lloyd P
The study of Neoplatonism today Autor(es): Gerson, Lloyd P. Publicado por: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra URL persistente: URI:http://hdl.handle.net/10316.2/42268 DOI: DOI:https://doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_2_2 Accessed : 26-Sep-2021 06:02:23 A navegação consulta e descarregamento dos títulos inseridos nas Bibliotecas Digitais UC Digitalis, UC Pombalina e UC Impactum, pressupõem a aceitação plena e sem reservas dos Termos e Condições de Uso destas Bibliotecas Digitais, disponíveis em https://digitalis.uc.pt/pt-pt/termos. Conforme exposto nos referidos Termos e Condições de Uso, o descarregamento de títulos de acesso restrito requer uma licença válida de autorização devendo o utilizador aceder ao(s) documento(s) a partir de um endereço de IP da instituição detentora da supramencionada licença. Ao utilizador é apenas permitido o descarregamento para uso pessoal, pelo que o emprego do(s) título(s) descarregado(s) para outro fim, designadamente comercial, carece de autorização do respetivo autor ou editor da obra. Na medida em que todas as obras da UC Digitalis se encontram protegidas pelo Código do Direito de Autor e Direitos Conexos e demais legislação aplicável, toda a cópia, parcial ou total, deste documento, nos casos em que é legalmente admitida, deverá conter ou fazer-se acompanhar por este aviso. impactum.uc.pt digitalis.uc.pt JOURNAL DEZ 2002 ISSN 2079-7567 eISSN 2183-4105 PLATO 2 Established 1989 http://platosociety.org/ INTERNATIONAL PLATO SOCIETY PLATO INTERNATIONAL PL ATO Société Platonicienne JOURNALInternationale Associazione Internazionale dei Platonisti Sociedad Internacional de Platonistas Internationale Platon-Gesellschaft The Study of Neoplatonism Today GERSON, Lloyd P., in 2.