This essay is a short response to comments made by Cannon, Meeks, and Yu to my articles “Beyond Subjectivism,” published in this special edition of Tradition and Discovery (34:1), and “Connected andSeparate Knowing: A Marriage of Two Minds,” published in Knowledge, Difference, and Power, edited by Nancy Goldberger, et al., focusing on convergences between my work and the ideas of Michael Polanyi.

Some patients who are dependent on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) are alert and retain capacity to participate in decision-making, including decisions regarding whether to continue life...

This essay explores the contribution that the thought of Michael Polanyi might make to the work in developmental epistemology of Blythe Clinchy and her colleagues in the Women’s Ways of Knowing project. In turn, the potential contribution of Clinchy’s work to Polanyi studies is explored. Both have much of value to share with the other. While Clinchy’s conceptualization of “connected knowing” as a complement to “separate knowing” is insightful and rich in its implications, Polanyi’s post-critical understanding of human knowing (...) provides a fuller, indeed comprehensive, philosophical understanding of the nature, importance, and dynamics of the two, the priority of connected to separate knowing, even when it seems to be absent, and how the two fit together. (shrink)

This brief essay summarizes the content of the current issue of Tradition and Discovery which is devoted to a symposium on similarities between and relevance to each other of the work of Blythe Clinchy, one ofthe authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing, and the work of Michael Polanyi. The background of Women’s Ways of Knowing is sketched for readers without independent familiarity with it.

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government (...) spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us. (shrink)

Literature on racism, anti‐racism, whiteness, nursing education and nurse educators was reviewed and analysed for the development of race consciousness and application of anti‐racist pedagogy. The literature describes an oppressive educational climate for non‐white identifying people, a curriculum that does not attend to the social construction of difference, and a nursing culture that is not consciously situated in a broader sociopolitical context. A particular focus on studies of nurse educators demonstrates a stark need for personal and professional development towards effectively (...) delivering anti‐racist pedagogy and a deconstruction of white normativity and dominance amongst white faculty. The protection and reproduction of white privilege is identified through the scholarship itself through a lack of racial analysis, an externalization of the root of oppression and non‐specific study measures and outcomes. The persistence and pervasiveness of white dominance in nursing and the lack of anti‐racist competence in white educators, particularly, merits a shift in anti‐racist efforts away from short‐term skill acquisition initiatives towards the deconstruction of socialized white supremacy and enactments of white privilege in nurse educators themselves. (shrink)

This article argues for the importance of studying life after mental illness. A significant proportion of people who experience mental illness recover, but the experience continues to affect their lives. Historical examination of the birth of mental after-care through the Mental After-Care Association (MACA) highlights the challenges faced by those who were discharged recovered from English and Welsh lunatic asylums between 1879 and 1928. This research demonstrates the relationship between ideas regarding psychiatric recovery and citizenship. Throughout the period, certification of (...) insanity for institutional treatment stripped patients of the status and rights of citizenship. Discharge on account of recovery restored a patient's legal access to citizenship, yet suspicions about their right and ability to particate in society lingered. The MACA designed after-care to facilitate restoration to full citizenship. The MACA was a product of the active citizenship movement, according to which, one's right to identify as a citizen depended on the performance of certain duties to the community. These duties varied according to socio-economic position and sex, meaning that each individual was prescribed a gendered personal citizenship role. MACA personnel saw their endeavours as part of their own citizenship roles, and designed their treatments accordingly. The MACA used a patient's assumption of a citizenship role to indicate recovery, and believed that supporting the performance of that role had mentally healing effects for patients who had been discharged recovered. MACA workers thus imbued the psychiatric innovation of after-care with the liberal political and social values of active citizenship. (shrink)

How did the idea of monarchy develop in Giovanni Botero’s thinking? How did he use it in his largest work, Relazioni universali (1st edition 1591)? How did he redefine it at the beginning of the seventeenth century? Botero developed his idea of monarchy by reading the classics and traditional literature on the subject, as well as by travelling and observing different models of government: his diplomatic experience in France (1585) and his three years in Spain as tutor of the princes (...) of Savoy (1603-1606) led to theories on the features of the ‘best form of government’. Starting from Botero’s first thinking on the subject (De regia sapientia, 1583), this chapter will focus on Relazioni universali as a kind of catalogue of comparative monarchy case studies from all over the world and pay particular attention to Discorso dell’eccellenza della monarchia (Discourse about the Excellence of Monarchy) published in Turin in 1607. Discorso has been translated into English in the Appendix. (shrink)

Healthcare environments continue to prove discriminatory and marginalizing towards patients and healthcare workers themselves, which contributes to inequitable health outcomes across lines of socially constructed difference. This content and discourse analysis of nursing identity scholarship asks whether there is a connection between nursing identity and oppressive behaviour by examining the construction of nursing identity and the foundational discourses, sometimes in absentia, that support such a construction. Bourdieu's concepts of social fields and Audre Lorde's concept of the master's house are applied (...) as a framework towards understanding the constructs of power and status in healthcare. The analysis identifies a gap in nursing identity literature where social constructs of difference are not considered. In the reviewed literature, nursing identity has been co‐opted by the professionalization project in effort to stabilize a conceptualization of nursing's contribution to healthcare towards gaining professional and societal status. This leads to a monolithic, apolitical representation of nursing identity that erases difference, denies historical influence, universalizes nursing work and further marginalizes marginalized identities. The oppressive and hegemonic nature of a universal nursing identity may contribute to a lack of disciplinary reflexivity about the ongoing influences of foundational discursive constructs of gender, epistemology, power and professional status. (shrink)

Market metaphors have come to dominate discourse on medical practice. In this essay, we revisit Peter Berger and colleagues’ analysis of modernization in their book The Homeless Mind and place that analysis in conversation with Max Weber’s 1917 lecture “Science as a Vocation” to argue that the rise of market metaphors betokens the carry-over to medical practice of various features from the institutions of technological production and bureaucratic administration. We refer to this carry-over as the product presumption. The product presumption (...) foregrounds accidental features of medicine while hiding its essential features. It thereby confounds the public understanding of medicine and impedes the professional achievement of the excellences most central to medical practice. In demonstrating this pattern, we focus on a recent article, “Physicians, Not Conscripts—Conscientious Objection in Health Care,” in which Ronit Stahl and Ezekiel Emanuel decry conscientious refusals by medical practitioners. We demonstrate that Stahl and Emanuel’s argument depends on the product presumption, ignoring and undermining central features of good medicine. We conclude by encouraging conscientious resistance to the product presumption and the language it engenders. (shrink)

In _Aristotle’s Ever-turning World in _Physics _8_ Blyth analyses the reasoning in Aristotle’s explanation of cosmic movement, with detailed evaluation of ancient and modern commentary on this central text in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy and science.

This article explores the relationships between legal proof and fundamental epistemic concepts such as knowledge and justification. A survey of the legal literature reveals a confusing array of seemingly inconsistent proposals and presuppositions regarding these relationships. This article makes two contributions. First, it reconciles a number of apparent inconsistencies and tensions in accounts of the epistemology of legal proof. Second, it argues that there is a deeper connection between knowledge and legal proof than is typically argued for or presupposed in (...) the legal literature. This connection is illustrated through a discussion of the Gettier problem in epistemology. It is argued that the gap or disconnect between truth and justification that undermines knowledge in Gettier cases also potentially undermines the success of legal verdicts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ever-Moving Soul in Plato's PhaedrusDougal BlythThe proof of the immortality of the soul at Phdr. 245c5-246a2 is unique in the dialogue for its apparent philosophical rigour and technical style, and it is peculiar in its rhetorical and mythical context.1 It is introduced as the first stage of Socrates' palinode, exhorting Phaedrus to give himself to a true lover rather than a non-lover. On this basis the philosopher will (...) then describe the course of true love (erōs) as the attempt of an older man to lead the soul of a younger whom he loves, along with his own soul, up and back to the original immortal condition of the "winged" soul which contemplates true being (246a-257b).As the groundwork upon which this vision is built the proof of the immortality of the soul deserves close study, not only of its argument, but also its rhetorical achievement and relation to the subsequent myth. It might be a parody or imitation of a Pythagorean proof, but the definition of soul and the role that plays in the implied theory appear original to Plato.2 Nevertheless, the importation of a fragment of some more extensive physical theory into a speech on love is surprising, and demands explanation.3 My procedure here involves the recovery of significant features [End Page 185] of the theory, firstly by reference to the myth, secondly by comparison with other dialogues containing related concepts and positions, and finally and most importantly by extended analysis of the physical and cosmological postulates of the argument itself.4 It should then emerge from my attention to the stages of its presentation that, as might be expected in its epideictic context, the statement of the proof involves significant rhetorical finesse. It both establishes the credibility of the subsequent myth, and, with its cosmic sweep, prepares the listener for the profundity of the latter. Moreover the proof is written so as itself to provoke that philosophical erōs for understanding which the myth then describes.I. To begin, we need some idea of what soul the proof is concerned with. The three possible meanings of the ambiguous phrase (245a5) are (i) every individual soul, (ii) one comprehensive world soul, or (iii) some common aspect of all living things, which, despite the mortality of psychophysical individuals, would be immortal in itself.5 The plurality of separate individual souls [i.e., sense (i)] is excluded by the requirements of the proof (see below), that "all soul" be one unique source of cosmic motion. No specific doctrine of a world soul [i.e., sense (ii)] is expressly stated in the Phaedrus; I shall in fact argue that the world soul is signified by the gods' chariots in the following myth, but in that case this cannot be equivalent to "all soul," since immortal souls (or fragments of soul as such) are described as entering into human and animal bodies, whereas the gods do not (248c-249d). This seems sufficient grounds to understand "all soul" as (iii)-one common soul in which we all participate insofar as we are alive; thus Plato writes "all soul cares for what is soulless (i.e., body), and travels round the whole world ('all [End Page 186] heaven', ) coming to be in different forms at different times" (246b6-7).Since the identity of the subject concerned in the proof of the immortality of "all soul" receives its only clarification subsequently in the course of the following myth, before turning to a detailed consideration of the argument I shall first survey the implications of the myth for the cosmological status of immortal soul. It is represented here as a chariot rising up to the sphere of the fixed stars, where each lesser soul follows in the train of its appointed god; and by passing beyond the outermost edge of the visible universe, insofar as it is capable, the soul studies the forms beyond, the truly divine, by proximity to which even gods are divine (249c6). Gods are thus, in this dialogue, paradigms of that divine soul which is said to circumnavigate the cosmos in governing it (246b7-c2, e5-6) and soul has its... (shrink)

Several prominent scholars assume that Aristotle regards the heavenly spheres as self-moving or rationally ensouled. Against this I argue first, Ph. 8.5 gives no support, and passages in Ph. 8 imply that all self-movers are terrestrial animals; second, passages in De motu animalium and De caelo where the heaven is called alive do not imply a quasi-animal soul; third, the exclusion of incidental self-movement from the heavens in Ph. 8.6 cannot be explained by locating movers in or on the spheres; (...) fourth, the passage in Ph. 8.10 concerning the prime mover’s location must be understood with that in De caelo 1.9 placing the changeless beings beyond the cosmos; fifth, Metaph. 12.7 and 9 exclude a heavenly intellect separate from the prime mover; and sixth, the heaven’s desire, responsible for its movement, consists in physical excitation of its aitherial body, analogous to animal desire in MA 10. (shrink)

This article challenges conventional readings of Michel Foucault by examining his fascination with neoliberalism in the late 1970s. Foucault did not critique neoliberalism during this period; rather, he strategically endorsed it. The necessary cause for this approval lies in the broader rehabilitation of economic liberalism in France during the 1970s. The sufficient cause lies in Foucault's own intellectual development: drawing on his long-standing critique of the state as a model for conceptualizing power, Foucault concluded, during the 1970s, that economic liberalism, (...) rather than “discipline,” was modernity's paradigmatic power form. Moreover, this article seeks to clarify the relationship between Foucault's philosophical antihumanism and his assessment of liberalism. Rather than arguing that Foucault's antihumanism precluded a positive appraisal of liberalism, or that the apparent reorientation of his politics in a more liberal direction in the late 1970s entailed a partial retreat from antihumanism, this article contends that Foucault's brief, strategic, and contingent endorsement of liberalism was possible precisely because he saw no incompatibility between antihumanism and liberalism—but only liberalism of the economic variety. Economic liberalism alone, and not its political iteration, was compatible with the philosophical antihumanism that is the hallmark of Foucault's thought. (shrink)

The arguments for redistribution of wealth, and for prohibiting certain transactions such as price-gouging, both are based in mistaken conceptions of exchange. This paper proposes a neologism, “euvoluntary” exchange, meaning both that the exchange is truly voluntary and that it benefits both parties to the transaction. The argument has two parts: First, all euvoluntary exchanges should be permitted, and there is no justification for redistribution of wealth if disparities result only from euvoluntary exchanges. Second, even exchanges that are not euvoluntary (...) should generally be permitted, because access to market exchange may be the only means by which people in desperate circumstances can improve their position. (shrink)

I argue here that a properly Platonic theory of the nature of number is still viable today. By properly Platonic, I mean one consistent with Plato's own theory, with appropriate extensions to take into account subsequent developments in mathematics. At Parmenides 143a-4a the existence of numbers is proven from our capacity to count, whereby I establish as Plato's the theory that numbers are originally ordinal, a sequence of forms differentiated by position. I defend and interpret Aristotle's report of a Platonic (...) distinction between form and mathematical numbers, arguing that mathematical numbers alone are cardinals, by reference to certain non-technical features of a set-theoretical approach and other considerations in philosophy of mathematics. Finally I respond to the objections that such a conception of number was unavailable in antiquity and that this theory is contradicted by Aristotle's report in Metaph. XIII that Platonic numbers are collections of units. I argue that Aristotle reveals his own misinterpretation of the terms in which Plato's theory was expressed. (shrink)

Recovery and rehabilitation are highly charged terms in contemporary mental health, with their meanings and implications contested by professionals and survivors alike. A loose ‘recovery movement’ with radical reformist aims, which emerged across Britain and the United States in the later decades of the 20 th century, has, some argue, been co-opted by ‘neoliberal’ political and clinical interests. Most of these narratives begin with the emergence of the recovery movement as a result of service-user/peer activism in the 1970s: few consider (...) the longer history of ideas and practices of recovery and rehabilitation. In turn, recovery and rehabilitation have been strangely marginal in the works of historians of psychiatry, madness, and mental health. This article traces some of the key literatures and concepts in relation to recovery and rehabilitation, and introduces this special issue of History of the Human Sciences, with contributions on Britain and the United States from the late 19 th century to the turn of the 21 st century. (shrink)

Reductive representationalism offers a promising route to an intelligible account of phenomenal consciousness. However, reductive representationalist accounts entail phenomenal externalism. Here I develop a new argument against phenomenal externalism and, by extension, standard reductive representationalism. I argue that the external determination of ‘here-and-now’ phenomenal properties entails an irreconcilable unintelligibility at the heart of reductive representationalist accounts. As reductive representationalism is motivated by the promise of rendering phenomenal experience intelligible, this criticism is fatal.

In their political treatises, the scholastic writers Ptolemy of Lucca and Giles of Rome discussed the question of whether women should serve in the military. The dispute came in response to Aristotle, who reported in his Politics that Plato and Socrates taught that women should receive the same military training as men and take an equal part in fighting. Such a treatment was made possible by a medieval context in which women under certain circumstances could be feudal lords responsible for (...) maintaining a contingent of knights and sometimes commanding them, and in which a large number of medieval stories of women fighters or leaders of knights circulated, some of them mythical but others based on real women. Both Giles and Ptolemy ultimately rejected female participation but, in keeping with the dialectical method, proposed arguments on both sides. These involve historical precedent, the biological and medical differences between men and women, analogies between female animals and women, divinely ordained gender roles, and the benefits of exercise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Socrates' Trial and Conviction of the Jurors in Plato's ApologyDougal BlythI am going to argue in this paper that, in the three speeches constituting his Apology of Socrates, Plato presents the judicial proceedings that led to Socrates' execution as having precisely the opposite significance to their superficial legal meaning. This re-evaluation will lead to some reflections on the politics of Socrates' defence, and, similarly, on Plato's own aims in (...) writing the Apology. I want to show not only that the trial as portrayed demonstrates an inevitable dereliction of duty by the democratic jury, but also, more interestingly, that throughout the proceedings Socrates understands the meaning of the trial precisely in terms of his anticipation of the jurors' judicial incapacity.In the prooimion to his defence speech, Socrates requests that the jurors ignore his manner of speaking and concentrate on whether his case is just, "since this is a judge's virtue (), while that of a rhêtôr is to speak the truth" (18a5-6, cf. 35c2-5). We can gloss the expression "a judge's aretê" in this context as his function, or responsibility.1 Socrates claims that he, himself, fulfills his own responsibility as a defendant to tell the truth (17b4-c4, 33c1-2, cf. 34b5, 35b9-c2) in a speech that asserts his exemplary piety in Apollo's service and his beneficial influence on the Athenian youth. But if, in claiming that he is innocent of the charge, Socrates does tell the truth, then those jurors who thereupon convict him of impiety and corruption, and subsequently sentence him to death, have failed in their duty to judge rightly.My claim is that Socrates sees the trial as a test of the jurors' abilities. It is characteristic of Socrates to test people regarding their concern for virtue and justice, a habit to which he devotes extended discussion during his defence, even dramatising it provocatively in a central passage (29d7-e5) that I aim shortly to analyse in detail. Moreover, Socrates specifically withholds from the jury the title of dikastai or judges; he does finally award the title in his address following the sentence, but only to those who have voted [End Page 1] to acquit him (40a2-3).2 The possibility thus emerges that Socrates has treated the legal proceedings all along as a moral (and intellectual) test, or trial, of the empanelled jurors themselves, to see whether they are capable of the legal function to which they have been allotted. In that case, Socrates is putting on trial, not just those individual citizens, but the very legal system of democratic Athens.Socratic irony and truthfulnessBefore considering Socrates' own explicit judgement during those final remarks on the jurors' moral offence and punishment, I should first address briefly the issue of Socrates' irony. In the past, some writers have asserted that this irony involves him in not telling the truth about himself during his defence, in which case the jury might well have been justified in convicting him. Actually, there does seem to be a consensus among the more extended treatments of the Apology that have emerged during the last decade, at least on the point that Plato presents Socrates as committed to making as sincere an attempt at a defence of his case as is consistent with his philosophical commitment to virtue, and so to telling the truth.3I shall not re-argue this point in detail, but shall take it to be secured by two basic considerations: consistency with the Crito would require Socrates to recognise a legal obligation to make a sincere attempt at defence while his obligation to Apollo to continue his mission in Athens if possible would motivate that attempt with the goal of acquittal.4 Instead, I want to show what role irony does have in Socrates' defence, given that his principled law-abidingness requires him to attempt to persuade the jury, in accordance with truth and justice, that he is innocent (cf. 19a6-7, 18a7-b1, 18e5).Where Socrates acknowledges the obligation to defend himself, he remarks on the difficulty he faces, a difficulty that has resulted from the slander to which he has long... (shrink)

Ch.9 of Metaph. 12 gives no support to the common view (against which I have argued elsewhere) that in ch.7 Aristotle identifies his Prime Mover not only as a god but also as an intellect. Rather, ch.9 approaches the divinity of intellect as a common belief (ἔνδοξον) from the Greek philosophical and poetic tradition (as at ch.7, 1072b23) that now requires dialectical testing. Here Aristotle initially establishes that there is a most active intellect (proposed ch.7, 1072b18–19: demonstrated ch.9, 1074b17–21, b28–9), (...) and that it contemplates what is best (proposed loc. cit.: demonstrated ch.9, 1074b21–7). Thus ch.9 proceeds by deducing, as a new result, characteristics implying that this intellect is itself the Prime Mover, since its object, qua best, must be the god of ch.7, and divine intellect is essentially identical (1074b33–1074a5), and an indivisible unity (a5–10), with that object. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Nassim Taleb rightly points out that although people may acknowledge in the abstract that the world is uncertain, they still behave as if a large enough sample size is all that is needed to predict, and model, the future. He also rightly notes that ever‐increasing quantities of information are relevant only in simple situations, such as in predicting the range of human height, but are misleading in more random arenas, such as financial markets. However, while Taleb decries the use (...) of narratives for falsely forcing the facts to fit a given story, we need narratives in order to make sense of a complex world. Further, Taleb fails to take sufficient heed of the fact that human narratives themselves become objects that act on subjects in an ever‐increasing web of complexity. (shrink)

(1982). Response and autonomy in the study of education: A personal account of three decades. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 7-17.

In this essay on epistemological development in college students, I argue that “subjectivism” (a.k.a. “multiplism;” often identified in female undergraduates) should be understood and treated not as amanifestation of a primitive, irrational notion of knowing that must be exterminated and replaced by the more impersonal, detached, objective procedures embodied in scientific method and critical thinking. Rather, it should be regarded as a point of departure for moving into more reflective modes of thought when approached via, and encouraged into, the more (...) personal, empathic procedure made known in Women’s Ways of Knowing as “connected knowing.” Along the way, I develop further the difference between “connected knowing” and “separate knowing” (the latter being the dominant academic paradigm of knowing), bringing out how connected knowing is an important and at times indispensable complement to separate knowing in achieving an objectivity integrated with subjectivity. (shrink)

This study adjudicates between two opposing accounts of morphological productivity, using English past-tense as its test case. The single-route model posits that both regular and irregular past-tense forms are generated by analogy across stored exemplars in associative memory. In contrast, the dual-route model posits that regular inflection requires use of a formal “add -ed” rule that does not require analogy across regular past-tense forms. Children saw animations of an animal performing a novel action described with a novel verb. Past-tense forms (...) of novel verbs were elicited by prompting the child to describe what the animal “did yesterday.” Collapsing across age group, the likelihood of a verb being produced in regular past-tense form was positively associated with the verb's similarity to existing regular verbs, consistent with the single-route model only. Results indicate that children's acquisition of the English past-tense is best explained by a single-route analogical mechanism that does not incorporate a role for formal rules. (shrink)

In his article, ‘What's Wrong with Tooley's Argument from Evil?’, Calum Miller's goal was to show that the evidential argument from evil that I have advanced is unsound, and in support of that claim, Miller set out three main objections. First, he argued that I had failed to recognize that the actual occurrence of an event can by itself, at least in principle, constitute good evidence that it was not morally wrong for God to allow events of the kind in (...) question. Miller's second objection was then that, in attempting to show that it is unlikely that God exists, I had failed to consider either positive arguments in support of the existence of God or possible theodicies, and thus that I was unjustified in drawing any conclusions concerning the probability that theism is true in the light of the total evidence available. Miller's third and final objection was that one of the approaches to logical probability that I employed – namely, that based upon a structure-description equiprobability principle, rather than a state-description equiprobability principle – was unsound since it has clearly unacceptable implications. In response, I argue that all three of Miller's objections are unsound. The third objection, however, is nevertheless important since it shows that my type of argument from evil cannot be based merely on the evils found in the world. One must also consider good states of affairs, and their relations to bad ones. I show, however, that that deficiency can be addressed in a completely satisfactory manner. (shrink)

Plato’s treatment of poetry is usually discussed without reference to other contemporary reception of Greek poetry, leading to divergent political or aesthetic accounts of its meaning. Yet the culture of the Greek polis, in particular Athens, is the defining context for understanding his aims. Four distinct points are made here, and cumulatively an interpretation of Plato’s opposition to poetry: on the basis of other evidence, including Aristophanes’ Frogs, that Plato would quite reasonably understand poetry to claim the craft of looking (...) after a city ; that Socrates makes a rival claim that philosophy is the pursuit of this skill; that Plato considers the poets, owing to this rivalry, to aim to exclude philosophy from Athens; and finally, that Plato’s exclusion of poetry from the theoretical just city of the Republic is part of his defence of the possibility of philosophy in Athens. (shrink)

(1981). From individuality to character: The Herbartian sociology applied to education. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 69-79.