In this paper, we consider recent attempts to metaphysically explain agentive modality in terms of conditionals. We suggest that the best recent accounts face counterexamples, and more worryingly, they take some agentive modality for granted. In particular, the ability to perform basic actions features as a primitive in these theories. While it is perfectly acceptable for a semantics of agentive modal claims to take some modality for granted in getting the extension of action claims correct, a metaphysical explanation of agentive (...) modality cannot, at least not in the way that conditional approaches to agentive modality do. We argue that this problem was present even in the classical conditional analysis. By a pessimistic induction, we suggest that, probably, no conditional approach to agentive modality will succeed. (shrink)

In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a desire (...) to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s compatibilism has had considerable influence. However, as Watson has argued in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil”, his view appears to have a disturbing consequence: extreme evil exempts an agent from moral responsibility. This is a reductio of the view. Moreover, in some cases our emotional reaction to an evildoer’s history clashes with our emotional expressions of blame. Anyone’s actions can be explained by his or her history, however, and thereby can conflict with our present blame. Additionally, we (...) too might have been evil if our history had been like the unlucky evildoer’s. Thus, our emotional responses to the evildoer compromise our standing to blame them. Since Strawson’s view demarcates moral responsibility by moral emotional responses, his view appears to be self-defeating. In this paper, I defend the Strawsonian view from the reductio and self-defeat problems. I argue that two emotions, disgust and elevation, can be moral reactive attitudes in Strawson’s sense. First, moral disgust expresses neither blame nor exemption from responsibility. Instead, moral disgust presupposes blameworthiness but is instead a distinct response to the extreme wrongdoer. Secondly, moral disgust involves self-directed attitudes that explain away our apparent lack of standing to blame the evil agent. The structure of disgust as a reactive attitude is mirrored along the positive dimension by the emotion that Haidt has called “elevation”, a feeling of moral inspiration. I conclude by defending my view from objections about the moral appropriateness of disgust. (shrink)

A common compatibilist view says that we are free and morally responsible in virtue of the ability to respond aptly to reasons. Many hold a version of this view despite disagreement about whether free will requires the ability to do otherwise. The canonical version of this view is reductive. It reduces the pertinent ability to a set of modal properties that are more obviously compatible with determinism, like dispositions. I argue that this and any reductive view of abilities faces a (...) significant challenge: it cannot adequately explain the freedom-grounding element of this ability. The problem has the form of a dilemma. This leaves reasons-responsive compatibilists with two options: abandon theories of free will grounded in abilities or abandon reductive theories of abilities. (shrink)

Reconstructing Damon is the first comprehensive study of Damon, the most important theorist of music and poetic meter in ancient Athens, detailing his extensive influence, and providing the first systematic collection, translation, and critical examination of all ancient testimonia for him.

Skeptical theism attempts to address the problem of evil by appealing to human cognitive limitations. The causal structure of the world is opaque to us. We cannot tell, and should not expect to be able to tell, if there is gratuitous evil, that is, evil which isn’t necessary for achieving some greater good or for precluding some greater evil. At first, it seems tempting to think that the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies might change this fact. Our cognitive (...) limitations may no longer be a fixed point in responding to the problem of evil. But I argue that this won’t ultimately matter. The workings of any AI capable of rendering the problem of evil tractable will likely be just as opaque to us as the causal structure of the world God created. Interestingly, then, both God and a sufficiently advanced AI are alien intelligences to us. This reveals what is truly difficult, and perhaps intractable, about the problem of evil. For the evils to be defeated, we would need a relational understanding of why God permitted them. Yet such an understanding of an inscrutable God seems forever beyond our, and even our post-human descendants, ken. (shrink)

Fear is a preventer, sometimes robustly so. When fear robustly prevents, it changes or diminishes what an agent is able to do. Various popular conceptions of fear focus on its negative role: fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we should, as in certain cases of akrasia. But by the same token, fear sometimes prevents us from acting as we shouldn’t, as in certain other cases of inverse akrasia. We end with a plea on behalf of fear, both in light (...) of its preventing role and its broader connection to other ways we express concern, in particular, to hope. (shrink)

The standard event-causal theory of action says that an intentional action is caused in the right way by the right mental states. This view requires reductionism about agency. The causal role of the agent must be nothing over and above the causal contribution of the relevant mental event-causal processes. But commonsense finds this reductive solution to the “agent-mind problem”, the problem of explaining the relationship between agents and the mind, incredible. Where did the agent go? This paper suggests that this (...) challenge against event-causal reductionism is importantly related to debates about fundamentality. It also suggests that extant event-causal answers to the agent-mind problem, ones that suggest that part of an agent’s mind can stand proxy for the agent herself, fail against the challenge. It sketches an alternative reductive view that appeals to entity grounding. This view resolves the commonsense challenge and promises to be theoretically fruitful with respect to other longstanding problems with the event-casual view. The paper concludes with a burden-shifting argument against emergentist agent-causal theories and non-reductive event-causal theories of agency. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (shrink)

This book provides a lucid commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and on Hegel’s other major writings on ethics and politics. Since it is the only commentary in English that covers the Philosophy of Right almost section by section, from start to finish, and it also carries on an instructive dialogue with many of the other commentaries published in recent years, it will be very useful to students and to scholars who aren’t specialists in Hegel. Although Franco can’t, of course, (...) afford to go into great detail on all of the many issues that he deals with, his judiciousness and wide reading in Hegel enable him to clarify a remarkable number of them, especially in the domain of “ethical life”. His discussions of Hegel’s conceptions of the state and of war and international relations are especially well balanced, neither avoiding difficulties nor abandoning Hegel to his legions of critics. His treatments of Hegel’s earlier works—especially the Jena lectures and the relevant portions of the Phenomenology of Spirit—are also quite helpful. Only readers who have themselves attempted to reconcile these disparate and dense texts and to reconstruct some of Hegel’s major arguments in ordinary language will fully appreciate how much Franco has accomplished. (shrink)

This book shows that the repeated announcements of the death of Hegel's philosophical system have been premature. Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom, Reality, and God brings to light accomplishments for which Hegel is seldom given credit: unique arguments for the reality of freedom, for the reality of knowledge, for the irrationality of egoism, and for the compatibility of key insights from traditional theism and naturalistic atheism. The book responds in a systematic manner to many of the major criticisms leveled at Hegel's (...) system, from Feuerbach and Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Charles Taylor. It provides detailed interpretations of Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit, large parts of his indispensable Science of Logic, and important parts of his Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Right. Unlike many academic books on Hegel, this one treats him very much as a 'live' thinker, whom we can learn from today. (shrink)

In this paper we show that being blameworthy for not blaming and being blameworthy for victim blaming are structurally similar. Each involve the two traditional contours of moral responsibility: a knowledge condition and a control condition. But interestingly, in these cases knowledge and control are importantly interrelated. Being in a relationship with another person affords us varying degrees of knowledge about them. This knowledge in turn affords agents in relationships varying degrees of influence over one another. Cases where an agent (...) is especially blameworthy for failing to blame a friend, a close colleague, or a spouse highlight this. The interdependence of these two conditions in interpersonal relationships sheds (partial) light on why victim blaming is morally wrong. We argue that victim blamers suffer from a kind of moral myopia by only focusing on what the victim could do, in virtue of their being in a relationship of some sort with their abuser, to avoid abuse. We focus specifically on cases where such moral myopia is fueled by misogynistic and hierarchical gender schema and scripts. (shrink)

Many contemporary philosophers believe that there is an important connection between holding someone responsible and being angry at them. The British philosopher P.F. Strawson argued that to blame someone‐to hold them responsible for a wrongdoing‐is just to feel and express certain kinds of moral anger toward them. Classical Buddhist thought suggests that anger is one of the poisons in our nature, something that gives rise to pain and suffering. Angry blame plays an important role in some of its most important (...) positive moments‐Katara confronting Pakku and Iroh defending the moon spirit, for instance. But Avatar: The Last Airbender ( ATLA ) highlights that people can choose not to be angry with wrongdoers. Media for children and young adults have an important role to play here, even for adults. In this role, ATLA succeeds in many ways. (shrink)

This paper articulates and responds to a challenge to contemporary compatibilist views of free will. Despite the popularity and appeal of compatibilist theories, many are left with lingering doubts about compatibilism. This paper explains this doubt in terms of the absurdity challenge: because a compatibilist accepts that they do not have causal access to all the actual sufficient causal sources of their own agency, the compatibilist can find their own agency absurd. By taking a cue from political philosophy, this paper (...) argues that a non-ideal construction of the problem of free will allows compatibilists to overcome this existential-metaphysical challenge, and by doing so, perhaps adopt a metaphysically progressive picture of human agency. (shrink)

This is a review of Daniel Dennett and Gregg D. Caruso's Just Deserts: Debating Free Will.

In a well-known apocryphal story, Theresa of Avila falls off the donkey she was riding, straight into mud, and injures herself. In response, she seems to blame God for her fall. A playful if indignant back and forth ensues. But this is puzzling. Theresa should never think that God is blameworthy. Why? Apparently, one cannot blame what one worships. For to worship something is to show it a kind of reverence, respect, or adoration. To worship is, at least in part, (...) to praise. You cannot praise and blame simultaneously. Indeed, Paul counsels against “back-talk” against God, suggesting we lack the standing to blame our creator (Romans 9:20). Drawing on Strawsonian theorizing about praise and blame, this paper argues that, surprisingly, a person can both blame and worship God. Although blameful worship is possibly epistemically akratic, it may sometimes be acceptable given our nature as finite, emotional beings. In fact, blaming God might on occasion be the only way we have to stand with God’s goodness despite apparent evidence of evil in the world. This suggestion, I’ll argue, should change the way we think about the problem of evil. The problem has interpersonal and moral psychological dimensions that merit serious attention. (shrink)

While considerable attention has been given to Kohlberg's stages of moral reasoning, little effort has been given to studying Kohlberg's notion of a metaphorical Stage Seven, which presupposes a cosmic rather than a universal humanistic orientation. The purpose of this study was to determine whether EEG coherence can distinguish cosmic orientation responses from non‐cosmic orientation responses to the question, ‘Why be moral?’. Thirteen cosmic orientation candidates were compared with thirteen non‐cosmic orientation subjects, matched for age, using EEG coherence measures. Results (...) indicate that cosmic orientation candidates exhibited higher EEG bilateral frontal alpha coherence than non‐cosmic orientation subjects (p<.01). In addition, a positive correlation was found between the Principled Thinking Scale of Rest's Defining Issues Test and right homolateral EEG coherence (rs =.46, p<.05). Discussion of the results, along with suggestions for further research and implications for education are included. (shrink)

Robert Williams objects that my interpretation of Hegel’s philosophical theology makes him an “Enlightenment naturalist.” In response, I explain how my book describes Hegel as decisively criticizing Enlightenment naturalism by showing that the finite and the natural must be sublated in the infinite. Second, I show that Hegel’s apparently paradoxical conception of the relation between humans and God makes sense when it is seen as part of the long tradition of rational mysticism, which includes Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, St. Augustine, and (...) Meister Eckhart. (shrink)

Many readers have suspected that Hegel---in arguing against Kant’s individualistic and critical way of approaching ethics and favoring instead an “ethical life” he associates with custom and habit---is in effect eliminating both individual judgment and any basis for criticism of corrupt or unjust communities. Most specialists reject this view of Hegel’s ethical theory, but they haven’t explained precisely how, on the contrary, ethical life preserves individual judgment and criticism within a new way of thinking about ethics. The goal of this (...) paper is to do that. (shrink)

According to Hegel, the true infinite is the fundamental concept of philosophy. Yet despite this fact, there is absence of consensus concerning its meaning and significance. The true infinite challenges the currently dominant non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel, as it challenged the dominance of the Kantian framework in its own day, specifically Kant’s attack on theology and his treatment of theology as a postulate of moralit y. Kant admits that the God-postulate has only subjective necessity and validity, and is an expression (...) of moral faith. Hegel both accepts Kant’s approach to the God-question through freedom and practical reason, but he rejects Kant’s philosophy of the postulates as incoherent, burdened with finitude and antithesis. The ought is only the beginning of the transcendence of finitude, but also essentially clings to finitude. This is the spurious infinite. In contrast to the traditional view of abstract transcendence, Hegel shows that the very attempt to separate the infinite from the finite only renders the infinite finite and levels it. The consciousness of limit (finitude) implies a transcendence of limit. The true infinite is an onto-theological principle, a social infinite that overcomes the limits imposed by abstract transcendence and the dualisms imposed by the Kantian frame. It is of vital importance for Hegel’s philosophy of religion, as both a doctrine of divine presence and absolute spirit in its community. (shrink)

Unlike the Senate of Republican Rome, this essay argues that councils were not the dominant or governing power in Greek oligarchies. Together with powerful officials and other powerful individuals, citizen assemblies mainly governed oligarchies, but admission to oligarchic assemblies was restricted by wealth. Before Solon, did the Areopagos Council govern oligarchic Athens? The principal source for this claim, [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 2-8, at least assigns the early Areopagos a broad judicial competence. Where did Ath. Pol.’s notion come from, and what (...) is it worth? Although ‘some people’ or ‘most people’ believed that Solon established the Areopagos Council, Ath. Pol. rejected that notion, possibly because along with others, Ath. Pol. and Aristotle thought that Solon founded Athens’ democracy, while for fourth century conservatives the early Areopagos was non-democratic. In part the competence of Ath. Pol.’s pre-Solonian Areopagos derives from and expanded its Solonian competence in Ath. Pol. 8.4, so that for Ath. Pol. democratic Solon will have reduced the Areopagos’ powers. In part it derives from fourth century conservative propaganda. This evidence is inadequate to claim that the Areopagos Council governed oligarchic Athens. (shrink)

Personal freedom, «living as you like», was a cardinal principal of Athens’ democracy and nearly always a daily reality for its citizens. Yet despite Athens’ ideologies and often extraordinary tolerance, what some consider significant violations of freedom also occurred; in particular, the Athenians reportedly prosecuted many intellectuals . All this has raised doubts about personal freedoms at Athens. Did these freedoms exist? Many deny it, including Isaiah Berlin in his famous essays On Liberty. Many modern democracies are guided by the (...) principle of the primacy of the individual over the state, and the paramount importance of protecting individual liberties. But among the Athenians the community came first. The thread linking Athenian violations of their deeply felt democratic ideology of «living as you like» was the priority of community interests. Drunkenness, wasting money, even doubting the gods were not regulated, if no one else was harmed. But the community came first. The Athenians punished those who harmed the polis. Private citizens were left free to live as they wished. (shrink)

Evolution is littered with polyphyletic parallelism: many roads lead to functional Romes. We propose consciousness embodies one such example, and represent it here with an equivalence class structure that factors the broad realm of necessary conditions information theoretic realizations of Baars’ global workspace model. The construction suggests many different physiological systems can support rapidly shifting, highly tunable, and even simultaneous temporary assemblages of interacting unconscious cognitive modules. The discovery implies various animal taxa exhibiting behaviors we broadly recognize as conscious are, (...) in fact, expressing different forms of the same underlying phenomenon. The variety of possibilities suggests minds today may be only a small surviving fraction of ancient evolutionary radiations – bush phylogenies of consciousness pruned by selection and chance extinction. Although few traces of the radiations may be found in the fossil record, exaptations and vestiges are scattered across the living mind. (shrink)

In De myst. 1.11–18 , Andokides reports a series of four judicial denunciations , made before the Athenians on four separate occasions in 415 B.c., concerning profanations of the Eleusinian Mysteries. After statements from the slave Andromachos and the metic Teukros, ‘a third denunciation followed. The wife of Alkmaionides, who had also been the wife of Damon, a woman named Agariste, made a denunciation that in the house of Charmides beside the Olympieion, Alkibiades, Axiochos and Adeimantos celebrated mysteries. And at (...) this denunciation all these men fled’ . A fourth denunciation was made by the slave Lydos. (shrink)

To judge from extant sources, after Homer until the late Hellenistic period no Greek man ever publicly stated that he loved his wife. By contrast, after Homer elite men often stated that they loved particular adolescent males. This essay explores possible reasons for these differences from more recent practice, and their progressive modification. Starting in the later fifth century, men might publicly state that they loved their dead wives. In New Comedy and then Hellenistic epigram, a young man might state (...) that he loved a girl. Only the Greek novel, from the late Hellenistic age, expresses complete heterosexual love, although the readership of this genre may have been female. (shrink)

Evolution is littered with paraphyletic convergences: many roads lead to functional Romes. We propose here another example - an equivalence class structure factoring the broad realm of possible realizations of the Baars Global Workspace consciousness model. The construction suggests many different physiological systems can support rapidly shifting, sometimes highly tunable, temporary assemblages of interacting unconscious cognitive modules. The discovery implies various animal taxa exhibiting behaviors we broadly recognize as conscious are, in fact, simply expressing different forms of the same underlying (...) phenomenon. Mathematically, we find much slower, and even multiple simultaneous, versions of the basic structure can operate over very long timescales, a kind of paraconsciousness often ascribed to group phenomena. The variety of possibilities, a veritable rainbow, suggests minds today may be only a small surviving fraction of ancient evolutionary radiations - bush phylogenies of consciousness and paraconsciousness. Under this scenario, the resulting diversity was subsequently pruned by selection and chance extinction. Though few traces of the radiation may be found in the direct fossil record, exaptations and vestiges are scattered across the living mind. Humans, for instance, display an uncommonly profound synergism between individual consciousness and their embedding cultural heritages, enabling efficient Lamarkian adaptation. (shrink)

468 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 right that this distinction need not be a problem for Kant's, or his own, account. Indeed, further discussion of this could be the basis for defending both empirical explanation and a more interpretive or phenomenological understanding of events. But Hudson does not provide this discussion, and without it the "thinkability" of the free agency description is weak. Hudson himself seems uncertain at times as to how much authority to grant to (...) this thinkability. He says, for example, in his Chapter 5 discussion of freedom, that "our first conception of freedom is a causality of reason through which we choose and act on some maxim or law" . Hudson's claim of adequacy for a descrip- tion that does not admit of explanatory certitude demands a more complete defense. This issue highlights, perhaps, the challenges of interpreting.. (shrink)

Personal freedom, «living as you like», was a cardinal principal of Athens’ democracy and nearly always a daily reality for its citizens. Yet despite Athens’ ideologies and often extraordinary tolerance, what some consider significant violations of freedom also occurred; in particular, the Athenians reportedly prosecuted many intellectuals . All this has raised doubts about personal freedoms at Athens. Did these freedoms exist? Many deny it, including Isaiah Berlin in his famous essays On Liberty. Many modern democracies are guided by the (...) principle of the primacy of the individual over the state, and the paramount importance of protecting individual liberties. But among the Athenians the community came first. The thread linking Athenian violations of their deeply felt democratic ideology of «living as you like» was the priority of community interests. Drunkenness, wasting money, even doubting the gods were not regulated, if no one else was harmed. But the community came first. The Athenians punished those who harmed the polis. Private citizens were left free to live as they wished. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Justice of the GreeksRobert W. WallaceSealey, Raphael. The Justice of the Greeks. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Pp. xiii 1 164.Over the last fifteen years research in Greek law has expanded rapidly, especially in Anglo-American countries. In consequence, significant differences of approach to this material have become apparent. The older, juristic approach is largely continental, where the living tradition of Roman law as the basis (...) for current legal codes has meant that most Greek legal historians first studied Roman law, were trained as lawyers, and now teach in law schools. By contrast, most Anglo-Americans now working in this field were trained as ancient historians or philologists. They know little of Roman or modern law and mostly care less about it, arguing that most Greek legislation was unsystematic, arising piecemeal in response to interpersonal or community problems. For these scholars, a juristic approach to Greek law is sometimes even misleading: sociology and anthropology offer more appropriate methodologies. Sealey places his new book squarely in the continental tradition. He expressly rejects sociology (22), and modestly announces his intention to publicize the work of Wolff, Ruschenbusch, and Thür (ix–x). However, S. also was trained as a historian and philologist. How far does his book add to the juristic tradition of Greek legal scholarship? And how far does it make its own, historical contribution? [End Page 130]“This book is an inquiry into the rule of law,” its first sentence declares. It is not always that, but rather, a wide-ranging exposition of various questions about Greek law, which ruled and in some areas (S. indicates) failed to rule. S.’s book offers a number of lucid, courteous discussions, presented sometimes in a paratactic way, but conveying overall a sense of chronological development. Its general intention is “to discover the historical contribution of Greek thought to the field of law, justice, and right... [and] to discover principles, concepts, and aims that underlay the development of law in Greek cities” (133). With a scope so large, the book is often too brief. With rapid strokes S. adopts positions typically without evaluating much of the scholarship regarding them. Some arguments S. has made before. He repeats them despite previous criticisms. S. includes several lengthy discussions of Roman and Near Eastern law, typically to illustrate differences with Greece. This may contrast with legal anthropologists, who illuminate Greek practices through comparative materials. Although S. adopts various hypotheses of his continental colleagues, it is not his purpose to add much to their arguments. More significantly, despite S.’s intention to find “the historical contribution of Greek thought to the field of law, justice, and right,” it remains unclear that the Greeks made such a contribution. As S. himself says, the Greeks “did not recognize an underlying body of thought expressed” in particular laws (59). By contrast, in smaller instances and in his general conclusions regarding the “principles, concepts, and aims” underlying Greek law, the positive results of S.’s work are historical, and even sociological.Chapter 1, “Scope of the Inquiry,” is perhaps most problematic. S. begins with the role of law in society, the meaning of the term “law,” and philosophical discussions of the nature of law especially in Savigny (7–9). Having set out objections to Savigny’s thesis that every nation’s civil law springs from, and remains true to, its distinctive character or historical circumstances (9–12), S. concludes, somewhat abruptly, that Savigny’s great merit was his recognition that “law can develop without statutory enactment and that the development stays within limits or follows lines that can be discerned” (12). It is so far unclear how Savigny’s thesis pertains to ancient Greece. It remains so during S.’s three illustrations of the development of Greek law beyond statutory enactment, in atimia, testimentary practice, and the marriage of heiresses (12–19). Indeed, it turns out, S. largely rejects Savigny’s primary insight (21–22). For S., laws are shaped not by national character but by “an underlying body of thought” characteristic of the society. Accordingly, S. concludes, the legal historian must fit specific legal provisions into their wider legal and intellectual context... (shrink)

Despite the Athenians’ pronounced ideology of personal freedom , many scholars deny that they enjoyed either positive freedoms or negative freedoms, where the state could intervene as it wished, as against Sokrates for his religious views. The current essay argues that in their personal lives the Athenians were entirely free, except when speech or action materially harmed the community. A second ideology that community welfare superseded the wishes of any citizen was both universal and paramount – even for Plato’s Sokrates.