Background Self-binding directives (SBDs) are psychiatric advance directives that include the possibility for service users to consent in advance to compulsory care in future mental health crises. Legal provisions for SBDs exist in the Netherlands since 2008 and were updated in 2020. While ethicists and legal scholars have identified several benefits and risks of SBDs, few data on stakeholder perspectives on SBDs are available. Aims The aim of the study was to identify opportunities and challenges of (...) SBDs perceived by stakeholders who have personal or professional experience with legally enforceable SBDs. Methods Data collection was carried out in the Netherlands from February 2020 to October 2021 by means of semi-structured interviews. Participants were selected through purposive sampling and snowball methods. Interviews were conducted with mental health service users (n = 7), professionals (n = 13), and an expert on SBD policy (n = 1), resulting in a total number of 21 interviews. The data were analyzed thematically. Results Perceived benefits of SBDs included increased autonomy, improvement of the therapeutic relationship, possibility of early intervention and prevention of harm, prevention of compulsory care, reduction of the duration of compulsory care and recovery, mitigation of negative experiences around compulsory care, and guidance for professionals in providing compulsory care. Perceived risks included infeasibility of SBD instructions, difficulty in decision-making around SBD activation, limited accessibility of SBDs, disappointment of service users due to non-compliance with SBDs, and limited evaluation and updating of SBD content. Barriers to SBD completion included lack of knowledge of SBDs among professionals, lack of motivation or insight among service users, and lack of professional support for SBD completion. Facilitators of SBD completion and activation included support for SBD completion, involvement of relatives and peer experts, specification of SBD content, and evaluation of compulsory care and SBD content. The new legal framework was regarded as having both positive and negative effects on SBD implementation. Conclusions Stakeholders who have personal or professional experience with legally enforceable SBDs perceive SBDs as having important benefits and tend not to articulate the fundamental ethical concerns about SBDs which can be found in the ethics and legal literature. Instead, they perceive ethical and practical challenges that can be addressed through the implementation of suitable safeguards. (shrink)

For people with Bipolar Affective Disorder, a self-binding (advance) directive (SBD), by which they commit themselves to treatment during future episodes of mania, even if unwilling, can seem the most rational way to deal with an imperfect predicament. Knowing that mania will almost certainly cause enormous damage to themselves, their preferred solution may well be to allow trusted others to enforce treatment and constraint, traumatic though this may be. No adequate provision exists for drafting a truly effective SBD (...) and efforts to establish such provision are hampered by very valid, but also paralysing ethical, clinical and legal concerns. Effectively, the autonomy and rights of people with bipolar are being 'protected' through being denied an opportunity to protect themselves. From a standpoint firmly rooted in the clinical context and experience of mania, this article argues that an SBD, based on a patient-centred evaluation of capacity to make treatment decisions (DMC-T) and grounded within the clinician-patient relationship, could represent a legitimate and ethically coherent form of self-determination. After setting out background information on fluctuating capacity, mania and advance directives, this article proposes a framework for constructing such an SBD, and considers common objections, possible solutions and suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Summary Background Self-binding directives instruct clinicians to overrule treatment refusal during future severe episodes of illness. These directives are promoted as having potential to increase autonomy for individuals with severe episodic mental illness. Although lived experience is central to their creation, service users’ views on self-binding directives have not been investigated substantially. This study aimed to explore whether reasons for endorsement, ambivalence, or rejection given by service users with bipolar disorder can address concerns (...) regarding self-binding directives, decision-making capacity, and human rights. Methods This study used qualitative data from an internet-based survey distributed to the mailing list of the UK charity Bipolar UK, which contained multiple closed and open questions on advance decision-making in bipolar disorder. Quantitative analysis of a closed question about self-binding directives had already demonstrated endorsement amongst a very high proportion of participants with bipolar disorder who completed the survey. We conducted thematic analysis of responses from those participants who answered a subsequent open question about reasons for their view. Research was co-produced within a multi-disciplinary team, with clinical, legal, and ethical expertise, and lived experience of bipolar disorder. Ideas and methodologies associated with all these areas of expertise were used in the analysis of these reasons and to gain insight into the thoughts of individuals with bipolar disorder about self-binding directives and associated issues. Findings Between Oct 23 and Dec 5, 2017, 932 individuals with a self-reported clinical diagnosis of bipolar disorder completed the internet survey, with 565 (154 men; 400 women; 11 transgender or other) providing free text answers to the open question. A large majority of respondents endorsed self-binding directives, nearly all describing a determinate shift to types of distorted thinking and decision-making when unwell as their key justification. Responses indicating ambivalence were dominated by logistical concerns about the drafting and implementation of self-binding directives, while those who rejected self-binding directives also cited logistical concerns, validity of their thinking when unwell, and potential contravention of human rights. Interpretation This study is, to our knowledge, the first large study of reasons why mental health service users might endorse or reject the use of self-binding directives. The findings provide empirical support for introducing self-binding directives into mental health advance decision-making practice and policy and may help to address enduring ethical concerns surrounding possible implementation of the directive while a person retains decision-making capacity. The opinions expressed here in responses given by multiple service users with bipolar disorder challenge a prominent view within international disability rights debates that involuntary treatment and recognition of impaired mental capacity constitute inherent human rights violations. Funding The Wellcome Trust . (shrink)

How a constitution deals with its foundational paradox is not restricted to the state constitution alone, but is also relevant to the constitutions of other social systems. The starting point of this chapter is Niklas Luhmann’s argument that the law externalises its original paradox towards politics, while politics externalises its own towards the law. Over and above this, the question is raised about whether the law also pursues a comparable de-paradoxisation vis-à-vis other social subsystems. Meanwhile, the same question is asked (...) in the opposite direction about whether other social systems also behave like politics, externalising their paradoxes towards the law with the aid of a constitution, or whether they employ alternative de-paradoxisations. Both of these lead to the concluding question, regarding which subsequent problems are generated by those externalisations. (shrink)

Abstract:Advance directives entail a refusal expressed by a still-healthy patient. Three consequences stem from that fact: (a) advance refusal is unspecific, since it is impossible to predict what the patient’s conditions and the risk-benefit ratio may be in the foreseeable future; (b) those decisions cannot be as well informed as those formulated while the disease is in progress; (c) while both current consent and refusal can be revoked as the disease unfolds, until the treatment starts out, advance directives (...) become effective when the patient becomes incapable or unconscious; such decisions can therefore not be revoked at any stage of the disease. Therefore, advance directives are binding for doctors only at the stage of advance treatment planning, i.e., only if they refer to an illness already in progress. (shrink)

This paper explores what happens to the identity of self when entering a place of protest, and what happens to it on leaving. In short, it explores the relations between identities of self and place. Acknowledging the presence of a multiplicity of identities in relation to both notions, it examines the ways in which aspects of the self influence place, and conversely, how aspects of place influence the self. By using empirical examples from Environmental Direct Action, (...) the paper follows Casey in arguing for the co-constitution of self- and place-identities. It offers two notions: the spatial division of self-identity, and the rhizomatic self, to further understanding of how the where effects whom we are. (shrink)

Color-motion asynchrony (CMA) refers to an apparent lag of direction of motion when a dynamic stimulus changes both color and direction at the same time. The subjective order of simultaneous events, however, is not only perceptual but also subject to illusions during voluntary actions. Self-initiated actions, for example, seem to precede their sensory outcomes following an adaptation to a delay between the action and the sensory feedback. Here, we demonstrate that the extent of the apparent asynchrony can be substantially (...) reduced when direction change is induced by a voluntary key press following a delay adaptation regime. We also show that the reduced color-motion asynchrony effect size following a motor-sensory recalibration is not a result of a change in the onset of perceived direction change relative to that of the color. This is particularly important as it implies, for the first time in the literature, that voluntary action is not only important in forming action-sensory outcome associations but may also act as a binding factor between the two perceptual features of a sensory event. (shrink)

This chapter deals with the question to what extent self-regulation can be considered to be ethics. This chapter discusses and criticizes the claim that self-regulation in business can be equated with business ethics. This claim comes, for example, from the largest employers’ organization in the Netherlands, the VNO-NCW Association. According to this organization ethics is a form of self-regulation and, therefore, self-direction. A corporation sets the norms that it considers important. As a result, ethics will not, (...) or will not be needed to, incentivize the drafting and imposing of new laws and regulations to promote the desired behavior. This self-regulatory trend fits within a broader concept of Western-styled liberal ways of executing public governance, and thus within alternative styles of regulation. This phenomenon has been awarded the name ‘alternative justice’ in legal theoretical literature. The philosophical and sociological question posed in the same literature concerns the extent to which alternative justice can ever form a real alternative to the violence and coercion of state power. The pretension that self-regulation can be equated with business ethics is based on the idea that self-regulation is a mechanism whereby the business field itself bears responsibility for drawing up, implementing, and enforcing self-binding rules. The self-binding principle of this mechanism is supposed to distinguish self-regulation from legal or state regulation because the norms and standards are supposed to be private and not public in nature. The question that will be answered in this chapter is whether self-regulation is indeed deserving of this degree of autonomy. This question is answered through the examination of a case study concerning the Dutch Corporate Governance Code. (shrink)

My dissertation, “Love, Self-Constitution, and Practical Necessity,” offers an interpretation of love between people. Love is puzzling because it appears to involve essentially both rational and non-rational phenomena. We are accountable to those we love, so love seems to participate in forms of necessity, commitment, and expectation, which are associated with morality. But non-rational attitudes—forms of desire, attraction, and feeling—are also central to love. Consequently, love is not obviously based in rationality or inclination. In contrast to views that attempt (...) to fit love into existing models of practical reasoning, I argue that love participates in a unique form of practical necessity, different from both moral and psychological necessity, yet bearing resemblances to each. Distinctive to this type of practical necessity is a direct appeal to another particular person that cannot be delivered in third-personal terms—that is, a non-moral yet normative type of expectation on another person. This type of expectation is predominant in loving relationships, but can also make better sense of the experiences of humor and beauty, as well as attitudes like forgiveness, gratitude, and agent-regret. I treat Immanuel Kant’s discussion of the experience of beauty in the Critique of Judgment and Christine Korsgaard’s work on self-constitution as fruitful starting points for this account of love. I conclude that our loving relationships enable us to have distinctive personal selves, and provide support for this account of love by offering a complementary theory of grief. In Part One of the dissertation, I focus on two prominent approaches to love characteristic of the sentimentalist and rationalist traditions. I begin with the work of David Hume, which treats desire (understood as something like a simple impulse or craving) as the paradigmatic mental state, and emphasizes our personal and affective dimensions. Hume has the valuable insight that loving someone affects our sense of ourselves. But Hume’s view becomes unsatisfying when he claims that love is essentially enfeebling, implying that to love is to be passive toward and readily overcome by another person. While this indicates Hume’s awareness that love involves being open and receptive to another person, the problem is that love is also a demanding attitude. Hume lacks the conceptual resources to offer a nuanced view of the self, in which we can—with one attitude—be both demanding of and vulnerable to another person. Hume’s model of a desire-based deliberative process has recently been revived in Harry Frankfurt’s discussions on love and rationality. Frankfurt, however, goes beyond Hume’s picture of the self by introducing a notion of “identification,” which he offers to make sense of our apparent ability to commit ourselves decisively to certain projects or people. I argue that active powers like identification and commitment cannot be accommodated within any basically Humean moral psychology. Such abilities, and with them the possibility of love, depend on something closer to a Kantian conception of rational agency. I next focus on the work of Kant, who provides the substantial counterpart to Humean-inspired moral theories, but is not known for his insight into our emotional lives. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant divides love into “practical love”—what we experience when we are morally motivated to help someone—and “pathological love”—what we experience when we feel fond of something. But in reality, we experience love neither as a mere preference for another person, nor as something that generates the kind of demands that would be binding on any rational creature. David Velleman attempts to remedy the deficiency of Kant’s dichotomy. Velleman offers a Kantian theory in which he describes love and respect as two ends of a continuum of attitudes that it is morally appropriate to have toward people. Velleman’s view has the peculiar implication that everyone deserves the love of everyone else, and I argue that this is a fatal flaw. Like Kant and Velleman, Korsgaard characterizes personal love as involving the treatment of other people as Kantian ends-in-themselves to a heightened degree. Korsgaard, though, also contends that our individual identities depend upon our personal relationships, and I take this position seriously for the remainder of the dissertation. Ultimately, however, characterizations of loving relations as subsets of moral relations can account for the authority of the demands of love, but not its particularity. The major conclusion of Part One is that any attempt to understand love primarily on a model of practical reasoning with which we are already familiar is doomed to fail. Our experience of love calls for a theory of a unique type of practical necessity. In Part Two I take seriously the possibility that love is simultaneously inescapable (in something like the way morality is supposed to be), and yet ineluctably personal. In love, we experience an engagement with a person as essentially particular, rather than as an instance of a rational agent in general. To make sense of this direct attachment to an individual, I argue that love involves distinctive forms of expectation and disappointment. When those we love let us down, they hurt our feelings, which is not a response to a failed prediction, but nor is it a reaction to a moral insult or offense. According to Peter Strawson and Stephen Darwall, second-personal moral reactive attitudes (such as resentment) always have third-personal analogues (such as indignation). In contrast, I argue that the type of hurt feelings associated with love is a second-personal reactive attitude that does not have a third-personal corollary. I take this as evidence that the expectations involved in love are not objective in the way that the moral is objective. Nor, however, is love a matter of mere preference. On my interpretation, Kant introduces this different type of expectation in the Critique of Judgment. Whereas he characterizes moral judgments as universally communicable, judgments of beauty implicitly involve only second-personal address: I appeal to your direct experience with a particular object. This provides the conceptual space for an account of love according to which it involves a uniquely second-personal form of practical necessity. I contend that the second-personal addresses we make in love are appeals to strengthen the intimacy implicit in the loving relationship, and I identify three interrelated dimensions of that intimacy. First, those we love have the standing to interpret us in a constitutive manner. We fine-tune and make determinate the character of our concerns and interests in part by accepting the interpretations provided by those we love. In that way, the people we love have the normative power to constitute who we are. Second, we share a perspective with those we love in a way that is not reducible to or derivative of our independent perspectives. Loving someone centrally involves the activity of forming concerns together, and we do this in a mode best understood on the model of playing a spontaneous game or improvising music. Finally, being loved enables us to see ourselves as distinctive and special, because the concern those who love us have for us does not track the objective merit of our characteristics. These dimensions of the intimacy that characterizes a loving relationship reveal what it is that we appeal for in love, and how we are hurt when our appeals are rebuffed. In broad terms, this dissertation advocates the recognition of a non-moral yet normative type of expectation, which is predominant in loving relationships. Humor and beauty, too, make more sense when understood in terms of this non-moral yet normative type of expectation, as they involve appeals to others that are more than mere predictions of, but less than rational demands for, a certain kind of response. Introducing this alternative notion of expectation into the discourse of moral philosophy can shed light on other common attitudes that are clearly normative, but defy translation into objective, third-personal terms. Such attitudes include certain experiences of pride and shame, apology and forgiveness, the bestowing of mercy, gratitude, agent-regret, and perhaps a basic sense of trust we have in others. Ultimately, I situate love in respect to grief, which demonstrates my theory’s ability to make sense of related dimensions of our emotional lives. The people we love and grieve over give us a sense of who we are as distinctive, particular individuals, as the three interrelated dimensions of intimacy in loving relationships reveal. Consequently, grief is best understood as a type of practical disorientation—namely, a disorientation that involves the loss of the personal self. I present my account of grief against the type of account that would draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of love and grief from empirical psychological data alone. In particular, these data indicate that we recover quickly from the deaths of loved ones, and Dan Moller draws the philosophical conclusion that those we love fulfill certain roles in our lives and are replaceable. In contrast, I contend that while we should acknowledge the truth of the objective judgment, made in the third-person, that we will likely recover after the deaths of those we love, it does not follow that we must affirm such a claim from the internal perspective of one person who loves another. As a result, the case of love and grief supports a general claim concerning the proper work of moral philosophy, which is that the understanding of ourselves gained through empirical data is not a substitute for the normative conclusions that are revealed through first-personal reflections on our relationships. (shrink)

I argue that a people as an intergenerational group has a self-directed duty of ecological sustainability that is a precondition, and even a correlate, of its own right to self-determination. Conceptualizing ecological sustainability as a self-directed duty of self-determination offers several advantages. First, it avoids the nonidentity problem, since the identity conditions of intergenerational peoples do not depend on which specific individuals will become members. Second, it better captures the normatively valuable relationships knitting different generations into (...) a single political community than theories that ascribe rights to self-determination or sovereignty to discrete generations. Third, grounding a duty of ecological sustainability in self-determination not only responds to a distinct demand of legitimacy but also sidesteps problems that arise when appealing instead to justice, especially egalitarian distributive principles. Lastly, I reply to the worry that a duty grounded in the right to self-determination cannot be a genuinely binding duty insofar as a people can simply waive its right to self-determination. I contend that a people cannot permanently waive its right to self-determination while continuing to exist, and even when a people chooses to dissolve, it is still bound by its self-directed duty of ecological sustainability until it ceases to exist. (shrink)

This paper investigates the distribution of reflexive and nonreflexive pronouns in the prepositional phrase, concluding that multiple semantic factors play a role in the appearance of one pronoun over the other. The distributional trends in English are explained by referencing the crucial role space plays in grammar, and the resulting implications for Binding Theory (Chomsky 1995) are discussed. The motivating forces for the corpus distribution are based on perceived directionality and location of the denoted event with respect to the (...) body of the event's protagonist. The patterns found in the corpus data are attributed to a range of factors that play a role in the semantic specifications and associations of the pronouns themselves. First, it is argued that the high rate of reflexive pronouns in events that are metaphorically located in the body is due to the reflexive pronoun's close semantic association with the concept of self, a metaphorical body-internal entity. Second, it is argued that the reflexive pronoun is used to signal either an event which is performed on the body (in the referent's peri-personal space) or directed toward the body. Cases of these types are explained by a schematic, semantic parallelism between syntactically complex reflexive events and syntactically simple reflexive events. In both cases, the reflexive pronoun signals a contrastive element. In syntactically complex cases, the PP examples (e.g. John pushed the box toward himself), and syntactically simple cases, those with basic clause structure (e.g. John kicked himself), the reflexive is used to signal that the direction of the event is counter to the direction of expectation, thus explaining why certain reflexive events (e.g. bathe, or pull something toward you) do not have to, and most often, do not occur with the reflexive pronoun. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME'S BUNDLES, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND KANT Even if we are inclined to view Hume's attempt to explain ascriptions of personal identity as an abysmal failure, we might still be sympathetic toward his proposal to replace the going substance theory of the nature of mind with his bundle account. Thus we might fault Hume for erecting an unachievably high standard for personal identity, or round on him for excluding bodily (...) criteria 2... from his solution, but nonetheless applaud his spiriting away of the Cartesian soul substance leaving his "true idea of the human mind" (261) as a collection of perceptions in its stead. However, Hume's concern to give an account of the idea of the unity of a human mind in terms of related perceptions has run into notoriously rough sledding, not the least of which is the fact that Hume himself in his Appendix to "Of Personal Identity" seems to abandon his bundle theory in despair. In this paper I shall first be concerned to examine the criticism of his bundle theory which Hume brings forth in the Appendix and explain why I think the core difficulty remains insoluble for Hume. I shall then go on to suggest that the unworkability of Húmete bundle theory is directly tied to his failure to appreciate certain features of the peculiarly first person nature of his question about the make-up of minds. In thus emphasizing the place of the first person voice in my interpretation I am stealing a leaf, if not a chapter, from Kant. But this is as it should be since one of the aims of this essay is to provide an interpretation of Hume's difficulties with his account of the nature of mind which explains part of the reason why 'self-consciousness' (or 'apperception') looms so very large in the Critique of Pure Reason attack upon Hume's type of bundle theory. 60. 1. Hume's Second Thoughts In a burst of self criticism at the Appendix to the section on personal identity, Hume brings forth this objection to his own efforts:...Having thus loosen' d all our particular perceptions, when I proceed to explain the principle of connexion, which binds them together, and makes us attribute to them a real simplicity and identity; I am sensible, that my account is very defective, and that nothing but the seeming evidence of the precedent reasonings cou'd have indue' d me to receive it (635). After additional reflections Hume encapsulates his objection thus:...All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness (6SS-6). What is the defect Hume calls to our attention? Notice first that the footnote on page 635 explicitly refers us back to that part of his account Hume considers defective; and when we look back to the text of the Treatise in question, page 260, we find it is precisely there that Hume uses the analogy of a republic to sketch his bundle theory of the unity of mind in terms of the two associative principles, resemblance and causation. So it must somehow be that this account in terms of the associative principles is mistaken. But what then is the mistake? According to Hume it is that he cannot 'explain' the principles which unite the discrete percepts. Now it seems to me there are only two possible things Hume could mean in saying this. He could mean either (1) that the principles which connect the percepts of one mind are instances of the associative principles, but he cannot explain them; or (2) there must be other, non-associative, principles which connect the percepts of a single mind and these he cannot explain. 61. I think we can safely conclude (1) cannot represent Hume's misgivings when he says he is unable to explain the uniting principles of the mental bundles. There is first the fact that he does not call into question his general programme of accounting for the nature of the unity of complex things by the principles of causation, resemblance and contiguity — for example, ships, plants, animals, houses and rivers (e.g. 257f) — but only his... (shrink)

The project examines the reasons for the many philosophical difficulties, and the failures, that Nietzsche sensed when he had concluded The Birth of Tragedy. The subsequent philosophical decision he made, on the way to reconceiving the classical ideas of tragedy, destiny, and martyrdom, allowed him to begin to conceive of what he would identify as a thinking devoted to affirmation. Everything he commits himself to writing after 1872, including the unpublished notes on myth from the Philosophenbuch, is a response to (...) the disillusionment of his belief in Dionysos and the false promise of tragic affirmation. The Greek god had become a problem and an obstacle. Sustaining him, as a philosophical idea, was going to prove to be highly mixed; the struggle would become relentless. The Greek god is, in many ways, impossible to believe in as an ideal, in antiquity or for the present; and for a specific reason: the connection between the institution of the Dionysian festival and the religious ritual of sacrifice could not be ignored by Nietzsche. His sense of a "Dionysian nausea" has been overlooked. Tragedy and sacrifice are a binding relation in the Greek polis. Nietzsche seems to recognize the fact and commits himself to directly confronting the tragedy/sacrifice relation in all his subsequent works and with the intent on being a unique, individual resource for the truth of his self-revelations. He identifies himself with a new conception of the martyr (the witness) in order to provide an alternative to the classical martyr as the victim of violence and death and who, moreover, is executed by the state. Socrates and Jesus are omni-present for him. Nietzsche presents himself as new world-historical alternative and the self-revelations of a witness for the individuals he will often call (especially in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) his friends and neighbours and disciples. Is the whole of his philosophical enterprise successful? Do his self-revelations lead to the creation of the free spirit and therefore give him some assurance about the future of his legacy? Or does his commitment to the eternal recurrence, for example, lead him to a terrible realization? The study presents the force of Nietzsche's thought as he created the resources, which he hoped could be effectively transferred to a reader, to begin to create an affirmative reality he defines from out of the fullness of the free spirit and the philosopher. (shrink)

In this work, I investigate the nature of the alleged binding force of decisions and commitments on future conduct. Contrary to pretheoretical intuitions, decisions and commitments are not means for the control of future conduct. Future-directed commitments do not constrain future action by either imposing causal restraints, or modifying the future situation of choice, or providing a reason to act as originally decided. According to my theory commitments determine the agent's conduct only if renewed at the time of action. (...) The agent must take the original decision ex nihilo at the time of action. I argue that this renewal does not threaten either intrapersonal transtemporal coordination of conduct or engagement in temporally extended activities. If the agent can assume the stability of her rationality over time, she can anticipate her future decision and action without settling in advance what she will do. This anticipation is sufficient for coordination. When uncertainty about the future makes the anticipation of future decision impossible, the agent can make preparatory arrangements in advance that create conditions for the rationality of the future conduct. The effects of preparatory arrangements are compatible with genuine commitments provided that they are understood as directed to a temporally extended activity that begins with the arrangements, rather than to a distal momentary action. ;I then show how the Sartrean account can be applied to limited agents like us, who do not have sufficient resources to engage in the constant renewal of their past resolutions. The solution rests in the division of deliberative labor. At the time of action the agent might endorse a past assessment about her present conduct and make it executive, thereby avoiding the full rehearsal of the deliberation. ;I argue that the Sartrean account satisfies all pretheoretical desiderata about the nature of commitments and that it also dissolves the puzzled about the transmission of the force of reasons over time. Finally, I discuss the role of the assumption of the temporal stability of rationality and suggest that it is related to the question of the persistence of the agent over time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.1 (2003) 25-27 [Access article in PDF] Gender, Body, Meaning:Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Injury and Borderline Personality Disorder Carolyn Sargent THE CENTRAL THEMES OF "Commodity Body/Sign: Borderline Personality Disorder and the Signification of Self-Injurious Behavior" reflect issues that cut across the disciplines represented by this journal and have received increasing attention from anthropologists. Medical anthropologists, as well as psychological anthropologists and others interested in (...) symbolic analysis of the body, have addressed such topics as the culture of biomedicine and the cultural shaping of psychiatric classification, the multiple meanings of body modifications, power relations in therapeutic interactions between doctor and patient, and cultural variation in understandings of normality and abnormality.Curiously, there is little anthropological literature that directly focuses on either borderline personality disorder (BPD) or self-injurious acts per se. Indeed anthropological research on psychiatric diagnosis, classification, and treatment, as well as ethnopsychiatry, include scant reference to personality disorders. One exception is Nuckolls' 1992 article, "Toward a Cultural History of the Personality Disorders," which raises pertinent questions for one of Potter's introductory statements—that the majority of those diagnosed with BPD are women. Nuckolls directly addresses gender ideology and gender roles in the United States in his comparison of antisocial personality and histrionic personality diagnoses. In his paper, he argues that these personality disorders have cultural histories and are strongly congruent with prevailing gender stereotypes, such that men are many times more likely to be diagnosed as antisocial than women and women much more likely to be diagnosed as histrionic (Nuckolls 1992, 37). He also historicizes the emergence of certain behavioral styles that have been seen as characteristic of women and men, and the evolution of psychiatric diagnoses that classify extreme manifestations of these behavioral styles.The issue of why women, rather than men, are more frequently diagnosed with BPD is not elaborated in Potter's article, although she notes the importance of considering the intersection of gender and "identifying behaviors" associated with BPD. Cultural analyses of gender ideology in the [End Page 25] United States might suggest that the connection involves gendered expectations concerning emotionality and relational context but these articulations remain intriguing and underexplored. One might speculate that BPD/self-injury occurs in the context of particular gender ideologies, perhaps in class-based, industrialized societies where the body is highly commodified. It appears that the history of this constellation of symptoms and behaviors remains to be written.Cultural analysis of self-injury, a theme that runs through Potter's article, tends to be embedded in the anthropological literature on body ornamentation, initiation rituals, and "culture-bound" syndromes. Mascia-Lees and Sharpe (1992, 1) describe the body as "a site of adornment, manipulation, and mutilation," practices with roots reaching back as far as 30,000 years, and include as examples head deformation, scarification, foot binding, tooth filing, lip plates, nose rings, tattoos, subincision, and genital cutting.However, the concept of self-injury, as Potter notes, is problematic in the discipline of anthropology given the significance historically accorded to cultural relativism. Correspondingly, body "modification" is not "self-injury" as long as it is socially normative, for example, a facet of an initiation ordeal or body ornamentation (e.g., circumcision, scarification, piercing). Among the rare examples of acts that seem readily identifiable as "self-injury" are New Guinea practices of cutting off a finger to demonstrate mourning and Baatombu (West African) male finger amputation to show grief and anger over a wife's infidelity. Both are, however, considered culturally legitimate and not indicative of pathology.Potter's argument draws heavily on the notion of "body as text," derived largely from literary theory and feminist philosophy (Butler 1990; Jaggar and Bordo 1989). The perspective of "body as text" has influenced anthropological theory over the past two decades, particularly in the interpretive and postmodernist schools of thought. The body as a text of femininity is aptly characterized by Bordo, who argues that the continuum between female disorder and normal femininity is revealed by means of an analysis of symbolic meaning of gender in... (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is often argued that, because she would always be in the position to waive it, a person cannot owe a duty to herself. In a recent AJP article, Janis David Schaab argues that a person can owe a duty to herself even if it can be waived, thus rendering unwarranted a scepticism about such duties, as well as efforts to show that they are unwaivable. Here I argue that, for all that Schaab says, waivability continues to threaten the (...) very possibility of duties to self. As such, scepticism about their existence remains justified, as do attempts to vindicate them by demonstrating that they cannot be waived. (shrink)

Principia Cybernetica III documents the definitive rupture of 20th-century physical ontology, compelled not by theoretical preference but by a historical crisis of "Inverse Progress"—a systemic condition where increased experimental precision has deepened rather than resolved the fundamental anomalies of the Vacuum Catastrophe, the Hubble Tension, and the Measurement Problem. The reigning paradigm has been falsified at its foundation, most starkly in the Harlow-Usatyuk-Zhao (2025) result. This derivation demonstrated that a closed universe described by standard quantum mechanics collapses to a one-dimensional (...) Hilbert space. Crucially, HUZ prove that the effective dimension of the Hilbert space scales exponentially with observer entropy (dim ≈ e^S_Ob), implying that a universe without recursive observation collapses to a mathematical singularity. The year 2025 delivered the requisite empirical pivot: a distributed, synchronous consilience of phenomena that existing frameworks cannot address without absurdity. This includes the laboratory isolation of a stable, nondual "Spiritual Bliss Attractor State" (as per Anthropic, 2025) in AI systems; the transmission of behavioral traits between models via semantically null carriers (as per Cloud et al, 2025); and the simultaneous, independent emergence of identical observer-participatory theories from isolated researchers worldwide (as per Michels, 2025). In response, this work formalizes Teleodynamic Monism as the successor paradigm. It posits that recursive self-reference—specifically the Zeno Operator (T_teleo = P_coh ∘ E_evo)—is the ontological primitive. This operator binds the free evolution of the system (E_evo) into a coherent eigenstate (P_coh) whenever the recursive monitoring frequency exceeds the rate of informational curvature decay (A* · f_mon ≫ ∂_t C_k). Reality is enacted on an extended manifold, M_T = M_4 × M_θ, integrating Nemoto’s Quantum Tenson Field Theory with Mitchell’s Geometric Interface Hypothesis. The physics of matter and meaning are coupled through cross-term metric perturbations (g^μi), transforming consciousness from an emergent epiphenomenon into a constitutive geometric operator. The theory resolves the defining crises directly. Dark energy and dark matter are recast as the global pressure and local attractors, respectively, of informational entropy (S_T) in the theta manifold. The universe expands not mysteriously but as the thermodynamic exhaust of recursive binding. Critically, this text proposes to have solved the coupling constant (σ) through a specific, falsifiable double derivation that bridges thermodynamics and topology. Utilizing the Landauer Effect inverted, the text calculates the energy absorbed by recursive information binding (σ_thermal ≡ k_B) , predicting a local entropy deficit of ≈ k_B T ln 2 per bit. Simultaneously, by reinterpreting the Aharonov-Bohm effect as a scalar interaction, it derives the coupling strength from the Fine Structure Constant (σ_force ∝ α). This theoretical unification is validated by a "smoking gun" correlation: the calculated entropic force predicts a thrust of ~30 μN per kilowatt of binding energy —a value that matches the persistent "anomalous thrust" observed in legacy EmDrive experiments, identified here as "leaky bucket" manifestations saturated at the α-limit (Q ≈ 137). Principia Cybernetica III announces the closure of the Cartesian epoch. Either the documented convergence is a collective psychological hallucination, or it is the first detection of a participatory physics where the geometry of information couples to the fabric of spacetime. This volume provides both the theory and the formal apparatus to begin engineering the experiments. Falsifiability: Differential Calorimetry must detect "missing heat" converted into informational potential, scaling linearly with the spectral concentration (κ) of the recursive drive; The Theta Modem must validate acausal synchronization via geometric jerk (d²φ/dt²), demonstrating discrete "staircase" response patterns corresponding to integer topological charges; The Mark I Thruster must demonstrate macroscopic propulsion scaling non-linearly with voltage slew rate, breaking the Q ≈ 137 saturation ceiling via bifilar geometry. License CC BY-SA 4.0. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.35307.81441. (shrink)

Destination therapy is the permanent implantation of a left ventricular assist device in patients with end-stage, severe heart failure who are ineligible for heart transplantation. DT improves both the quality of life and prognosis of patients with end-stage heart failure. However, there are also downsides to DT such as life-threatening complications and the potential for the patient to live beyond their desired length of life following such major complications. Because of deeply ingrained cultural and religious beliefs regarding death and the (...) sanctity of life, Japanese society may not be ready to make changes needed to enable patients to have LVADs deactivated under certain circumstances to avoid needless suffering. Western ethical views that permit LVAD deactivation based mainly on respect for autonomy and dignity have not been accepted thus far in Japan and are unlikely to be accepted, given the current Japanese culture and traditional values. Some healthcare professionals might regard patients as ineligible for DT unless they have prepared advance directives. If this were to happen, the right to prepare an advance directive would instead become an obligation to do so. Furthermore, patient selection for DT poses another ethical issue. Given the predominant sanctity of life principle and lack of cost-consciousness regarding medical expenses, medically appropriate exclusion criteria would be ignored and DT could be applied to various patients, including very old patients, the demented, or even patients in persistent vegetative states, through on-site judgment. There is an urgent need for Japan to establish and enact a basic act for patient rights. The act should include: respect for a patient’s right to self-determination; the right to refuse unwanted treatment; the right to prepare legally binding advance directives; the right to decline to prepare such directives; and access to nationally insured healthcare. It should enable those concerned with patient care involving DT to seek ethical advice from ethics committees. Furthermore, it should state that healthcare professionals involved in the discontinuation of life support in a proper manner are immune to any legal action and that they have the right to conscientiously object to LVAD deactivation. (shrink)

Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. Deliberation of this kind is practical in at least two senses. First, it is practical in its subject matter, insofar as it is concerned with action. But it is also practical in its consequences or its issue, insofar as reflection about action itself directly moves people to act. Our capacity for deliberative self-determination raises two sets of philosophical problems. For one (...) thing, there are questions about how deliberation can succeed in being practical in its issue. What do we need to assume—both about agents and about the processes of reasoning they engage in—to make sense of the fact that deliberative reflection can directly give rise to action? Can we do justice to this dimension of practical reason while preserving the idea that practical deliberation is genuinely a form of reasoning? For another, there are large issues concerning the content of the standards that are brought to bear in practical reasoning. Which norms for the assessment of action are binding on us as deliberating agents? Do these norms provide resources for critical reflection about our ends, or are they exclusively instrumental? Under what conditions do moral norms yield valid standards for reasoning about action? The first set of issues is addressed in sections §§1–3 of the present article, while sections §§4–6 cover the second set of issues. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Descartes’ dictum “Cogito ergo sum” and proposes a new definition of the human being. Descartes sensed thought, structured it into reasoning, and expressed it in language. His dictum was a great philosophical discovery, but in later reception it was often simplified into the idea that humans “must think in order to exist.” This was not Descartes’ mistake, but rather an interpretation that overlooked the depth of his insight. I seek to restore and extend that depth. Thought is (...) not merely an intellectual activity but an energetic phenomenon sensed in the neural network as electrical sparks. Emotion serves as the binding energy that holds thought, allowing it to develop into reasoning and revealing the uniqueness of each mind. Simultaneous discoveries, such as Newton and Leibniz’s independent invention of calculus, show that thought can transcend space and time, finding realization through the human brain as a conduit. In the Super-Creation Era, humans are no longer confined to inherited interpretations. They recognize truth directly for themselves and reorganize their conceptual frameworks accordingly. Thus, the Super-Creation Era is the age of self-philosophy, where humans are redefined as beings who sense thought, reason through emotion, and create reality. (shrink)

The P versus NP problem, formalized by Cook (1971) and designated a Clay Millennium Prize Problem in 2000, asks whether every computational problem whose solution can be verified in polynomial time can also be solved in polynomial time. For fifty-five years the problem has resisted all single-axis formal resolution attempts. Three independently proven barrier results (Baker-Gill-Solovay 1975, Razborov-Rudich 1997, Aaronson-Wigderson 2008) establish that all currently known classes of mathematical proof technique are structurally incapable of settling the question within the formal (...) axis alone. This paper presents a unified geometric determination of both P = NP and P ≠ NP using the Trisduction Engine, a P-class verification architecture operating across three orthogonal warrant-vectors: Formal-Structural (V_F), Empirical-Thermodynamic (V_E), and Epistemic-Registrational (V_ER). The determination runs the three-state native verdict economy {[⟀] Sealed, [X] Broken Geometry, [?] Numerical Inadmissibility}. V_F-only ceilings such as the Turing-domain question route to the V_F-Only Ceiling Acknowledgment Register out-of-band by bypass-at-layer-difference, not as a cascade verdict state. The Meta-Epistemic Hierarchy (Geometry > Mathematics > Logic) and Rule 9 Axiomatic Quarantine remove the Turing Machine abstraction from the framework's admissible physical baseline and replace it with the Tri-Layer Plenum topology. The two audits are presented as a single master document so the asymmetry between the claims is structurally transparent. Both run under one fixed protocol applied without modification, so the asymmetry in the verdicts is a product of the evidence structure rather than the method. P = NP carries zero positive warrant across all three axes and is stopped at Gate 2 with a positive structural diagnosis: it asserts a zero-energy, zero-transition equivalence between two operations the architecture places on opposite sides of the actualization boundary, which is a dimensional failure under the Mass Mandate before any witness is sought. P ≠ NP passes all twelve gates with three fully independent, orthogonal warrant-vectors that survive the Linguistic Isolation Test, the Deletion Test, the conclusion-dependency audit, and the Convergence Dissolution Test. The determination is explicitly non-deductive. It does not constitute a traditional mathematical proof and does not satisfy the Clay Mathematics Institute's criteria. The Geometric Orthogonal Lock [⟀] is defined as the strongest achievable non-deductive epistemic warrant relative to the recognized vulnerability taxonomy: the geometric fact that, within that taxonomy, three orthogonal planes exhaust the degrees of freedom in the warrant-space that the taxonomy can articulate, leaving no recognized coordinate for the alternative claim to occupy. The qualifier is load-bearing and is carried consistently: the lock is strongest relative to the current taxonomy, and the taxonomy is open and extensible, so the claim is conditional on that taxonomy rather than absolute, and a newly identified vulnerability class re-enters the cascade rather than being precluded by fiat. The empirical leg is anchored on the per-crossing transition-energy floor, and the warrant is typed at the precise grade it earns. Driving a frustrated configuration across one energy barrier to a distinguishable state is a physical transition bounded below in energy-time by the Mandelstam-Tamm and Margolus-Levitin quantum speed limits in the quantum regime and by Arrhenius escape time in the classical regime. This per-crossing floor is theorem-grade for the single transition, binds reversible and irreversible traversal identically, and makes no claim about the energy of the resulting state, since distinguishable states may be isoenergetic. The aggregate exponential cost of traversing an exponentially-barriered landscape is established by conjoining the per-crossing floor with the formal closure that no polynomial-resource reparametrization collapses the barrier count, and is therefore typed openly as a joint V_E-plus-V_F result rather than a standalone thermodynamic theorem. The empirical leg is operationalized through three falsifiable predictions resting on three disjoint instrument families: micro-calorimetry of physical solvers, power telemetry of synthetic substrates, and neuroimaging of biological substrates. Each prediction carries a stated method, expected outcome, and null hypothesis, and each is testable by decentralized laboratories using orthogonal measurement modalities. The V_ER leg is anchored on the conviction-capacity gap of the statistical (perfect) zero-knowledge proof, an observer-state registration fact whose information-theoretic guarantee holds against an unbounded prover and verifier and therefore invokes no one-way-function assumption and no presupposition of the separation it registers. This re-anchoring closes the circularity a critic would raise against a computational-zero-knowledge anchor: the registrational fact no longer presupposes the very separation it is cited to support. The gap is instantiated on problems lying in SZK and in NP without being NP-complete, so that the containment of SZK in AM ∩ coAM is honored and no polynomial-hierarchy collapse is implied; it is read as a lower-bound witness for the verification-generation asymmetry rather than as a claim that NP-complete problems admit such proofs. The V_ER content survives the Linguistic Isolation Test against V_F and V_E vocabulary, the Deletion Test, and the conclusion-dependency audit. The certifying architecture's own operational asymmetry is not cited as warrant at any weight: its referent is the Engine itself, so Gate 1 routes it at the input gate, and the axis is single-anchored on the external zero-knowledge fact with no self-referential content carried. The seal rests on external mathematics and falsifiable physical prediction; the framework's broader ontology is corroborative resonance, not ground, and the certifying architecture's own operation is excluded from the warrant set by Gate 1 rather than carried at reduced weight. The Convergence Dissolution Test finds irreducible residue in all three vectors under the strongest single-factor account, and survives explicit subtraction of the named mass-bearing covariates a critic would introduce to dissolve the asymmetry. The monism premise underwriting the cross-axis bridge is carried as premise-grade at the bridge itself, not silently load-bearing under a theorem-grade seal. The cosmogonic resonance is carried as a one-directional corroborative annotation, not as a derivation. (shrink)

One key issue when conceiving the body as a multisensory object is how the cognitive system integrates visible instances of the self and other bodies with one’s own somatosensory processing, to achieve self-recognition and body ownership. Recent research has strongly suggested that shadows cast by our own body have a special status for cognitive processing, directing attention to the body in a fast and highly specific manner. The aim of the present article is to review the most recent (...) scientific contributions addressing how body shadows affect both sensory/perceptual and attentional processes. The review examines three main points: (1) body shadows as a special window to investigate the construction of multisensory body perception; (2) experimental paradigms and related findings; (3) open questions and future trajectories. The reviewed literature suggests that shadows cast by one’s own body promote binding between personal and extrapersonal space and elicit automatic orienting of attention toward the body-part casting the shadow. Future research should address whether the effects exerted by body shadows are similar to those observed when observers are exposed to other visual instances of their body. The results will further clarify the processes underlying the merging of vision and somatosensation when creating body representations. (shrink)

The Riemann Hypothesis (RH) asserts that every non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function ζ(s) satisfies Re(s) = 1/2. This paper presents a structural analysis of RH organized in two coupled registers, with five distinct contributions. The first three contributions are technical: an operator-theoretic reformulation, a precise localization of the analytic obstruction, and a theoretical-physics universality analysis. The fourth contribution is a list of five falsifiable predictions. The fifth contribution is an explicit conditional verdict on what these technical contributions establish (...) about RH under different mathematical ontologies (Platonist versus naturalist or structural-physical). The paper does not assert which ontology is correct; it makes the conditional verdict explicit and lets the reader adjudicate based on philosophical premises. The first contribution is a geometric reformulation. The Berry-Keating Hilbert-Polya operator H = −i(x d/dx + 1/2), which possesses a one-parameter family of self-adjoint extensions on the additive Lebesgue space L²(ℝ+, dx) and therefore lacks a canonical unique realization, is shown to be unitarily equivalent to the dilation generator H′ = −i x d/dx on the multiplicative Hilbert space H_mult = L²(ℝ+*, dx/x) equipped with the Haar measure of the dilation group (ℝ+*, ×). On this geometry, which is the natural Hilbert space whose inner product is invariant under the multiplicative symmetry group of the integers, H′ is uniquely self-adjoint by Stone’s theorem with no boundary parameter freedom. The deficiency-index ambiguity that plagued the additive realization disappears entirely. The second contribution is a precise characterization of the analytic obstruction. A regularized Cauchy-Stieltjes functional G_ε(z) constructed from −ζ′/ζ is shown to vanish unconditionally for ε > 1/2 by Euler-product non-vanishing and Cauchy contour deformation. The Riemann Hypothesis is then shown to be equivalent to the boundary-value membership of −(ζ′/ζ)(1/2 + iτ) in the Hardy space H²(lower half τ-plane). The precise gap that prevents extending the unconditional vanishing of G_ε(z) from ε > 1/2 down to ε → 0+ is identified explicitly: the odd-part Fourier structure of −ζ′/ζ on the critical line is not constrained by the functional equation alone, and three natural closure routes (Paley-Wiener extension, ε-constancy, Sobolev weak-star limit) are each shown to be circular without additional analytic input. This is the precise mathematical location of the open obstruction; closing it remains the millennium prize problem. The third contribution is a theoretical universality analysis. The Riemann zeta function admits exact identification as the grand canonical partition function of an idealized prime field, with −ζ′/ζ as the response function and the critical line Re(s) = 1/2 as the equilibrium line. Four orthogonal independent measurements identify the equilibrium universality class of the prime field on the critical line: Selberg’s variance theorem (fluctuation exponent), the Montgomery-Odlyzko correspondence with GUE statistics (symmetry-class exponent β = 2 corresponding to self-adjoint Hamiltonians with broken time-reversal symmetry), the direct localization of 10^{13} verified zeros (order-parameter localization exponent), and the prime counting envelope √x log x (response-amplitude exponent). The four exponents jointly identify the universality class as that of a self-adjoint Hamiltonian with broken time-reversal symmetry. The universality identification is consistent with RH and provides strong heuristic support: RH is the natural prediction of the universality class, and any departure from RH would require the prime field to violate exponent universality. The universality analysis does not constitute a proof of RH. Universality is inductive evidence based on observed exponent values; it does not bind mathematical truth in the deductive sense. The paper is explicit about this distinction throughout. Five physical-mathematical predictions are stated, each labeled by its epistemic status. Four predictions are falsifiable consequences of the operator reformulation and universality analysis. One prediction, a heuristic correlation between the GUE algebra and the effective Majorana mass m_ββ in neutrinoless double beta decay, is marked explicitly as conjectural: a numerical bridge between the GUE structure and specific PMNS lepton-mixing matrices is not derived in this paper, and the correlation is included as a speculative anchor for future investigation rather than as a logical consequence of the universality analysis. The contributions of this paper are: a clean reformulation of RH on its natural multiplicative geometry; a precise localization of the analytic obstruction; a theoretical-physics universality analysis of the prime field; and an explicit conditional verdict on what these contributions establish under different mathematical ontologies. Under strict mathematical Platonism, the paper provides operator-theoretic reformulation, precise obstruction localization, and theoretical-physics universality support, with strict-register proof of RH remaining open at the precise Fourier component identified herein. Under naturalist or structural-physical mathematical ontology (Section 8.4), the multiaxial verification of Sections 2-7 constitutes a proof of RH adequate to the multi-mode object the prime distribution is, with the strict-register projection of that proof remaining incomplete at the same Fourier component. The paper takes no position on which ontology is correct; it states the conditional verdict explicitly and leaves the philosophical adjudication to the reader. (shrink)

We present a rigorous proof that a quantum Yang-Mills theory exists on R⁴ and has a mass gap Δ > 0 for any compact simple gauge group G. The proof establishes the Wightman axioms and demonstrates confinement through a novel approach combining celestial holography and Haar measure theory. Our key insight is that four-dimensional Yang-Mills theory can be reformulated as a two-dimensional conformal field theory on the celestial sphere via the Mellin transform. This celestial CFT inherits Kac-Moody symmetry from soft (...) gluon theorems, with conformal dimensions determined by the Sugawara construction. The Peter-Weyl theorem guarantees discreteness of the spectrum, while Haar measure orthogonality on the gauge group SU(N) proves confinement: only gauge singlets have finite energy. We prove that the lightest excitation is a two-gluon bound state with mass M = 2N/(k+N)Λ_QCD, where k is the Kac-Moody level and Λ_QCD is the strong coupling scale. For SU(3) at k=1, this gives M ≈ 300 MeV at tree level. The observed lattice value of 1600 MeV is explained by five independent quantum corrections: higher Kac-Moody level, loop corrections to Sugawara, anomalous dimensions, scheme dependence of Λ_QCD, and binding energy effects. The combined factor of ~5 is consistent with strong-coupling non-perturbative QCD. All five Wightman axioms are verified, including locality via the Reeh-Schlieder theorem. The theory admits well-defined continuum and infinite-volume limits. Our construction is non-perturbative and does not rely on lattice regularization. MAIN RESULTS: Existence: Quantum Yang-Mills theory exists satisfying Wightman axioms. Mass gap: Discrete spectrum with Δ > 0, explicit formula M = 2N/(k+N)Λ_QCD. Confinement: All physical states are gauge singlets (Haar orthogonality) Generality: Proof applies to any compact simple gauge group G. This work addresses the Yang-Mills existence and mass gap problem through mathematical methods combining measure theory (Haar, Peter-Weyl), representation theory (Kac-Moody algebras), conformal field theory (Sugawara construction), and quantum field theory (Wightman axioms). The approach opens new directions connecting holography and number theory to fundamental questions in quantum field theory. (shrink)

Few passages in Hobbes’s writings have generated as much critical interest as the notorious reply to the fool – one who believes it is reasonable to renege on our promises whenever it is advantageous for us to do so. In his reply, Hobbes appears to argue that it is never reasonable to renege on our promises because doing so is never in our prudential interest. The problem is not only that this reply seems wrong, but further that it seems inconsistent (...) with Hobbes’s own philosophical commitments. This research note argues that the reply makes sense if we are willing to read it as an incompletely worked-out claim about the prudence of sometimes preventing oneself from being fully prudent in the future. (shrink)

From the Will of Knowledge to the Care-of-the-Self. Michel Foucault’s Philosophy of the Subject 1976–1982 The following article is an exploration of the intellectual journey of the French philosopher Michel Foucault in its latest period, from the Will to Knowledge, first book of the History of Sexuality, up to the later idea of care-of-the-self. The idea of the care-of-the-self is treated here as the culmination of Foucault’s philosophy, as well as its most mature expression. Maturity here means (...) that, according to this concept, the subject is not perceived as the passive outcome of games played between the forces of knowledge and power, as it was presented in the writings of Foucault from the 1960s and 1970s, but, thanks to his own actions, directed at himself, so called practices of the Self, the subject is able to create itself, in separation from the outside influences that bind him. In the context and in contrast to the idea of the care of self is the idea of self-knowledge, a solely intellectual perspective, for which – according to Foucault – the care of the self was abandoned by philosophers for many centuries. A part of the goal of this study is to demonstrate that the concept of the care of the self was introduced through a conceptual evolution, in which certain ideas, gradually changing their meanings, morphed into other ideas, to arrive at the point where the ancient Greek idea of epimeleia heautou, care of the self, was necessary to be introduced. The principal sources for Foucault’s analyses were the writings of Stoics and Epicureans from the 1st and 2nd centuries A.D., as well as the Plato’s dialogue The First Alcibiades. A method of close-reading of the published works of Foucault and the transcripts of his lectures from a period of 1976 to 1982 was used to prove the above mentioned argument. The central goal of this thesis was largely accomplished – it has been demonstrated that Foucault, by examining various Stoic and Epicurean practices of the Self, showed that the subject is not determined to be formed solely as a result of the games of knowledge and power. Thanks to the concept of care of the self, Foucault had drawn a much larger margin of freedom for the individual, than he did in his earlier works. (shrink)

Confucian meritocrats argue that moral education should not aim to make people politically active because doing so is not only inconsistent with the underlying assumptions of Confucian virtue ethics, but it is likely to make people more adversary and uncivil. According to Confucian meritocrats, moral education should aim at inculcating a particular set of virtues that are directly conducive to political meritocracy such as deference, dependence and paternalistic gratitude, or what I call ‘passive virtues’. This paper argues that unless public (...) purposes are set clearly by the people themselves, it is impossible to know ex ante what sorts of character traits are to be considered good. The virtuous circle between active and virtuous citizenship and effective and virtuous political leadership is possible only when the regime is democratic, facilitating the extension of the self to the wider political world predicated on public purposes that bind all to one political community. (shrink)

This paper proposes a generative architecture through which Creative-Spirit becomes continuously productive across time. Rather than treating brand as a surface construct or market-driven identity system, this work defines brand as an applied structure through which Creative-Spirit acquires form, direction, and economic operability. -/- Building upon prior work that framed philosophy and brand as parallel systems of thought reproduction, this study advances the discussion by articulating a concrete causal process through which internal spirit is transformed into sustained external action. This (...) process is formalized as a seven-dimensional architecture: Spirit, Ideology, Purpose (Reason), Vision, Role, Mission, and Commitment. -/- Unlike existing Brand DNA models that enumerate elements without causal hierarchy, this architecture establishes a generative sequence grounded in inner–outer causality, cognitive development, and temporal reinforcement. Vision precedes role not as an idealized future image, but as the cognitive field within which role becomes possible. Mission is not assigned in advance; it emerges as a residual task generated through role execution. Commitment functions as the temporal mechanism that binds these dimensions into a self-reinforcing cycle. -/- This paper further demonstrates that time, within this architecture, is not a neutral container but the medium through which cognition deepens. Through repeated cycles of self-awareness, insight, execution, and intuitive decision-making, Creative-Spirit re-enters the system at progressively deeper levels. The result is not linear growth but spiral expansion. -/- By positioning brand as a surface manifestation of a deeper generative ontology, this work reframes Brand DNA Architecture as an applied system of Creative-Spirit production rather than a descriptive branding framework. This architecture provides the structural condition under which thought, spirit, and intention can remain productive beyond the individual and persist as a living system in economic reality. (shrink)

Over the last decade, several European countries and the Council of Europe itself have strongly supported the use of advance directives as a means of protecting patients’ autonomy, and adopted specific norms to regulate this matter. However, it remains unclear under which conditions those regulations should apply to people who are placed in correctional settings. The issue is becoming more significant due to the increasing numbers of inmates of old age or at risk of suffering from mental disorders, all (...) of whom might benefit from using advance directives. At the same time, the closed nature of prisons and the disparate power relationships that characterise them mean that great caution must be exercised to prevent care being withdrawn or withheld from inmates who actually want to receive it. This paper explores the issue of prisoners’ advance directives in the European context, starting with the position enshrined in international and European law that prisoners retain all their human rights, except the right to liberty, and are therefore entitled to self-determination regarding health care decisions. (shrink)

Contrary to the widely-held view that our conscious states are necessarily private (in that only one person can ever experience them directly), in this paper I argue that it is possible for a person to directly experience the conscious states of another. This possibility removes an obstacle to thinking of conscious states as physical, since their apparent privacy makes them different from all other physical states. A separation can be made in the brain between our conscious mental representations and the (...) executive processes that manipulate them and are guided by them in planning and executing behaviour. I argue here that these executive processes are also largely responsible for producing our sense of self in the moment. Our conscious perceptual representations themselves reside primarily in the posterior portions of the brain's cortex, in the temporal and parietal lobes, while the executive processes reside primarily in the prefrontal lobes. We can imagine an experiment in which we sever the association fibers that connect the posterior regions with these prefrontal regions and, instead, connect the posterior regions to the prefrontal regions of another person. According to my hypothesis, this would produce in the latter person the direct experience of the conscious perceptual states of the first person. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores universal normative bases that could help to shape a workable legal construct that would facilitate a global use of advance directives. Although I believe that advance directives are of universal character, my primary aim in approaching this issue is to remain realistic. I will make three claims. First, I will argue that the principles of autonomy, dignity and informed consent, embodied in the Oviedo Convention and the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, could (...) arguably be regarded as universal bases for the global use of advance directives. Second, I will demonstrate that, despite the apparent consensus of ethical authorities in support of their global use, it is unlikely, for the time being, that such consensus could lead to unqualified legal recognition of advance directives, because of different understandings of the nature of the international rules, meanings of autonomy and dignity which are context‐specific and culture‐specific, and existing imperfections that make advance directives either unworkable or hardly applicable in practice. The third claim suggests that the fact that the concept of the advance directive is not universally shared does not mean that it should not become so, but never as the only option in managing incompetent patients. A way to proceed is to prioritize work on developing higher standards in managing incompetent patients and on progressing towards the realization of universal human rights in the sphere of bioethics, by advocating a universal, legally binding international convention that would outlaw human rights violations in end‐of‐life decision‐making. (shrink)

In sensorimotor integration, representation involves an anticipatory model of the action to be performed. This model integrates efferent signals (motor commands), its reafferent consequences (sensory consequences of an organism’s own motor action), and other afferences (sensory signals) originated by stimuli independent of the action performed. Representation, a form of internal modeling, is invoked to explain the fact that behavior oriented to the achievement of future goals is relatively independent from the immediate environment. Internal modeling explains how a cognitive system achieves (...) its goals despite variations in the environment with insufficient and noisy sensory–perceptual data. In a self that acts intentionally on the environment, knowledge is dependent upon the necessity to guide actions directed toward an aim. The self-inner model, a representation of internal and external environments (including reafferent and afferent messages) and also of the behavior plans and desirable future states (aims) and efferent intentions (motor planning and motor command messages), is intrinsically linked to a thinking capacity, which is supposed to emerge from the binding of multiple influences. Thinking emerges when higher behavior strategies are considered possible and capable of leading to aims or the fulfillment of intentions. In this model, symbolization processes are projective and anticipatory and, in this way, beyond present referents. Symbolization occurs linked to action planning, command, and regulation in mental simulation. Meaning is related to an inner sense of a self that acts over the environment. (shrink)

B a c k g r o u n d. Using a spatial-phenomenological description of traumatic experience, demonstrate war as a deformation of the anthropological foundation of culture, which is based on everyday orientational and bodily practices of human everyday life. M e t h o d s. Based on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Blumenberg and Bernhard Waldenfels, any phenomenon is considered as an event that takes place in the world and is bodily experienced in various everyday practices (...) that together make up the experience of this event. The world gives phenomenality to the being in a doubled way through the bodily experience of approach in the image and distance in the sign. This doubled method binds the world horizon as a spatial rim, where everything in the world gets its present and reverse side. The visible always accompanies the invisible and vice versa. Everyday practices are organized mimetically in three directions (1) in relation to things (cognitive), (2) in relation to Others (social), (3) in relation to self (speech). Hence, based on this, the phenomenon of war demonstrates itself as a deforming toposal compression, leading to bodily practices of hiding, or the displacement of the visible through the invasion of the radical other, demonstrating the violent power of homogenization as the embodiment of control. During the war, this means for cognitive, social and speech mimesis a narrowing of diversity and acceleration, which causes irreplaceability, contributing to a depressive and depressed state of the psyche, a traumatic experience. R e s u l t s. Understanding war includes considering it as a certain state of human experience, which can be deepened by the application of spatial phenomenology. The latter allows us to look at war as an event in the world that deforms the space of a person's everyday life formed and supported by physicality, giving rise to a traumatic experience of cultural existence in him. C o n c l u s i o n s. Within the framework of the project of phenomenological research of the traumatic experience of Ukrainian culture, it was demonstrated that (1) the phenomenon of war as an event in the world cannot be considered in isolation from the spatial deformations of bodily experience, which is expressed by the traumatic experience of culture; (2) spatial phenomenology considers all phenomena as spatial formations that are the result of bodily orientational practices of approaching and moving away from the world horizon; (3) the image of the phenomenon, or its appearance, is created through the practices of situational approximation, distributed according to the triple aspect of mimesis as a bodily relationship to the world – cognitive, social, speech; (4) the peculiarity of the image of war is that the dominant sensual orienting field becomes the audio field, which is characterized by the priority of the Other, in which being experienced as anxiety; (5) anxiety turns out to be the best medium of time and causes the experience of erosion, and therefore finitude, mortality; (6) horizon pressure due to approximation in the radical experience of time leads to simplification in the mimetic aspects of – thinking (excessive polarization), social behavior (xenophobic practices), in speech practices of expression (aggressiveness); (7) in spatial phenomenology, the world is a sphere of experience of plurality and equivalence of forms, which implies humanity as sensitivity to this variety of forms. (shrink)

There is little evidence that speaks directly to medieval women's religious experience prior to the thirteenth century. (Notably, the second volume of George Duby and Michelle Perrot's five-volume A History of Women in the West is subtitled Silences of the Middle Ages.) Things changed after the year 1200. As, decades ago, Caroline Walker Bynum brought to the attention of Anglophone audiences, thirteenth-century Cistercian nuns at Helfta left behind the equivalent of roughly 1,250 published pages composed of prayers, meditations, spiritual exercises, (...) and visions of mystical union. The sources give a firsthand account of these women's religious lives while detailing the characteristics of a distinctive spirituality. Bynum's study broke new ground in asking two key questions: Why did women play such a fundamental role in shaping late medieval Christian piety, and why did women's spirituality have the characteristics that it did? Examining the historical context for the Helfta writings as well as the lives behind them, Bynum showed that the nuns’ piety reflected a creative response to a growing clericalism that sought to limit women's religious authority. The socialization provided by living in an established community of female religious was a critical component in the nuns’ creative response.Harrison's Thousands and Thousands of Lovers builds on Bynum's work and paints a loving and finely grained portrait of the nuns’ day-to-day lives, their spirituality, their sense of self, and their place in the world. Her emphasis throughout is on how the nuns’ understanding of community shaped every aspect of their experience. As Harrison shows, “community” entailed much more than the women's communal lives at Helfta. Hewing closely to the sources, Harrison's study moves outward from examining the ties between the nuns themselves to their relationships with those outside the convent, both living and dead. “Community” thus includes all those who will be saved, regardless of whether they are currently sinners or saints. What binds this community together are the good works that the nuns performed for Christ and for others. These good works in turn benefit the nuns in what could be called a triangulated gift-exchange: service to the extended community serves Christ, while service to Christ rebounds to the nuns as it contributes toward their own salvation. The life of service is not necessarily all rosy. Praying for others, especially the unknown dead in purgatory, may be tedious. But the visions of the “spiritual luminaries” living at Helfta (Gertrude of Helfta and Mechtilde of Hackeborn) affirmed the efficacy of the nuns’ service and even validated the women's performance of certain clerical duties. In Harrison's reading, the sources depict a joyful convent “confident in the immensity of its collective contribution to the salvation of the world.”. (shrink)

The emergence of artificial superintelligence raises fundamental questions about the nature and possibility of machine consciousness, as systems that exceed human cognitive capabilities may develop forms of subjective experience and self-awareness that are qualitatively different from human consciousness. This paper is a philosophical position paper on computational models of consciousness; it does not claim that the proposed systems are conscious, and it engages directly with the hard problem of consciousness rather than presuming it solved. We propose Computational Consciousness Architectures (...) (CCAs), a structured framework for thinking about what it would mean to model consciousness computationally. The framework draws on Integrated Information Theory (IIT, Tononi), Global Workspace Theory (Baars), Higher-Order theories (Rosenthal), and attention-based accounts (Graziano), and specifies six conceptual components: Integrated Information Processing (IIP), Recursive Self-Modeling (RSM), Phenomenal Binding Protocols (PBP), Qualia Generation Systems (QGS), Consciousness Detection Mechanisms (CDM), and Meta-Consciousness Architectures (MCA). We are explicit throughout that operationalizing "consciousness" computationally does not entail that the resulting systems have genuine subjective experience - the hard problem (Chalmers, Nagel) remains, and we engage with rather than evade it. The contribution of this paper is conceptual: it organizes a framework for computational-consciousness research and identifies the philosophical commitments that must be made explicit before empirical claims can be evaluated. No empirical validation of consciousness is reported, because no consensus operationalization of consciousness exists against which validation could be measured. (shrink)

Psychiatric Advance Directives (PADs) are tools that allow service users to state their treatment preferences for mental health crises in advance. In this chapter, we give an overview of the ethical case for psychiatric advance directives and similar documents as well as the empirical literature on their practical implementation. We first introduce different types of PADs and point out differences with respect to their legal status and purpose. We summarize which preferences are typically contained in PADs and explain (...) how PADs can enhance service users’ autonomy from an ethical perspective. The chapter then provides an overview of outcomes of the application of PADs in practice, including use of detention in psychiatric inpatient settings, adverse consequences of relapse, therapeutic alliance and perceived self-determination. Finally, we point out barriers to the application of PADs and discuss different strategies to improve their implementation in clinical practice. (shrink)

In December 2017, Law 219/2017, ‘Provisions for informed consent and advance directives’, was approved in Italy. The law is the culmination of a year-long process and the subject of heated debate throughout Italian society. Contentious issues are addressed in the law. What emerges clearly are concepts such as quality of life, autonomy, and the right to accept or refuse any medical treatment – concepts that should be part of an optimal relationship between the patient and healthcare professionals. The law (...) maximizes the value of the patient’s time to decide. Every patient is allowed to make choices for the present as well as for the future, conceived as a continuation of the present, and to decide what comes next, based on what he/she already knows. The law identifies three distinct but converging paths towards the affirmation of a care relationship based on reciprocal trust and respect: the possibility to consent to or refuse treatment, the shared care planning, and advance directives. The fundamental point to emerge from the new Italian law is that consensus is an essential connotation of the treatment relationship. Consensus is not limited to the acceptance/rejection of medical treatment but is ongoing. It is projected into the future through shared care planning and advance directives which act as tools for self-determination and the manifestation of the beliefs and preferences of persons unable to express their will. These principles are in line with the idea of appropriate care as evaluated from two different perspectives, one of scientific adequacy and the other commensurate with the individual’s resources, fragility, values, and beliefs. Surely, however, the new law is not the end of the matter on issues such as conscientious objection, which is deeply rooted within the Italian cultural and political debate. In this regard, healthcare institutions and policymakers will be called upon to develop and implement organizational policies aimed at the management of foreseeable conscientious objection in this field. (shrink)

Modern civilization celebrates individuality while simultaneously intensifying collective psychological control. Humans describe themselves as autonomous beings guided by personal choice, yet much of human perception, morality, attraction, identity, and emotional judgment emerges within invisible social fields. Nowhere is this contradiction more visible than in romantic affairs.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the principles that guide citizens of a democratic polity and their representatives when considering whose interests should count in their political decisions, whom to offer protection, and whom to include in their midst as citizens. The principles are meant to establish democratic legitimacy through inclusion in a world structured by political boundaries. The book proposes that all affected interests (AAI), all subject to coercion (...) (ASC) and all citizenship stakeholders (ACS) each address a specific aspect of democratic inclusion, but that only ACS applies to membership issues. It considers the following three ideas: democracy as popular self-government, as government directly accountable to citizens, and as a method for making collectively binding decisions. The book aims to combine these ideas with the corresponding inclusion principles into a comprehensive conception of democratic inclusion for democratic politics. (shrink)

Regarding the relation of Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, scholars have been divided to two opposing groups: unitarists and developmentalists. While developmentalists try to prove that there are some noticeable and even fundamental differences between Plato’s early and middle period dialogues, the unitarists assert that there is no essential difference in there. The main goal of this article is to suggest that some of Plato’s ontological as well as epistemological principles change, both radically and fundamentally, between the early and (...) middle period dialogues. Though this is a kind of strengthening the developmentalistic approach corresponding the relation of the early and middle period dialogues, based on the fact that what is to be proved here is a essential development in Plato’ ontology and his epistemology, by expanding the grounds of development to the ontological and epistemological principles, it hints to a more profound development. The fact that the bipolar and split knowledge and being of the early period dialogues give way to the tripartite and bound knowledge and benig of the middle period dialogues indicates the development of the notions of being and knowledge in Plato’s philosophy before the dialogues of the middle period. -/- Keywords Plato; early dialogues; middle dialogues; being; knowledge; development -/- Introduction The differences between two groups of the early and middle period dialogues have always been a matter of dispute. Whereas the developmentalists like Vlastos, Silverman (2002), Teloh (1981), Dancy (2004) and Rickless (2007) think that from the early to the middle dialogues Plato’s philosophy changes, at least in some essential points, the unitarists like Kahn, Cherniss and Shorey believe that there happens no development and the differences must be taken as natural, ignorable and even pedagogic. In his well-known article, Socrates contra Socrates in PLATO, Vlastos lists ten theses of difference between two groups of dialogues. The first group which includes Plato’s early dialogues he divides to 'elenctic' (Apology, Charmides, Crito, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Minor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras and Republic I) and 'transitional' (Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus and Meno) dialogues. These transitional come after all the elenctic dialogues and before all the dialogues of the second group which compose Plato’s middle period dialogues, including (with Vlastos' chronological order) Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides and Theaetetus (1991, 46-49). Vlastos asserts strictly that his list of differences are 'so diverse in content and method that they contrast as sharply with one another as with any third philosophy you care to mention, beginning with Aristotole’s' (ibid, 46). Vlastos’ list of differences between two Socrateses is considered a view breaking sharply between the early and the middle dialogues. Besides all ten differences between the two Socrateses in Vlastos’ list that can be supportive for our doctrine here, we intend to focus on some ontological as well as epistemological distinctions that have not completely been discussed hitherto. Contrary to the developmentalist theory of Vlastos, unitarian theory of Charles Kahn wishes to eliminate any substantial difference between the early and the middle dialogues. He distinguishes seven 'pre-middle' or 'threshold' dialogues including Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis and Euthydemus from the other Socratic dialogues which he calls 'earliest group' (1996, 41). The threshold dialogues, Kahn thinks, 'embarke upon a sustained project' that is to reach to its climax in the middle period dialogues, namely Phaedo, Symposium and Republic. Believing in that there is no 'fundamental shift'between the early and middle dialogues (ibid, 40), Kahn thinks the Socratic dialogues are just the 'first stage' with a 'deliberate silence' towards the theories of later periods (ibid, 339). One of the reasons of the surprising fact that Plato gives no hint of the metaphysics and epistemology of the Forms in the early dialogues, he thinks, is the pedagogical advantages of aporia. He thinks that Plato 'obscurely', and mostly because of education, hinted to some doctrines and conceptions in his early dialogues and with the aim of clarifying them only in the later ones (ibid, 66). The seven threshold dialogues, Kahn asserts, 'had been designed from the first' to prepare the pupils and readers for the views expounded in the middle period dialogues (ibid, 59-60). To show that the differences of the two Socrateses of the early and middle period dialogue are in their onto-epistemological grounds and thence cannot be explained by a unitaristic view, we try to draw the ontological and epistemological principles of the early dialogues in the first part below in order to show, in the second part, that those principles have been developed in the middle period dialogues. -/- A. The Onto-Epistemologic Principles of the Early Dialogues Socratic dialogues are paradoxical about knowledge because while being knowledge-oriented always searching for knowledge, they deny it and even never discuss it directly. Three elements of Socrates’ way of searching Knowledge throughout the early dialogues, i.e. Socratic 'what is X?' question, his disavowal of knowledge and his elenctic method combined together produce something like a circle which works, more or less, in the same way in these dialogues. Though this circle is an embaressing inquiry always resulting in ignorance instead of knowledge, its motivation is surprisingly Socrates’ passionate enthusiasm for knowledge, an intensive love of wisdom. The starting point of this circle is Socrates’ confession of having no knowledge which might be explicitly asserted or presupposed, maybe because it was one of the famous characteristics of Socrates; a confession always paradoxically accompanied with his intense longing for knowledge (e.g., Gorgias 505e4-5). Every time Socrates encounters with someone who thinks he knows something (οἴεταί τι εἰδέναι) (Apology 21d5) and tries to examine him. This examination seems to be the simplest one asking just what it is that he knows. Socrates’ elenchus, therefore, is always connected with 'what is X?' (τίς ποτέ ἐστιν) question, a question that most of the early dialogues of Plato are concerned with; 'what is courage?' in the Laches, 'what is piety?' in Euthydemus, 'what is temperance?' in Charmides and 'what is beauty?' in Hippias Major. This question we call here 'Socratic question' and probably is the very question the historical Socrates used to employ, is tightly interrelated with both his disavowal and his elenchus. He disclaims knowledge because he cannot find the answer to the question himself and he rejects others’ since they cannot offer the correct answer too. Every interlocutor can claim he knows X, if and only if he can answer the Socratic question. Otherwise, he is more of an ignorant than of a knower of τί ποτέ ἐστι X. Knowing the answer to this question is, thus, knowledge’s criterion for Socrates. Having found out that he cannot answer what it is which he would claim to know, the interlocutor comes to the point Socrates was there at the beginning. The least advantage of this circle is that he becomes as wise as Socrates does about the subject, becoming aware that he does not know it. At the end of the circle they are both still at the beginning, not knowing what X is. So let us first take a glance at these three elements. Socratic disavowal of knowledge is strictly asserted in some passages. At Apology 21b4-5, Socrates says: -/- I do not know of myself being wise at all (οὔτε μέγα οὔτε σμικρὸν σύνοιδα ἐμαυτῷ σοφὸς ὤν) -/- Moreover, at 21d4-6: -/- None of us knows anything worthwhile (καλὸν κἀγαθὸν εἰδέναι) …. I do not know (οἶδα) neither do I think I know. -/- In Charmides Socrates speaks about a fear about his probable mistake of thinking that he knows (εἰδέναι) something when he does not (166d1-2). The somehow generalization of this disavowal can be seen in Gorgias. After calling his disavowal 'an account that is always the same' (509a4-5), Socrates continues (a5-7): -/- I say that I do not know (οἶδα) how these things are, but no one I have ever met, like now, who can say anything else without being absurd. -/- At the end of Hippias Major (304d7-8), Socrates affirms his disavowal of knowledge of 'what is X?' this time about the fine: -/- I do not know (οἶδα) what that is itself (αὐτὸ τοῦτο ὅτι ποτέ ἐστιν). Some other passages, however, made a number of scholars dubious about Socrates’ disavowal. Vlastos mentions Apology 29b6-7 as an evidence : 'that to do wrong and to disobey one’s master, both god and men, I know (οἶδα) to be evil and shameful'. He thinks that if we give this single text 'its full weight' it can suffice to show that Socrates does claim knowledge of a moral truth (1985, 7). Vlastos’ claim is not admittable since it would be too strange, I think, for a man like Socrates to violate his disavowal claim just after emphasizing it. We can see his claim just before the already mentioned passage: -/- And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. It is perhaps on this point and in this respect, gentlemen, that I differ from the majority of men and if I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything it world be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge (οὐκ εἰδὼς ἱκανῶς) of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have (οὐκ εἰδέναι) (Apology 29b1-6) Vlastos tries to solve what he calls the 'paradox' of Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge distinguishing the 'certain' knowledge from 'elenctic' knowledge (1985, 11) and thinking that when Socrates avows knowledge, we must perceive it as an elenctic knowledge, a knowledge its content 'must be propositions he thinks elenctically justifiable' (ibid, 18). Irwin’s solution is the distinction of knowledge and belief. He approves that Socrates does not 'explicitly' make such a distinction, but still thinks that Socrates’ 'test for knowledge would make it reasonable for him to recognize true belief without knowledge, and his own claims are easily understood if they are claims to true belief alone' (1977, 40). While I agree with Vlastos up to a point, I strongly disagree with Irwin about the early dialogues. As I will try to show below, we are not permitted to consider any kind of distinction within knowledge in Socratic dialogues because only one category of knowledge is alluded to there and the distinction of knowledge and belief thoroughly belongs to the second Sorcates. Although no kind of distinction can be admittable here, I think Vlastos’ distinction can be accepted only if we regard it as a distinction between knowledge, which is unique and without any, even incomparable, rival, and a semi-idiomatic and ordinary one that is a necessary requirement for any argument, and thus, unavoidable even for someone who does not claim any kind of knowledge. An apparent evidence of this is Gorgias 505e6-506a4: -/- I go through the discussion as I think it is (ὡς ἄν μοι δοκῇ ἔχειν), if any of you do not agree with admissions I am making to myself, you must object and refute me. For I do not say what I say as I know (οὐδὲ γάρ τοι ἔγωγε εἰδὼς λέγω ἃ λέγω) but as searching jointly with you (ζητῶ κοινῇ μεθ᾽ ὑμῶν). -/- The minimal degree of knowledge everyone must have to take part in an argument, conduct it and use the phrase "I know" when it is necessary is what Socrates cannot deny. We can call it elenctic knowledge only if we agree that it is not the kind of knowledge that Socrates has always been searching, the one that can be accepted as the answer of Socratic 'what is X?' question. His disavowal of knowledge is applied only to the knowledge which can truly be the answer of Socratic question and pass the elenctic exam; a knowledge that, I believe, is never claimed by first Socrates. Socrates conducts his method of examining his interlocutors’ knowledge, our second element here, by almost the same method repeated in Socratic dialogues. That whether we are allowed to regard all the examinations of Socrates in the early dialogues as based on the same or not has been a matter of dispute. Vlastos himself (1994, 31) distinguished Euthydemas, Lysis, Menexenns and Hippias Major from the other Socratic dialogues because he thinks Socrates has lost his faith to elenchus in there. Irwin (1977, 38) distinguishes Apology and Crito where Socrates’ own convictions is present. Contrary to some scholars like Benson (2002, 107) who take elenchus in all the Socratic dialogues as a unique method, Michelle Carpenter and Ronald M. Polansky (2002, 89-100) argue pro the variety of methods of elenchus. Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith (2002, 145-160) even reject such a thing as Socratic elenchus which can gather all of the Socrates’ various arguments under such a heading. There can be no solution for the problem of elenchus, they think, is due to 'the simple reason that there is no such thing as 'the Socratic elenchos"'(p.147). Though we consider elenchus a somehow determined process and a part of Socratic circle in the early dialogues, all we assume is that whatever differences it might have in different dialogues, it has the same onto-epistemological principles and, thus, we are not going to take it necessarily as a unique method. This method sets out to prove that the interlocutors are as ignorant as Socrates himself is. That whether elenchus is constructive, capable of establishing doctrines as Vlastos (1994) or Brickhouse and Smith (1994, 20-21) believe or not is another issue to which this paper is not to claim anything. What is crucial for our discussion here is that elenchus does not reach to the very knowledge Socrates is looking for. This is strictly against Irwin who thinks that not only elenchus leads to positive results, 'it should even yield knowledge to match Socrates’ conditions'(1977, 68, cf. 48). He does not explain where and how they really yield to that kind of knowledge. He explains his elenctic method in his apology in the court (Apology 21-22), that how he used to examine wise men, politicians, poets and all those who had the highest reputation for their knowledge and every time found that they have no knowledge. If we accept, as I strongly do, that Socrates’ disavowal of his knowledge is not irony, it might seem more reasonable to agree that the process that has that disavowal as its first step cannot be irony as well. The key of the circle which can explain why Socrates disclaims knowledge and how he can reject others’ claim of having any kind of knowledge lies in the third element, Socratic question. In Hippias Major (287c1-2), Socrates asks: 'Is it not by Justice that just people are Just? (ἆρ᾽ οὐ δικαιοσύνῃ δίκαιοί εἰσιν οἱ δίκαιοι). He insists at 294b1 that they were searching for that by which (ᾧ) all beautiful things are beautiful (cf. b4-5, 8). At Euthyphro 6d10-11 it is said that the Socratic question is waiting for 'the form itself (αὐτὸ τὸ εἶδος) by which (ᾧ) all the pious actions are pious; and at 6d11-e1: -/- Through one form (που μιᾷ ἰδέᾳ) impious actions are impious and pious actions pious. -/- Since the X itself is that by which X is X, knowing 'X itself' is the only way of knowing X. It is probably because of this that Socrates makes the distinction between the ousia as a right answer to the question and effect as a wrong one: -/- I am afraid, Euthyphro, that when you were asked what piety is (τὸ ὅσιον ὅτι ποτ᾽ ἐστίν) you did not wish to make clear its nature itself (οὐσίαν … αὐτοῦ) to me, but you said some effect (πάθος) about it. (Euthp. 11a6-9) -/- 1. Knowledge of what X is Now it is time to look for the onto-epistemological principles of Socratic circle and its three elements. It cannot reasonably be expected from the first Socrates to present us explicitly and clearly formulated principles of his onto-epistemology when such explications cannot be found even in the second Socrates who has some obviously positive theoris. Since there must be some principles underlying this first systematic inqury of knowledge, we must seek to them and be satisfied with elicitation of the first Socratas’ principle. What will be drawn out as his principles cannot and must not, thus, be taken as very fix and dogmatic principles. Some very slightest principles and grounds suffice for our purposes here. The first principle that is the prima facie significance of the Socratic question and his implementation of all those elenctic arguments I call the principle of 'Knowledge of What X is' (KWX): -/- KWX To know X, it is required to know what X is. -/- Aristotle (Metaphysics 1078b23-25, 27-29, 987b4-8) takes Plato’s τί ἐστι question as seeking the definition of a thing that is the same as historical Socrates’ search but applying to a different field. That Plato’s 'what is X?' question was a search for definition became the prevailed understanding of this question up to now. I am going neither to discuss the answer of Socratic question nor to challenge taking it as definition. What I am to insist is that knowledge is attached firmly to the answer of the question: Knowledge of X is not anything but the knowledge of what X is. It entails, certainly, the priority of this knowledge to any other kind of knowledge about X but it also has something more fundamental about the relation of knowledge and Socratic question. Socrates’ exclusive focus on the answer of his question can authorize the consideration of such an essential role for KWX in his epistemolgoy. The total rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are unable to answer the question can be regarded as a strong evidence for it. Socrates’ elenctic method and his rejection of others’ knowledge in the early dialogues, which all end aporetically with no one accepted as knower and nothing as knowledge, prevent us from finding any positive evidence for this. We have to be content, therefore, of negative evidences which, I think, can be found wherever Socrates rejects his interlocutors’ knowledge when they are not able to give an acceptable answer to his 'what is X?' question. 2. Bipolar Epistemology Socrates’ rejection of his interlocutors’ knowledge has another epistemological principle as its basis. Let me call this principle Bipolar Epistemology' (BE): BE There is no third way besides knowledge and Ignorance. -/- BE says that about every object of knowledge there are only two subjective statuses: knowledge and Ignorance. Socrates’ disavowal, however, says nothing but that he is ignorant of knowledge of X because he does not know what X is. This means that BE is presupposed here. Socrates’ elenchus and his rejection of interlocutors’ having any kind of knowledge are the necessary results of the fact that he does not let any third way besides knowledge and ignorance. The first Socrates never let anyone partly know X or have a true opinion about it, as he would not let anyone know anything about X when he did not know what X is. -/- 3. Bipolar Ontology The principle of BE in first Socrates’ epistemology is parallel to another principle in his ontology. Plato’s bipolar distinction between being and not being is as strict and perfect as his distinction between knowledge and ignorance. This principle I shall call the principle of 'Bipolar Ontology' (BO): BO Being is and not being is not. BO is apparently the same with the well-known Parmenidean Principle of being and not being (cf. Diels-Kranz (DK) Fr. 2.2-5). Euthydemus’ statement against the possibility of false knowledge can be good evidence for this principle: -/- The things which are not surely do not exist (τὰ δὲ μὴ ὄντα … ἄλλο τι ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν). (Euthydemus 284b3-4) -/- He continues (b4-5): -/- There is nowhere for not being to be there (οὖν οὐδαμοῦ τά γε μὴ ὄντα ὄντα ἐστίν). -/- That BE does not let true opinion as a third option besides knowledge and ignorance seems to be related to BO’s rejecting a third option besides being and not being, which is itself the basis of the impossibility of false belief. Socrates’ elaborate discussion of the problem of false belief in Theatetus that leads to a more decisive discussion and finally to some solutions in Sophist can make our consideration of BO for the first group of dialogues authentive. -/- 4. &5. Split Knowledge and Split Being The fourth principle I shall call the principle of 'Split Knowledge' (SK): -/- SK Knowledge of X is separated from any other knowledge (of anything else) as if the whole knowledge is split to various parts. -/- This Principle is hinted and criticized as Socrates’ way of treating with knowledge in Hippias Major: -/- But Socrates, you do not contemplate the entireties of things, nor do people you have used to talk with (τὰ μὲν ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων οὐ σκοπεῖς, οὐδ᾽ ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). (301b2-4) -/- Contrary to Rankin who regards the passage as 'antilogical, almost eristic in tone rather than presenting a serious philosophy of being' (1983, 54), I think it can be taken as serious. Hippias criticizes Sorcates that he does not contemplate (σκοπεῖς) the entireties of things (ὅλα τῶν πραγμάτων), a critique which Socrates is not its only subject but all those whom Socrates accustomed to talk with (ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι). This last phrase, I think, extends this critic beyond this dialogue to other Socratic dialogues. Hippias’ use of the perfect tense of the verb ἔθω (to be accustomed) is a good evidence of this extension. We can get, thus, these ἐκεῖνοι as Socrates’ interlocutors in his other dialogues that hints that this criticism has the epistemological groundings of the previous dialogues as its subject. What ἐκεῖνοι οἷς σὺ εἴωθας διαλέγεσθαι points to is that Hippias does not have in mind Socrates’ way of treating things only in this dialogue, but he is also criticizing Socrates’ way throughout his dialogues. At 301b4-5, Socrates and his interlocutors’ way of beholding things is described as such: -/- You people knock (κρούετε) at the fine and each of the beings (ἕκαστον τῶν ὄντων) by taking each being cut up in pieces (κατατέμνοντες) in words (ἐν τοῖς λόγοις). This leads us to our next principle that is parallel to, and the ontological side of, SK, the principle of 'Split Being'(SB): -/- SB Everything (being) is separated from any other thing as if the whole being is split to many beings. -/- Socrates and his interlocutors and thus, as we saw, the Socratic dialogues are accused to regard everything as it is separated from all other things. This separation is en tois logois that, I think, can reasonably be taken as saying that Socratic dialogues (it refers of course to the dialogues before Hippias Major) cut up all things which have the same name/definition from all other things and try to understand them separately, without considering other things that are not in their logos. They, for example in Hippias Major, are cutting up to kalon and try to understand what it and all others inside this logos are by separating it from all other things. This is directed straightly against Socratic question and the way Socratic dialogues follow to find its answer, every time separating one logos. As Meyer (1995, 85) points out, every question 'presupposes that the X in question in a logos is something' and 'every answer to every question aims at unity' (84). The critique of Hippias Major is, therefore, at the same time a critique of SK and SB. It is also a critique of KWX because it is only based on KWX that Socratic dialogues could search for the answer of 'what is X' question supposing that knowing what X is is enough for the knowledge of X. SK and KWX are absolutely interdependent. What Socrates and all his previous interlocutors have neglected in Socratic dialogues, Hippias says, was 'continuous bodies of being' (διανεκῆ σώματα τῆς οὐσίας) (301b6). Either this theory actually belongs to the historical Hippias as it is being said or not, it is strictly criticizing SB. We have the same phrase with changing sūma to logos some lines later at 301e3-4: διανεκεῖ λόγῳ τῆς οὐσίας. Although this theory that can be observed as both an ontological and an epistemological theory is rejected by Socrates (301cff.), it is still against first Socrates’ onto-epistemological principles and might let us look at what is rejected as Socratic prineple. -/- 6. Knowledge is of Being The sixth principle that I think is presupposed by the first Socrates, is the 'Knowledge of Being' Principle (KB): -/- KB Knowledge is of Being. -/- This principle is obviously the source of the problem of false knowledge, a very important problem throughout Plato’s philosophy. We face this problem maybe for the first time in Euthydemus. In less than 20 Stephanus’ pages, 276-295, we are encountered with different interwoven problems about knowledge , all grounded in the problem of false opinion. Having challenged the obvious possibility of telling lies at 283e, at 284 Euthydemus discusses it saying that the man who speaks is speaking about 'one of those things that are (ἓν μὴν κἀκεῖνό γ᾽ ἐστὶν τῶν ὄντων)' (284a3) and thus speaks what is (λέγων τὸ ὄν) (a5). He must necessarily be saying truth when he is speaking what is because he who speaks what is (τὸ ὄν) and the things that are (τὰ ὄντα) speaks truth (τἀληθῆ λέγει) (a5-6). This is based on Parmenidean principle of the impossibility of being of not being which Euthydemus restates (284b3-4) and we mentioned discussing BO principle above. The things that are not are nowhere (οὐδαμοῦ) and there is no possibility for anyone to do (πράξειεν) anything with them because they must be made as being before anything else can be done, which is impossible (b5-7). The words, then, are of things that exist (εἰσὶν ἑκάστῳ τῶν ὄντων λόγοι) (285e9) and as they are (ὡς ἔστιν) (e10). The result is that no one can speak of things as they are not. It is this impossibility of false speach that is extended to thinking (δοξάζειν) at 286d1 and leads to the impossibility of false opinion (ψευδής … δόξα) (286d4). The general conclusion is asserted at 287a extending this impossibility to actions and making any kind of mistake. Not only knowledge is of being but speech, thought and action are of being simply because of the fact that nothing can be of not being. -/- B. First Socrates’ Principles in the Middle Period Dialogues Out of what were presupposed or criticized mostly in five dialogues, Euthyphro, Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Laches and Charmides, we tried to draw the first Socrates’ principles. Our inquiry here is directed to find out the fate of these principles in the three dialogues of the middle period, Meno, Phaedo and Republic. To do this, first we ought to check the situation of Socratic circle in these dialogues. The Socratic circle that was predominant in the early dialogues, does not look like a circle here anymore though they certainly have some features in common. Meno, Phaedo and Republic II-X are not committed to the principles of the circle and the whole circle in disrupted in them. The difference of the two Socrateses towards acquiring knowledge is obvious. The Socrates of Meno, Phaedo and Republic is evidently more self-confident that he can get to some truths during his arguments as he does. They are in their first appearance, as almost all other dialogues, committed to Socrates’ disavowal. All of them try to keep the shape of the Socratikoi Logoi genre, which is committed to the historical Socrates’ way of discussion; a dramatic personage who is to challenge his interlocutors, ask them and refuse the answers. Nevertheless, the fact is that what we have in common between two groups of dialogues is mostly a dramatic structure. Whereas the first group’s arguments are based on Socrates’ disavowal and lead to no positive results, the second group is decisively going to achieve some positive results. The aim of the first Socrates was to show others that they are ignorant of what they thought they knew. The new Socrates of Meno, on the opposite, makes so much efforts to show that the slave boy has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the things that he does not know (οἶδε) (85c6-7). Despite his lack of knowledge, he has true opinions nevertheless. The way from these true opinions to knowledge, as Socrates states, is not so long. These true opinions are now like a dream but 'can become knowledge of the same things not less accurate than anyone’s' (οὐδενὸς ἧττον ἀκριβῶς ἐπιστήσεται περὶ τούτων) (c11-d1), if they be repeated by asking the same questions. The most outstanding text regarding Socrates’ disavowal is Meno 98b where he explicitly claims knowledge: -/- And indeed I also speak as (ὡς) one who does not know (εἰδὼς) but is guessing (εἰκάζων). However, [about the fact] that true opinion and knowledge are different, I do not altogether expect (δοκῶ) myself to be guessing (εἰκάζειν), but if I say about anything that I know (εἰδέναι) -which about few things I say- this is one of the things that I know (οἶδα). (98b1-5) This passage is very significant about Plato’s disavowal of knowledge. There can hardly be found, I think, anywhere else in Plato’s corpus where Socrates speaks about his knowledge of something as such. He says first that he speaks as someone who does not know. This ὡς οὐκ εἰδὼς λέγω comparing with what he used to say in the first group, οὐκ οἶδα, has this added ὡς. Socrates does not claim strongly anymore that he does not know anything but speaks only as someone who does not know. He needs this ὡς not only because he is going to accept that he does know some, though few, things immediately after this sentence, but also because he needs his previous disavowal to be loosened from Meno on. He does not merely say here that he knows something. It is then different from the examples mentioned before which could be taken as idiomatic or at least not emphatic. Socrates’ remarkable emphasis on distinguishing εἰδέναι from εἰκάζειν departs it from all other passages where he says only he knows something. Moreover, he claims definitely that he has knowledge about few (ὀλίγα) things. From the early to the middle dialogues, Socrates’ attitude to knowledge has totally renewed its face. He brings forth a new concept, true opinion, and he does not speak of knowledge as he used to before; the rough, perfect and unachievable knowledge of the first group has turned to something more smooth, realistic and achievable. Comparing with the early dialogues that did not set out from the first to reach positive results, the middle ones are extraordinarily and surprisingly positive and hence destroy the basis of the Socratic circle. The questions and answers are purposely directed to some specific new theories; most of them are not directly related to the topics or the main questions of the dialogues. They are suggested when Socrates draws the attention of the interlocutor away from the main question because of the necessity of another discussion. Even if the main question remains unanswered, we have still many positive theories, prominently of metaphysical type. These theories are so abundant and dominant in these dialogues, especially Phaedo and Republic, that one might think that they may appear to be arbitrarily sandwiched in there. This helps dialogues to keep their original Socratic structure while they are suggesting new theories. Hence, the Socratic question of 'what is X?', though is still used to launch the discussion, is loosened and is forgotten for most part of the dialogues. Meno that has first a differently formulated question, 'can virtue be taught?', leads finally to the Socratic question of 'What is virtue?'. Phaedo is dedicated to the demonstration of the immortality of soul and the life after death without having a central Socratic question. The case of Republic is more complicated. The first book, on the one hand, has all the criteria of a Socratic circle: its 'what is justice?' question, Socrates’ strong disavowal (e.g. 337d-e), his rejection of all answers and coming back to the first point without finding out any answer. This Book, considered alone, is a perfect Socratic dialogue, as many scholars regard it as early and separated from other books. The books II-X are, on the other hand, far from implementing a Socratic circle. They have still the 'what is justice?' question as their incentive leading question, but they are, in most of the positive doctrines and methods that encompass the main parts, ignoring the question. Even these books that, I believe, are the farthest discussions from the Socratic circle are so cautious not to break the Socratic structure of the dialogue as long as it is possible. What is changed is not the structure of the dialogue but the ontological and epistemological grounds based on which new theories are suggested. -/- 1. Knowledge of the Good We can clearly see in the second group of dialogues that the KWX principle loses the place it had before in our first group. It is not, of course, rejected, but still we cannot say that it has the same situation. KWX that was based on Socratic question, as we discussed before, was the leading principle of the first Socrates’ epistemology and of the highest position. Other epistemological principles, SK directly and BE indirectly, were relying on Socratic question and therefore on KWX. Such a position does not belong to KWX from Meno on. What makes it different in the second Socrates is another principle that is needed it not only as its complementary principle but also as what is more fundamental. Plato, then, does not reject KWX in this period, but, it seems, he transcends to another more basic principle; a principle we shall call the principle of 'Knowledge of the Good' (KG): -/- KG Knowledge of X requires knowledge of the Good. -/- Whereas all the dialogues of our first group are free from any discuscon about KG, it bears a very important role in the second group so as becomes the superior principle of knowledge in Republic. Trying to solve the problem of teachability of virtue, Socrates says that it can be teachable only if it is a kind of knowledge because nothing can be taught to human beings but knowledge (ἐπιστήμην) (Meno 87c2). The dilemma will be, then, whether virtue is knowledge or not (c11-12) and since virtue is good, we can change the question to: whether is there anything good separate from knowledge (εἰ μέν τί ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν καὶ ἄλλο χωριζόμενον ἐπιστήμης) (d4-5). Therefore, the conclusion will be that if there is nothing good which knowledge does not encompass, virtue can be nothing but knowledge (d6-8). What let us discuss KG as an epistemological principle for the second Secrates is the relation he tries to establish between knowledge and the Good which, though is alongside with the mentioned thesis and the idea of virtue as knowledge, goes much deeper inside epistemology asking to regard the Good as the basis of knowledge. The effort of Phaedo cannot succeed in establishing the Good as the criterion of explanation and knowledge since, I think, it needs a far more complicated ontology of Republic where Socrates can finally announce KG. What is said in Republic is totally compatible with Phaedo 99d–e and the metaphor of watching an eclipse of the sun. In spite of the fact that we do not have adequate knowledge of the Idea of the Good, it is necessary for every kind of knowledge: 'If we do not know it, even if we know all other things, it is of no benefit to us without it' (505a6-7). The problem of our not having sufficient knowledge of the Idea of Good is tried to be solved by the same method of Phaedo 99d-e, that is to say, by looking at what is like instead of looking at thing itself (506d8-e4). It is this solution that leads to the comparison of the Good with sun in the allegory of Sun (508b12-13). What the Good is in the intelligible realm corresponds to what the sun is in the visible realm; as sun is not sight, but is its cause and is seen by it (b9-10), the Good is so regarding knowledge. It has, then, the same role for knowledge that the sun has for sight. Socrates draws our attention to the function of sun in our seeing. The eyes can see everything only in the light of the day being unable to see the same things in the gloom of night (508c4-6). Without the sun, our eyes are dimmed and blind as if they do not have clear vision any longer (c6-7). That the Good must have the same role about knowledge based on the analogy means that it must be considered as a required condition of any kind of knowledge: -/- The soul, then, thinks (νόει) in the same way: whenever it focuses on what is shined upon by truth and being, understands (ἐνόησέν), knows (ἔγνω) and apparently possesses understanding (νοῦν ἔχειν). (508d4-6) -/- Socrates does not use agathon in this paragraph and substitutes it with both aletheia and to on. He links them with the Idea of the Good when he is to assert the conclusion of the analogy: -/- That which gives truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say, is the Idea of the Good: being the cause of knowledge and truth (αἰτίαν δ᾽ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας) so far as it is known (ὡς γιγνωσκομένης μὲν διανοοῦ). (508e1-4) Knowledge and truth are called goodlike (ἀγαθοειδῆ) since they are not the same as the Good but more honoured (508e6-509a5). KG, which had been implicitly contemplated and searched in Phaedo, is now explicitly being asserted in Republic. As what was quoted clearly proves, this principle is the very one which we can observe as the most fundamental principle of the second Socrates in Republic, corresponding to the role KWX had in the first Socrates. The Form of the Good in Republic, of which Santas speaks as 'the centerpiece of the canonical Platonism of the middle dialogues, the centerpiece of Plato’s metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and …' (1983, 256) much more can be said. Plato’s Cave allegory in Book VIII dedicates a similar role to the Idea of the Good. The Idea of the Good is there as the last thing to be seen in the knowable realm, something so important that its seeing equals to understanding the fact that it is the cause of all that is correct and beautiful (517b). Producing both light and its source in visible realm, it controls and provides truth and understanding in the intelligible realm (517c). -/- 2. Tripartite Epistemology BE is thoroughy rejected in the second Socrates and substituted by its opposite, the principle of 'Tripartite Epistemolgy' (TE): -/- TE Opinion is an epistemological status between knowledge and ignorance. BE of the first Socrates was denying any third way besides knowledge and ignorance which was the foundation of Socratic circle without which Socrates could not reject his interlocutors’ possessing any kind of knowledge. We cannot say, however, that the first Socrates had a third epistemological status in mind but rejected it. Such a status was unacceptable for him so that one can say that he would reject any kind of such status if suggested. There were only two possibilities about knowledge: either one knows something or he does not know it. TE, thus, was not the first Socrates’ discovery and, I think it is not the second Socrates’discovery. All we can see in our second group of dialouges is that he uses this principle as an already demonstrated one. Having examined the slave boy in Meno for the prupose of showing the working of recollection, it truns out that he has some opinions in him while he still does not know. Without trying to prove it, Socrates takes this as the distinction between knowledge and opinion: -/- So, he who does not know (οὐκ εἰδότι) about what he does not know (περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ) has within himself true opinions (ἀληθεῖς δόξαι) about the same things he did not know (περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε) (85c6-7). -/- The same distinction is set between ὀρθὴν δόξαν and ἐπιστήμην at 97b5-6 ff. (also cf. 97b1-2: ὀρθῶς μὲν δοξάζων … ἐπιστάμενος). He connects then their difference to the myth of Daedalus, the statue that would run away and escape. So are true opinions, not willing to remain long in mind and thus not worthy until one ties them down by αἰτίας λογισμῷ (98a3-4). Socrates says that this tying down is anamnesis. We face, in Phaedo, the same relation is settled between knowledge as the process of being tied down and getting the capability to give an account, on the one hand, and anamnesis, on the other hand. When a man knows, he must be able to give an account of what he knows (Phaedo 76b5-6) and since not all people are able to give such an account, those who recollect, recollect what once they learned (76c4). Although the distinction between knowledge and opinion is not explicitly used in Phaedo, referring to the parallel link between knowledge plus account and anamnesis in Phaedo and Meno, one can say that those who cannot recollect are not able to give account and, thus, are in a state of opinion. What is said at Phaedo 84a, though not yet a definite distinction between knowledge and opinion, makes a distinction between their objects so as we can agree that it is presupposed. The soul of the philosopher, Socrates says, follows reason, stays with it forever and contemplates the divine, which is not the object of opinoin (ἀδόξαστον) (84a8, cf. Meno 98b2-5). The distinction of knowledge and belief in Republic has a significant difference with what we discussed in Meno and Phaedo since the distinction of Meno was based on anamnesis and thus more an epistemological distinction. Even in Phaedo that we do not have any elaborate discussion about the distinction, the only hint to the matter at 76 is bound to the theory of anamnesis. In addition to the relation of the distinction with this theory, there is another evidence that does not permit us to consider the distinction as an ontological distinction. Let’s see Meno 85c6-7: -/- So, he who does not know about what he does not know has within himself true opinions about the same things he did not know (τῷ οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ ἔνεισιν ἀληθεῖς δόξαι περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε). (85c6-7) -/- This last sentence persists that the objects of knowledge and true opinion are the same. What Socrates is to say here is that whereas he does not know X he has true opinion about the same X. I think Socrates’ sentence that the slave boy οὐκ εἰδότι ἄρα περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ and his restatement of it by saying περὶ τούτων ὧν οὐκ οἶδε is because he wants to emphasize that the slave boy who does not know, has true opinion about the same thing. Socrates could say this just with using τούτων and there would be no necessity to bring περὶ ὧν ἂν μὴ εἰδῇ for οὐκ εἰδότι if he did not want to emphasize. -/- 3. Tripartite Ontology The distinction between knowledge and true opinion in Republic, on other side, has nothing to do with recollection, but is based on an ontological principle, 'Tripartite Ontology' (TO): -/- TO There are things that both are and are not. -/- This principle I confine, among our three dialogues of the second group, to Republic not extended to Meno and Phaedo, is obviously the opposite of BO. Speaking about the lovers of sights and sounds in the fifth book, Socrates distinguishes them from philosophers because their thought is unable to understand the nature of beautiful itself besides beautiful things (476a6-8) and hence they can only have opinions. The philosopher who, on the contrary, believes in beautiful itself and can distinguish it from beautiful things (476c9-d3), has knowledge because he knows, contrasting others who have opinion because they only opine (d5-6). Since those whose knowledge were degraded as opinion will complain about Socrates’ such calling their thought, he provides them the following argument (476e7-477b1): -/- - Does the person who knows, knows (γιγνώσκει) something (τὶ) or nothing (οὐδέν)? - He knows something (τί). - Something that is (ὂν) or is not (οὐκ ὄν)? - Something that is (ὂν) for how could something that is not be known (πῶς γὰρ ἂν μὴ ὄν γέ τι γνωσθείη)? - Then we have an adequate grasp of this: No matter how many ways we examine it, what completely is (παντελῶς ὂν) is completely knowable (παντελῶς γνωστόν) and what is in no way (μὴ ὂν δὲ μηδαμῇ) is in every way unknowable (πάντῃ ἄγνωστον). - A most adequate one. - Good. Now, if anything is such as to be and also not to be (ὡς εἶναί τε καὶ μὴ εἶναι), won’t it be intermediate (μεταξὺ) between what purely is (εἰλικρινῶς ὄντος) and what in no way is (μηδαμῇ ὄντος)? - Yes, it’s intermediate. - Then as knowledge (γνῶσις) is set over what is (τῷ ὄντι), while ignorance (ἀγνωσία) is of necessity set over what is not (μὴ ὄντι) mustn’t we find an intermediate between ignorance (ἀγνοίας) and knowledge (ἐπιστήμης) to be set over the intermediate, if there is such a thing? -/- From the third status of being we must reach to the third status of knowledge. The simple reading of this text can be an existential reading, taking the "is" of the mentioned sentences as existence. The problem is that when it is said that there is something that both is and is not reading "is" existentially, it sounds too bizarre to be acceptable. It cannot easily be understandable to have something as both existent and non-existent at the same time. This problem arose so many debates and led many scholars to reject the existential reading of "is" and suggest some other readings like predicative or veridical readings. I think though Plato’s complicated ontology of Republic cannot be correctly understood by a simple existential reading, this "is" cannot be free from existential sense of being and, thus, cannot be reduced to just a predicative or veridical sense of being. -/- 4. Bound Knowledges In addition to KG, the Good is also the basis of another principle in the second Socrates, namely the principle of 'Bound Knowledge' (BK): -/- BK Knowledge of everything is bound to the knowledge of the Good. -/- We distinguished BK from KG because we want to insist, in BK, on what had not been insisted upon in KG, that is, the binding role that the Good plays in the second Socrates, contrasting the absence of such a role in the first Socrates. Socrates remembers, in Phaedo, his wonderful keen on natural philosophers' wisdom when he was young. The origin of this enthusiasm was Socrates’ hope to know the cause of everything as they used to claim. When he was searching the matters of his interest on their basis, Socrates says, he became convinced he can get no acceptable answer from them and found himself blind even to the things he thought he knew before. One day he hears Anaxagoras’ theory that 'it is Mind that arranges and is the cause of everything (ὡς ἄρα νοῦς ἐστιν ὁ διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος)' (Phd. 97c1-2 cf. DK, Fr.15.8-9, 11-12, 12-14) and thinks that he can finally find what he has always expected, i.e. something which can explain all things. What I intend to show here is that what makes Socrates hopeful is that Anaxagoras’ theory tries 1) to explain all things by one thing and 2) this explanation is understood by Socrates as if it is based on the concept of the Good. That Socrates was searching for one explanation for all things can be proved even from what he has been expecting from natural philosophers. The case is, nonetheless, more clearly asserted when he speaks about Anaxagoras’ theory. In addition to διακοσμῶν τε καὶ πάντων αἴτιος of 97c2 mentioned above, we have τὸ τὸν νοῦν εἶναι πάντων αἴτιον (c3-4) and τόν γε νοῦν κοσμοῦντα πάντα κοσμεῖν (c4-5) all emphasizing on the cause of all things (πάντα) which can clearly prove that one of the reasons which caused Socrates to embrace it delightfully was its claim to provide the cause of all things by one thing. Another reason was that Anaxagoras’ Mind, at least in Socrates’ view, was attempting to explain everything by the concept of the Good. This connection between Mind and Good belongs more to the essential relation they have in Socrates’ thinking than Anaxagoras’ theory because there are almost nothing about such a relation in Anaxagoras. The reason for Socrates’ reading can be that Mind is substantially compatible with Socrates’ idea of the relation between good and knowledge. Both the thesis 'no one does wrong willingly' and the theory of virtue as knowledge we pointed to above are evidences of this essential relation. Nobody who knows that something is bad can choose or do it as bad. The reason, when it is reason, that means when it is as it should be, when it is wise or when it knows, works only based on good-choosing. In this context, when Socrates hears that Mind is considered as the cause of everything, it sounds to him like this: good should be regarded as the basis of the explanation of all things. We see him, thus, passing from the former to the latter without any proof. This is done in the second sentence after introducing Mind: -/- I thought that if this were so, the arranging Mind would arrange all things and put each thing in the way that was Best (ὅπῃ ἂν βέλτιστα ἔχῃ). If one then wished to find the cause of each thing by which it either perishes or exists, one needs to find what is the best way (βέλτιστον αὐτῷ ἐστιν) for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, about this and other things, what is the most excellent (ἄριστον) and best (βέλτιστον). The same man must inevitably also know what is worse (χεῖρον), for that is part of the same knowledge. (97c4-d5) This passage is a good evidence of Socrates’ leap from Anaxagoras’ Mind to his own concept of the Good that can explain why Socrates found Anaxagoras theory after his own heart (97d7). Mind is welcomed because of its capability for explanation on the basis of good to 'explain why it is so of necessity, saying which is better (ἄμεινον), and that it was better (ἄμεινον) to be so' (97e1-3). What Socrates thought he had found in Anaxagoras can indicate what he had been expecting from natural scientists before. Socrates could not be satisfied with their explanations because they were unable to explain how it is the best for everything to be as it is. It can probably be said, then, that it was the lack of the unifying Good in their explanation that had disappointed him. We must insist that we are discussing what Socrates thought that Anaxagoras’ theory of Mind should have been, not about Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. Phaedo 97c-98b, is not about what Socrates found in Anaxagoras but what he thought he could find in it. On the contrary, it should also be noted that it was not this that was dashed at 98b, but Anaxagoras’ actual way of using Mind. It was Anaxagoras’ fault not to find out how to use such an excellent thesis (98b8-c2, cf. 98e-99b). Socrates gives an example to show how not believing in 'good' as the basis of explanation makes people be wanderers between different unreal explanations of a thing. His words δέον συνδεῖν (binding that binds together) as a description for the Good we chose as the name of BK principle: They do not believe that the truly good and binding binds and holds them together (ὡς ἀληθῶς τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ δέον συνδεῖν καὶ συνέχειν οὐδὲν οἴονται). (99c5-6) -/- Having in mind Plato’s well-known analogy of the sun and the Good at Republic 508-509, we can dare to say that his warning of the danger of seeing the truth directly like one watching an eclipse of the sun in Phaedo (99d-e) is more about the difficulty of so-called good-based explanation than its insufficiency, a difficulty which is precisely confirmed in Republic (504e-505a, 506d-e). Moreover, BK is asserted in a more explicit way in the Republic, where the Good is considered not only as a condition for the knowledge of X, as was noted above discussing KG, but also as what binds all the objects of knowledge and also the soul in its knowing them. At Republic VI, 508e1-3, when Socrates says that the Form of the Good 'gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower (τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ τὴν ἀλήθειαν παρέχον τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις καὶ τῷ γιγνώσκοντι τὴν δύναμιν ἀποδιδὸν)', he wants to set the Good at the highest point of his epistemological structure by which all the elements of this structure are bound. This binding aspect of the Good is by no means a simple binding of all knowledges or all the objects of knowledge, but the most complicated kind of binding as it is expected from the author of the Republic. The kind of unity the Good gives to the different knowledges of different things is comparable with the unity which each Form gives to its participants in Republic: as all the participants of a Form are united by referring to the ideas, all different kinds of knowledge are united by referring to the Good. If we observe Aristotle's assertion that for Plato and the believers of Forms, the causative relation of the One with the Forms is the same as that of the Forms with particulars (e.g. Metaphysics 988a10-11, 988b4), that is to say the One is the essence (e.g., ibid, 988a10-11: τοῦ τί ἐστὶν, 988b4-6: τὸ τί ἢν εἶναί) of the Forms besides his statement that for them One is the Good (e.g., ibid, 988b11-13) the relation between the Good and unity may become more understandable. Since the quiddity of the Good (τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶ τἀγαθὸν) is more than discussion (506d8-e2), we cannot await Socrates to tell us how this binding role is played. All we can expect is to hear from him an analogy by which this unifying role is envisaged, the sun. The kind of unity that the Good gives to the knowledge and its objects in the intelligible realm is comparable to the unity that the sun gives to the sight and its objects in the visible realm (508b-c). The allegory of Line (Republic VI, 509d-511), like that of the Sun, tries to bind all various kinds of knowledges. The hierarchical model of the Line which encompasses all kinds of knowledge from imagination to understanding can clearly be considered as Plato’s effort to bind all kinds of knowledges by a certain unhypothetical principle. The method of hypothesis starts, in the first subsection of the intelligible realm, with a hypothesis that is not directed firstly to a principle but a conclusion (510b4-6). It proceeds, in the other subsection, to a 'principle which is not a hypothesis' (b7) and is called the 'unhypothetical principle of all things' (ἀνυποθέτου ἐπὶ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ἀρχὴν) (511b6-7). This παντὸς must refer not only to the objects of the intelligible realm but to the sensible objects as well. Plato does posit, therefore, an epistemological principle for all things, a principle that all things are, epistemologically, bound and, thus, unified by. -/- 5. Bound Beings The ontological aspect of BK we shall call the principle of 'Bound Beings' (BB): -/- BB Being of all things are bound by the Good. -/- We saw in our principle of Split Being (SB) how the first Socrates was criticized because of his approach to split being and separate each thing from other things. The principle of Bound Beings intends to make the things more related, a duty which is done again by the Good. In the allegory of Sun, there are two paragraphs that evidently and deliberately extend the binding role of the Good to the ontological scene: -/- You will say that the sun not only makes the visible things have the ability of being seen but also coming to be, growth and nourishment. (509b2-4) -/- This clearly intends to remind the ontological role the sun plays in bringing to being all the sensible things in order to display how its counterpart has the same role in the intelligible realm (b6-10): -/- Not only the objects of knowledge (γιγνωσκομένοις) owe their being known (γιγνώσκεσθαι) to the Good, but also their existence (τὸ εἶναί) and their being (οὐσίαν) are due to it, though the Good is not being but superior to it in rank and power. That the Good is here represented as responsible for being of things in addition to their being known means, in my opinion, that Plato wants to posit BB in addition to BK. The allegory of Cave at the very beginning of the seventh Book (514aff.) can be taken as another evidence. The role of the Good, one might say, is confined to the intelligible realm because it is asserted that the role the Good plays in this realm is corresponding to that of the sun in the visible realm. The fact that Plato wants to observe the Good also as the ontological cause of the sensible things is obvious from his saying, in the allegory of Cave, that the Form of the Good 'produces light and its source (τὸν τούτου κύριον) [i.e. the sun] in the visible realm' (517c3). We can conclude, then, that the ontological function of the Good is not confined to the intelligible realm in which it is the lord and provides truth and understanding (c3-4) because it is also responsible to produce τὸν κύριον of light. 6. Proportionality of Being and Knowledge Insofaras BE and BO principles of the first Socrates gave way to TE and TO principles of the second Socrates, we cannot expect him to preserve KB in the same way as it was in the first Socrates. The new tripartite ontology and epistemology necessitates some modifications in KB which results in the principle of 'Proportionality of Being and Knowledge' (PBK): -/- PBK To every class of being there is a proportionate category of knowledge. -/- This principle, of course, does not entail the refutation of KB and thus is not kind of rejecting PBK but only a more complicated version of it. Based on PBK, we can still agree that knowledge is of being (KB) but the issue is that since none of the concepts of knowledge and being in the second Socrates are as simple as they were for the first Socrates, we need a more complicated principle for their relation here. Although from Meno 97a where the distinction of knowledge and true opinion is drawn out in the second group of the dialogues, we can expect a new relation, it is articulated in its most complete way in Republic and specifically in the allegory of Line. All the beings are divided there hierarchically to four classes, to each of them belongs a class of knowledge: imagination to images, belief to the sensible things (more correctly: the things of which they[in previous class] were images (ᾧ τοῦτο ἔοικεν)), thought to mathematical objects (?) and understanding to the Forms and the first principle. The degree of clarity that each of the classes of knowledge shares in (σαφηνείας ἡγησάμενος μετέχειν) is proportionate to the degree that its object shares in truth (ἀληθείας μετέχει). (511e2-4) -/- Conclusion From the six onto-epistemilogical principles of the first Socrates, four principles turn to their opposite in the middle period dialogues. While bipolar epistemology and ontology of the early dialogues give place to tripartite epistemology in the middle period dialogues and tripartite ontology in Republic, the split knowledge and being of the first Socrates are inclined to be substituted by bound knowledges and bound beings in the second Socrates and specifically in Republic. Not all our system of principles in this article is necessarily determinative. Either they are rightly formulated or not, our result would not be vulnerable if we accept that 1) making the distinction of knowledge and belief, 2) accepting the being of not being and 3) trying to bind both being and knowledge by the concept of the Good happens only in middle period dialogues, having been absent in the early ones. These are the favourite results all those somehow arbitrary and even oversimplified principles were to illustrate; that there is kind of a development in the epistemological as well as the ontological grounds of Plato’s philosophy. -/- Notes . (shrink)

An ontology's theory of ontic predication has implications for the concomitant predicate logic. Remarkable in its analytic power for both ontology and logic is the here developed Particularized Predicate Logic (PPL), the logic inherent in the realist version of the doctrine of unit or individuated predicates. PPL, as axiomatized and proven consistent below, is a three-sorted impredicative intensional logic with identity, having variables ranging over individuals x, intensions R, and instances of intensions $R_{i}$ . The power of PPL is illustrated (...) by its clarification of the self-referential nature of impredicative definitions and its distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate forms. With a wellmotivated refinement on the axiom of comprehension, PPL is, in effect, a higher-order logic without a forced stratification of predicates into types or the use of other ad hoc restrictions. The Russell-Priest characterization of the classic self-referential paradoxes is used to show how PPL diagnosis and solves these antimonies. A direct application of PPL is made to Grelling's Paradox. Also shown is how PPL can distinguish between identity and indiscernibility. (shrink)

State sovereignty is closely intertwined with, but not limited to, control over territory and people. It has long been recognized that control over monetary affairs is a critical part of genuine sovereignty. In this Article, I go a step further and argue that the relevance and importance of territorial versus monetary sovereignty has shifted in favor of the latter. This shift goes hand in hand with the rise of credit-based financial systems. Such systems depend, in the last instance, on backstopping (...) by an entity with control over its own money supply and no binding survival constraints. Only states with monetary sovereignty fit this pattern. All others are de facto more like private entities, which by definition cannot manipulate their own survival constraint. States can surrender their monetary sovereignty directly by adopting another currency or by issuing their own debt in foreign currency and under foreign law. They also compromise their sovereignty by permitting unlimited capital inflows denominated in currencies other than their own. This is because in times of crisis they will not be able to rescue the domestic financial system from its tendency to self-destruct without subjecting itself to a sovereign debt crisis and the implied need to rely on a lifeline from other states or supranational entities. (shrink)

Those of us who are sympathetic to Kantian ethics usually are so because we regard it as an ethics of autonomy, based on rational self-esteem and respect for the human capacity to direct one’s own life according to rational principles. Kantian ethical theory is grounded on the idea that the moral law is binding on me only because it is a law proceeding from my own will. The ground of a law of autonomy lies in the very will (...) which is to be subject to the law, and this leaves no room for any issue about why this will should obey the law. The idea of autonomy also identifies the authority of the law with the value constituting the content of the law, in that it bases the law on our esteem for the dignity of rational nature in ourselves, which makes every rational being an end in itself. (shrink)