Xenophon's portrait is the only one other than Plato's to survive, and while it offers a very personal interpretation of Socratic thought, it also reveals much about the man and his philosophical views.

One of the foundational works of military history and political philosophy, and an inspiration for Alexander the Great, the Anabasis of Cyrus recounts the epic story of the Ten Thousand, a band of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger to overthrow his brother, Artaxerxes, king of Persia and the most powerful man on earth. It shows how Cyrus' army was assembled covertly and led from the coast of Asia Minor all the way to Babylon; how the Greeks held the (...) field against a superior Persian force; how Cyrus was killed, leaving the Greeks stranded deep within enemy territory; and how many of them overcame countless dangers and found their way back to Greece. Their remarkable success was due especially to the wily and decisive leadership of Xenophon himself, a student of Socrates who had joined the Ten Thousand and, after most of the Greek generals had been murdered, rallied the despondent Greeks, won a position of leadership, and guided them wisely through myriad obstacles. In this new translation of the Anabasis, Wayne Ambler achieves a masterful combination of liveliness and a fidelity to the original uncommon in other versions. Accompanying Ambler's translation is a penetrating interpretive essay by Eric Buzzetti, one that shows Xenophon to be an author who wove a philosophic narrative into his dramatic tale. The translation and interpretive essay encourage renewed study of the Anabasis as a work of political philosophy. They also celebrate its high adventure and its hero's adroit decision-making under the most pressing circumstances. (shrink)

The Symposium that Xenophon wrote has lived in the shadow of the more famous one by Plato, so much so that it has not received a full commentary in English for well over a hundred years. Yet it is a work as useful for its Greek as it is precious for its content. Socrates is the hero of each Symposium, but most of our understanding of him is usually owed to Plato; we risk assuming that his portrait of Socrates (...) is right. Xenophon saw the man differently: his picture is independent, and it is the only significant surviving alternative view. Moreover, the scene that Xenophon paints in his Symposium has a vigour and wit of its own. The work is a document of prime importance for the classical Greek society which we study most and know best: it is set at the male heart of it. Thirdly, Xenophon's Greek is lucid and unforced. The editor has been using the text for a number of years to help students bridge the gap between what they learn from their beginners' courses and the richer Greek of more fashionable texts. Hence an unprecedented amount of help with the language, and a large vocabulary, as well as the notes usual in this series on the content. (shrink)

This book presents translations of three dialogues Xenophon devoted to the life and thought of his teacher, Socrates. Each is accompanied by notes and an interpretative essay that will introduce new readers to Xenophon and foster further reflection in those familiar with his writing. "Apology of Socrates to the Jury" shows how Socrates conducted himself when he was tried on the capital charge of not believing in the city's gods and corrupting the young. Although Socrates did not secure (...) his own acquittal, he profoundly impressed some listeners who then helped to shape the public perception of philosophy as a noble, if highly idiosyncratic, way of life. In "Oeconomicus," Xenophon relates the conversation Socrates had on the day he turned from the study of natural philosophy to that of moral and political matters. "Oeconomicus" is concerned most directly with the character and purpose of Socrates' political philosophy. Xenophon provides entertaining portraits of Socrates' circle of friends in the "Symposium." In the process, he conveys the source of every individual's pride in himself, thus defining for each a conception of human excellence or virtue. The dialogue concludes with Socrates' beautiful speech on love (eros) and its proper place in the good or happy life. (shrink)

: In a short and much-neglected passage in the second Critique, Kant discusses the threat posed to human freedom by theological determinism. In this paper we present an interpretation of Kant’s conception of and response to this threat. Regarding his conception, we argue that he addresses two versions of the threat: either God causes appearances directly or he does so indirectly by causing things in themselves which in turn cause appearances. Kant’s response to the first version is that God cannot (...) cause appearances directly because they depend essentially on the passive sensibility of finite beings. Kant’s response to the second version is that human beings are endowed with transcendental freedom, which blocks the causal transitivity that is presupposed by this version. We also contrast his position on this topic with Leibniz’s and Spinoza’s. (shrink)

An essential text for understanding Socrates, Xenophon's Memorabilia is the compelling tribute of an affectionate student to his teacher, providing a rare firsthand account of Socrates' life and philosophy. The Memorabilia is invaluable both as a work of philosophy in its own right and as a complement to the study of Plato's dialogues. The longest of Xenophon's four Socratic works, it is particularly revealing about the differences between Socrates and his philosophical predecessors. Far more obviously than Plato in (...) the dialogues, Xenophon calls attention in the Memorabilia to his own relationship with Socrates. A colorful and fully engaged writer, Xenophon aims above all to convince his readers of the greatness of Socrates' thought and the disgracefulness of his conviction on a capital charge. In thirty-nine chapters, Xenophon presents Socrates as an ordinary person and as a great benefactor to those associated with him. (shrink)

Bill Brewer presents an original view of the role of conscious experience in the acquisition of empirical knowledge. He argues that perceptual experiences must provide reasons for empirical beliefs if there are to be any determinate beliefs at all about particular objects in the world. This fresh approach to epistemology turns away from the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge and works instead from a theory of understanding in a particular area.

We must critically rethink race and genetics in the context of the new genetic breakthroughs and haplotype mapping. We must avoid the slippery slope of turning socially constructed racial categories into genetic realities. It is a potentially dangerous arena given the history of racialized science in the United States and globally. Indeed, the new advances must be viewed in the context of a long history of racial inequality, continuing into the current period. This is more than a question of how (...) carefully we use categories of analysis such as race. Justice and equity must be core to our considerations. There is a community stake in this work that must be seriously considered and included in decision making. A progressive and critical analysis is in order. (shrink)

This paper examines the form of mental representation of scientific theories in scientists and nonscientists. It concludes that images and schemas are not the appropriate form of mental representation for scientific theories but that mental models and perceptual symbols do seem appropriate for representing physical/mechanical phenomena. These forms of mental representation are postulated to have an analogical relation with the world and it is this relationship that gives them strong explanatory power. It is argued that the construct of naïve theories (...) as used in developmental psychology may be the appropriate form of mental representation for non physical/mechanical domains. The paper adopts a strong form of psychologism in the philosophy of science and argues that model-based approaches to scientific theories are more appropriate forms of representation for scientific theories than the formalist approaches that dominate current philosophy of science. (shrink)

Physical objects are such things as stones, tables, trees, people and other animals: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world we live in. therefore expresses a commonsense commitment to physical realism: the persisting macroscopic constituents of the world we live in exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone.

It is close to current orthodoxy that perceptual experience is to be characterized, at least in part, by its representational content, roughly, by the way it represents things as being in the world around the perceiver. Call this basic idea the content view.

Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the (...) realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject (...) that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Plato and Xenophon: Apologies compares two key dialogues on the death of Socrates. Socrates was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth of ancient Athens and was tried, convicted, imprisoned, and executed. Both Plato and Xenophon make clear that the charges were not brought forward in the spirit of true piety, and that Socrates was a man of real virtue and beneficence. To this day, his trial and execution remain a mark upon the democracy that put him to (...) death. These dialogues underscore the limitations of democratic relativism and emphasize the nature of philosophy or the free mind. Plato’s Apology of Socrates is both poetry and an act of reformation, justifying the life of philosophy, challenging the authority of the pagan gods and heroes, and introducing Socrates as a heroic and even divine figure. In contrast, Xenophon’s Socrates is not dialectical and otherworldly, but makes a different appeal for philosophy. From Xenophon emerges the heroic tradition of Plutarch with its reflections on the virtues and vices of great historical men. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Plato and Xenophon’s immediate audience. (shrink)

Talbot Brewer offers a new approach to ethical theory, founded on a far-reaching reconsideration of the nature and sources of human agency.

This article presents the results of an experiment which investigated elementary school children's explanations of the day/night cycle. First, third, and fifth grade children were asked to explain certain phenomena, such as the disappearance of the sun during the night, the disappearance of stars during the day, the apparent movement of the moon, and the alteration of day and night. The results showed that the majority of the children in our sample used in a consistent fashion a small number of (...) relatively well‐defined mental models of the earth, the sun, and the moon to explain the day/night cycle. These mental models of the day/night cycle were empirically accurate, logically consistent and revealed some sensitivity on the part of the children to issues of simplicity of explanation. The younger children formed Initial mental models which provided explanations of the day/night cycle based on everyday experience (e.g., the sun goes down behind mountains, clouds cover up the sun). The older children constructed synthetic mental models (e.g., the sun and the moon revolve around the stationary earth every 24 hours; the earth rotates in an up/down direction and the sun and moon are fixed on opposite sides) which represented attempts to synthesize the culturally accepted view with aspects of their Initial models. A few of the older children appeared to have constructed a mental model of the day/night cycle similar to the scientific one. A theoretical framework is outlined which explains the formation of initial, synthetic, and scientific models of the day/night cycle in terms of the reinterpretation of a hierarchy of constraints, some of which are present early in the child's life, and others which emerge later out of the structure of the acquired knowledge. (shrink)

The standard paradigm for mental causation is a person’s acting for a reason. Something happens - she intentionally φ’s - the occurrence of which we explain by citing a relevant belief or desire. In the present context, I simply take for granted the following two conditions on the appropriateness of this explanation. First, the agent φ’s _because_ she believes/desires what we say she does, where this is expressive of a _causal_ dependence.1 Second, her believing/desiring this gives her a _reason_ for (...) φ-ing: recognizing that she has this belief/desire makes her φ-ing intelligible as rational in the light of her other attitudes and circumstances. A further condition must be met, though, if this is to be a genuine psychological explanation, a case of her acting _for_ the reason in question. Consider the following example of Davidson’s (1973, p. 79). An exhausted climber is desperate to rid herself of the weight and danger of holding her partner on a rope; and her sudden realization that simply letting go would achieve this so unnerves her that her grip loosens slightly and he falls. Her releasing him causally depends upon her having this belief and desire, which provide _a_ reason for doing what she does. But this is not _why_ she does it: it would be at best misleading to say that she dropped him, intentionally, because she was fed up with holding his weight, or because she thought that she might otherwise fall. Her letting go does not depend upon her having these reasons in the right way. The reason-giving relation is causally irrelevant. If we are to explain a person’s acting _for_ a reason, then her doing. (shrink)

In his comments, Richard Fumerton carefully develops two fundamental concerns with my views, which he interprets sympathetically, and almost entirely correctly. Before turning to these concerns, though, I must make one point about his concise opening statement of my principal claims. As I hope is clear from my précis, perceptual experiences provide reasons for empirical beliefs not simply in virtue of sharing demonstrative content with them. The key idea is that a person cannot properly grasp the objective content of these (...) experiences—that is, he cannot actually have experiences of particular things in the mind-independent world around him—without understanding that his apprehension that things are thus and so out there is in part due to the fact that they are. He therefore recognizes the relevant content as his epistemic openness to the way things objectively are. This is clearly central to my overall position. (shrink)

Realism concerning a given domain of things is the view that the things in that domain exist, and are as they are, quite independently of anyone.

I take it for granted that sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs; indeed this claim forms the first premise of my central argument for (CC). 1 The subsequent stages of the argument are intended to establish that a person has such a reason for believing something about the way things are in the world around him only if he is in some mental state or other with a conceptual content: a conceptual state. Thus, given that sense experiential states (...) do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content. (shrink)

Alexithymia is characterized by difficulty identifying and describing one’s own emotion. Identifying and describing one’s emotion involves several cognitive processes, so alexithymia may result from a number of impairments. Here we propose the alexithymia language hypothesis—the hypothesis that language impairment can give rise to alexithymia—and critically review relevant evidence from healthy populations, developmental disorders, adult-onset illness, and acquired brain injury. We conclude that the available evidence is supportive of the alexithymia–language hypothesis, and therefore that language impairment may represent one of (...) multiple routes to alexithymia. Where evidence is lacking, we outline which approaches will be useful in testing this hypothesis. (shrink)

We perceive a world of mind-independent macroscopic material objects such as stones, tables, trees, and animals. Our experience is the joint upshot of the way these things are and our route through them, along with the various relevant circumstances of perception; and it depends on the normal operation of our perceptual systems. How should we characterise our perceptual experience so as to respect its basis and explain its role in grounding empirical thought and knowledge? I offered an answer to this (...) question in Perception and its objects. Here I aim to clarify some of my central arguments and to develop and defend the position further in the light of subsequent critical discussion. (shrink)

We believe that the ordinary physical objects that we perceive continue to exist unperceived; and this is intuitively an aspect of any authentic characterization of how the world appears to us in perception. But how can experience present its objects as continuing to exist beyond that very experience of them? Here I aim to explain this phenomenon. I start with an insight from Evans (1985). Familiar attempts to implement this insight fail, in my opinion. Here I introduce, motivate, defend, and (...) elaborate an alternative approach to its implementation that, I claim, succeeds. Its key is to recognize the role of Evans’s insight in the metaphysics of perceptual experience itself. (shrink)

It is not clear whether to assess Robert Audi’s Moral Knowledge and Ethical Character as a collection of essays or a unified piece of theorizing. Seven of the book’s twelve essays have been published before, and at first blush they appear connected by little more than a common focus on ethics. These essays are framed, however, by an introduction and conclusion characterizing the book as the elaboration of a single, large-scale ethical theory. Perhaps a comprehensive theory can be disentangled from (...) these essays, but its contours and merits would be far clearer if Audi had presented it systematically, drawing selectively from previous essays rather than reproducing them wholesale. (shrink)

We perceive things in the external world as spatially located both with respect to each other and to ourselves, such that they are in principle accessible from where we seem to be. I hear the door bang behind me; I feel the pen on the desk over to my right; and I see you walking beneath the line of pictures, from left to right in front of me. By displaying these spatial relations between its objects and us, the perceivers, perception (...) places us in the perceived world: our world and the world we perceive are one. Clearly this is not achieved by our continually perceiving ourselves along with the things around us, and thus recovering our position with respect to them. Indeed I shall argue that there are serious difficulties with the suggestion that this might be the basic mechanism for perceptual self- location. Furthermore, I shall argue that our existence as an element of the objective order cannot be inferred from the raw given in sense perception. Hence it cannot even be on the right lines as an answer to the question 'What is it for perception to represent its objects as environmental to the subject?', that it should present these objects, along with the perceiving subject himself, or along with something from which his existence in the perceived world could be deduced, in the very same frame so to speak. Nevertheless it yields him an awareness of himself as there in the wings of that scene, genuinely located with respect to the action, yet somehow not normally quite getting onto the stage. And I shall argue here, that perceptual contents succeed in being self-locating in this way in.. (shrink)

The question how to account for illusion has had a prominent role in shaping theories of perception throughout the history of philosophy. Prevailing philosophical wisdom today has it that phenomena of illusion force us to choose between the following two options. First, reject altogether the early modern empiricist idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience. Instead we must characterize perceptual experience entirely in terms of its (...) representational content. Second, retain the early modern idea that the core subjective character of experience is simply constituted by the identity of its direct objects, but admit that these must be mind-dependent entities, distinct from the mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. I argue here that the early modern empiricists had an indispensable insight. The idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience is more fundamental than any appeal to perceptual content, and can account for illusion, and indeed hallucination, without resorting to the problematic postulation of any such mind-dependent objects. (shrink)

The metaphysics of ordinary objects is an increasingly vibrant field of study for philosophers. This volume gathers insights from a number of leading authors, who together tackle the central issues in contemporary debates about the subject. Their essays engage with topics including composition, persistence, perception, categories, images, artifacts, truthmakers, metaontology, and the relationship between the manifest and scientific images. Exploring the nature of everyday things, the contributors situate their arguments and the latest research against the background of the field's development. (...) Moreover, many essays propose new ideas and approaches, looking ahead to the future of the metaphysical study of ordinary objects. Featuring numerous clearly explained examples and with thoughtful links drawn to other, related disciplines such as pragmatism, this wide-ranging volume fills a major gap in the literature and will be important for scholars working in metaphysics. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Possibility of Falsity The Involvement of Generality Notes References.

La modernité s’est accompagnée d’une reprise en main par l’État des noyaux de pouvoir religieux qui lui étaient auparavant extérieurs. Toutefois, on peut montrer qu’à cette rupture se superpose une autre discontinuité notable : l’apparition d’un concept de pouvoir nouveau, s’occupant de la vie elle-même et non plus de ses marges, qui serait la biopolitique. Il est possible de déceler les leviers conceptuels qui nouent ensemble ces deux transformations chez l’un des penseurs essentiels de cette modernité politique, Spinoza, dans la (...) mesure où, tout en démontrant la nécessité pour le pouvoir politique de s’émanciper du religieux et de le reprendre en main, il participe d’une nouvelle manière de penser l’exercice du pouvoir. (shrink)

La modernité s’est accompagnée d’une reprise en main par l’État des noyaux de pouvoir religieux qui lui étaient auparavant extérieurs. Toutefois, on peut montrer qu’à cette rupture se superpose une autre discontinuité notable : l’apparition d’un concept de pouvoir nouveau, s’occupant de la vie elle-même et non plus de ses marges, qui serait la biopolitique. Il est possible de déceler les leviers conceptuels qui nouent ensemble ces deux transformations chez l’un des penseurs essentiels de cette modernité politique, Spinoza, dans la (...) mesure où, tout en démontrant la nécessité pour le pouvoir politique de s’émanciper du religieux et de le reprendre en main, il participe d’une nouvelle manière de penser l’exercice du pouvoir. (shrink)

Kant's theory of the intuitive intellect has a broad and substantial role in the development and exposition of his critical philosophy. An emphasis on this theory's reception and appropriation on the part of the German idealists has tended to divert attention from Kant's own treatment of the topic. In this essay, I seek an adequate overview of the theory Kant advances in support of his critical enterprise. I examine the nature of the intuitive intellect's object; its epistemic relation to its (...) object; its mode of comprehension; the relationship between these cognitive elements; and I ask which minds Kant regards as intuitive intellects. (shrink)

In The Varieties of Reference (1982), Gareth Evans claims that considerations having to do with certain basic ways we have of gaining knowledge of our own physical states and properties provide "the most powerful antidote to a Cartesian conception of the self" (220). In this chapter, I start with a discussion and evaluation of Evans' own argument, which is, I think, in the end unconvincing. Then I raise the possibility of a more direct application of similar considerations in defence of (...) common sense anti-Cartesianism. Progress in this direction depends upon a far more psychologically informed understanding of normal and abnormal bodily awareness than is generally found in philosophical discussions of these issues. In the context of my attempt at some such understanding, I go on to assess the potential of this more direct line of argument. (shrink)

The goal of this chapter is to describe recollective memory and give an account of some of the characteristics of this form of human memory. I take recollective memory to be the type of memory that occurs when an individual recalls a specific episode from their past experience. I start with this very loose definition because a large part of this chapter consists of an attempt to work out a more detailed and analytic description of this form of memory.

A number of public controversies have emerged around forensic DNA testing backlogs at crime laboratories in the United States. This study provides a first look at public responses to such backlogs, using a controversy in the state of Wisconsin as a case study. First, it builds on research about public understandings of DNA and the “CSI effect” to develop a theoretical framework. Next, it explores news coverage of the Wisconsin backlog. It then uses survey data to show that public understandings (...) of DNA, media use, and demographic factors were related to how closely respondents followed the story about the backlog and/or how much they supported increased spending on DNA testing at the crime lab. Self-reported understanding of DNA predicted following the backlog, whereas perceived reliability of DNA evidence predicted both following the backlog and support. Total television viewing was not related to either following the backlog or support, but watching crime television predicted following the backlog. Reading a newspaper and watching local TV news each predicted following the backlog; reading a newspaper also predicted support. These results suggest a number of theoretical insights into how members of the public may reason about and draw on media messages regarding DNA and DNA testing in responding to forensic DNA testing backlogs. (shrink)