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24Truthier Than Thou: Truth, Supertruth and Probability of TruthNoûs 50 (4): 740-58. 2015.Different formal tools are useful for different purposes. For example, when it comes to modelling degrees of belief, probability theory is a better tool than classical logic; when it comes to modelling the truth of mathematical claims, classical logic is a better tool than probability theory. In this paper I focus on a widely used formal tool and argue that it does not provide a good model of a phenomenon of which many think it does provide a good model: I shall argue that while supervaluationis…Read more
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21Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito: Critical EssaysRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2004.Plato's Euthyrphro, Apology, andCrito portray Socrates' words and deeds during his trial for disbelieving in the Gods of Athens and corrupting the Athenian youth, and constitute a defense of the man Socrates and of his way of life, the philosophic life. The twelve essays in the volume, written by leading classical philosophers, investigate various aspects of these works of Plato, including the significance of Plato's characters, Socrates's revolutionary religious ideas, and the relationship betw…Read more
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21Justice Through Apologies: Remorse, Reform, and PunishmentCambridge University Press. 2014.In this follow up to I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies, Nick Smith expands his ambitious theories of categorical apologies to civil and criminal law. After rejecting court-ordered apologies as unjustifiable humiliation, this book explains that penitentiaries were originally designed to bring about penance - something like apology - and that this tradition has been lost in the assembly line of mass incarceration. Smith argues that the state should modernize these principles and techniques to…Read more
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20What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology (edited book)Routledge. 2019.This book encourages renewed attention by contemporary epistemologists to an area most of them overlook: ancient philosophy. Readers are invited to revisit writings by Plato, Aristotle, Pyrrho, and others, and to ask what new insights might be gained from those philosophical ancestors. Are there ideas, questions, or lines of thought that were present in some ancient philosophy and that have subsequently been overlooked? Are there contemporary epistemological ideas, questions, or lines of thought…Read more
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18Why Socrates Should Not Be PunishedHistory of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 20 (1): 53-64. 2017.: In her recent paper, “How to Escape Indictment for Impiety: Teaching as Punishment in the Euthyphro,” G. Fay Edwards argues that if Socrates were to become Euthyphro’s student, this should count as the appropriate punishment for Socrates’ alleged crime. In this paper, we show that the interpretation Edwards has proposed conflicts with what Socrates has to say about the functional role of punishment in the Apology, and that the account Socrates gives in the Apology, properly understood, also pr…Read more
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16Review of Dominic Hyde Vagueness, Logic and Ontology (Ashgate, 2008) (review)Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 16 (4): 531-533. 2010.
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15This introductory article is structured around the following themes: it begins with a brief overview of some important works that have paved the way for the present discussion. This is followed by a critique of the concept of “experience” and the philosophies based on it, that was first presented by feminist thinkers Joan Scott and Judith Butler in the 1980’s. The question this debate poses to the discussions in this book is whether focusing on experience is still a philosophically viable option…Read more
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15Adorno: Disenchantment and ethics: Adorno: A critical reader (review)Social Theory and Practice 29 (3): 487. 2003.
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14Questions for a reluctant jurisprudence of alterityIn Desmond Manderson (ed.), Essays on Levinas and law: a mosaic, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.Levinas and Adorno both refuse to translate their stringent ethical convictions into a programmatic social theory because translating their theories of non-identity into models of governance would necessarily perpetrate, en masse, the very subsumptive violence they denounce. Although Levinas and Adorno have come to provide ethical guidance to Continental philosophers, their outright refusal to be drawn into applied theory has caused innumerable difficulties for progressive theorists compelled by…Read more
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14Review of Giovanna Borradori's (review)Review of Giovanna Borradori's Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida.
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13The Bloomsbury Handbook of Socrates (edited book, 2nd ed.)Bloomsbury Handbooks. 2024.This handbook provides detailed philosophical analysis of the life and thought of Socrates across fifteen in-depth chapters. Each chapter engages with a central aspect of the rich tradition of Socratic studies and, after surveying the state of scholarship, points the way forward to new directions of interpretation. A leading team of scholars present dynamic readings of Socrates, extracted from the historical context of Plato's dialogues, covering elenchus, irony, ignorance, definitions, pedagogy…Read more
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13Aristophanes' acharnians 591–2: A proposed new interpretationClassical Quarterly 67 (2): 650-653. 2017.Kenneth Dover proposes an explanation of this joke in which the gist is to be understood in terms of ‘homosexual rape as an expression of dominance’, so that Dicaeopolis is offering himself up for use as a pathic by Lamachus. Dover believes that the joke becomes ‘intelligible if the assumption is that the erastēs handles the penis of the erōmenos during anal copulation’. Others have seen a circumcision joke here. Alan Sommerstein explains how the joke would work either of these ways.
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11The argument and purpose of this comment will be to cross-pollinate value incommensurability theory and Levinasian deconstruction so as to begin to develop a social and legal theory that (1) is motivated by an ethical commitment to the irreducibility of human subjects, institutions, and goods and (2) negotiates between those incommensurable subjects and values through democratic procedural mechanisms. This hybridization of the two schools of thought will provide ethical grounding for legal incom…Read more
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8The philosophy of knowledge: a history (edited book)Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History presents the history of one of Western philosophy's greatest challenges: understanding the nature of knowledge. Divided chronologically into four volumes, it follows conceptions of knowledge that have been proposed, defended, replaced, and proposed anew by ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary philosophers. This volume covers the Presocratics, Sophists, and treatments of knowledge offered by Socrates and Plato. With original insights into the vast swee…Read more
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7‘Childish Frivolity’: Plato’s Socrates on the Interpretation of PoetryIn David Keyt & Christopher Shields (eds.), Principles and Praxis in Ancient Greek Philosophy: Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy in Honor of Fred D. Miller, Jr, Springer Verlag. pp. 61-73. 2024.Scholars have wrestled with the very troubling but also rather long passage in the Protagoras in which Socrates offers an interpretation of a poem by Simonides (339e-347a). On the one hand, the way in which Socrates develops his interpretation leads to an outcome that makes it look as if Socrates attributes distinctly Socratic views to the poet, which had led a number of scholars to conclude that, albeit in a rather strange way, Socrates is trying to do something philosophically serious in his i…Read more
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6Socrates on Punishment and the Law:Apology 25c5-26b2In Marcelo D. Boeri, Yasuhira Y. Kanayama & Jorge Mittelmann (eds.), Soul and Mind in Greek Thought. Psychologial Issues in Plato and Aristotle, Springer. pp. 37-53. 2018.In his interrogation of Meletus in Plato’s version of Socrates’ defense speech, Socrates offers an interesting argument that promises to provide important evidence for his views about crime and punishment—if only we can understand how the argument is supposed to work. It is our project in this paper to do that. We argue that there are two main problems with the argument: one is that it is not obvious how to make the argument valid; the other is that the argument seems to rely on a distinction th…Read more
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6The Socratic ParadoxesIn Hugh H. Benson (ed.), A Companion to Plato, Blackwell. 2006.This chapter contains sections titled: The Prudential Paradox The Meno Argument Socrates’ Argument against “The Many” in the Protagoras Knowledge and Belief What Endows an Object with the Power of Appearance? Does Socrates have the Metrētikē Technē? The Moral Paradox Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle Note.
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4‘What it Makes Sense to Say’: Wittgenstein, rule‐following and the nature of educationEducational Philosophy and Theory 37 (3): 425-430. 2005.In his writings Jim Marshall has helpfully emphasized such Wittgensteinian themes as the multiplicity of language games, the deconstruction of ‘certainty,’ and the contexts of power that underlie discursive systems. Here we focus on another important legacy of Wittgenstein's thinking: his insistence that human activity is rule‐governed. This idea foregrounds looking carefully at the world of education and learning, as against the empirical search for new psychological or other facts. It reminds …Read more
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1Association in Husserl and Freud – Passivity and the UnconsciousIn Luiz-Carlos Pereira Marcia Cavalcante Schuback (ed.), Time and Form, Puc University Press. 2013.
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1Disavowal, Ignorance and the Colonial Difference: Rethinking Phenomenology From the StartIn Maria Gyemant & Délia Popa (eds.), Approches Phénoménologiques de L'Inconscient, Georg Olms Verlag. 2015.
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@FP= Although rehabilitation is often considered a type of punishment for criminal offenders, its objectives are therapeutic rather than punitive. While some theories of punishment claim that criminals deserve to suffer for their crimes, the rehabilitative ideal views criminal behavior more like a disease that should be treated with scientific methods available to cure the offender. Many convicts suffer from mental and physical illness, drug addiction, and limited opportunities for economic succ…Read more
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@FP=Punishment in the contemporary United States is a massive and costly enterprise. As of 2001, approximately 5.6 million living adult residents of the United States had served time in a federal or state prison. In that same year, federal, state, and local governments in the United States spent $57 billion punishing these individuals, which does not include $72 billion to provide police protections and $38 billion to maintain the court system. An American resident is more than eight times more …Read more
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Socratic moral psychologyIn John Bussanich & Nicholas D. Smith (eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to Socrates, Continuum. 2013.
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Questions for a reluctant jurisprudence of alterityIn Desmond Manderson (ed.), Essays on Levinas and law: a mosaic, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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The World Beyond Europe as Spirit: Transcendental Prejudice and Phenomenology [In Japanese]Logos Kai Fainomenon (Tokyo, 2015) 30 31-47. 2014.
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Self-alteration and temporality: the radicalized and universal reductions in Husserl’s late thinking (au-delà de Derrida)In Dermot Moran Hans Rainer Sepp (ed.), Phenomenology 2010 Vol. 4. Selected Essays from Northern Europe: Traditions, Transitions and Challenges, Zeta Books. pp. 51-86. 2011.This text argues that Husserl’s late philosophy of temporal and bodily subjectivity can only be understood by means of the interplay between different reductions. For various reasons, this decisive methodological aspect has been largely overlooked by most interpreters. As a consequence, the co-originality of the constitution of space and time, which first enables a comprehensive grasp of the originary processes in the living streaming present, has remained virtually unknown. This also means that…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Aesthetics |
20th Century Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |