Suzanne Stern-Gillet

Plotinus's theory of dual selfhood is one of the best-known and most puzzling aspects of his philosophy. Each human being, he held, is both a compound of body and soul and a discarnate member of the hypostasis Intellect. He built evaluative norms into this duality, all of which derive from what he argued to be the ontological superiority of the discarnate element in us over the body-soul compound. This led him, in turn, to claim that the best and happiest human life is a life of self-purification, mostly devoted to the care of the higher self.Until fairly recently, scholarly consensus had been that, in so centering his "ethics" around the higher self, Plotinus had downplayed what we moderns take to be the very core of the moral life, namely, concern for the needs and entitlements of other agents . It was also generally agreed that, in his description of the ethical life, Plotinus had done no more than develop a claim that is prevalent in ancient theories of ethics, most of which present the life of rational self-fulfillment as the best life for a human being to lead. Ancient ethics, it was then concluded, crucially differs from its modern, post-Kantian, counterpart.This interpretation is now under attack. While some historians of ethics have for some time argued that it is exegetically misleading to set up a sharp dichotomy between ancient and

Plato's "Ion," despite its frail frame and traditionally modest status in the corpus, has given rise to large exegetical claims. Thus some historians of aesthetics, reading it alongside page 205 of the Symposium, have sought to identify in it the seeds of the post-Kantian notion of 'art' as non-technical making, and to trace to it the Romantic conception of the poet as a creative genius. Others have argued that, in the "Ion," Plato has Socrates assume the existence of a technē of poetry. In this article, these claims are challenged on exegetical and philosophical grounds. To this effect, Plato's use of poiētēs and poiēsis in the Symposium is analysed, the defining criteria of technē in the "Ion" and other dialogues are identified and discussed, and the 'Romantic' interpretation of the dialogue is traced to Shelley's tendentious translation of it. These critical developments lead to what is presented as a more faithful reading of the dialogue. In the "Ion," it is claimed, Plato seeks to subvert the traditional status of poetry by having Socrates argue that poetry is both non-rational and non-cognitive in nature. In the third part of the article, suggestions are offered as to the contribution made by the "Ion" to the evolution of Plato's reflections on poetic composition, and particularly as to the reasons which later induced Plato to substitute the concept of mimesis for that of inspiration in his account of poetry.

Is scientific reasoning the standard of rationality? Can historical explanation be reduced to the scientific mode of reasoning? R.G. Collingwood answered both questions negatively. He further attempted to show that the types of justification used to account for moral actions are closely similar to historical explanations. His ethics has thus a strong historicist and relativistio flavour. Hie aim of my paper is to state Collingwood's ethical views and to show that the "ethical judgment", which inevitably relies on rules, cannot be equated with the "historical judgment".