Diego Garcia Rincon

A paper in The Phronesis Issues preprint series applying the displacement framework. The conventional ordering of plant evolution --- charophyte algae, then non-vascular embryophytes (mosses, liverworts, hornworts), then early tracheophytes (Cooksonia, Rhyniophytes), then lycophytes, ferns, gymnosperms, and finally angiosperms --- is presented in pedagogical and reference contexts as a settled sequence. The actual evidential basis for this ordering is substantially more fragmentary, contested, and inference-laden than the pedagogical presentation suggests. We apply the Displacement Framework's distinction between configurations that are well-supported, partially-supported, and culturally-maintained-but-underdetermined to the case of plant evolution narrative. We introduce a distinction at the centre of the analysis: presumed (inherited through teaching and accepted as default), supposed (actively hypothesised but underdetermined by evidence), and evidenced (constrained by data of sufficient quality). The conventional plant-evolution narrative is a mixture of all three, but the ratio is not what the pedagogical presentation implies. Nine propositions formalise the conventional narrative (P1), the cryptogam-first presumption versus the cryptospore evidence record (P2), the Rhynie chert moment as the rare evidentially-rich window (P3), the bryophyte paraphyly versus monophyly contest (P4), the gymnosperm-angiosperm-Gnetales position uncertainty (P5), the molecular-clock versus fossil-first-appearance discrepancy (P6), the narrative attractor in evolutionary pedagogy (P7), the preservation-bias substrate constraint on the inferential landscape (P8), and the framework's prescription for honest phylogenetic presentation (P9). The paper closes with the observation that the framework's analysis of plant evolution applies more broadly to scientific narrative inheritance: the pedagogical compression of underdetermined claims into settled-sounding sequences is itself a wrong attractor in the epistemic landscape, sustained by the cost of teaching uncertainty relative to the perceived ease of teaching narrative.

This paper examines the relation between Pythagorean and Heraclitean political views. I argue that for Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Archytas the cosmological and musical notions of harmony (ἁρμονία) and the related notion of concord (ὁμόνοια) have an intrinsic political significance. These thinkers variously reflect upon political harmony and concord, and agree that a crucial condition for it is law (νόμος), which according to Pythagoras and Heraclitus has a divine origin. I begin with the Heraclitean fragments 22 B51, 54, 72, and 114 DK, in which social and political reflection is connected with the theory of the harmony of opposites. In the case of Pythagoras and early Pythagoreanism, the intense, albeit indirect political influence in Magna Graecia—as transmitted by Iamblichus and Porphyry—offers evidence for social and political ideas determined by a reflection on the cosmological role of harmony and number. Finally, Archytas’ political application of rational calculation in fragment 47 B3 DK, which aims at producing concord by establishing the just measures of wealth in the city, together with the testimony on Archytas’ intense and fruitful political activity, can be taken as confirmation that the thinker’s wider cosmological views were indeed intertwined with his political reflection and action.

Book 1 of Plato’s Laws, and particularly the image of the puppet introduced near its end, has been traditionally interpreted as presenting the moral psychology model that underlies the educational system delineated by the Athenian Stranger, which construes virtue as consonance between the non–rational and the rational elements of the soul. But a different and competing conception of virtue looms large in Laws 1, virtue as victory of the best part of the soul in psychic conflict. This paper argues that the Athenian’s conception of education as the correct conformation of originally conflicting psychic forces requires the simultaneous presence of the harmony and the conflict models of virtue in Laws 1. Education is in turn defined by calculation, the rational activity which persuasively leads the conflicting non–rational forces towards a consonant reciprocal rapport. By strategically developing his understanding of education and calculation in Laws 1, the Athenian shows how the harmony model of virtue overcomes the conflict model, while at the same time recognising that there is some truth to the conflict model after all and integrating it within the harmony model.

This paper makes the claim that the overall structure of Plato’s Laws follows the principle of indirect access to the knowledge of human soul, which consists in the understanding that a philosophical approach to the soul is only possible initially through an image of it. The structure of the Laws can be interpreted as a movement towards the soul’s interior, beginning with the famous image of the puppet. According to this image, the movement opens with the analysis of the non-rational elements of the soul, which are capable of an harmonic relation with the rational element, and advances bit to bit to the rational or epistemic element. The political necessity of undertaking the dialectical investigation in order to attain a philosophical knowledge of the human soul and its specific excellence appears only at the end of the dialogue. In this way, the structure of the Laws dramatizes the progressive birth of philosophy, conceived as the dialectical investigation of the unity of virtue, starting from the initial understanding of the human soul contained in the myth of the puppet.