Ed Grippe

This essay relates Plato’s views on Homeric justice in the Apology and Crito to current domestic and foreign policy. Applying the insights of these dialogues to contemporary issues of war and civil liberties, the essay contends that the separation of time and the foreignness of culture may aid our decisionmaking if we take the time to consider the lessons offered to us across the centuries. Plato assists in this bridging process through the literary device of the dialogue. The dialogues provide the opportunity to involve the reader personally in the ongoing struggle to come to grips with what is central to human life. The last section of this essay will link the relevance of ancient thought to contemporary issues such as Abu Ghraib tortures and Guantanamo detentions in the light of the earlier sections’ consideration of the Apology and the Crito.

This paper argues that Ellis’ analysis of Fundamentalism as narcissistically disturbed can apply to the very scientific disciplines he relies upon to make his argument. Citing Elizabeth Lloyd’s critique of methodological objectivity, I draw a parallel between the overstated belief that humans can defy finitude through certainty gained via scientific objectivity and Ellis’ charge that the religious faithful deny human limits in their delusional certainty in an afterlife. I link scientism and religious fundamentalism in their apodictic assertions and their instrumentalism. I argue that Ellis’ insight into the narcissistic nature of fundanlentalism is, by being successful, a challenge to his project in so far as it rests on a scientific fundamentalism. Finally, I offer resolution by appealing to Gandhi’s notion of satyagraha or conflict resolution through mutual recognition of the core veridical insights embedded in opposing viewpoints.

This work is an "internalist" critique of Richard Rorty's New Pragmatism. It is an attempt to take Rorty's philosophy on its own terms in order to appreciate its strengths while, simultaneously, reading his narrative to ascertain if it, in Rorty's own words, "hangs together" well. I believe that as a criticism of the philosophic and scientific propensity for claiming that they have the last word--a "final vocabulary"--on important human issues, his observations are significant intellectual contributions. Nevertheless, Rorty's public offering of a coherent set of beliefs fails, and therefore, his attempt to a new platform of meaning should be rejected. ;Anti-foundational in scope, Rorty's historicist take on philosophy allows no privileged language, metaphor, or practice which can achieve a word-link with a foundational, non-linguistic reality. Philosophy is one among an infinite number of culturally based narratives . Being unhinged from corresponding to a determining standard--transcendent or immanent--the individual's creative response to life's causal impingements are only bound by their inventiveness. ;However, to forestall cruelty and humiliation, while promoting tolerance to insure an open-ended interchange amongst narrators, Rorty suggests a privatization of philosophy similar to Jefferson's argument for a separation of church and state. Yet with this strategy to bifurcate idiosyncratic idioms of self-assertion from the rhetoric of a liberal democratic "solidarity", Rorty's narrative reveals itself to be inconsistent in two related ways. First, the metaphor of "solidarity" will not sustain scrutiny. This is because Rorty's insistence on hermeneutics over epistemology virtually eliminates interpersonal discourse, reducing public exchanges to an undemocratic Mendelic struggle for personal "semantic authority", leading to a self-defeating notion of association similar to Hobbes' flawed Social Contract theory. Consequently, "solidarity" gets reduced to a centerless system of incompatible "voices" within a psyche determined by instinctual drives and environmental demands, incongruous with autonomous choice. Second, Rorty, by speaking about these incommensurate vocabularies as being his "self", commits the same error as Descartes: objectifying his first-person of experience of "being" by treating it as a third-person encounter with an experience . Therefore, I believe Rorty's narrative to be incoherent and unworkable

This essay relates Plato’s views on Homeric justice in the Apology and Crito to current domestic and foreign policy. Applying the insights of these dialogues to contemporary issues of war and civil liberties, the essay contends that the separation of time and the foreignness of culture may aid our decisionmaking if we take the time to consider the lessons offered to us across the centuries. Plato assists in this bridging process through the literary device of the dialogue. The dialogues provide the opportunity to involve the reader personally in the ongoing struggle to come to grips with what is central to human life. The last section of this essay will link the relevance of ancient thought to contemporary issues such as Abu Ghraib tortures and Guantanamo detentions in the light of the earlier sections’ consideration of the Apology and the Crito.