Nicholas Smith

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, friendship, politics and the daemon. Building on these core Socratic topics, this edition includes new accounts of Socrates in the work of philosopher and historian, Xenophon, the comic playwright, Aristophanes, as well as important scholarship on topics such as emotions, the afterlife, motivational intellectualism and virtue intellectualism. Fully revised and updated, the Bloomsbury Handbook of Socrates elucidates the complex landscape of Socratic thought and interpretation.

The emphasis Socrates puts on caring and other conative psychological conditions in Plato’s Apology is striking insofar as Plato’s Socrates is generally represented as an intellectualist about motivation and virtue. One might expect, accordingly, the representations of good and bad behaviour in his speeches would be characterized more in cognitive than in conative terms. The argument of this paper is that we can better understand Socrates’ conception of moral psychology – and also his views about moral culpability – by attending carefully to the way he explains his side of the case in the Apology. Our argument shows that the attribution of motivational intellectualism to Socrates can be sustained, but not in the way scholars have historically understood it. We show that a different conception of how Socrates understood the relationship between conation and cognition is necessary.

“Ethics in Plato’s Early Dialogues” reviews the main features of the ethical thought given to Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues. These topics include: eudaimonism (and whether that entails a problematic kind of egoism), virtue intellectualism (the view that virtue is a kind of knowledge that is at least similar to craft) motivational intellectualism (the view that all human action follows whatever the agent thinks is in her best interest at the time of action, among all of the options of which she is aware at the time), and the connections that are made in these dialogues between virtue and happiness. Also discussed are the views expressed about how and why ethical agents go wrong.

In Book V of Plato’s _Republic_, Plato has Socrates distinguish between three distinct cognitive powers (_dunameis_): knowledge (_epistēmē_), opinion (_doxa_), and ignorance (_agnosia_). Powers, Socrates goes on to explain, are distinguished in virtue of what they are related to and what they accomplish (_eph hōi te esti kai hō apergazetai_ --477d1). In this section of the dialogue, the second of these two differentiae is not invoked again; instead, all of the distinctions Socrates makes here are made in terms of the different objects to which the powers are related. Knowledge, we are told, is related to what is (to on); ignorance is related to what is not (to mē on); opinion is related to what both is and is not.Scholars have attended almost entirely to the distinction between knowledge and opinion, and for good reason: It is clear that this distinction is the primary one that Plato wishes to explicate here, as it is in terms of this distinction that the important difference between the philosopher rulers and ordinary rulers will be drawn. The distinctions between knowledge and ignorance and opinion and ignorance are only very briefly mentioned, and ignorance itself remains almost wholly unexplained. This chapter discusses the role of ignorance in Plato’s epistemology. This chapter's analysis is novel in four ways: First, other scholars have attended almost exclusively to the roles assigned to knowledge and opinion in this passage, and have neglected to explain whether — and if so, how — their analyses could explicate what Plato has Socrates say about ignorance. Secondly, the chapter argues that we should not understand the ‘related to’ part of Plato’s analysis as an intensional one: cognitive powers are not ‘of’ or ‘about’ the objects to which they are related, as scholars have generally supposed. The relationship of the powers to objects, rather, is a nomological one. Thirdly, I argue that what is produced by the cognitive powers are what we would call conceptualizations (or conceptions) of the entities to which they are said to be related (_epi_). Finally, the chapter argues that the case of ignorance makes clear that the ‘is’ in Plato’s analysis of the relata of each cognitive power must be understood neither veridically (where ‘is’ means ‘is true’), nor existentially (where ‘is’ means ‘exists’), but predicatively (where ‘is’ means ‘is F,’ where F is the name of a Platonic Form).

A number of authors have noted that vagueness engenders degrees of belief, but that these degrees of belief do not behave like subjective probabilities. So should we countenance two different kinds of degree of belief: the kind arising from vagueness, and the familiar kind arising from uncertainty, which obey the laws of probability? This chapter argues that we cannot coherently countenance two different kinds of degree of belief. Instead, it presents a framework in which there is a single notion of degree of belief, which in certain circumstances behaves like a subjective probability assignment and in other circumstances does not. The core idea is that one's degree of belief in a proposition is one's expectation of its degree of truth.

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 that can be deepened by gazing back upon some ancient philosophy? The answers are 'yes' and 'yes', according to this book's 13 chapters, written by philosophers seeking to enrich contemporary epistemology through engaging with ancient epistemology. Key features: Blends ancient epistemology with contemporary epistemology, each reciprocally enriching each. Conceptually sensitive chapters by scholars of ancient epistemology. Historically sensitive chapters by scholars of contemporary epistemology. Clearly written chapters, guiding readers at once through central elements both of ancient and of contemporary epistemology.

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 sweep of ways in which philosophers have sought to understand knowledge, The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History embraces what is vital and evolving within contemporary epistemology. Overseen by an international team of leading philosophers and featuring 50 specially-commissioned chapters, this is a major collection on one of philosophy's defining topics.

Two things can be said about law in the United States: we litigate more than any culture in history, bringing almost all of our evaluative discourse before the law; and the law translates those conversations into economic analyses and ultimately awards victorious parties with cash. The process of universal commodification, where all things enter the market and abide by its principles of exchange, has gained such momentum in legal theory that the idea that something cannot be properly or respectfully managed by market forces is now written off as moralistic naivete. Everything now has a price under the law, as the particularities of one's flesh, bone, pain, and love are now systematically reduced to an abstract monetary value so that they can enter market transactions. I argue throughout this work that this practice is both cognitively and ethically flawed. ;Although critiques of identity thinking and its practical apotheosis in universal commodification are common within Continental philosophy, these criticisms do not offer progressive alternatives because they stall in Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas' respective ethical criticisms of legality as such. Seeking to press beyond this impasse, I draw practical conclusions for legal theory from Anglo-American incommensurability theory. From a confluence of the three versions of incommensurability, I sustain an ethical and epistemological critique of both the law and economics movement and other forms of legal commensuration of identity. I conclude by offering a set of practical reforms aimed at recognizing and expressing the truth of incommensurability

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 interpretation. On the other hand, the “philosophically serious” approach must confront several features of the Socratic interpretation that seem anything but serious. Immediately after concluding his interpretation, Socrates contends that the entire enterprise of poetical interpretation is “no different from the second-rate drinking parties of the agora crowd” (347c3-5) and dismisses such a form of entertainment as “childish frivolities” (347d6). In this paper, I argue that Socrates is presented by Plato as (i) doing something philosophically significant in this passage, and also (ii) providing an interpretation of Simonides that would appear to any intelligent reader as both comical (in places) and far-fetched in its conclusions, and also (iii) believing that the interpretation of poetry is an example of “childish frivolity.” Indeed, I claim that it is the third of these claims—which, after all, is the conclusion Socrates himself reaches by the time he is done—that Plato’s Socrates wants most of all for us to accept.

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 their critiques of instrumental reason but handcuffed by their skepticism toward practical reform. I do not mean to suggest that Adorno and Levinas were not personally engaged with political causes or that numerous interpreters have not extrapolated political content from their work, but rather that Levinas and Adorno expressly blocked the conversion of ethics into political and legal programs on ethical grounds. This paper outlines the procedural and substantive questions that I find most worrisome for a "Jurisprudence of Alterity" motivated by Levinas or Adorno.

@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 likely to be incarcerated than a German resident and nearly nineteen times more likely than a Japanese resident. Despite the fact that our incarceration rates are so disproportionately high when compared to rates of other wealthy democracies, we suffer far more violent crime per capita than similar nations. In 2001, the reported offense rate per 100,000 for homicide in the United States was 5.6 while in Germany the rate was 3.23. For rape, the numbers are more disproportionate, with 31.8 in the U.S. compared with 10.45 in Germany. The comparison with Japan is still more dramatic, with Japanese homicide rates at 1.10 and rape rates at 1.85 per 100,000. The United States invests more in punishment than any other nation–both in terms of financial expenditure and the loss of freedom for millions of convicts–yet this price does not appear to result in a safer society. Given this, we must ask fundamental questions regarding punishment: What justifies punishment? What are the objectives of punishment? How should we accomplish those objectives? How important are those objectives when compared with other objectives, such as personal liberty? Imagine, for example, that we retained all of our current laws but one punishment applied for violating any of them: regardless of whether you were convicted of murder or exceeding the speed limit, you would be executed. Surely we could all be more confident that such a threat would reduce criminal activity, but with this security would come the anxiety that you or a loved one would be killed for committing a minor offense..

The 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 incommensurability theorists, and political grounding for Levinasian critical theory.

In an earlier paper I argued that time travellers cannot change the past: alleged models of changing the past either fall into contradiction or else involve avoiding, not changing, the past. Goddu has responded to my argument, maintaining that his hypertime model involves time travellers changing (not avoiding) the past. In the present paper I first discuss what would be required to substantiate the claim that a given model involves changing rather than avoiding the past. I then consider Goddu's hypertime model and an earlier model due to Meiland. I argue that neither author does what would be required to substantiate the claim that the model involves changing (not avoiding) the past. I go on to give reasons for the stronger claim that no-one can present a coherent model and also substantiate the claim that it involves changing (not avoiding) the past.

Apologies can be profoundly meaningful, yet many gestures of contrition - especially those in legal contexts - appear hollow and even deceptive. Discussing numerous examples from ancient and recent history, I Was Wrong argues that we suffer from considerable confusion about the moral meanings and social functions of these complex interactions. Rather than asking whether a speech act 'is or is not' an apology, Smith offers a highly nuanced theory of apologetic meaning. Smith leads us though a series of rich philosophical and interdisciplinary questions, explaining how apologies have evolved from a confluence of diverse cultural and religious practices that do not translate easily into secular discourse or gender stereotypes. After classifying several varieties of apologies between individuals, Smith turns to apologies from collectives. Although apologies from corporations, governments, and other groups can be quite meaningful in certain respects, we should be suspicious of those that supplant apologies from individual wrongdoers.

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 sweep of ways in which philosophers have sought to understand knowledge, The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History embraces what is vital and evolving within contemporary epistemology. Overseen by an international team of leading philosophers and featuring 50 specially-commissioned chapters, this is a major collection on one of philosophy's defining topics.