•  1
    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
  •  5
    The Bloomsbury Handbook of Socrates (edited book)
    with Russell Jones and Ravi Sharma
    Bloomsbury Handbooks. 2023.
    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
  •  10
    Questions for a reluctant jurisprudence of alterity
    In Desmond Manderson (ed.), Essays on Levinas and Law: A Mosaic, Palgrave-macmillan. 2008.
    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
  • @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
  •  8
    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 incom…Read more
  •  49
    Why Time Travellers (Still) Cannot Change the Past
    Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 71 (70th Anniversary Issue on Metaph): 677-94. 2015.
    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 Godd…Read more
  • The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates, 2nd ed. (edited book)
    with Russell E. Jones and Ravi Sharma
  •  76
    I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies
    Cambridge University Press. 2008.
    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 ser…Read more
  •  7
    The 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
  •  90
    From Fine and Kamp in the 70’s—through Osherson and Smith in the 80’s, Williamson, Kamp and Partee in the 90’s and Keefe in the 00’s—up to Sauerland in the present decade, the objection continues to be run that fuzzy logic based theories of vagueness are incompatible with ordinary usage of compound propositions in the presence of borderline cases. These arguments against fuzzy theories have been rebutted several times but evidently not put to rest. I attempt to do so in this paper
  •  37
    Kantian Restorative Justice?
    Criminal Justice Ethics 29 (1): 54-69. 2010.
    Linda Radzik, Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics. For someone with sensibilities such as mine, Kantian ethical theory pulls in two...
  •  11
    This 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
  •  5
    The Socratic Paradoxes
    In 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.
  •  21
    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
  •  31
    Apologies in Law will consider apologies in various legal contexts, but in this commentary outline what I consider the most significant questions arising regarding expressions of contrition within criminal justice.
  •  41
    A common objection to theories of vagueness based on fuzzy logics centres on the idea that assigning a single numerical degree of truth -- a real number between 0 and 1 -- to each vague statement is excessively precise. A common objection to Bayesian epistemology centres on the idea that assigning a single numerical degree of belief -- a real number between 0 and 1 -- to each proposition is excessively precise. In this paper I explore possible parallels between these objections. In particular…Read more
  •  16
    Moral Psychology as the Focus of Early Greek Ethics
    Philosophical Inquiry 40 (1-2): 58-73. 2016.
  •  35
  •  28
    This paper makes the counterintuitive argument that apologetic offenders in both criminal and noncriminal contexts deserve reductions in punishment even according to retributive theories of justice. I argue here that accounting for post-offense apologetic meanings can make retributivism more fair and consistent much in the same way that considering pre-offense behavior such as culpable mental states like premeditation provide a more holistic and accurate view of the badness of the offense at iss…Read more
  •  16
    Review of Dominic Hyde Vagueness, Logic and Ontology (Ashgate, 2008) (review)
    Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 16 (4): 531-533. 2010.
  •  7
    Aristophanes' acharnians 591–2: A proposed new interpretation
    Classical 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.
  •  2
    ‘What it Makes Sense to Say’: Wittgenstein, rule‐following and the nature of education
    Educational 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
  •  214
    Socrates on the Emotions
    Plato Journal 15 9-28. 2015.
    In this paper we argue that Socrates is a cognitivist about emotions, but then ask how the beliefs that constitute emotions can come into being, and why those beliefs seem more resistant to change through rational persuasion than other beliefs.
  •  6
    Socrates on Punishment and the Law:Apology 25c5-26b2
    In 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
  •  50
    Response to critics
    Analytic Philosophy 53 (2): 234-248. 2012.
  •  49
    Persuade Or Obey
    The Harvard Review of Philosophy 19 69-83. 2013.
  •  13
    What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology (edited book)
    with Stephen Cade Hetherington
    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
  •  112
    Socrates and the Laws of Athens
    Philosophy Compass 1 (6). 2006.
    The claim that the citizen's duty is to “persuade or obey” the laws, expressed by the personified Laws of Athens in Plato's Crito, continues to receive intense scholarly attention. In this article, we provide a general review of the debates over this doctrine, and how the various positions taken may or may not fit with the rest of what we know about Socratic philosophy. We ultimately argue that the problems scholars have found in attributing the doctrine to Socrates derive from an anachronistic …Read more