Nick Smith

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 that Socrates himself rejects ––a distinction between voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing. Earlier discussions of the argument require Socrates to be using a premise here that he regards as false. In this paper, we argue that Socrates actually regards the critical premise as true, and thus we end up providing a significantly new interpretation of Socrates’ view that all wrongdoing is involuntary. We claim, that even this position must accommodate the idea that some people really do voluntary harm to others.

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.

: In her recent paper, “How to Escape Indictment for Impiety: Teaching as Punishment in the Euthyphro,” G. Fay Edwards argues that if Socrates were to become Euthyphro’s student, this should count as the appropriate punishment for Socrates’ alleged crime. In this paper, we show that the interpretation Edwards has proposed conflicts with what Socrates has to say about the functional role of punishment in the Apology, and that the account Socrates gives in the Apology, properly understood, also provides the correct interpretation of what Socrates says in the Euthyphro about the role of instruction for wrongdoers.

In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates clearly indicates that he is a cognitivist about the emotions—in other words, he believes that emotions are in some way constituted by cognitive states. It is perhaps because of this that some scholars have claimed that Socrates believes that the only way to change how others feel about things is to engage them in rational discourse, since that is the only way, such scholars claim, to change another’s beliefs. But in this paper we show that Socrates is also responsive to, and has various non-rational strategies for dealing with, the many ways in which emotions can cloud our judgment and lead us into poor decision-making. We provide an account of how Socrates can consistently be a cognitivist about emotion and also have more than purely rational strategies for dealing with emotions.

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.

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.

@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..

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.

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.

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.

Much of our private and public ethical discourse occurs in the giving, receiving, or demanding of an apology, yet we suffer deep confusion regarding what an apology actually is. Most of us have never made explicit precisely what we expect from a full apology and therefore apologizing has become a vague and clumsy ritual. Full apologies can be morally and emotionally powerful, but, as with most valuable things, frauds masquerade as the genuine article. These semblances of apologies often deceive and manipulate, and such duplicity is common between lovers, families, litigants, and nations. In response to this, I propose nine elements that an apology must satisfy in order to be considered categorical. I believe we have such a categorical apology in mind when we seek a full apology. The standards for a categorical apology are rigorous and precise, and I hope to disentangle the distinct elements of apologies. A categorical apology is a rare and burdensome act, and under certain circumstances full apologies may not be possible regardless of how badly we may desire them. While the leading social science accounts by Aaron Lazare and Nicolas Tavuchis aptly demonstrate how apologies lubricate reciprocally egoist relationships, such theories ultimately prove unsatisfying because apologies achieve their highest meaning as morally rich acts. Both Tavuchis and Lazare offer merely descriptive accounts when a prescriptive argument seems necessary. No philosopher, however, has ever devoted a monograph to the topic and only a handful of papers on apologies have appeared in philosophy journals.

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 issue. On my view, retributivists should endorse the general principle that categorically apologetic offenders deserve less punishment because certain kinds of contrition can revise the very nature of the offense and thereby make it less bad and deserving of less punishment. This claim is symmetrical with the popular view that unapologetic or remorseless offenders deserve more punishment.

@FP= Although rehabilitation is often considered a type of punishment for criminal offenders, its objectives are therapeutic rather than punitive. While some theories of punishment claim that criminals deserve to suffer for their crimes, the rehabilitative ideal views criminal behavior more like a disease that should be treated with scientific methods available to cure the offender. Many convicts suffer from mental and physical illness, drug addiction, and limited opportunities for economic success and these problems increase the likelihood that they will engage in criminal activity. If we simply incarcerate the convict while she “pays her debt to society,” she will likely reenter it with all of the obstacles that drove her to crime still in place. She will also need to contend with additional difficulties: a criminal record will impact her employment opportunities, she will be older and still without marketable skills or education, her social relationships may have deteriorated while she was in jail, and she may have become further acclimated to criminal culture. Thus incarcerating offenders could actually make them more likely to commit offenses after they are released, and recidivism rates attest to this. A rehabilitative approach would attempt to treat the underlying cause of her transgressions so that she can return to society to become a full and productive citizen. In other words, instead of exacting revenge against criminals and making their lives worse, rehabilitation tries to help them.

In 2008 I published I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies with Cambridge University Press. I Was Wrong provides a nuanced framework for the ethical meanings of apologies from individuals and collectives, considering along the way the historical and cultural traditions that inform modern acts of contrition. I have discussed I Was Wrong on NPR, CNN, BBC, CBC, Philosophy Talk, and various other national and international programs.I am now working on the follow-up book, tentatively titled Apologies in Law and also under contract with Cambridge University Press. Apologies in Law will apply the framework for the ethical meanings of apologies from I Was Wrong to acts of contrition in civil and criminal law. As a recently tenured J.D./Ph.D. experienced as a litigator in a major Manhattan law firm and as a staff attorney for the U.S. Court of Appeals, I hope to use my upcoming sabbatical to complete a draft of Apologies in Law. I will revise and polish the draft during the summer of 2009

Socrates is one of the most important yet enigmatic philosophers of all time; his fame has endured for centuries despite the fact that he never actually wrote anything. In 399 B.C.E., he was tried on the charge of impiety by the citizens of Athens, convicted by a jury, and sentenced to death. About these facts there is no disagreement. However, as the sources collected in this book and the scholarly essays that follow them show, several of even the most basic facts about these events were controversial in antiquity, and the questions persist today: How and why was Socrates brought to trial? Why did the jurors, members of the world's first democracy, find him guilty? When he was given an opportunity to escape execution, why did he refuse to do so and instead accept the punishment that he and his friends agreed was unjustly assigned to him? How exactly did Socrates die? Differences of opinion on these and other issues continue to arouse our curiosity and to challenge new generations of students and scholars. The Trial and Execution of Socrates: Sources and Controversies is the first work to collect in one place all of the major ancient sources on Socrates' death--those of both his critics and his defenders--as well as recent scholarly views. Part I includes new translations of Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the death scene from Phaedo, as well as other ancient sources that shed light on Socrates' trial and execution. Part II features some of the most influential recent scholarship on this historically momentous event with work by M. F. Burnyeat, Robert Parker, Mark L. McPherran, Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, Richard Kraut, Christopher Gill, and Enid Bloch. Ideal for undergraduate surveys of ancient Greek philosophy and upper-level courses on Socrates and Socratic philosophy, this unique collection provides an unprecedented look into the many perplexing questions surrounding the trial and execution of this remarkable man.

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 us that we need to consider, in Peter Winch's words, ‘what it makes sense to say’ about certain educational phenomena, and how these meanings stand against understanding a wider form of life. This insight has important implications for doing educational research, and we examine some of these.

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.