Paul Carelli

Comparative philosophy is an important and growing field. Increasingly, philosophy instructors are looking to offer philosophy courses that span more than just one regional culture. Developing a syllabus for a course in comparative philosophy for the first time can be a daunting challenge. Among the many questions one has to ask is how much class time should be spent characterizing the cultural differences between the two philosophical traditions before examining the philosophical traditions themselves and what sort of materials should be covered from each tradition. Perhaps surprisingly, my answer to the first question is little to none. Characterizing cultures brings with it a danger of essentializing that should be avoided in the classroom. As to the sorts of materials to be covered, it is best to look at whole works from individual philosophers, rather than try to compare whole traditions.

This volume presents fifteen articles that were the eventual result of a conference on ancient Chinese and Greek views of cultivation held in January of 2016 at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. The articles are evenly distributed into three sections: the first dedicated to understanding the way cultivation is conceptualized, the second to investigating epistemological problems concerning cultivation, and the third to considering practical applications. There is a brief but informative introduction to the volume as a whole and separate short introductions before each of the three sections. Notes and bibliographical material are found at the end of each article and there is a contributor list...

There are at least two apparently conflicting views of courage found in Plato's dialogues: the intellectualist view exemplified by Socrates’s identification of courage with wisdom as found in the Protagoras; and the dispositional view of courage as a natural temperament to overcome fear in situations of danger, the necessary qualification for the auxiliary class in the Republic. In this paper I argue that these views are complementary, dispositional courage being a necessary precondition for the pursuit of the proper human excellence of wisdom. I demonstrate this by considering the role opinion plays in each understanding of courage, showing both that dispositional courage is necessary to ensure that proper opinions be retained in the pursuit of wisdom and that wisdom is necessary to guarantee these opinions are the proper ones. Finally, I argue that not only is this relationship of the two understandings of courage present in the Republic, but even in the Protagoras Socrates’s method of conducting the el..

Paul Carelli - Plato's Cosmology and its Ethical Dimensions - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 322-323 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Paul Carelli University of Kentucky Gabriela Roxana Carone. Plato's Cosmology and its Ethical Dimensions. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 319. Cloth, $70.00. The ethical implications of Plato's late cosmology rarely receive scholarly treatment. Carone's book is a welcome exception. Carone divides her book into nine chapters. After an introductory chapter, the next six chapters form three pairs, with the first chapter of each pair offering an interpretation of the cosmology of a particular late dialogue, and the second presenting..