Robert Roecklein

The issue of coming into being in Greek philosophy is investigated mostly by specialists in language analysis and philological science. Plato versus Parmenides, Robert J. Roecklein brings to the fore Plato's refutation of Parmenides' argument in his famous dialogue by that name. Roecklein offers an unprecedented exposition of the dialogue the Parmenides, and seeks to illuminate a political dimension in Parmenides' early formulations of the challenges made to the reality of coming into being in nature

A Tale of Two Liberalisms studies the tension between two psycho-political models of personality. The early American heritage, embedded in the Federalist Papers and in the design of the Constitution, establishes conscious individual decisions as the basis of public order. The second liberalism, 'experimental liberalism', is a byproduct of stimulus-response reasoning in psychological sciences. This theory replaces the rationalist model with deterministic concepts of reaction to both biological and environmental forces. The dissertation focuses on the stresses impinging on language uses. The 'classical' liberal insists that there are no facts beyond what is comprehended and articulated by each individual. The stimulus-response model, by contrast, maintains that all human speech and cognition is reducible to a scientific description which is very frequently, perhaps usually, not understood as such by the individuals appraised