Ting Fung Ho

Can human agency produce things that are genuinely creative and original? Some philosophers are skeptical. Here I argue that the case of creative activity should lead us to reexamine and ultimately expand our conception of agency. When we do this, we see that rather than being incompatible with agency, creativity offers an especially robust form of agency: a form in which agents are responsible not just for token events but for the general patterns that characterize those events as forms of human activity.

Despite its centrality in Plato’s Republic, the conception of ignorance has received little sustained attention. This paper argues that Plato distinguishes agnoia—a broad category of cognitive deficiencies—from ignorance (amathia), understood as the vice of the rational part of the soul. Ignorance, on this account, is a particularly pernicious form of agnoia, one that renders reason inept at grasping what is good for human beings. It consists in a network of fundamental yet misguided evaluative commitments about how to live, rooted in an inflated view of one’s own grasp, which distorts reason’s love of truth and wisdom.

This paper explores a distinctive form of social interaction—interpersonal inquiry—in which two or more people attempt to understand one another by engaging in conversation. Like many modes of inquiry into human beings, interpersonal inquiry partly shapes its own objects. How we conduct it thus affects who we become. I present an ethical ideal of conversation to which, I argue, at least some of our interpersonal inquiry ought to aspire. I then consider how this ideal might influence philosophical conceptions of the self.

Ignorance is commonly assumed to be a lack of knowledge in Plato’s Socratic dialogues. I challenge that assumption. In the Protagoras, ignorance is conceived to be a substantive, structural psychic flaw—the soul’s domination by inferior elements that are by nature fit to be ruled. Ignorant people are characterized by both false beliefs about evaluative matters in specific situations and an enduring deception about their own psychic conditions. On my interpretation, akrasia, moral vices, and epistemic vices are products or forms of ignorance, and a person who lacks knowledge is not necessarily ignorant.