Plato on Education as the Development of Reason

Socrates' great educational innovation was in ascribing moral worth to the intellectual activity reflectively directed at one's own life. His concept of eudaimonia was so different from the ordinary that talking about it took on sometimes a paradoxical air, as in Apology 30b3. For him, reason is not a tool for attaining goals independently thought worthwhile; rather, rationality itself, expressed in the giving of reasons and the avoidance of contradictions, confers value to goals and opinions. Persons are reasonable, but obviously not the empirical human being. But education is aimed at the empirical man or woman and inevitably employs psychological means. How then is it possible that the result of education should grow out of the depths of each individual and be nevertheless valid for all individuals? In the Symposium, Plato gives Aristophanes the crucial move. Each of us is only half the whole person and we are moved by our desire for what we lack. In this context, to claim that the soul is immortal is to claim-at least-that the soul has a non-empirical dimension, that its real objects are not the objects of desire as such, and that a person's sensible life is not the true basis for the evaluation of his or her eudaimonia. However, in the soul which is not free from contradictions there is no advantage to right but unexamined options. There is in the life of the naïve just an insecurity which is not merely pragmatic. Even if a person never falters to the end of life, this is no more than moral luck. One is still guilty on the level of the logos, and liable to blame and punishment not for what one does, but for what one could have done.

Particle and Astro-physics Challenge Kant’s Phenomenolism

For two centuries Kant's first Critique has nourished various turns against transcendent metaphysics and realism. Kant was scandalized by reason's impotence in confronting infinity (or finitude) as seen in the divisibility of particles and in spatial extension and time. Therefore, he had to regard the latter as subjective and reality as imponderable. In what follows, I review various efforts to rationalize Kant's antinomies-efforts that could only flounder before the rise of Einstein's general relativity and Hawking's blackhole cosmology. Both have undercut the entire Kantian tradition by spawning highly probable theories for suppressing infinities and actually resolving these perplexities on a purely physical basis by positing curvatures of space and even of time that make them reëntrant to themselves. Heavily documented from primary sources in physics, this paper displays time’s curvature as its slowing down near very massive bodies and even freezing in a black hole from which it can reëmerge on the far side, where a new universe can open up. I argue that space curves into a double Möbius strip until it loses one dimension in exchange for another in the twin universe. It shows how 10-dimensional GUTs and the triple Universe, time/charge/parity conservation, and strange and bottom particle families and antiparticle universes, all fit together.

A Notion of μηδέv in the Philosophy of Aristotle

This article shows that Aristotle created the first notion of a zero in the history of human thought. Since this notion stood in evident contradiction to the basic principles of his metaphysics and logic, he rejected it.

Philosophy and Education

From its first appearance in western culture, philosophy has been considered able to build up reality, to educate people, and to disclose truth. Plato proposed philosophers as governors in life-long pursuit of philosophical learning. Socrates was the ideal paradigm of an educating philosopher: he tried to wake up human minds so that they could be aware of themselves and of the world, criticizing tradition and prejudices in a logically consistent perspective. A critical and dialogic approach—not by mere chance defined as "Socratic"—to problems has been considered until now the most profitable method of teaching. Socrates is a pioneer in discussing the question of a philosophical (paideia), as he defined his method "maieutic." He was not an authoritarian teacher, but a sparring partner in the process of self-education. Moreover, he considered himself as the most learned and, at the same time, the wisest in Greece, just because he was conscious of his ignorance. Therefore, he understood for the first time in our cultural tradition that knowledge is an endless process rather than a product, within marked bounds.

Constructivist Moral Realism

We are social animals in the sense that we spontaneously invent and continuously re-invent the social realm. But, not unlike other artifacts, once real, social relations, practices, institutions, etc., obey prior laws, some of which are moral laws. Hence, with regard to social reality, we ought to be ontological constructivists and moral realists. This is the view sketched here, taking as points of departure Searle's recent work on social ontology and May's on group morality. Moral and social selves are distinguished to acknowledge that social reality is constructed but social morality is not. It is shown how and why moral law requiring respect for the dignity and well being of agents governs a social world comprising roles that are real only because of their occupants' social intentions.

First Revelation: When Theoretical Becomes Visible

En las teorías científicas se postulan entidades teóricas que de alguna manera se relacionan con lo observable. Sin embargo con el avance científico y tecnológico, los científicos a menudo sostienen poder observar, co ayuda de algún artefacto, las entidades que tiempo atrás habían sido postuladas por la teoría. Esta transición de algunas entidades del reino de lo teórico al de lo observable con carga teórica presenta características interesantes para un análisis sobre la articulación de las teorías. En este trabajo se presenta una descripción de tal transición en la que se pone en evidencia que además de la aceptación de la teoría involucrada en garantizar el funcionamiento y construcción del artefacto, la carga teórica asociada a la observación con instrumentos, también se debe aceptar un postulado de reducción que establece una relación entre entidades pertenecientes a distintas teorías. También se sugiere una dificultad intuitiva en sostener una postura antirealista de entidades teóricas frente a la posibilidad de que tales entidades puedan revelarse como ‘visibles’ con la ayuda de algún desarrollo tecnológico aceptado por la comunidad científica.

The Rationality of Scientific Discovery

In order to understand the rationality of scientific creation, we must first clarify the following: (1) the historical structure of scientific creation from starting point to breakthrough, and then to establishment; (2) the process from the primary through the productive aspects of the scientific problem, the idea of creation, the primary conjecture, the scientific hypothesis, and finally the emergence of the genetic structure establishing the theory; and (3) the problem threshold of rationality in scientific creation. Given that the theory of scientific creation adopts the descriptive viewpoint of rationality, it therefore establishes rational principles such as the following: (1) a superlogical mode of thinking; (2) an analysable genetic structure which consists of the primary and productive aspects (including experiential facts, background theory, operational means, higher irrational factors, etc.); (3) a means of recourse to the effect of incubation of a higher idea; (4) a movement in thinking from generality to particularity; and (5) the replacement of irrational by rational factors.

Blindsight and the Role of the Phenomenal Qualities of Visual Perceptions

The aim of this paper is to defend a broad concept of visual perception, according to which it is a sufficient condition for visual perception that subjects receive visual information in a way which enables them to give reliably correct answers about the objects presented to them. According to this view, blindsight, non-epistemic seeing, and conscious visual experience count as proper types of visual perception. This leads to two consequences concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities of visual experiences. First, phenomenal qualities are not necessary in order to see something, because in the case of blindsight, subjects can see objects without experiences phenomenal qualities. Second, they cannot be intentional properties, since they are not essential properties of visual experiences, and because the content of visual experiences cannot be constituted by contingent properties.

Kant’s Categories Reconsidered

Adopting a Quinean criterion of ontological commitment, I consider the question of the ontological commitment of Kant's theory of our a priori knowledge of objects. Its direct concern is the customary view that the ontology of Kant's theory of knowledge in general, whether a priori or empirical, must be thought in terms of the a priori conditions or representations of space, time, and the categories. Accordingly, this view is accompanied by the customary interpretation of ontology as consisting of Kantian "appearances" or "empirical objects." I argue against this view and interpretation. My argument turns on the opposition between the necessity and universality of the a priori and the particularity and contingency of the existent. Its main point is that the a priori can remain necessary and universal only if the existence of objects is kept distinct from it.

The Feeling of Pain

The metaphysical concepts of act and potency that are central to the Thomistic tradition can help us solve the problem of understanding pain, sorrow and grief. Human beings, as natural creatures, are composed of act and potency. If rightly understood, these concepts can give a rational explanation to the reality of pain-without having recourse to religious beliefs-by accepting it as a natural derivation of our natural limits.