Text of Valedictory lecture delivered May 2014
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The Oxford Handbook of Plato provides in-depth and up-to-date discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues in twenty-one articles. The result is a useful reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in... more
The Oxford Handbook of Plato provides in-depth and up-to-date discussions of a variety of topics and dialogues in twenty-one articles. The result is a useful reference to the man many consider the most important philosophical thinker in history. Plato is the best known, and continues to be the most widely studied, of all the ancient Greek philosophers. Each article serves several functions at once: they survey the lay of the land; they express and develop the authors' own views; they situate those views within a range of alternatives. This book contains articles on metaphysics, epistemology, love, language, ethics, politics, art and education. Individual articles are devoted to each of the following dialogues: the Republic, the Parmenides, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Timaeus, and the Philebus. There are also articles on Plato and the dialogue form; on Plato in his time and place; on the history of the Platonic corpus; on Aristotle's criticism of Plato, and on Plato and ...
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Research Interests: Sociology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Medicine, Personhood, Socrates, and 11 moreSocial Identification, Medicine, Curriculum, Humans, Female, Male, Public health systems and services research, Interdisciplinary Communication, Practice Education/Clinical Evaluation, Health Personnel, and professional patient relations
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The neglected Platonic dialogue Euthydemus is peculiar in many ways. It is, apparently, an extensive catalogue of bad arguments by disgraceful sophists; but its complex composition suggests that this focuses attention on the shape and... more
The neglected Platonic dialogue Euthydemus is peculiar in many ways. It is, apparently, an extensive catalogue of bad arguments by disgraceful sophists; but its complex composition suggests that this focuses attention on the shape and nature of argument—attention that some think Plato is incapable of giving. He uses the idiom of games, and of seriousness and play, to provoke reflection on logical and syntactic structure and their normative features; but to see how he does so we need to consider the complex background of the fiction of a Platonic dialogue, and its use of surprise and humour. Comparison with the bbc Radio 4 game ‘Mornington Crescent’ might help.
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Research Interests: Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, Communication, Death, and 13 morePhilosophy of Medicine, Property, Body, Quality of life, Philosophy of Psychiatry, Health, Medicine, Curriculum, Humans, Public health systems and services research, Interdisciplinary Communication, Practice Education/Clinical Evaluation, and Health Personnel
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At Philebus 48a–50a, Socrates offers an account of “the laughable” and the mixture of pleasure and pain that constitutes our response to comedy. This account may generalize to our other emotional attitudes: they are complex responses to... more
At Philebus 48a–50a, Socrates offers an account of “the laughable” and the mixture of pleasure and pain that constitutes our response to comedy. This account may generalize to our other emotional attitudes: they are complex responses to their intentional objects, often in tension and conflicted. This account of emotional attitudes, and of comedy in particular, may help to explain how the comic episodes described in the dialogues are designed to generate a response, not only in the described audience, but also, most importantly, in the reader. Because that response is conflicted, this chapter argues, it generates a felt puzzlement in its audience; and this—the phenomenology of comedy—is a provocation to attention and then reflection. The chapter considers three comic moments—in the Charmides, the Protagoras, and the Euthydemus—to illustrate how the response to comedy is brought to bear on questions of moral epistemology and how the emotional content of that response renders the moral...
In this chapter, I explore the parallel between the shape of Timaeus' discourse in Plato's dialogue and the shape of the world that he describes. There is, plainly, an analogy between Timaeus' act of describing a world in... more
In this chapter, I explore the parallel between the shape of Timaeus' discourse in Plato's dialogue and the shape of the world that he describes. There is, plainly, an analogy between Timaeus' act of describing a world in words and the demiurge's task of making a world of ...
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On first reading, the Politicus appears a dismal dialogue (compared, for example, to the immediacy of both the philosophy and the drama of the Theaetetus). This conversation between the Eleatic Stranger and the hopelessly complaisant... more
On first reading, the Politicus appears a dismal dialogue (compared, for example, to the immediacy of both the philosophy and the drama of the Theaetetus). This conversation between the Eleatic Stranger and the hopelessly complaisant Young Socrates seems ...
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... I am grateful to many people who have given me advice: notably Zsuzsanna Balogh, Sarah Broadie, Peter Gallagher, David Galloway, Christopher Gill, Michael Lacewing, Terry Penner, Anthony Price, Patrick Riordan, Christopher Rowe,... more
... I am grateful to many people who have given me advice: notably Zsuzsanna Balogh, Sarah Broadie, Peter Gallagher, David Galloway, Christopher Gill, Michael Lacewing, Terry Penner, Anthony Price, Patrick Riordan, Christopher Rowe, Janice Thomas, and Ann Whittle. ...