and Plato

Plato, Technē, and Philosophy as a Profession

Who has a legitimate claim to wisdom? Emily Hulme argues that Plato's response to this question was shaped by the concept of technē (art, craft, expertise, profession) and that he developed the notion of philosophy as a genuine profession in the dialogues against the rival claims of practices like sophistry The first part of the book concerns technē in general, drawing on literary, epigraphic, and art historical evidence to discuss this concept in Greek thought and culture and explaining the position of this term in Plato's epistemological vocabulary. The second part offers close readings of a handful of key dialogues: philosophy defined against sophistry in Euthydemus, Hippias Minor, Protagoras, and Gorgias; the profession of philosopher-rulers in the Republic; and philosophy versus politics in the Sophist and Statesman

REENCHANTMENT, INEFFABILITY, AND “THE DIALECTIC OF NOMINALISM”

Martin Jay's newest book, Magical Nominalism: The Historical Event, Aesthetic Reenchantment, and the Photograph , aims to reveal the presence of a third current of thought in modern thinking. This current, which he calls “magical nominalism,” does not fit the traditional dichotomies (voluntarism–determinism, subjectivism–realism, and so on) around which the field's prevailing narratives are organized. As he shows, magical nominalism participates in the process of destroying the Scholastic idea of a perfectly ordered cosmos (an idea that was initiated by nominalism in the fourteenth century) but introduces into the nominalist matrix of thought a reference to an ontological dimension of reality that was initially absent from it. However, as he insists, magical nominalism does not constitute a homogeneous current. This form of thinking resists definition in unequivocal terms. Studying it therefore requires an approach that is capable of articulating a plurality of views.

La interpretación dialéctica de la hermenéutica

The rise of the theme of interpretation in contemporary philosophy has sparked criticism of those positions that treat all human praxis as a form of interpretation, promoting a relativism for which no objective truth exists. This paper argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer´s hermeneutics avoids this criticism by developing a dialectical notion of interpretation in which interpreting does not mean imposing an arbitrary meaning, but rather mediating a particular concrete situation through a common space of meaning. Here it is examined how, according to Gadamer, this mediation takes place both in the understanding of the social world and at the more fundamental level of living language. Finally, some avenues for further development opened up by this examination are suggested, in particular that of a hermeneutic social philosophy capable of providing guidance on meaning to contemporary capitalist societies. 

The neglected argument about C. S. Peirce’s pragmaticism

This article examines Peirce’s pragmaticism from the perspective of his own retrospective assessments of his work. Taking seriously Peirce’s self-criticisms and later reformulations, the paper argues that the development of pragmatism cannot be adequately understood through isolated maxims or fragmentary readings, but only in connection with the systematic architecture of his philosophy. Given the still incomplete chronological organization of Peirce’s writings, the study adopts a reconstructive methodology that seeks to reestablish conceptual continuity among dispersed texts. On this basis, under the name of a neglected argument concerning Peirce’s pragmaticism, the article revisits the transition from the early formulation of the pragmatic maxim to its later reformulations, showing that this movement is inseparable from the place of the normative sciences in Peirce’s thought. The analysis suggests that the mature meaning of pragmaticism, in its evolutionary version, depends on its grounding in the categories and on the articulated relation among aesthetics, ethics, and logic.

Two truths and one aporia: a Madhyamaka model of agency in dialogue with Western philosophy of action

from the