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The objective of this essay is a holistic view of aesthetics, ethics, and neuroaesthetics. After a few introductory case studies, aesthetics is systematically introduced as a philosophical subdiscipline. This perspective is then expanded from aesthetics to neuroaesthetics. Using various art forms as well as current media formats, the aspects of beauty and ugliness are discussed, and aesthetic properties are expanded to include ethical implications. These can be expressed through ideals of beauty and the compulsion for body transformation. This perspective is then expanded from aesthetics to neuroaesthetics. From this point of view of art, the so-called golden ratio will play a central role. It will be shown how representations affect people and what ethical implications are associated with the effects. Therefore, this essay first has to look at art from the perspective of neuroaesthetics, and then consider the ethical aspects of the beautiful and the ugly. The considerations lead to a brief discussion of Socrates's three sieves.

In many eighteenth-century agricultural texts, peasants were depicted as an impediment to agrarian improvement, superstitious and resistant to novelty. That was the stereotype one often encountered, in any case, in more programmatic writing about agriculture from this period. A closer look at the era's technical literature tells a more complicated story, however. Much as traveling European naturalists relied on local intermediaries in far corners of the globe, elite agricultural improvers back home relied on local rural knowledge as they drafted a new technical literature on farming. This article looks at Jacob Guyer (also known as Kleinjogg), a Swiss farmer who became an enlightened celebrity after the Zurich doctor Hans Caspar Hirzel published a biography of him in 1761. Hirzel called Kleinjogg a "philosophical farmer"; the article explores the implications of this title, and examines the various ways that elite eighteenth-century authors used contact with rural people and direct experience of farming as a source of authority.

This article reconstructs a dialogue between three modern philosophical treatments of the Ancient Greek comic poet Aristophanes's play, The Clouds (first performed in 423 BCE), which has generally been received as an unjust satire of Socrates. I argue that Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Leo Strauss all assume a rather unconventional position in their respective readings—especially given their status as philosophers—by actually coming to the comedian's defense, and by showing, in distinct but related ways, how his play grasps the “negativity” in Socrates more profoundly than do the other depictions of the philosopher that have been bequeathed to posterity. By further appealing to the hidden affinities between Aristophanes and Socrates, each of these modern thinkers, finally, shows himself to be invested in the specific function of the comedian-satirist within the polis, an investment that has implications for both antiquity and modernity.

Whilst there is growing concern within archaeology about the wider impact of archaeological research in general, only limited attention has so far been paid to the impact fieldwork has on local communities. Here, using examples from fieldwork with an agro-pastoral Mursi community in Ethiopia's Lower Omo Valley, we present a case in which local oral traditions are modified in response to archaeological discoveries. This illustrates a particular example of the impact of fieldwork during and after its completion; and the enduring traces of contact upon fieldwork participants. We argue that in employing an attitude of impact practice within fieldwork that foregrounds the Socratic notion of dialogue, the resulting focus highlights the value and significance of archaeology to local communities.

This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010–2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face-to-face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers Jose Socrates and Pedro Passos-Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail-out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets – later associated with the conditions of the bail-out – concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.

For quite a few years the two authors have been engaging in dialogues about management issues. Using as a model Plato's dialogues between Socrates and his various students, we have tried to clarify the nature of a concept by asking questions and thinking carefully about the answers. We disagree about many things, but agree that we respect each other's opinions, and can clarify our own viewpoints by debating them respectfully with another. For this dialogue, we decided to focus on the question of the scale of business operations. One of us has a particular preference for small scale enterprise, and for the localisation of the economy, because he believes that the giganticism of corporations is behind many of the problems we face today. As you will see, the other protagonist disagrees, arguing instead that other issues than scale are at the root of why some businesses do bad things.

The debate about whether some attribute is ‘by nature’ or ‘by nurture’ has a long history and it covers numerous topics. For instance, Socrates proposed that our ideas of complex concepts come from memories that are innate within us. Even today thinkers believe that some of our ideas are part of our nature rather than our nurture. This theory has social and policy implications. If intellectual quotient (IQ) is a fixed part of nature, is it worthwhile to contribute tax dollars to improve one's nurturing environment? Or, more generally, some think that understanding human nature might affect how we ought to live. Influenced by Darwin and developments in genetics, the nature/nurture debate has reduced to a debate about whether our attributes are ‘genetic’ or ‘environmental’. Yet, the implications of the genetic theories of human nature are not obvious since genes alone do not produce any attributes. Key concepts: ‘Nativists’ employ ‘poverty of stimulus’ arguments to demonstrate that an idea or cognitive ability could not have been learned. ‘Empiricists’ believe that our beliefs about the world come from our perceptual connection to the world and not from our natures. IQ is likely to be influenced by nurturing environments. Likely, there is no such thing as the singular good life; rather there are numerous valid conceptions of the good life. The gene/environment dichotomy is false but that does not mean we cannot distinguish between robust and plastic developmental events. Keywords: nature; nurture; genetics; language; knowledge

In this second installment on the Theaetetus, I discuss Theaetetus' second and third definitions of knowledge, namely, ‘true judgment’ and then ‘true judgment with the addition of an account’. I offer a brief description of Socrates' intricate examination of these suggestions, concentrating especially on the discussion of false judgment and that of the so-called ‘Dream Theory’. I then proceed to map different lines of interpretation for these passages that have been offered by scholars writing in the last 40 years.

This article argues that providing a forum for philosophical conversation within prison education is relevant to the self-understanding and desistance of prison- ers. Semi-structured interviews with 20 participants of an in-prison philosophy class in Scotland investigated the personal relevance of engaging in philosophical dialogue. Find- ings demonstrated that philosophical dialogue develops participants’ self-understanding, providing vocabulary for alternative self-definition. The philosophy class achieved this by encouraging self-reflection, developing communication skills, and providing a fo- rum for positive prosocial interaction with peers. These skills are essential in reframing self-understanding which is, in turn, essential to desistance.

From Socrates to Jean Brodie, we have become accustomed to teachers serving as placeholders for transgressive and powerful desires in our cultural imaginary. Evidenced by recent scholarship on teachers in film, however, as well as by the 2006 film Notes on a Scandal, the way we ought to feel about teachers acting on their transgressive motivations, realizing the cultural fantasies that shadow desire and break from social norms, is less clear. In this article James Stillwaggon and David Jelinek frame the problematic erotics of school films in terms of the fantasy of the subject presumed to know and the transgressive bliss of jouissance. Stillwaggon and Jelinek analyze Notes on a Scandal as a breakdown and reversal of the tradition of school films to which it is indebted and work from it toward an understanding of the unrecognized and often conflicted cultural commitments that shape teaching.

While a great deal has been written on Plato's Lysis in philosophy and philology journals over the last thirty years, nothing has been published on Lysis in the major Anglo-American philosophy of education journals during that time. Nevertheless, this dialogue deserves attention from educators. In this essay, Mark Jonas argues that Lysis can serve as a model for educators who want to move their students beyond mere aporia, but also do not want to dictate answers to students. Although the dialogue ends in Socrates's affirmation of aporia, his affirmation is actually meant to persuade his interlocutors to reflect on an epiphany they had previously experienced. In what follows, Jonas offers a close reading of relevant passages of Lysis, demonstrating the way that Socrates leads his interlocutors to an epiphany without forcing his answers upon them.

The popularity of Jacques Ranciere in recent work in educational philosophy has rejuvenated discussion of the merits and weaknesses of Socratic education, both in Plato's dialogues and in invocations of Socrates in contemporary educational practice. In this essay Jordan Fullam explores the implications of this trend through comparing Ranciere's educational thought to an analysis of the relationship between dialectic and stultification in Plato's Republic. This task clarifies what is useful in the recent wave of scholarship that brings Ranciere's work to bear upon Socratic education, and what we might redeem in the practice of teaching that Plato assigns to the character of Socrates in the Republic. Fullam also draws on the educational literature on Socratic education to provide further context to explore the usefulness of both Ranciere and Socrates for contemporary teaching.

In order to help researchers who have to resort to time-consuming work on collecting, analyzing, and visualizing social media data, we have developed a system, called the Social and Crowdsourced Activity Extraction System (SOCRATES). This tool supports researchers utilize a single, modularly architected, open-sourced, and standardized platform for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing social media data. In this demonstration, a follow-up to one we presented at ASIST 2014 (Matni, Choi, & Shah, 2014), we present "SOCRATES 2.0" with improved functionalities, more precisely, those that help users focus on their research problem(s) without spending time and effort dealing with details in data processing. Through a process of asking questions related to the users' interests and requests for certain analyses, the system generates one sentence about a possible research statement and provides the collected data and analysis results with one click.

The ontological theory of the later Franz Brentano is often referred to as ‘reism.’ But what exactly is reism, and how is it related to modern-day nominalism? In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Brentano’s reism as a specific variety of nominalism. This variety, although motivated by distinctly modern concerns about truthmakers, adopts a strategy for providing such truthmakers that is completely foreign to modern nominalism. The strategy rests on proliferation of coincident concrete particulars. For example, ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is Greek’ are made true, respectively, by wise-Socrates and GreekSocrates, where wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates).

While the diversity in social media platforms is a primary motivation for people to participate in different social media services and utilize them in appropriately different manners, the heterogeneity in formats and platforms can also encumber information gathering and investigation, especially for a researcher who might have to resort to time consuming and rudimentary cut-and-paste tasks. In this demonstration we introduce the Social and Crowdsourced Activity Extraction System (SOCRATES), a tool developed to help researchers utilize a single, modularly architected, open-sourced, and standardized platform for collecting social media data from application programming interfaces (APIs), analyzing it with a variety of methodologies, and exploring it via multiple visualizations. SOCRATES has been developed as a highly usable social-computational platform that allows researchers from any background to track, capture, visualize, explore, and analyze large or small amounts of social media data and annotations.

While imitatio Christi has widely been recognised as a narrative element of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, other possible literary allusions have been under-explored. This article examines the presence of allusions to the death of Socrates in the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Socrates was often used in Christian apologetic contexts, thus its possible presence in Martyrdom of Polycarp is not surprising. This article seeks to understand the narrative function of Socratic allusions, especially relating to the text's construction of martyrdom and its Christology. It posits that imitatio Christi and imitatio Socratis function together apologetically to demonstrate the reasonableness of Christian worship of Jesus.

Socrates asks Euthyphro whether the gods value piety because it is good, or if piety is good because the gods value it. If we generalize Socrates’s question, we come to a choice that has exercised tremendous influence in the history of metaphysics. Instead of asking about value, we can talk about any property. Instead of asking about valuing, we can ask about any attitude or activity. Instead of talking just about the gods, we can talk about any class of individuals. If we make all these generalizations we get the following pair of questions.

A recent report on the UK's higher education system by Lord John Browne exemplifies the dominant trend in education policy initiatives toward a focus on education primarily for employment and for the acquisition of skills. In this essay, Alison Assiter argues that such an entrepreneurial approach neglects essential aspects of the processes of teaching and learning. She draws on the work of Hannah Arendt, who saw the proper role of education as imparting the love of a subject, to critique the view expressed in Browne's report. Assiter then uses Soren Kierkegaard's reflections on education to further develop Arendt's perspective. While Kierkegaard certainly would have agreed with Arendt that teaching is a process of inspiring in students the love of a subject, he went beyond this to suggest that teaching also must encourage students to believe they can make a difference in the world and must instill in both teachers and students a commitment to engaging in a mutual process of development.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Finnish Centre of Excellence in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Department of Politics and Economic Studies, Helsinki University, Helsinki, Finland Research and Teaching Associate, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Socrates Professor in Philosophy and Technology and the Humanist Tradition, Technical University Eindhoven, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The relationship between God and morality has been a topic of philosophical discussion since Socrates engaged Euthyphro in the agora. In recent years, it has received a lot of attention, as theistic philosophers have attempted to show that divine command theory and other theistic meta-ethical accounts are defensible. Whether metaphysical naturalism is compatible with moral realism is a related (and equally controversial) topic. This essay surveys the main issues in these debates.

Although technology has its place in the academic world, for both the classroom and collaborative scholarship, an over-reliance on technology and injudicious application to the classroom environment, especially to overcome financial strain at the university level, replaces the Socratic model while not always offering a viable alternative. The anonymity of the online classroom, moreover, threatens the students’ ability to build mentoring relationships and career networks, and does not always prepare them for real-world expectations. Hybrid online courses that balance classroom instruction with independent, out-of-classroom activities may prove more educationally valuable in the long run. The academy, however, runs the risk of stifling individuality among students as a result of dependence upon the virtual classroom.

This article argues that philosophical definitions are overrated as sources of understanding or wisdom. Socrates gives a standard argument in their favor which is often still proffered. Still, that Socrates's definitions never succeed invites an ironic reading of that argument. Plato also gives crucial arguments against treating definitions as important to understanding, and those objections have current versions. That raises an issue: What did we think definitions would do for us anyway? That question invites a reassessment of definitions that makes them less central and gives them a more humble, though still dangerous, role to play, one that requires they be integrated with surrounding examples and our own complex educations toward wisdom.

‘Have you ever taken sufficient care of yourselves?’ By asking the elite Athenian youth this question, Socrates implies that the liberation of self and the capacity to govern are inseparable. Drawing on the lectures given by Michel Foucault at the College de France in 1984 – only recently made available to the public – we show the consequences of the return to this ancient care-of-self ethic in the organizational context. After reviewing the contributions made to business ethics by these two philosophers, we propose four phases necessary to the emergence and constitution of a moral subject in organizations: self-awakening, self-evaluation, self-transformation and self-presentation. We then suggest various managerial practices and behaviour inspired by this philosophical parrhesia embodied by the Greek philosopher wherein the manager should have a personal relationship with his or her own activity. Finally, we discuss implications of our study in the field of business ethics and propose an agenda for future research.

Alvin Plantinga gave a reductio of the conjunction of the following three theses: Existentialism (the view that, e.g., the proposition that Socrates exists can't exist unless Socrates does), Serious Actualism (the view that nothing can have a property at a world without existing at that world) and Contingency (the view that some objects, like Socrates, exist only contingently). I sketch a view of truth at a world which enables the Existentialist to resist Plantinga's argument without giving up either Serious Actualism or Contingency.

This chapter contains sections titled: Marcus' Project Socrates and the Stoic Art of Living Types of Philosophical Text Assimilation and Digestion Writing the Self Further Reading References

In this essay, I compare the atheism of Friedrich Nietzsche with that of Richard Dawkins. My purpose is to describe certain differences in their respective atheisms with the intent of showing that Nietzsche's atheism contains a richer and fuller affirmation of human life. In Dawkins’s presentation of the value of life without God, there is a naive optimism that purports that human beings, educated in science and purged of religion, will find lives of easy peace and comfortable wonder. Part of my argument is that this optimism regarding the power of objective science is subject to Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and what he calls the “theoretical man.” As such, it fails in terms of providing a true affirmation of life in the godless world.