Theaetetus 151e–186e: Did Plato Refute Protagoras?

This article examines detective stories translated by Nasīb al-Mashʿalānī published in the periodical al-Ḍiyāʾ (“The Gleam”) and their contribution to the process of Arab nation-building at the turn of the twentieth century. We show how al-Mashʿalānī’s work consisted of a cultural process rather than a textual product or linguistic transfer. These translations introduced new social, political and epistemological concepts that were particularly important to societal changes in the Arab world – such as the notion of civil society, the relationship of the public to institutions of law and the police, the pursuit of justice, and ways of dealing with crime in the Western model of law and order – that al-Mashʿalānī deliberately adapted to the local Arab culture.

IntroductionKarl Popper (1945) appeals to of Athens in the opening pages of The Spell of Plato, Volume I of The Open Society and Its Enemies with the following excerpt:For the Open Society (about 430 B.C.):Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.Immediately as a contrast Popper quotes from Plato of Athens:Against the Open Society (about 80 years later):The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war as well as in the midst of peace to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals . . . only he has been told to do so . . . In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and in fact, to become utterly incapable of it (p. 3).Popper uses these two r eferences to frame a critical discussion of Plato's historicism. As a critical introduction to political philosophy his aim is to that civilization has not yet fully recovered from the shock of its birth, the transition from the tribal or 'closed society,' with its submission to magical forces, to the 'open society' which sets free the critical powers of man. In the final chapter he continues in this vein: is no return to a har - monious state of nature ... if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, courageously, using what reason we have, to plan for security and freedom.His initial reference is to Pericles' Funeral Oration (after 490 BCE) from Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War. It is a speech by Pericles that provides a eulogy for the pr inciples of Athenia n democracy. The statement of its underlying principles in fact provides a better warrant for the political concept of openness:It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privil ege, but as the reward of m erit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant.Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. And in the matter of education, whereas they from early youth are always undergoing laborious exercises which are to make them brave, we live at ease, and yet are equally ready to face the perils which they face.1In these brief passages Pericles points to the advantages of democracy that thrives on openness and transparency, despite the fact that the words themselves are reported by an anti-democratic Thucydides who while admiring Pericles' leadership criticized the mob rule of democracy (Perry, 2012).George Soros, Popper's student, describes Popper's concept of the open society as an epistemological concept rather than a political one even though in Popper's hands it resembles liberal democracy and becomes a political instrument for societal improvement.Living in the twenty-first century it is necessary to revisit the notion of openness as it has become one of the most used concepts to analyze a welter of problems and situations, often with conflicting meanings. …

The article analyzes the main approaches to understanding the concept of the «rule of law», which is currently practically implemented as a principle of functioning of legal systems of the Western legal tradition both at the national level and in the sphere of international communication of states, communities and state authorities of which profess the values of Western civilization. The ideas of the rule of law, democracy, and human rights, as defining values of Western civilization, are also the basis of the political and legal concept of Professor V. Sokurenko, one of the founders of the Lviv Scientific School of History of law. Founded by Professor P. Nedbailo, Associate Professor V. Kalynovych, Professor V. Kulchytskyi and Professor V. Sokurenko in the 1950s and early 1960s, the traditions of the scientific school of the history of law are now supported and developed by their successors, in particular, Professor B. Tyshchyk, Professor M. Kostytskyi, Associate Professor E. Orach, Associate Professor A. Kolbenko, Associate Professor T. Andrusiak, Professor I. Boyko, Professor M. Kobyletskyi, and also the younger generation of scholars. Based on the purpose of the research, the article reveals the patterns and features of the doctrine of the rule of law in the Lviv scientific school of the history of law, which are illustrated by the example of the political and legal concept of Professor V. Sokurenko, who expressed Г. Федущак-Паславська ISSN 2078-4503. Вісник Львівського університету. Серія юридична. 70 2023. Випуск 76 the leading ideas of the school. The analysis of the main elements of the political and legal concept of Professor V. Sokurenko makes it possible to reveal the understanding of the principle of the rule of law in the Lviv scientific school of the history of law. It is found that almost all issues considered by V. Sokurenko in the scientific research, one way or another are related to the understanding of law, its correlation with other phenomena. Revealing the correlation between law and the state, the scholar defines law as an expression of the common interests and social wisdom of people who created the state by having agreed. Revealing the problem of the rule of law, V. Sokurenko asserts that the functioning of this principle consists in ensuring the rule of law by the state authorities, which, in turn, correspond to the values professed by the respective society. His remark that values in law are predetermined requirements that law must meet in order to be an effective regulator of social relations is of paramount importance. The scholar draws attention to the essence and peculiarities of the functioning of the rule of law principle in the legal system of common law. He concludes that in this type of legal system, the role of the judge is very prominent, having the power to restore justice in each specific case, even in the absence of the norm of law that directly regulates the relevant legal relationship. Therefore, the principle of the rule of law is ensured by the activity of the independent judicial branch of government. Taking into account the prevailing positivist type of legal understanding at the time of the formation of his political and legal concept, Professor V. Sokurenko emphasizes the need for the domination of law as an important condition of the legal state. Inherent in the Lviv scientific school of the history of law, the scholar expresses the requirement to reconcile the norms of the law with the morality of the people, the requirement for the regulatory unity of the norms of the law with the requirements of morality. That is, V. Sokurenko emphasizes the supremacy of legal law in his concept.

The article is devoted to the main regulators of social interaction in the states of the past and present: morality and law. The first, having receded into the background in the process of social development and giving way to law, continues to significantly influence the development of social relations. The analysis of the interrelation of these most important elements of human culture in the process of regulating social relations, their impact on each other and on society, testifies to the ambiguity of such influence. The law, which does not adequately take into account the requirements of morality and ethics, leads to the formation of undemocratic political regimes and arbitrary power, incompatible with modern ideas about the well-being and stability of society and the state. At the same time, the maintenance by law of ideological values masquerading as moral imperatives is a way of managing society based on the manipulation of mass consciousness. The fundamental values that guide society in its development are formed not only under the influence of factors of economic and cultural reality, but also under political concepts and ideological paradigms. Unfair use of the dialectical connection between law and morality serves, as a rule, the narrow-group interests of a few social strata that play key roles in states. The social purpose of the law is not limited to the regulation and protection of certain social relations. The law mediating the interest of citizens is obliged to protect society from the impact on it of various ideological, moral and other interpretations of reality that do not correspond to universal ideas about personality, freedom, justice, equality and other phenomena of the surrounding reality inherent in a modern developed state.

Resumen: La crítica desde la teoría política feminista hacia el concepto de ciudadanía puede comprenderse desde una concepción amplia de la epistemología como gnoseología en general. Desde esta perspectiva, el eje de la crítica se dirige al concepto de individuo ciudadano universal, sustentado desde la teoría contractualista, al argumentar que está constituido desde un universalismo restringido que revela un sesgo de género. De este modo, el artículo propone que el sustento epistémico del análisis feminista a la noción de ciudadanía versa sobre un cuestionamiento a la categoría de un sujeto de derecho universal, planteando este reconocimiento como clave para la obtención de la emancipación de las mujeres de las relaciones de dominación, argumentando en base a ello que la división entre el espacio de lo público y el ámbito de lo privado es una ficción. Desde ahí, surge el cuestionamiento por el tipo de sujetos que deben sustentar el modelo de la ciudadanía, desde el cual el feminismo ha erguido parte importante de su propuesta para transformar la concepción de la política como un espacio que reconoce la diferencia de género y sostiene la equidad.

The African Diaspora Nahum Dimitri Chandler (bio) Preamble There is no given horizon of thought or critical practice that is, or can be rendered, in its contemporary formation commensurate with the problematic named under the heading of the African Diaspora. This, in a word, yields what may be called the problem of theory with regard to what has often been called the African Diaspora. Within my own formation—which is to say other itineraries and signposts could be privileged—four signal references must be remarked. In his 1915 text The Negro, expressing an achieved perspective that he had won across the opening decade and a half of the twentieth century, W. E. B. Du Bois essayed what should be understood as an epistemological conception of “the Negro” as a global diasporic ensemble, that is, a “serious synoptic view of Africans around the world” (Du Bois 1915b). Du Bois had noted at the head of the closing section of his little book, titled “Suggestions for Further Reading,” that “there is no general history of the Negro race” (a formulation echoed by George Shepperson in his 1970 introduction to the book as then still appropriate [Shepperson 1970; Aptheker 1989]). It is in all truth in light of this epistemic conception that Du Bois would subsequently develop (in tandem with many others) a far-reaching political conception of a global Africa—in the pan-Africanist movement of 1919–1945 and in his conception of “worlds of color” (already from 1900, but especially from the end of World War I) in which he conceived of colonialism as the twentieth century’s broadest articulation of the “problem of the color line” (Du Bois 1900; 1909; 1915a; 1920; 1925; 1928; 1935; 1945; 1947). Yet, it must be remarked in this context that for Du Bois in his 1915 text (as earlier in his itinerary), there were no stable criteria by which to consistently name the terms of the supposed object of his analysis—for, he explicitly disavowed the concept of race, even as he had no other term by which [End Page 1] to bring into view the ensemblic whole in question. This problem remains our own, despite and beyond all manner of disavowals. It is in this context that one might understand the penultimate challenge of Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (beyond his ultimate strident categorical challenge to American Democracy) as a call for a new theorization of the African American situation (Cruse 1967). It was a problematic that in fact was exploding in the moment in historically spectacular form with worldwide implication as a matter of political representation, only to reopen in a new way, in its eventuality across the ensuing decades, as a somewhat more intractable dimension of this problem, that is, as a question of epistemic possibility (of power as both resource and economy, of institution, and of techniques of thought). In this same historical unfolding, Cedric Robinson’s monumental effort and tremendous accomplishment in Black Marxism posed at its core the necessity of a re-theorization of modernity as a whole—specifically, the figure of supposedly replete Europe and a certain dominant discourse of radical thought attendant to it (a radicalism claiming a “European” lineage) and a replacement of the thematization of slavery as located at the root of capital accumulation in its modern form (Robinson 2000 [1983]). This led him to announce a complex and enigmatically difficult figure, or hypothesis, of a certain “black subject” as a theoretical guide for a re-narrativization of contemporary historicity and the possibilities encoded therein. Further, and finally, challenging the “black radical tradition,” even as he avowed it, he can be understood to have also posed the demand for a new theorization of the problematic of the African Diaspora. Unfolding into our own moment, in a parallel or proximate but distinct manner, the work of Hortense Spillers, in particular as documented in the remarkable project placed under the heading of Black, White, and in Color, has been carrying out the patient, difficult, and insurmountable work of clarifying not only the terms of the announcement of a new subjectivity, or its possibility—especially under the exemplary guidance of the situation of...

Anarchist philosophy has often played and continues to play a crucial role in interventions in working‐class and labor movements. Anarchist philosophy influenced real‐world struggles and touched the lives of real, flesh‐and‐blood workers, especially those belonging to the industrial, immigrant working classes of late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century America. Too often the writings, which were disseminated to, and hungrily consumed by, these workers are dismissed as “propaganda.” However, insofar as they articulate and define political, economic, and social concepts; subject political, economic, and social institutions to trenchant critique against clear and well‐defined normative standards; offer logical justifications of their own positions; and advance positive alternative proposals, why should these writings not be regarded as philosophical texts and analyzed accordingly? Obviously they should, and the fact that they have been so long ignored by political philosophers, historians, and other scholars reflects academic prejudice rather than the intellectual and philosophical merit of the writings. This article is a preliminary step toward giving anarchist philosophy the hearing it so richly deserves.

Journal Article The Ethical Aspects of Limited War Get access W. Robert McFadden W. Robert McFadden Professor of Religion Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Church and State, Volume 13, Issue 1, Winter 1971, Pages 113–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcs/13.1.113 Published: 01 January 1971

The duty of civility refers to the set of moral requirements that are associated with Rawls’s idea of public reason and its corresponding view of liberal-democratic political legitimacy. Indeed this duty is said to be one of the central “innovations” of Rawls’s theory of public reason (PL 253). It applies to both government oficials and ordinary citizens in the public political forum when they are resolving constitutional essentials andmatters of basic justice. The duty of civility instructs them to “be able to explain to one another on those fundamental questions how the principles and policies they advocate and vote for can be supported by the political values of public reason” (PL 217). A principal obligation of the duty of civility, then, involves the practice of public justiication. Citizens and oficials should identify and sometimes publicly communicate suitable justifying reasons for their exercise of coercive political power, at least with respect to constitutional essentials andmatters of basic justice. Public justiication is “not simply valid reasoning, but argument addressed to others” (PL 465). It proceeds on the basis of public reasoning, that is, by way of ascertainable evidence and reasons and arguments drawn from a reasonable political conception of justice, consistent with the liberal principle of legitimacy based on the criterion of reciprocity. According to this criterion, the exercise of political power is legitimate only when “we sincerely believe that the reasons we would offer for our political activities – were we to state them as government oficials – are suficient, and we also reasonably think that other citizens might reasonably accept those reasons” (PL 447).

Migration generates complex social realities in which a variety of moral requirements come into play. Traditional moral theories, with their methodological nationalism, are insufficient to adequately attend to such complexity. A theory of global justice is required, and cosmopolitanism is proposed as an adequate basis for evaluating migration policies. Critical cosmopolitanism complements the arguments of freedom of movement and equality of opportunities based on the individualist, rationalist and universalist premises of classical cosmopolitanism, with arguments in favor of responsibility in political structures and immigrants’ recognition and participation in political communities. This revised cosmopolitanism assumes the relevance of a plurality of moral commitments and reinterprets universalism in a procedural, contextual and open sense. From this perspective, an illative logic of “both/and” allows for a reconsideration of crucial political concepts. This chapter proposes, firstly, a reframed concept of state legitimacy according to which the local, the national and the global cease to be considered mutually exclusive realms; secondly, a reformulation of the nexus between citizenship and the State and the necessity to reshape spaces for solidarity and participation; and, finally, a foundation of public culture on the recognition of others in their otherness through dialogue.