White's Argument Research Articles

"History of the Siege of Lisbon" - a different (hi)story

Using José Saramago's (1922-2010) novel "The history of the siege of Lisbon" (1989) as a model and example, this article attempts to demonstrate the function of multiperspective narrative structures in metahistoriographical novels, making reference to Vera and Ansgar Nünning. It discusses the problem of supposed objectivity in history studies and the invisibility of marginalised groups, who should no longer be exclusively the focus of the description, but finally also the describers. It also takes a brief digression on Hayden White's argument on the relationship between literature and historiography. By analysing the structure of perspective and by looking at the means of irony in the novel, the article aims to show how far it critically addresses these problems. It concludes that it is necessary to replace the collective singular of history (according to Reinhart Koselleck) with a more pluralistic understanding of history(-ies).

“A professor of darkness”: Higher Education and the Annihilation of Virtue in Cormac McCarthy'sThe Sunset Limited

AbstractWhile critics have remarked how The Sunset Limited stresses White's identity as a professor, they have had little to say regarding what this fact and White's suicidal longing reveal concerning McCarthy's view of the contemporary university. This article fills this gap by scrutinizing White's death wish through the lens of the academy's engagement with virtue. Drawing upon John Henry Newman's understanding of the relationship between the university and character formation, as well as traditional formulations of classical and Christian virtues, I show how White's arguments in favor of self-annihilation are grounded in an education lacking any pursuit of virtue of either kind. Representative of the modern academy, White has located all value not in an ethical consideration of how to be a good man in community with others, but in the artistic achievements of humanity; his vocation has concerned itself with aesthetics at the expense of virtue. Divorced especially from the theological virtues, the education White professes darkness by combining intellectual pride with moral skepticism in such a way as to subvert human solidarity, individual purpose, and indeed the project of the university itself.

The Ecology of Chaos in Paradise Lost

The Ecology of Chaos in Paradise Lost Sarah Smith In recent years, Paradise Lost has emerged in the field of Milton studies as an environmental, ecological text: a work that forges deep ties between the earth and humans and one that casts humans not only as rulers of creation, but as stewards as well.1 These deep ties, scholars have shown, between humans and environment render the earth deeply engaged with and responsive to the epic's moral, human events. That earth "felt the wound," many have pointed out, suggests that Milton imagines the Fall not merely as a human tragedy but as one that affects the entire universe.2 Inspired by this recent critical work, which has demonstrated the close relationship between the moral and the material in the epic, I want to revisit an older critical debate, that of the moral status of chaos. In bringing chaos and ecocriticism together, I aim, to borrow the phrase of two new materialist critics, to give matter "its due."3 Paradise Lost is perhaps an unusual object for ecocritical analysis. Ecocriticism, which "takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture," Cheryll Glotfelty writes, and examines literature using an "earth-centered approach," developed in the 1960s and 1970s, long after Milton's death, in response to the [End Page 31] world's modern environmental crises.4 Moreover, Paradise Lost sits uneasily alongside an early, provocative, and influential essay in environmental criticism by Lynn White that identifies Christian anthropocentrism as the root cause of the world's modern ecological problems. According to White, Christianity "not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends."5 If anthropocentrism, the attitude that human needs and concerns are paramount, has helped cause today's ecological crises, then it is not surprising that the ecocritical project has been committed to questioning and destabilizing humans' place at the center. And indeed, most ecocriticism has been marked by a commitment to "deep ecology," a philosophy that holds that the "well-being and flourishing of human and non-human Life on Earth have value in themselves … independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes."6 Second-wave ecocriticism has similarly sought to interrogate the hierarchical attitudes that place humans above the earth, but it is distinguished by its engagement with critical theory (feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial) to delineate the ways in which forms of social inequality intersect with ecological issues.7 More recently, the new materialism of Jane Bennett and the object-oriented ontology of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton have advanced the ecocritical project by challenging humans' privileged place over matter.8 Ecocriticism, then, has been to a large extent committed to challenging Christian anthropocentrism, a task that does not ostensibly dovetail with Milton's deeply hierarchical rendition of Genesis. But Ken Hiltner, Diane Kelsey McColley, Robert Watson, and others have demonstrated that although Milton wrote in an age less anxious about environmental destruction than our own, Renaissance literature can be read greenly.9 These critics have shown that questions regarding the appropriate relationship between humans and nature existed long before Darwin and the Romantic poets.10 And indeed, Paradise Lost has proven an especially rich text for green reading because, as a retelling of Genesis, it provides an opportunity to engage with White's argument that [End Page 32] Christian anthropocentrism bears some responsibility for today's environmental crisis. White's essay has faced challenges from critics such as William Leiss and Jeremy Cohen who insist that Christianity never gave humans permission for uninhibited subjugation.11 In Milton studies, Hiltner and McColley have made the case for ecocritical readings of Paradise Lost along similar lines, arguing that the epic is not anthropocentric, but instead demonstrates the duty of humans to be stewards of the earth.12 Milton's vitalist monism has been especially central in demonstrating links between human and nonhuman life, asserting the importance of stewardship, and registering environmental loss as well as possibilities for renewal.13 But, while discussion of Adam and Eve's stewardship has largely been limited to the care of plants...

Ontological theorizations in critical security studies: making the case for a (modified) post-structuralist approach

This article demonstrates the nuances of the critical security studies literature and argues for the benefits of employing a (modified) post-structuralist approach to security. The proposed “modification” is necessary to avoid the inclination within post-structural approaches to conflate epistemological commitments with ontological ones. Using Stephen K. White's arguments for the viability of “weak ontologies,” I demonstrate that a critical post-structuralist approach need not be anathema to the making of claims, nor should it be seen as suffering from a paralytic disjuncture from the “real world.” Two important points that counter familiar critiques leveled against a critical post-structuralist security studies are then introduced. First, acts of re-construction can be critical in the most fundamental ontological sense, though they need not employ the “strong ontologies” that appeal unproblematically to external grounds to make their claims. Second, acts of re-construction can emanate directly from post-structuralist commitments, where deconstruction is both a first step and an ethic to bring to engagement with the status quo. Hence, maintaining critical commitments can mean being reflexive about the indeterminacy of the claims that are ultimately made while being accountable to them.

Roger White's Argument against Imprecise Credences

According to the Imprecise Credence Framework (ICF), a rational believer's doxastic state should be modelled by a set of probability functions rather than a single probability function, namely, the set of probability functions allowed by the evidence (Joyce [2005]). Roger White ([2010]) has recently given an arresting argument against the ICF, which has garnered a number of responses. In this article, I attempt to cast doubt on his argument. First, I point out that it's not an argument against the ICF per se, but an argument for the Principle of Indifference. Second, I present an argument that's analogous to White's. I argue that if White's premises are true, the premises of this argument are too. But the premises of my argument entail something obviously false. Therefore, White's premises must not all be true. 1 Introduction2 White's Argument3 A Counterargument

Attention is cognitive unison: an essay in philosophical psychology

1. Highlights of a Difficult History 1.1 The Preliminary Identification of Our Topic 1.2 Three Approaches 1.3 Bradley's Protest 1.4 James's Disjunctive Theory 1.5 The Source of Bradley's Dissatisfaction 1.6 Behaviourism and After 1.7 Heirs of Bradley in the Twentieth Century 2. The Underlying Metaphysical Issue 2.1 Explanatory Tactics 2.2 The Basic Distinction 2.3 Metaphysical Categories and Taxonomies 2.4 Adverbialism, Multiple Realizability, and Natural Kinds 2.5 Adverbialism and Levels of Explanation 2.6 Taxonomies and Supervenience Relations 3. Rejecting the Process First View 3.1 Supervenience-Failure 3.2 The Modal Commitments of The Process-First View 3.3 The Interference Argument - A Putative Problem for Adverbialist Accounts 3.4 Conclusion 4. Cognitive Unison 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The Problem with Attitude Based Adverbialism 4.3 Gilbert Ryle and Alan White 4.4 White's Argument Against Disposition-Based Adverbialism 4.5 The Cognitive Unison Theory 4.6 Tasks 4.7 Cognitive Processes 4.8 Potential Service of a Task 4.9 Superordinate Tasks 4.10 Some Features of the Theory 4.11 Divided Attention 4.12 Degrees of Attention and Merely Partial Attention 4.13 Summary 5. The Causal Life of Attention 5.1 Mental Causation 5.2 How to Respond to Mental Causation Objections 5.3 The Causal Role of Attention 5.4 Attention as an enabling condition 5.5 Counterfactuals 5.6 The Causal Relevance of Attention per se 5.7 Counterfactuals and Causally Relevant Properties 5.8 Objections to Counterfactual Analysis of Causation and of Causal Relevance 5.9 The Extrinsicness of Unison 5.10 The Privative Character of Unison and The Problem of Absence Causation 5.11 Causal Exclusion 5.12 Summary 6. Consequences for Cognitive Psychology 6.1 Psychology and Metaphysics 6.2 The Metaphysical Commitments of the Process-Identifying Project 6.3 The Diverse Explanatory Construals of Current Psychological Results 6.4 Reasons for Deflation 6.5 Inductively Unreliable Properties 6.6 Questions Without Answers 6.7 The Positive Payoff 7. Philosophical Work for The Theory of Attention 7.1 Putting Attention to Philosophical Work 7.2 Attention and Reference 7.3 Attention and Consciousness 7.4 Prospects for Optimism Notes References

The changing face of El Moudjahid during the Algerian War of Independence

The 1956 Soummam conference is considered a turning point for Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN), due to a platform that asserted the supremacy of political over military objectives and the corollary importance of diplomacy and public relations. For domestic outreach, the FLN turned to a small publication that had debuted months previously – El Moudjahid – giving it a heightened profile and a new importance. From its founding in June 1956 to the Evian Accords in March 1962, El Moudjahid's layout evolved dramatically – an evolution most evident on its cover page. The simple style and pamphlet-like shape of the early issues initially shifted to a text-dense ‘broadsheet’ layout, and ultimately by a single photograph. Yet even after the layout stabilised, the page's various elements continued to evolve. This article argues that these changes illustrate Hayden White's argument about the ‘content of the form’: that the physical organisation of a page is not inert, but rather influences how readers understand its content. Taken seriously this means turning the analysis from El Moudjahid's content to its physical structure: its cover page elements and their relationship with the text. Focusing on El Moudjahid's French edition, this study addresses ten elements: the language used, the presence, size, and placement of the title, authorship, the presence, size, and placement of the crescent and star emblem, the subtitle ‘Organe Central du Front de Libération Nationale’, inset articles and notices, the presence and location of the place of publication, the amount and currency of the price, the slogan ‘Révolution Par le Peuple et Pour le Peuple,’ and the presence of the Algerian flag. It concludes by examining two time elements: the publication date and the issue number. Complicating Benedict Anderson's arguments about the linear nature of ‘national time’, El Moudjahid presented Algeria's national time as both horizontal and vertical – linear and sacral. Its publication date and issue number anchored the reader in horizontal calendar time. However, as an ‘organ’ El Moudjahid differed from Anderson's national newspaper. It added verticality by emphasising the sacrality of anniversaries, like that of 1 November 1954. While scholars have used El Moudjahid as a primary-source archive, they have put little analytic pressure on the cover and other constituent parts. Doing so enables a more substantive understanding of the journal, its operations and its impact, in ways that can only enrich its archival uses in the future.

Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914-2005 (review)

Reviewed by: Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 Elena Shulman Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005. By Denise J. Youngblood . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006. ISBN 0-7006-1489-3. Photographs. Notes. Filmography. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvi, 319. $34.95. Denise Youngblood employs a multidisciplinary approach to explore topics in Soviet history through the medium of fiction mainstream films about combat and wartime. She bases this "filmic history" of wars on a selection of 160 titles that met the criteria of simultaneously engaging "in key issues of war and wartime" and having been popular with general audiences or garnering critical acclaim. Youngblood's approach is indebted to Hayden White's argument that film is "a distinctive form of historical discourse" (p. 3) and much can be gained by judging films by standards such as their effectiveness in capturing Russian experiences during wars, whether and how such films kept to the official version of events and inspired patriotism, and how well they facilitated the production of a "usable past." This approach yields tangible rewards. The book begins with a discussion of films set in the context of World War I, the Russian Civil War, World War II, and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and concludes with the cinematic depictions of the Chechen wars. Youngblood opens each chapter with a "historiophoty," a helpful brief summary of how the history of wars was interpreted for the screen in a given epoch. The bulk of each chapter is devoted to several important films for the period with plot summaries, descriptions of particularly illuminating moments, including combat scenes and depictions of enemies, box office data, and an assessment of how well each work kept to the official line of its era. The crux of Youngblood's argument is that films about war have a special meaning in Soviet cinematic history and this primacy of war films also gave filmmakers an opportunity "to subvert official history in the guise of art or entertainment" (p. 3). Youngblood is most original in the second half of the book where she takes on prevailing assumptions about the ossified martial culture of the late Soviet period and the contested representations of wars in present day Russia. She contends that although there was pressure on directors to make superficial combat epics in the 1960s and 1970s, as Brezhnev's government increasingly emphasized the "cult" of World War II, complex films with young and uninspired soldiers dying senselessly continued to be made and seen by millions. This dynamic resurfaced in Putin's Russia where the government hopes to use the memory of the Second World War to drum up patriotism and support, while at the same time popular tastes continue to push for exposés of unsavory aspects such as the use of penal battalions. Films about Afghanistan and Chechnya are now another fraught arena for contested interpretations. In such films, Russian soldiers, abandoned to their fates by their own government, appear as prisoners in the hands of their sometimes worthy enemies who at least know why they fight. This work is a pleasure to read with a useful filmography of war-related films listed by war, director, or by title in both English and Russian. The [End Page 967] author deftly avoids jargon and includes enough information about the films for those who have not seen them. This book will spur readers to see the films and view them in a new light. It will also attract scholars for its interpretive insights and as a reference tool. Its scope should work well in graduate seminars on Soviet history, seminars on historical methods, or in undergraduate courses where films figure prominently as sources. Elena Shulman Texas Tech University Lubbock, Texas Copyright © 2007 Society for Military History

Drunkard's Refuge: The Lessons of the New York State Inebriate Asylum (review)

Reviewed by: Drunkard's Refuge: The Lessons of the New York State Inebriate Asylum Thomas R. Pegram John W. Crowley and William L. White . Drunkard's Refuge: The Lessons of the New York State Inebriate Asylum. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. x + 127 pp. $24.95 (1-55849-430-8). The New York State Inebriate Asylum in Binghamton was a pioneering institution: chartered in 1854 and opened to patients a decade later, it was the first large-scale American facility devoted to the medical treatment and rehabilitation of inebriates. In outline, however, its history was a brief, sad chronicle of failure. Even before it opened its doors in 1864, its visionary founder, Dr. J. Edward Turner, had become enmeshed in disputes with state and local authorities over control of the facility. The operation of the Asylum was further hampered by a series of fires; by objections to the expense and elegance of Turner's building plans; and by a disabling personal and professional rivalry between Turner and Dr. Willard Parker, the chair of the institution's board of directors. Turner's difficult and inflexible manner worsened each of these crises until he was forced out as director in 1866. A second director, Dr. Albert Day, enjoyed brief success until he, too, was shoved aside in 1870. The Asylum then fell under the influence [End Page 580] of graft-seeking politicians until it was sold to the state of New York in 1879. Two years later, the facility was reopened as an insane asylum with no attention to the treatment and rehabilitation of alcoholics. John W. Crowley and William L. White sketch the basic features of this institutional history, but their interest is in another aspect of the New York State Inebriate Asylum. Specifically writing for an audience of "individuals working within or living within the worlds of addiction treatment and recovery" (p. vii), Crowley and White explore Turner's contribution to the developing disease concept of alcoholism, and the implications for contemporary treatment and recovery programs of his struggle to establish an institution devoted to the medical treatment of inebriates. They see Turner as an important figure in advancing a medical understanding of inebriety (building on the ideas of Benjamin Rush and others) against the dominant nineteenth-century moral construct that condemned the drunkard as a victim of weak will and base appetite. Crowley and White, working through thin and sometimes idiosyncratic sources, place Turner in an ambiguous position between the moral framework of temperance reform and the professional outlook of medicine. On the one hand, he never became involved in temperance work, even though he was raised in Maine, a nineteenth-century hotbed of dry activism; rather, he pursued a medical approach to inebriety, studying the issue with European authorities and firsthand through the dissection of more than 350 dead drunkards. On the other hand, Turner's medical education was somewhat informal (studying with a neighboring doctor and attending lectures in Philadelphia), his critics frequently challenged his medical credentials, and the authors claim that his commitment to founding an institution to treat inebriates was inspired by the Washingtonian movement (a self-reforming body of former drunkards) and that he carried on with the same fanatical zeal as the dry crusader Neal Dow. The influence of Washingtonian reform is central to Crowley and White's argument, but also problematic. The Washingtonian project of reclaiming drunkards and making them into sober men, they argue, hardened Turner's belief that inebriety was a treatable condition—yet the Washingtonian emphasis on self-improvement in a supportive peer community clashed with Turner's autocratic methods. Turner believed that isolation and a completely controlled environment were essential to treatment. In contrast, both his rival, Parker, and his successor, Day, endorsed greater freedom for patients, trust within a community of recovering inebriates, and an emphasis on the will that borrowed from the moral tradition of reform. Indeed, Crowley and White demonstrate that the moral and medical paradigms for understanding and treating alcoholism intermingled in the nineteenth century and endured in drug and alcohol treatment in the twentieth century. Thomas R. Pegram Loyola College Baltimore, Maryland Copyright © 2005 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Misperception and the use of force: A commentary on Ralph White's "American Acts of Force".

Ralph White's argument about the important role of demonized enemy images, lack of realistic empathy, and misperception in the processes leading to crisis and war find important parallels in the theoretical and empirical literature on international relations. I emphasize that military superiority is not sufficient to deter adversary aggression and that White's proposed guidelines for policymakers have some overlap with contemporary theories of crisis management.

Testing the interpretation of inspection time as a measure of speed of sensory processing

Explaining the relationship between inspection time (IT) and IQ depends on understanding the psychophysics of IT. White's (1996, Personality and Individual Differences, 20, 351–363) argument that IT is a measure of temporal resolution within the visual system was tested. Two predictions were made on the basis of White's argument that IT does not depend on line-length discriminations but on discriminating target from mask. First, radically different target-mask configurations would result in the same response outcome. Second, increasing the number of alternative targets would not increase IT. Three subjects performed four pattern masking tasks presented on a LED display with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) ranging from 0–75 msec and using three configurations of backward mask. Results met the predictions. Psychometric functions for different tasks were near identical and IT estimates did not increase as the number of targets was increased. It is therefore possible that the IT-IQ relationship applies generally to pattern backward masking tasks. Results also confirmed the prediction (Levy, 1992, Personality and Individual Differences, 13, 987–1002; White, 1996, Personality and Individual Differences, 20, 351–363) that discriminative accuracy does not rise above chance level until after some small, non-zero SOA.

"This Book of Starres": Learning to Read George Herbert

Reviews James Boyd White, "This Book of Starres": Learning to Read George Herbert. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994. 292 pp. $37.50 by W.A. Sessions The poem from which James Boyd White takes his title is about the proper reading of "Holy Scriptures." The ambiguities in Herbert's original poem point to the kind of dialectic that White would have readers of George Herbert learn: the incompleteness of "starres" as "poore books" can only be contrasted to what "lights" toward full meaning in "This book of starres." This dialectic obtains in White's own book in a method of analysis that combines two distinctly differing styles. The first is a rather old-fashioned New Critical reading and the second, a poststructuralist digressive selfconstruction . Such a self informs White's book and seeks a point of contact with the text itself as some sort of soteriological center. The first emphasis on close reading subsumes the Eliot thesis of tradition and talent and the Whiteheadian thesis of process: "The life of this poetry is not," White comments, "in poems as artifacts, but in the process of poetry-making that produced them, in the process of poetry-reading they require" (p. 150). This process excludes, fairly rigorously, any cultural engagement, although White does attempt some theological background early on, largely unfocused. What it does include is its firm dialectic of two selves, the reader's and the poet's, in that order and with a fluidity that extends to the poetry: "Herbert's conception of a person, then, is not as a single thing, but as a place of tension, conversation, conflict, and uncertainty — though here his parts are for the moment united in the poem itself" (p. 81). In fact, it is precisely in the text that person is revealed: "In reading Herbert's poems we are given a brokeness of language and self that in some way parallels his, which it is our task and opportunity to face," says White in the last line of his last chapter (p. 264). This self that is defining its multiple selves in reading Herbert's multiple selves (textualized into a book) is quite well-defined early on 56Book Reviews in White's argument. It is none other than a dramatized White, the product of a topology of region as well as mentality, and so throughout the book White takes his reader into other texts he knows, which for him form a contrast for his apprehension of Herbert. Ranging from the Iliad to Winnie-the-Pooh, such texts focus on three New England poets, particularly Emerson, Dickinson, and Frost. If frequently the extra-textual analyses do not help but interrupt, too cozily assuming a familiarity with the reader, at other times the insights are worth the breaks in the argument. Dickinson's movement from the spiritual to the physical landscape, the obverse of most contemporary poems and fiction, reveals a special technique of Herbert's seen all the more clearly for the comparison. If White's styles — close reading and poststructural solipsism — in combination are refreshing, there is some reason for caveat lector, at least for the omnivorous graduate student ready to "psyche" out the analysis and label it. White's mind is much too subtle for such labelling, and if repetitive or redundant in analysis, certainlyobviating any new ideological reading of Herbert, White's double style does keep the narrative of discovery going (unlike many other Renaissance critical texts). If few presses and few editors today allow such generous and lengthy readings as White's, the readings do provide what is rare in critical texts today. The reader sees text leading to text in a sequence that itself is salvific if followed, at the least therapeutic, because it evokes mystery and acceptance, as in "Love" (III). In short, Herbert reveals Herbert. In such a process, of course, it is a genuine question if such readings as White's add anything new or intend to. To the master Herbert studies from Tuve, Summers, and Stewart to Fish, Vendler, and Bloch, White adds few original readings. Similarly he offers little of the impact of new ideologies on Herbert texts, such as Schoenfeldt demonstrates...

Myth and Metaphysics in Plato's "Phaedo" (review)

Book Reviews David A. White. MythandMetaphysicsin Plato's"Phaedo."Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 199o. Pp. 316. Cloth, $45.oo. Although this book is in essence a running commentary on the Phaedo,a central theme weaves together its disparate elements, as White examines the relation between the rational and the mythical elements in the work. In particular, White focuses his commentary on the rather anomalous fact that "a singularly complex myth stands as a narrative summit overlooking the rational substructure of the Phaedo" (x7). Against those who would see the myth at the end of the dialogue as either subordinate or irrelevant to the rational arguments of the work, White will attempt to demonstrate that the myth is intimately connected to these arguments in the sense that the rational arguments, designed to convince us of the immortality of the soul, will require the myth in order to achieve this goal. The insufficiency of rational argument, according to White, is foreshadowed in the opening scene of the dialogue, where Socrates explains why he has begun composing poems. Although in the past dreams had informed him "to make music and practice it" (6oe), Socrates had inferred that this directed him to do philosophy, which is "the greatest kind of music." But since his sentencing he has wondered whether the words weren't meant to be taken literally and begins to compose verses in order to fulfill his duty. White thinks we should see in this a recognition of the limits of reason. Just as by beginning to compose poems Socrates casts doubt upon whether philosophy should have been the exclusive occupation of his life, so the Phaedo itself, by placing the myth at the end of the chain of rational arguments, will recognize that "philosophy can and perhaps must be complemented by myth" (3 l). Further evidence for the necessity of myth to complement reason comes after Socrates has presented the first two proofs for the soul's immortality. Although Simmias and Cebes rationally accept the arguments, they admit to Socrates that they are still plagued by fears. In order to dispel remaining fears, Socrates insists that they must "sing spells" (77e) and "find a charmer" (78a) who will help them alleviate their anxieties. White takes this as proof that reason by itself will not persuade Simmias and C,ebes and that "regardless of how long the argument takes to complete, some arguments will eventually require mythical supplementation" (xo3). White continues in this vein for much of the book, offering up declarations on the shortcomings of reason according to the Phaedo:Socrates insists that singing the myth "is necessary in order to persuade us of the truth about the next life" (1~7); the arguments for immortality "will be incomplete and require some other form of dis- [443] 444 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3o:3 JULY 199~ course to fill the gap left by the argument" (138); when we accept the myth "the arguments will then be more likely to be persuasive" (238). What emerges, then, is an antirational or at least an extrarational Socrates, a Socrates who believes that reason by itself will not persuade us of anything important and that other than rational means must ultimately be employed. One's attitude toward this work, 1 imagine, will depend on how plausible one finds this picture of Socrates. Personally, I do not see that this portrait of Socrates corresponds to that of the devoted rational enquirer portrayed throughout the dialogues, nor do I think White's arguments are very compelling. To consider just one of the more crucial pieces of evidence: White thinks that Socrates' command to Simmias and Cebes after the first two proofs to "sing songs" and to "find an enchanter" means that he is telling them to turn to other grounds besides rational argument. Against the suggestion that by "singing songs" Socrates is merely exhorting them in a metaphorical way to continue the argumentative process, White argues that "to sing songs" can't mean to argue discursively because Socrates is telling them "to sing songs" in order to allay their fears regarding the afterlife. But since neither Simmias nor Cebes disputes the logic of the proof...

Flanagan on Quinean Ethics

Previous articleNext article No AccessDiscussionFlanagan on Quinean EthicsRoger F. GibsonRoger F. Gibson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 98, Number 3Apr., 1988 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/292970 Views: 5Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1988 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Robert Feleppa Quine, Davidson, and the Naturalization of Metaethics, Dialectica 55, no.22 (Jun 2005): 145–166.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1746-8361.2001.tb00211.xFOLKE TERSMAN Quine on Ethics, Theoria 64, no.11 (Feb 2008): 84–98.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-2567.1998.tb00225.x

UNIT TRUSTS, HOMOGENEOUS BELIEFS AND THE SEPARATION PROPERTY: A NOTE

A recent paper in this journal by J.R. White (1981) provides some evidence on the homogeneity of beliefs of unit trust managers and concludes that ‘Unit trusts are well informed about the market and process information efficiently.’ This note provides some additional evidence on the beliefs of unit trust managers based on a larger sample of trusts embracing different years and a number of objectives. It suggests that White's arguments are not conclusive at the theoretical level and not substantiated by the empirical evidence.

‘True’ and Truth

In Parts I, II, and III of the paper, the authors show that an argument essential to Alan White's defense of the Correspondence Theory of truth is unsuccessful. They argue that some of the premises of White's argument are false, and others incoherent. They show, further, that certain widely accepted assumptions in the philosophy of language, which underlie White's argument, must also be abandoned. In Part IV, they attempt to say something new about ‘true’, ‘false’, truth and falsity, and related notions. They do not offer a competing theory to White's, but instead stress features of the use of these words and concepts which philosophers have either ignored or insufficiently emphasized.