In antiquity the Oracle at Delphi urged each to "know thyself." Socrates followed with the observation that "The unexamined life is not worth living." Aristotle called for a balance in creating the "good life" centering on the "golden mean." In the second century A.D. Marcus Aurelius, emperor of the Roman empire (the closest the western world may have ever come to a philosopher king), reminded ...

Abstract This paper argues that there are three distinct senses of possibility at play in the Republic’s discussion whether best city is possible: natural possibility, for existing cities, and ideal possibility. It argued Socrates makes different claims about each political proposals Book v. (1) Women guardians to be naturally possible. (2) considers it an open question common family (the so-ca...

Dr. Willmer's second edition of this little book fulfills his stated purpose ... to correlate some of the numerous fragments of scattered data which have so far been obtained and to orientate them in such a way as to illustrate the more fundamental contributions which the method has made to physiological knowledge, and to show the manner in which a change of outlook has already been brought abo...

How to bridge the gap between the separate worlds of knowledge makers and policy makers is a problem at least as ancient as Plato, who sought to resolve it by integrating the two in a single individual: the philosopher-king. Yet even in the simpler and comparatively unchanging, hierarchical social order of the ancient Athenian city-state, Plato’s proposed solution represented a “utopia” in the ...

The debate on television’s "public service"obligations can only make full sense if integrated in the broader context of the debate on the best political model for society. In fact, the classic "public service"rationale is based in a normative conception of good and in a suspicious view of the average citizen that is largely tributary of a Platonic or Elitist approach to the political organizati...

Recent historians have rehabilitated King Duarte of Portugal, previously maligned and neglected, as an astute ruler and philosopher. There is still a tendency, however, to view Duarte as a depressive or a hypochondriac, due to his own description of his melancholy in his advice book, the Loyal Counselor. This paper reassesses Duarte's writings, drawing on key approaches in the history of medici...

In recent years, we have learned much about how police, defendants, and prosecutors are affected by different policies. At the same time, economic theory is being forgotten or disregarded. Even more so today, economists political scientists treat “the enforcement apparatus of courts, prosecutors, legislature as a philosopher-king, with imperfect knowledge but only best motives” (Friedman Law’s ...

In this two hundredth anniversary year of his death, we are met to celebrate the life and career of Joseph Priestley—and most of us celebrate the wrong man, for the wrong reasons. We celebrate the pneumatic chemist who, in a flurry of random experiments made over a period of five years, isolated and partially identified nine new gases, including oxygen—and the man who spent roughly five times a...