ellauri026.html on line 227: This is a famous line, but here it would hardly seem to merit its fame—who cares about people “arguing about how tough they are”? The word here translated as “tough” just happens to be one of the central words of Hellenic thought: arete, “virtue” or “excellence,” that subject of so many subsequent philosophy lectures—whose learnability or unlearnability Plato made the subject of inquiry, and which Aristotle defined as a mean between two vices. The word can be used to mean something like “bravery,” but it is wildly broader and richer than “how tough one is” (there is a queen named Arete in the poem, but Wilson refrains from translating her as “Queen Tough”). The line was quoted over and over again in later days because it was considered the height of happiness for a man to have a son and grandson competing with each other to possess virtue or true excellence. This Wilson suppresses, as a thing irrelevant to contemporary idiom—“toughness” will have to serve in its place.
ellauri096.html on line 136: Foundationalists reject (1). They take some propositions to be self-evident. Coherentists reject (2). They tolerate some forms of circular reasoning. For instance, Nelson Goodman (1965) has characterized the method of reflective equilibrium as virtuously circular. Charles Peirce (1933–35, 5.250) rejected (3), an approach later refined by Peter Klein (2007) and championed at book-length by Scott F. Aikin (2011). Infinitists believe that infinitely long chains of justification are no more impossible than infinitely long chains of causation. Finally, the epistemological anarchist rejects (4). As Paul Feyerabend refrains in Against Method, “Anything goes” (1988, vii, 5, 14, 19, 159).
ellauri096.html on line 257: Binkley illuminates this reasoning with doxastic logic. The inference rules for this logic of belief can be understood as idealizing the student into an ideal reasoner. In general terms, an ideal reasoner is someone who infers what he ought and refrains from inferring any more than he ought. Since there is no constraint on his premises, we may disagree with the ideal reasoner. But if we agree with the ideal reasoner’s premises, we appear bound to agree with his conclusion. Binkley specifies some requirements to give teeth to the student’s status as an ideal reasoner: the student is perfectly consistent, believes all the logical consequences of his beliefs, and does not forget. Binkley further assumes that the ideal reasoner is aware that he is an ideal reasoner. According to Binkley, this ensures that if the ideal reasoner believes p, then he believes that he will believe p thereafter.
ellauri183.html on line 258: The nuclear holocaust has come and gone. Only one man survives: paleologist Calvin Cohn, who happened to be safely, deeply underwater at the time. And, after some black-humor-ish conversations with God, Cohn is allowed to live—for a while, at least—and he finds himself on an island a la Robinson Crusoe, with a communicative chimp named Buz (product of chimp-speech experiments) as his only companion. Cohn, son of a rabbi, engages in existential, religious, and Talmudic speculations with the chimp—though he refrains from trying to convert him to Judaism. He must reexamine the basics of social interaction—when Buz gets too physically chummy ("If you had suckled the lad, could you marry him?"), when a friendly gorilla appears and causes jealousies, and, above all, when five more talking chimps appear... including the lisping Mary Madelyn, the object of everyone's sexual attention (including Cohn's).
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