Person:

Jones, Russell

In De Interpretatione 6-9, Aristotle considers three logical principles: the principle of bivalence, the law of excluded middle, and the rule of contradictory pairs (according to which of any contradictory pair of statements, exactly one is true and the other false). Surprisingly, Aristotle accepts none of these without qualification. I offer a coherent interpretation of these chapters as a whole, while focusing special attention on two sorts of statements that are of particular interest to Aristotle: universal statements not made universally and future particular statements. With respect to the former, I argue that Aristotle takes them to be indeterminate and so to violate the rule of contradictory pairs. With respect to the latter, the subject of the much discussed ninth chapter, I argue that the rule of contradictory pairs, and not the principle of bivalence, is the focus of Aristotle’s refutation. Nevertheless, Aristotle rejects bivalence for future particular statements.

I argue that Socrates, by his own lights, failed to achieve happiness. This result is important not so much for what it reveals about Socrates’ own well-being, but for what it reveals about the Socratic conception of happiness.

A standard account in Socratic scholarship has it that Plato’s Socrates is an intellectualist about motivation, in that Socrates accepts that both one’s actions and one’s desires always follow one’s concurrent beliefs about what is in one’s overall best interest. Brickhouse and Smith offer an alternative intellectualist interpretation of Socrates, on which Socrates accepts the standard account’s claim with respect to actions but rejects it with respect to desires. On this alternative view, there are nonrational desires that are not always responsive to belief and may even affect belief. As part of their alternative account, Brickhouse and Smith offer interpretations of two important passages: Meno and Protagoras. I argue that the standard account makes better sense of Meno, and that an argument Brickhouse and Smith make against the standard account using Protagoras fails.