Volume 101, Issue 1

The digression of Plato’s Theaetetus (172c2–177c2) is as celebrated as it is controversial. A particularly knotty question has been what status we should ascribe to the ideal of philosophy it presents, an ideal centered on the conception that true virtue consists in assimilating oneself as much as possible to god. For the ideal may seem difficult to reconcile with a Socratic conception of philosophy, and several scholars have accordingly suggested that it should be read as ironic and directed only at the dramatic character Theodorus. When interpreted with due attention to its dramatic context, however, the digression reveals that the ideal of godlikeness, while being directed at Theodorus, is essentially Socratic. The function of the passage is to introduce a contemplative aspect of the life of philosophy into the dialogue that contrasts radically with the political-practical orientation characteristic of Protagoras, an aspect Socrates is able to isolate as such precisely because he is conversing with the mathematician Theodorus.

The history of prudence is often depicted as a history of loss. According to one version, the scientification of moral knowledge in medieval philosophy calls into question the role of prudence in moral action (Nussbaum 1978). And while Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) still tries to integrate prudence into a scientific framework of moral knowledge, the Salmantine theologian Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546) eventually abandons this approach and excludes prudence from moral knowledge altogether (Fidora 2013). I would like to argue, however, that Vitoria plays a different role in this development: He does not exclude prudence from scientific moral knowledge but gives an integrated account that Aquinas lacks. But this integration comes at a price because he is eventually unable to explain how prudence allows an agent to deal with the problem of contingency in action.

Hobbes’ theory of political education and its impact on his political thought has received relatively little attention. Existing contributions rarely extend beyond Hobbes’ political philosophy to analyze how he understood education to work in the first place. This article aims to fill in the gap by first reconstructing Hobbes’ understanding of the mechanism of teaching and learning. Tracing the continuities and developments of the concept from the Elements of Law (1640) to Behemoth (1668) in the first section, the second half sketches the theory of political education and its importance to the central issue of Hobbes’ political thought, the generation of sustained political stability. The core question turns out to be: Is teaching the truth in political matters compatible with political stability? The article argues that while those who answer the question in the negative provide insufficient textual evidence, those who affirm it are hard pressed to describe a content of political education that could be politically effective.

This article explores Kant’s view, found in several passages in his late writings on moral philosophy, that the verdicts of conscience are infallible. We argue that Kant’s infallibility claim must be seen in the context of a major shift in Kant’s views on conscience that took place around 1790 and that has not yet been sufficiently appreciated in the literature. This shift led Kant to treat conscience as an exclusively second-order capacity which does not directly evaluate actions, but one’s first-order moral judgments and deliberation. On the basis of this novel interpretation, we develop a new defence of Kant’s infallibility claim that draws on Kant’s account of the characteristic features of specifically moral judgments.

In a Hebrew translation of some Philonian works, Israeli scholar Yehoshua Amir (formerly Hermann Neumark, 1911–2002) offered a number of emendations, explaining some of them in extensive footnotes. To make some of his suggestions more widely available, I translate here three of his more important notes explaining his emendations, and discuss them with further evidence. They deal with emendations to Migr . 9, Heres 52 f., and Heres 313 f.