Plato, the last pre-socratic philosopher

Commentary: Coda--a Socratic dialogue: Plato.

Epimenides Where do you come from, Socrates, and where are you going? Socrates Actually, it was you I was looking for in the marketplace. I just met with Theodorus and Alcibiades and we had a discussion that was well worth hearing about the interesting letter of the noble Charles Poole. Epimenides What do you think of the present debate, Socrates? Socrates Good heavens, I fancy you will never l...

Pre-Socratic Discrete Kinematics

We present a neglected heterodox version of Zeno’s paradox of the Stadium, underlining some problems that a discrete kinematics would have to account for. Building on our reconstruction of the Stadium argument we provide new arguments to show that a discrete kinematics cannot uphold three independently plausible assumptions about motion, that we label No Switching, Granular Continuity and Diffe...

The Philosopher and the Sage: Plato and Lao-Tzu on Following the Way of Nature

*** Lao-Tzu, paradoxical poet-philosopher of the mysterious Tao, father of the mysticalmeditative philosophical religion of Taoism. Plato, mathematically-minded theorizer of Forms, father of Academic philosophy and Western rationalism. What could these two foundational thinkers of East and West possibly have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out. As we shall see, for both Plato 1 and Lao-Tzu,...

The Socratic Bergson

Socratic Trees

We consider the method of Socratic proofs (SP-method). SP-method enables a formal explication of the idea of solving logical problems (i.e problems of entailment/ derivability/ theoremhood) by pure questioning, that is, by transforming the relevant initial question into consecutive questions without making any use of answers to the questions just transformed. Our aim is to give a method of tran...