In Book Four of Plato's Republic, Socrates divides the soul. He argues that because one thing cannot do or undergo opposites in the same respect, in the same relation, and at the same time, some cases of psychological conflict can only be explained by supposing that the soul is actually more than one thing. But Socrates does not seem to deny that the soul is a unity. Rather, he seems to hold th...

The Symposium of Plato presents the demythologizing of the god Eros, that is, the rational clarification of his nature. At a dinner to celebrate the victory of the tragic poet Agathon in the Theatre, the guests all give speeches in honour of the god. Of the initial speakers, neither the comic poet Aristophanes nor the tragic poet Agathon can give more than a partial account of his nature, and i...

Do we have an obligation to obey any law, no matter how unjust or evil, provided only that it is in fact a valid rule of the legal system in which we happen to be physically located? The attention given to this problem in recent years as a result of controversies over civil disobedience and post-Watergate reassessment of the relation between law and ethics justifies a new look at the classic st...

The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) is an open-invitation forum designed to encourage research into electronic markets and trading agents. In this paper we present the Socrates trading agent and the strategies that were developed for and used in the TAC Supply Chain Management game as part of the 2004 competition. The resulting behaviour and performance in the TAC competition as well as in a se...

Software agents are often claimed to become a new generation of tools facilitating efficient management of information. While a number of possible agent application areas are listed in the literature, support for academic mobility is not one of them. At the same time student mobility is one of the important objectives within the European Union and autonomous agents could be used to streamline t...

The design time of System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is today rapidly increasing due to high complexity and lack of efficient tools for development and verification. This article describes the design and implementation of a Multiprocessor SoC (MSoC) conducted by three master students. We propose a generic platform generator as a way to reduce time-to-market and verification time. With the project, we have...