this article is an attempt to show that how the meanings of the words “philosophy” and “philosopher” change in plato’s phaedo in comparison with his early socratic dialogues. the phaedo is plato’s interpretation of socrates’ life, philosophy and death, in light of orphic and pythagorean eschatological doctrines. in this interpretation, plato reveals his problem of epistemological pessimism and ...

To be perceived as believable partners in human-machine interactions, virtual agents have to express adequate social attitudes. The social attitude expressed by an agent should reflect the social situation of the interaction. The agent ought to take into account its role and its social relation toward its interactants when deciding how to react in the interaction. To build such an agent able to...

As a medical student I once heard Dr. Osler remark that he almost wished he could have lived in the fifth century before Christ so he could have sat at the feet of Hippocrates under the old plane tree on the Island of Cos and have listened to his discourses on medicine. This chance remark excited in me a persistent desire to visit, at some future date, this Island of Cos and sit down, myself, u...

This thesis develops several pieces of theory and computational techniques which can be deployed for the purpose of allowing a computer to analyze short pieces of text (e.g. ‘Socrates is a man and every man is mortal.’) and, on the basis of such an analysis, to decide yes/no questions about the text (‘Is Socrates mortal?’). More particularly, the problem is seen as a logical inferencing task. T...

The role that dialogue plays in the works of Xenophon is a deeply interesting issue that could be analyzed from a variety of different perspectives. From a literary point of view, it would be possible to raise the question of how dialogue fits into what is above all a narrative framework, in particular in the Cyropaedia and in the Anabasis. It would also be worthwhile to analyze from a literary...