Browse — tag · ethics
Tag: ethics
Pages tagged with ethics.
99 pages
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Agnosia (Merleau-Ponty)
Visual agnosia is the clinical condition that gives Merleau-Ponty the case of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception — Schneider, the WWI veteran whose shrapnel injury produced an inability to perceive the world as a field of possibility…
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Alcibiades I (First Alcibiades)
Author: Plato (disputed) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. D. S. Hutchinson, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Antigone (Hegel's Reading)
Hegel reads Sophocles' Antigone (442 BCE) as the structural figure of immediate ethical substance — the ethical actor whose deed (burying her brother against Creon's edict) reveals the constitutively guilty structure of ethical action unde…
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Apology
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Application (Anwendung)
For Gadamer, application (Anwendung) is not a step that follows understanding but a moment intrinsic to it: "application does not mean first understanding a given universal in itself and then afterward applying it to a concrete case. It is…
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Arthur Schopenhauer
German post-Kantian philosopher (1788–1860) whose system — laid out in Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818, expanded 1844) — articulates a metaphysics of the Will (the thing-in-itself underlying all phenomena), an ethics of compassion…
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Beyond Good and Evil
Author(s): Friedrich Nietzsche · Year: 1886 (this edition 2014) · Type: book
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Call and Vocation (l'appel)
Mounier's structural-vertical of the personal life across Personalism. The call (l'appel) is the structure through which freedom, value, vocation, and prophetic action all operate: freedom is "always something called forth" (Ch V, p. 60);…
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Callicles
Callicles, the Athenian who is the centerpiece immoralist of Plato's Gorgias — the third and fiercest of Socrates' interlocutors, occupying "more than half" the dialogue. He is otherwise unattested outside the Gorgias (Cooper), and may be…
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Cautious Anthropomorphism
A strategic use of human predicates for non-human things in order to defamiliarise both terms — neither to make stones knowable like us, nor to flatten ontological difference into a uniform plane. The term enters the contemporary new-mater…
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Charmides
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Christian Love (Simmel's Reconstruction)
Simmel's philosophical reconstruction of Christian love as a distinct trans-vital love-form, structurally opposed to universal-philanthropy: Christian love embraces the total person — sinner as sinner, "without that 'in spite of'" (Oakes p…
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Clitophon
Author: Plato (disputed) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Francisco J. Gonzalez, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Contingency of the Future
Merleau-Ponty's name for the structural condition of historical time as it bears on political legitimacy and political guilt. There is no science of the future: every political reading of a situation is unavoidably a wager that may turn ou…
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Courage (Andreia)
Andreia — literally "manliness," of wide scope (military prowess its core but extending to endurance against pain, pleasure, desire, and fear) — is the virtue the Laches tries and fails to define. Two distinguished generals, Laches and Nic…
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Crito
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Economy of Donation
Mounier's name in Personalism Ch II p. 22 for the anti-economic economy of the person: "The vitality of the personal impulse is to be found neither in self-defence (as in petty-bourgeois individualism) nor in life-and-death struggle (as wi…
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Emmanuel Levinas
Lithuanian-born French philosopher (1906-1995). Author of Totality and Infinity (1961), Otherwise than Being (1974), and Existence and Existents (1947). In Knight's reading, Levinas is the principal counter-figure to Merleau-Ponty's elemen…
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Engagement through Disengagement
Merleau-Ponty's marginal phrase at L6 [80] of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953): "Engagement through disengagement. (the l'Académie Française episode)." Initially glossing Valéry's late acceptance of life (in particul…
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Euthyphro
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Evil as Positive Reversal (Schelling)
Schelling's distinctive theory of evil from the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809): evil is not privation (Augustine, Leibniz) and not mere sensuality ("Monotheletism") but the positive reversal of the in…
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Faith and Good Faith (MP's 1946 formulation)
Merleau-Ponty's resolution of the apparent opposition between faith (unreserved commitment going beyond what is given) and good faith (sincerity in saying what one thinks). Developed in the 1946 essay "Faith and Good Faith" (Chapter 12 of…
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G. W. F. Hegel
German philosopher (1770–1831). Author of the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; ingested as hegel-1807-phenomenology-spirit), the Wissenschaft der Logik (1812-16, with the Doctrine of Being revised 1831-32; all three volumes now ingested —…
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Gloria
Merleau-Ponty's term — borrowed from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, where it is Maria's word for the moment of harmony in which "events respond to their will" — for the moment of victory in commitment under contingency. The gloria "m…
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Gorgias
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Donald J. Zeyl, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Granite of Fate
Nietzsche's figure from Beyond Good and Evil §231 for the uneducable bodily substratum of the individual — the fixed aspect of the self that all subsequent development can redirect but neither create nor erase. "Deep in us, really 'down th…
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Gregarious vs. Singular
The opposition between the gregarious (grégaire — that which conserves the species: exchangeable, communicable, intelligible) and the singular (the cas singulier / fortuitous case — unexchangeable, mute, unintelligible) is the second of th…
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Healing Schneider
Chouraqui's 2025 name for the positive side of Merleau-Ponty's ethical project: opposing and undoing the agnosiastic tendencies that MP diagnoses across clinical, political, existential, and ontological registers. The project is not buildi…
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Healing Schneider: On Merleau-Ponty's Ethical System of Play
Author: Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University) Year: 2025 Type: paper (Philosophies 10:1, 3)
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Herd Morality
Nietzsche's name for the morality of the herd animal — the valuation that serves the preservation of the community by leveling its members, prizing obedience, compassion, and equality, and treating itself as morality as such. The central t…
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Hipparchus (On the Love of Gain)
Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Hippias Major (Greater Hippias)
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Paul Woodruff, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Hippias Minor (Lesser Hippias)
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Historical Responsibility
Merleau-Ponty's name for a positive philosophical category that exceeds liberal "intention/circumstance" distinctions: the political agent is responsible for the role he plays as it is read by his victims and his inheritors — for what othe…
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Homoiōsis Theōi (Becoming Like God)
Homoiōsis theōi — "becoming like god so far as possible" (176b) — is the ethical telos Plato lodges, surprisingly, inside the epistemology of the Theaetetus. In the Digression (172c–177c) Socrates sets two lives against each other: the phi…
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Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem
Author(s): Maurice Merleau-Ponty Year: 1947 (French original); 1969 (English translation by John O'Neill, Beacon Press) Type: book
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Humanism in Extension / Humanism in Intension
Merleau-Ponty's 1947 political distinction between two senses of "humanism." Humanism in intension ("intensive") is the love of humanity as embodied in a few — the guardians of Western culture who preserve its "treasure" and whose status i…
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Incorporation of Truth
Nietzsche's term (Einverleibung der Wahrheit) for the method by which the knowledge that truth is falsification is converted from an intellectual item into embodied, instinctive orientation. Introduced in The Gay Science (§§11, 110), the p…
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Jean-Paul Sartre
French philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual (1905–1980). Merleau-Ponty's closest philosophical interlocutor through the 1940s and early 1950s, co-founder with MP of Les Temps Modernes (1945), and the addressee of the Introduction…
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Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
American scholar working at the intersection of medieval studies, ecocriticism, and philosophy of history; author of "Time Out of Memory" (in E. Scala and S. Federico, eds., The Post-Historical Middle Ages, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). The w…
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Laches
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Rosamond Kent Sprague, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Law of Tact
Derrida's name (in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy §4, p. 77) for the quasi-transcendental commandment to touch without touching, prior to any religion, culture, or ritual abstinence. The law of tact is "the law itself, the law of the law": "on…
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Laws
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Trevor J. Saunders, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Letters (Epistles, excluding VII)
Author: Plato (mixed authenticity) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Glenn R. Morrow, Hackett 1997) · Type: letters (catalogued as sourcetype: fragment)
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Lysis
Author(s): Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Stanley Lombardo, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Man, the Hero (the Contemporary Hero)
Merleau-Ponty's existential-ethical figure of the post-1940 hero — the figure "condemned to follow out fragile meanings without either the triumph of an absolute or the relief of despair." The concept is given its concentrated statement in…
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Master and Slave Morality
Nietzsche's typology of two value-creating types, given its locus classicus in Beyond Good and Evil §260: "There is master-morality and slave-morality." Master morality arises "under a dominating type" that feels itself "value-determining……
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Master-Slave Dialectic
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit §§186–196 — the first asymmetric form of recognition (Anerkennung), in which two self-consciousnesses encounter each other in a life-and-death struggle, one becomes master (Herr) by risking life, the other s…
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Max Scheler
German phenomenologist (1874–1928); Munich phenomenology school. Author of Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (1913–16), Vom Umsturz der Werte (collection containing "Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen", 1912), Di…
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Meno
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Michel de Montaigne
French Renaissance philosopher (1533–1592), author of the Essais. Merleau-Ponty reads Montaigne in Signs' "Reading Montaigne" (1947) as a proto-phenomenologist of incarnation — the first modern philosopher who takes "the 'mixture' of the s…
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Minos (On Law)
Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Malcolm Schofield [inferred], Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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New Liberalism
Merleau-Ponty's programmatic political stance, formulated in the Epilogue of Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). A "sort of new liberalism" (AD 224) that (a) refuses the dictatorship of the proletariat, (b) accepts Communist action and rev…
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Nomos and Phusis (Convention vs Nature)
The great fifth-century antithesis between convention/law (nomos) and nature (phusis) — is justice a real feature of the world or a human contrivance? — staged across three Platonic dialogues, most radically by Callicles in the Gorgias. Ca…
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Personalism
Author: Emmanuel Mounier · Year: 1950 (French; English trans. Mairet 1952) · Type: book
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Personalism
Mounier's synthesizing term for the mid-twentieth-century philosophical-political movement that affirms the person (la personne) — neither a thing nor a definition but "the one reality that we know, and that we are at the same time fashion…
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Phaedo
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Phenomenology of Spirit
Author(s): Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) Year: 1807 (original); 2018 (Pinkard trans., Cambridge Hegel Translations) Type: book (Hegel's first published system; originally subtitled System der Wissenschaft. Erster Theil. Die Phä…
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Philebus
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE — one of the stylometrically secure "late" dialogues (Cooper, intro) — (trans. Dorothea Frede, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Philia (Friendship)
Plato's inquiry into friendship/love (philia) in the Lysis — an aporetic dialogue that defines nothing yet deposits the conceptual materials two later theories will mine: Plato's own erotics in the Symposium and Aristotle's philia in the E…
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Philosopher of the Future
Nietzsche's counter-figure to the scholar and the dogmatist: the value-creating legislator announced throughout Beyond Good and Evil (subtitled Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future). Where "philosophical laborers after the noble model of…
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Philosophical Praxis of Medicine
Heinbokel's positive thesis (2021) for what medicine can become once its use of science is subjected to phenomenological analysis under the description "coherent deformation." Medicine, on this reading, is not a hybrid (a phenomenology and…
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Piety (To Hosion / The Holy)
Piety (to hosion / to eusebes — the holy, the pious, godliness) is the virtue the Euthyphro tries and fails to define. Located as "a part of justice — the part concerned with the care of the gods" (12e–13a), it is run through five definiti…
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Play as Political Virtue
Chouraqui 2025's name for the existential-attitudinal form of Merleau-Ponty's ethics: the practical virtue corresponding to hermeneutic freedom. Play is not the absence of seriousness; it is the higher seriousness that takes responsibility…
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Politics (Merleau-Ponty)
MP's political thought develops across Humanism and Terror (1947), the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949), Adventures of the Dialectic (1955), the inaugural lecture (1953), Signs (1960), and the late ontology of V&I and Eye and Mind (1959–61). T…
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Prospective Activity of Consciousness
Merleau-Ponty's term in Phenomenology of Perception (p. 241; see also p. 246) for the unique primary phenomenon at the foundation of his philosophy: the irreducible movement of consciousness toward the world, projecting a future and instit…
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Protagoras
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Protagoras
Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490–420 BCE), the first and most famous of the Greek sophists — itinerant professional teachers of aretē (excellence/virtue) — and the figure after whom Plato's Protagoras is named. He appears in the wiki in two di…
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Punishment as Cure (Curative Penology)
Across the Gorgias and Laws IX, Plato holds that punishment (kolasis) aims at cure, reform, and deterrence — never retribution. Since injustice is a disease of the soul and "no one does wrong willingly," the legislator is a doctor of souls…
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Recognition and Institution
Chouraqui 2025's name for the structural form of agency in Merleau-Ponty's mature ethics: action is the simultaneous unity of recognition (taking the object as a standard, responding to what is) and institution (actively assigning meaning,…
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Republic
Author: Plato · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Rival Lovers (Lovers / Amatores)
Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Jeffrey Mitscherling, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Rule of Law (Plato's Laws)
In the Laws, the rule of law is the political form available for the human (post-Cronus) condition — when no godlike knower is, in fact, ever in power. Nomos becomes "the dispensation of reason," the "edicts of reason" dignified with the n…
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Second Alcibiades (Alcibiades II)
Author: [Plato] (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Anthony Kenny, Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Self-Knowledge and Care of the Self
The Delphic command "know thyself" (gnōthi seauton) and its practical correlate "care for / cultivate oneself" (epimeleia heautou) form a single Socratic-Platonic imperative whose burden is to ask what the self is before it can be known or…
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Sense vs. Respect
Merleau-Ponty's distinction between sens du réel (sense of the real) and respect du réel (respect for the real), drawn from "On Indochina" in Signs (p. 520). Chouraqui 2025 §3.1 foregrounds the contrast as the perceptual face of hermeneuti…
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Simone de Beauvoir
French philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual (1908–1986). Educated at the École Normale Supérieure during the same period as Merleau-Ponty (Sorbonne / ENS late-1920s); lifelong intellectual partner of Sartre; author of Le deuxième…
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Sittlichkeit
Hegel's term — Pinkard renders as "ethical life" — for the lived, substantial ethical substance of a people (a polis, a tradition) as distinct from Moralität (Kantian individual morality). Sittlichkeit is the immediate form of Spirit (Chap…
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Socrates
Athenian philosopher (c. 470–399 BCE), executed on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, and the principal speaker of most of Plato's dialogues. Socrates wrote nothing: he philosophized only orally, in face-to-face question-and-answ…
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Socratic Ignorance (Human Wisdom)
Socratic ignorance is the second-order knowledge of one's own non-knowledge — the "human wisdom" (anthrōpinē sophia) the Apology makes Socrates' signature: the wisest person is the one who, "like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is wo…
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Socratic Intellectualism (Virtue Is Knowledge)
The thesis, sharpest in the Protagoras, that virtue is knowledge — and its two corollaries: the unity of the virtues (courage, justice, temperance, piety, wisdom are one knowledge, not separable dispositions) and the denial of akrasia ("no…
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Spuria (Pseudo-Platonic Works)
Author: Pseudo-Plato (spurious — agreed not by Plato) · Year: c. 4th–1st c. BCE · Type: other (survey of nine works in the Spuria appendix)
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Temperance (Sōphrosynē)
Sōphrosynē — self-command, a developed consciousness of oneself and one's due place — is the virtue the Charmides tries and fails to define. The editor stresses it "has no adequate translation": not abstemiousness but dignity, self-restrai…
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The Absolute as Moral Catastrophe
Merleau-Ponty's diagnostic that the philosopher's claim to Absolute Knowledge is not merely an epistemological error but a moral catastrophe whose political form is purges. Developed in Sense and Non-Sense's "The Metaphysical in Man" (Chap…
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The Birth of Sense: Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy
Author(s): Don Beith Year: 2018 Type: book (Ohio University Press, Series in Continental Thought No. 52)
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The Crooked Finger of Chauvet-Pont d'Arc: Retrieving the Depth of Time Through a Transtemporal Account of Parietal Art
Author(s): Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Year: 2024 Type: paper (journal article, Chiasmi International vol. 26, pp. 263–282)
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The Form of the Good
The capstone of Plato's metaphysics in the Republic (504a–509c): the Form of the Good (to agathon) is "the most important thing to learn" (megiston mathēma, 505a), the source of both the being and the intelligibility of the Forms — and yet…
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The Mean (To Metrion / Due Measure)
Plato's doctrine — sharpest in the Statesman (283c–285c) — that there are two arts of measurement: (a) measuring relative magnitude (greater and less, things measured against each other), and (b) measuring against the mean or due measure (…
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The Sovereign Individual
The figure introduced at GM II.2 as the "ripest fruit" of the long prehistoric labor of the "morality of custom": "the sovereign individual, like only unto himself, the autonomous, supermoral individual who has liberated himself from the m…
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The Tripartite Soul
Plato's division of the soul into three parts — the rational (logistikon), the spirited (thumoeides), and the appetitive (epithumētikon) — argued in Republic IV (435a–441c) and used to define justice as psychic order. Its engine is the pri…
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Theages (On Wisdom)
Author: Plato (disputed — a dubium) · Year: c. 4th c. BCE (trans. Nicholas D. Smith [inferred], Hackett 1997) · Type: dialogue
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Tragic Optimism
Mounier's signature coinage at Personalism Ch I p. 16: "Between the impatient optimism of liberal and revolutionary illusion, and the impatient pessimism of the fascists, the right road for man is in this tragic optimism, where he finds hi…
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Trotsky's Horse
A recurring image in Merleau-Ponty's writings on politics, drawn from Leon Trotsky and quoted at least four times in MP's Inédits 1946–1949 (Mimesis 2022; see Chouraqui 2025 §2.2 and footnotes 8–10): "one learns to ride a horse by mounting…
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True Humanism (Merleau-Ponty)
MP's "true humanism" / "humanisme réel" / "vrai humanisme" names a humanism without an a priori human substratum: humanity cannot be conceived prior to the practices of communication and communion. The locus classicus is the "Note on Machi…
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Universal Philanthropy
Simmel's articulation of a distinct trans-vital love-form: love directed at "everything that bears a human face" (Oakes p. 211), abstracted from individuality, kindred to but structurally distinct from both cosmic eros (pantheism of love)…
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Virtu (Merleau-Ponty's Machiavelli)
Merleau-Ponty's redeemed reading of Machiavellian virtu in the "Note on Machiavelli" (1949, collected in Signs as "Note sur Machiavel") — not as the cynical political objectivism that Koestler diagnosed in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945)…
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Voir-Selon / Vivre-Selon
Frank Chouraqui's systematized technical term for Merleau-Ponty's most accomplished formulation of pre-doxastic faith — a "style of seeing/living" that is partial both in its arbitrary focus and in its structural incompleteness, where beli…
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Writing and Living
Merleau-Ponty's name for the relation between the writer's vocation and the writer's life, and for the quadruple-negation thesis through which the relation is articulated: writing is neither end nor means, neither cause nor effect of life…
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Être humain est un parti / To Be Human Is Also to Take a Side
Stendhal's phrase from the Lucien Leuwen marginalia, picked up by Merleau-Ponty as the closing political-philosophical thesis of Investigations into the Literary Use of Language (1953). The thesis: the writer's engagement is intrinsic to t…