Even if Melissus’s analysis of the concept of existence is faulty, his procedure is very interesting. He challenges the data of sense experience by a… - Catherine Rowett

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Even if Melissus’s analysis of the concept of existence is faulty, his procedure is very interesting. He challenges the data of sense experience by appealing to conceptual truths, facts about what a certain predicate (here ‘true’) must entail. These facts seem to escape the need to appeal to sense experience. We check up what is true about being true by examining our notion of being true, not by checking any things in the external world. So the argument seems to find a way of challenging the value of sense experience without begging the question. Melissus casts doubt on the senses by privileging the logical grammar of the word ‘true’. But, we might ask, did we learn how to use the word ‘true’ without relying on the senses?

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About Catherine Rowett

Catherine Joanna Rowett (born 29 December 1956, previously publishing as Catherine Osborne from 1979 to 2011) is a British former Member of the European Parliament representing the Green Party of England and Wales, and academic. She is Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. She is known in particular for her work on Greek Philosophy, especially the Pre-Socratic philosophers.

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Alternative Names: Catherine Osborne Catherine Joanna Rowett

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Additional quotes by Catherine Rowett

As the Presocratic philosophers bow out and Plato arrives to direct the next drama in the series, the Sophists make an astounding final act. All singing, all dancing, they ask society to question its raison d’être, its political beliefs, its moral values, its religious beliefs, its educational system, its legal codes, and its codes of etiquette. They draw attention to the power of the media and ask us to consider whether, without the media, there would be any truth at all. The antagonism that they generate, as portrayed by the Socrates imagined in Plato’s dialogues, starts the ball rolling for some of the most exacting philosophical endeavours the world has ever seen.

In the Protagoras Socrates persuades Protagoras that goodness is identical with pleasure. He advocates a form of hedonism. In the Gorgias, Callicles espouses hedonism and Socrates refutes him. Socrates gets Callicles to admit that, after all, some pleasures are not good. [...] So Socrates holds contradictory views on pleasure in the Protagoras and the Gorgias.

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