Meno: Plato on Ethics and Epistemology

While Plato’s Meno is ostensibly about ethics since it discusses virtue, it is also about epistemology, i.e. the theory of knowledge. Written in 385 BC,[1] the plot is about a man, Meno, who is talking to Socrates about the nature of virtue. Meno wanted to know if virtue can be taught, gained through practice or is inborn.

A Brief Meditation on Time

From the very beginning, when we emerge crying and screaming into the world, the clock starts ticking, its hands sweeping through space, marking our moments, and counting down towards the moment time will end for us.

Even before our birth, others, our mothers, our fathers, the doctors, our siblings, have already started counting our time for us, from conception to emergence. And then after to begin worrying for us, that our time here will be all too brief, and for some, all too long.

The clock, the calendar, they rule our lives. We worry when we have too little time, we are in too much of a rush; we fret when we have too much time, feeling as if we are stuck in a waiting room of our lives waiting for life itself to “begin,” when it has really carried on unabated. In our youths, we think we have forever, even if there are those who do die young. In our old age, we grieve over what time we have left. Yet if we allow ourselves to be ruled by the clock, we find ourselves almost as if we wish each event to be over so we can hurry on to the next. Yet if we don’t abide by time, we find ourselves missing opportunities, trains, examinations and appointments.

Counterfactual Conditionals: Regrets, the Future and Decision-Making

One might think that philosophy dwells on what is not relevant to life, especially in areas such as logic which can seem so abstract and hence divorced from reality. Arthur Schopenhauer acknowledges this when he writes: “To seek to make practical use of logic would … mean to seek to derive with unspeakable trouble from universal rules what is immediately known to us with the greatest certainty in the particular case. It is just as if a man were to consult mechanics with regard to his movements.”[1] Lest you misunderstand, Schopenhauer does think logic is of great theoretical importance, it just isn’t practically useful. Nonetheless, I want to talk about an application of the concept of counterfactual conditionals to real life, to illuminate what might not really be so obvious.