Latest news with #Socrates
Telegraph
5 days ago
- Telegraph
Violent prisoners taught philosophy
Prisoners have been taught the philosophy of stoicism under schemes that have reduced violence and conflict behind bars. Watchdogs at Wayland Prison in Thetford, Norfolk, have revealed the inmates have been undergoing classes based on the works of Socrates and Zeno of Citium. The theories behind stoicism were developed by Socrates, the Greek philosopher, while Zeno is credited with having developed the concept and founded the stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Stoicism, which was taken on by the Romans, teaches individuals to focus on what they can control – their thoughts and actions – and to accept what they cannot, such as external events and outcomes. Stoics strive to develop virtues such as wisdom, courage, justice and temperance to achieve a life of tranquillity and virtue. The classes at the category C prison are said by its watchdog, independent monitoring board (IMB), to have been so popular that they have been scheduled throughout the year to meet demand. The IMB said the innovative approach was proving an effective remedy to combat drug use at the jail and contributing to a decline in the amount of violence. Data published by the watchdogs showed that assaults on staff and other prisoners had decreased. 'It is this sort of effort, which distances itself from both punitive and simply educative approaches and, instead, seeks to increase a prisoner's inner resilience, which we would encourage and were recommending in our commentary on the 2024 prisoner attitude survey,' said the watchdogs. 'We therefore recommend to the governor that the prison takes the success of this course and examines how additional resilience and prevention training could be introduced as an expanded weapon in its war on the evils of drugs and the rehabilitation chances of its prisoners.' The move follows research by Manchester Met University into the impact of regular sessions on Descartes, Aristotle, Plato and other thinkers on prisoner's ability to trust and cooperate with other inmates, including some of the most dangerous Category A prisoners. Dr Kirstine Szifris, a researcher in the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, said the initial interactions were characterised by 'bravado, one-upmanship and competition' with the men not having any respect for any of their criminal counterparts. She led the prisoners through a series of philosophical problems to illustrate ideas such as Plato's ideal society, the Stoic philosophy of the Greeks and Romans, and the Socratic method of inquiry. One scenario led them to imagine they were shipwrecked on a desert island with other survivors and asked how they would organise their new society. She found that through an emphasis on philosophical conversation, the inmates began to appreciate the importance of listening to each other. 'They learned that working together to understand what Kant, Descartes or Plato were saying was more fruitful than trying to outdo each other,' she said.
Epoch Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- Epoch Times
Pericles's Funeral Oration
In 430 B.C., the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered a 'Funeral Oration' to commemorate those who had died in war. His speech exalted Athens as a free, beautiful, and courageous city, illustrating the need to articulate higher principles and kindle hope in times of trouble. The Greatest Statesman of Athens The 5th century B.C. is often called Greece's 'Golden Age.' Democracy became a legal and political reality, Greek city states successfully deterred a massive Persian invasion and secured two centuries of independence, and philosophers like Socrates began asking probing philosophical questions that continue to concern humanity. Playwrights , Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Euripides wrote some of the most famous dramas to this day, while the physician Hippocrates laid the foundations for modern medicine and the traveling bard turned history into an intellectual discipline in its own right.
Yahoo
11-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
ExxonMobil May Sell Singapore Fuel Retail Business in $1B Deal
Exxon Mobil Corporation XOM is in talks to divest its entire network of 59 gasoline stations in Singapore to Aster Chemicals and Energy, a joint venture between global commodities giant Glencore and Indonesia's Chandra Asri Group, according to a Bloomberg report. The deal, if finalized, could be valued at around $1 billion. A sale would mark a strategic shift for ExxonMobil, enabling it to redeploy capital toward higher-growth opportunities. The move aligns with CEO Darren Woods' broader strategy to streamline the company's downstream portfolio and concentrate on high-return investments, particularly in upstream oil and gas production and low-carbon initiatives. ExxonMobil has operated in Singapore for more than 130 years, primarily under the Esso brand. While the gas station divestiture would mark a significant change, the company maintains a sizable footprint in the city-state, including a refinery, chemical and lubricant manufacturing plants, a fuel terminal and an LPG bottling facility. According to the report, Aster Chemicals and Energy has been actively expanding its presence in Southeast Asia's energy sector. Its recent acquisitions include Shell's Singapore refining and chemicals assets, as well as Chevron Phillips Singapore Chemicals' polyethylene manufacturing facility on Jurong Island. Winning the bid for ExxonMobil's retail network would further consolidate Aster's position in the region's downstream market. Discussions are currently centered on finalizing the price and transaction structure. While no definitive agreement has been announced, the potential exit underscores ExxonMobil's global restructuring efforts and Aster's growing appetite for Southeast Asia's energy infrastructure. XOM currently carries a Zack Rank #3 (Hold). Investors interested in the energy sector may look at a few better-ranked stocks like The Williams Companies, Inc. WMB, W&T Offshore, Inc. WTI and Oceaneering International, Inc. OII, each carrying a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) at present. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Williams Companies' strong base business performance and strategic expansions, such as the $1.6 billion Socrates project, further boost its outlook. Additionally, Williams' increased dividend, robust pipeline, and favorable credit rating upgrade suggest a solid foundation for long-term growth. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for WMB's 2025 EPS is pegged at $2.11. W&T Offshore benefits from its prolific Gulf of America assets, which offer low decline rates, strong permeability and significant untapped reserves. The company's acquisition of six shallow-water fields in the GoA added 18.7 million barrels of proved reserves and 60.6 million barrels of proved plus probable reserves. The firm is focused on strategically allocating capital toward organic projects, which should boost its production outlook. WTI has a Value Score of B. Oceaneering International delivers integrated technology solutions across all stages of the offshore oilfield lifecycle. With a geographically diverse asset portfolio and a balanced revenue mix between domestic and international operations, the company effectively mitigates risk. As a leading provider of offshore equipment and technology solutions to the energy sector, OII benefits from strong relationships with top-tier customers, ensuring revenue visibility and business stability. The Zacks Consensus Estimate for OII's 2025 EPS is pegged at $1.79. The company has a Value Score of B. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Williams Companies, Inc. (The) (WMB) : Free Stock Analysis Report Exxon Mobil Corporation (XOM) : Free Stock Analysis Report W&T Offshore, Inc. (WTI) : Free Stock Analysis Report Oceaneering International, Inc. (OII) : Free Stock Analysis Report This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research ( Zacks Investment Research Sign in to access your portfolio
ABC News
07-07-2025
- General
- ABC News
Why we should keep fewer thoughts to ourselves — and other things I've learned from Agnes Callard - ABC Religion & Ethics
Few would challenge the notion that, in order to properly think a question through, we need at least some time alone with our thoughts . Some might even claim we can't think for ourselves unless we are thinking by ourselves. But a new book by a public philosopher, based on the wisdom of an ancient philosopher, reminds us that inviting others to 'intrude' into our 'private mental world' and think with us, makes sense. In her book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life , Agnes Callard describes thinking as 'the road from ignorance about the most important things to knowledge about them'. By travelling with another — asking questions and testing answers, refuting and being refuted, using two heads instead of one — we have more hope, not less, of getting at the truth. Callard's 'love affair' with Socrates began in high school. It led her to not only study ancient Greek history in college, but to learn ancient Greek as well. The notion that inquiry is 'a social process', and an interlocutor a vital tool, struck her as having relevance beyond the academic realm. And so, at the age of 21, having decided Chicago's equivalent of the Athenian agora was the steps of its Art Institute, she went there and started asking people if they'd like to have a philosophical conversation. To Callard's surprise, most said 'yes'. She'd follow up with a question such as: 'What is art?', 'What is courage?' or 'What is the meaning of life?' The Art Institute of Chicago on 9 July 2022. (Photo By Raymond Boyd / Getty Images) But where, in the Socratic dialogues, people answered with quick, confident answers that Socrates refuted in a manner that paved the way for an extended inquiry, Callard says her dialogues 'never really got off the ground': The people I talked to seemed put off by my approach, confused about my intentions, and, in truth, somewhat afraid of me. They felt trapped, and I felt not at all like Socrates. Looking back, she notes that deep conversations about the meaning of life and how we should live require a level of vulnerability, self-exposure and trust that doesn't lend itself to conversation with a stranger whose motives are unclear. If such a stranger 'claimed that they would immediately adopt your way of living, if only you explained it to them, you might think they were only acting, or pretending, or somehow making fun of you, or being ironic', Callard writes. Some of Socrates's own interlocutors 'felt sure that he was always preserving an ironic distance from them', she notes, holding 'the life of his mind apart from theirs'. But in Callard's view, the philosopher's most 'radical feature' wasn't 'godlike hidden wisdom' but his willingness to 'put all his cards on the table', make himself vulnerable and treat others as sources of knowledge. If she's right, there's no such thing as Socratic irony — save the fact that 'the man who hid his thoughts from others less than perhaps anyone in the whole history of the world should have come to be credited with the concept'. Knowing what you don't know Confucius asserted that knowing what you know, and what you don't , is 'true' knowledge. Socrates spoke about how ignorant he was of what he didn't know. Nowadays, pie-charts that divide knowledge into what we 'know we know', 'know we don't know', 'don't know we don't know' and even 'don't know we know' remind us how little we can be sure of, how much remains uncertain, how high the bar Confucius set must be. 'We are all of us irrational, divided, opaque and oblique creatures', physician Karen Hitchcock wrote in her 2015 Quarterly Essay Dear Life : We communicate in a multitude of ways: with our eyes and hands and bodies and heart rate, as well as with words we may or may not mean. We may ask for — think we want — the opposite of what we wish for. We change our minds. What's more, Hitchcock says, this is 'what it is to be human'. Whatever we know, we know it as people bound by time and space, experience, education and intellect, to name but a few of our many limits. We're influenced by our upbringing, our surroundings, our emotions, our relationships, our bodies — we can't escape our subjectivity. As theologian Michael Jensen puts it, 'we know as knowers who are ourselves a part of what we know': We cannot transcend the things we seek to know. The historian is herself an historical being; the biologist is part of a biological system. The psychologist has his neuroses, too. Anything we seek to know, we know from within. Physicist Carlo Rovelli says we can never have total certainty — and don't need it: 'Between full ignorance and total certainty there is a vast intermediate space where we conduct our lives.' Jensen likewise notes that the fact we know so partially doesn't mean history makes no sense, or the world contains no meaning, or that we can't know anything. Truth and falsehood, right and wrong, aren't always easy to discern, but they're not relative. And Rovelli says that while we can't have 'total' certainty, we can strive to gather more reliable knowledge over time; we can be genuinely open to the questioning of our beliefs, the most reliable of which should 'survive' questioning. 'This is the core teaching of scientific thinking', he writes. But not only scientific thinking. A social quest for better answers 'There are parts of my body whose invisibility follows from how I usually position myself in order to look out at the world', Callard notes. We can contort ourselves to bring some of those parts into view, she says, but we can't ever eliminate all our blind spots all at once. We can consider the possibility we are wrong, we can even realise we were wrong; we can replace less 'stable' answers with more stable ones — the 'lever' is available: The problem is that the set of occasions when people most need to pull it — when they are wrong about something fundamentally important, something that approaches the heart of how they live their lives — are also the occasions when the lever seems stuck. She goes so far as to suggest most searches 'aim to arrive neither at what I know, nor at what I don't know, but at a way to keep doing what I was doing before I ran into a problem'. This is why she conceives of thinking as 'a social quest'. Not only is it a social quest, it's a quest for better answers to 'the sorts of questions that show up for us already answered'. The questions that matter most in life are often the most difficult to think about, she explains. The answers have a bearing not only on how we should live, but how, in any given moment — including the moment in which we ask the question — we are living. It's easy to have my thinking challenged when the question is trivial and the stakes are low, or to change my ethical position when it suits me. It's harder when the answer might demand that I start thinking — living — differently. It was easy for me, before I had savings and an income, to define 'the rich' as anyone with an income and some savings who could feed their family and pay their bills. It was easy, then, to hold that the rich should give the bulk of their earnings to the poor. Now, it is tempting to define 'rich' differently, or to hold that the 'rich' should give away only a 'significant proportion', not 'the bulk' of what they earn — or to simply set such thinking to one side. Callard — who devotes two chapters to politics (one to justice and one to liberty), one to equality, one to love and one to death — says the most interesting and elusive questions in life are the 'load bearing' ones: 'the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration'. What does it mean to commit to a relationship for life? Is it 'cheating' to 'write' essays using prompts? How should a parent raise a child? If we are already married, or already using AI to write essays, or already raising a child, there's a sense in which we're already living an answer. If we wait for the right time to step back and examine questions 'marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them', we might never really think them through: The human need to know how to live subjects us to its desperate logic: Because I must know it, it must be the case that I do know . The passionate confidence with which people are inclined to proclaim their ethical beliefs — often with little ability to defend those beliefs — stems not from flightiness but from a seriousness about the project of living their one and only life. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes. To live well, and to think well, to answer 'untimely questions' well, we need all the help we can get. And while we will inevitably answer another person from our own subjectivity, and another person will inevitably answer us from theirs — their perspective, and challenges, and refutations, might show us truth, or alert us to falsehood, that we wouldn't otherwise see. The moment we are wrong, we were wrong Accepting we are wrong is rare, indeed. According to Moore's paradox, no sooner have we done it and we're claiming to be right again. 'If you find yourself recollecting something you were wrong about in the past, what you are effectively doing is thinking about how right you are now', Callard explains. Then there's Meno's paradox, which asks how we can search for what we don't yet know. Alone, Callard writes, we 'fall prey' to the epistemic dilemma. 'But if you and I both have the same question yet different answers, a path opens up: we can test our answers against each other.' There might be levers that we cannot move alone, which with another person's help, begin to shift. And while, in a debate, the person who's refuted is the 'loser', in a Socratic dialogue, the person who's refuted can count the 'loss' as gain. If the ideal was achieved — which, depending on the minds, the motives, the mood, the culture, on any number of variables, won't always be the case — knowledge was too. The experience of being refuted isn't, Callard says, the same as changing one's mind, or suspending judgement. We can change our minds by simply forgetting or giving up an old view and coming to adopt a new stance, or a neutral one, in its place. To be refuted involves feeling ignorant, confused and perplexed — it's a distinct experience. To use the Socratic method of asking and answering, persuading and being persuaded, to inquire into important questions, requires a readiness to process, entertain or accommodate 'any and all kinds of thought' with an open mind that moves toward what's true and away from what is false. We might be tempted to gloss over the moment we realise we are wrong to the moment we can say we were once mistaken but now we're not. Yet Callard says that in a philosophical context (and, I would think, in other contexts) it is 'polite' to 'mark the transition'. We can do this with a pause, or by saying 'Okay' or 'I see now', or we can do it with a sentence that, while just two words — 'You're right' or 'I'm wrong' — marks a turning point. Living lives 'oriented toward knowledge' Only by admitting ignorance, or at least by being willing to, can we expect to grow less ignorant. Socrates claimed, and Callard agrees, that our inability to 'lead lives based on knowledge — because we lack it' isn't a reason to give up on acquiring it. We can still seek to live lives 'oriented toward' both thinking and knowledge. And, by being humble when we're right, and apologising when we're wrong, by being gracious and generous when we ask and when we answer, by letting one another make mistakes and try again, we might just foster the conditions that make the kind of thinking together that Callard envisions more likely. Callard is aware that in writing a book about how 'thinking is not something a person can do by herself' alone, she isn't exactly practising what she preaches. But the fact she is drawing on other people's thinking, enlisting other people's 'help', throughout the book — along with anecdotes and acknowledgements that suggest a pattern of engaging with interlocutors, whether friends or partners, colleagues or students, in her daily life — convinced me that if I invited her to think with me, she would. Based on her experience with strangers on the steps of the Art Institute steps, thinking with another might be easier said than done. We are 'inclined toward misunderstanding'; it is difficult to trust a stranger and be vulnerable. But in existing relationships, or other contexts where each party trusts the other person is engaging in good faith — not knowing who will refute who, or how; or what answers, if any, they will find — it could yet 'work'. The answers we come to accept with the help of another mind might be less convenient and more difficult than the ones we'd arrive at alone, but there's a decent chance they'll be closer to the truth. If thinking is a road, it's not one we should travel alone. Emma Wilkins is a Tasmanian journalist and freelance writer whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary journals in Australia and beyond.
Daily Mail
04-07-2025
- Daily Mail
I installed a Ring doorbell to keep my house safe... and then caught two middle-aged men in this humiliating exchange
During a girls' trip to Istanbul last month, my mum and I were at a swish restaurant. I had spent hours poring over reviews and travel forums to find us the perfect spot overlooking the Bosphorus Strait: a view that has, since the seventh century BC, captivated admirers from Socrates of Constantinople to Mark Twain and Greta Garbo.
