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Many scholars consider that Socrates in the Lysis holds that friendship and love are egoistic and utility-based. In this paper, I will argue against those readings of Plato’s Lysis. I will analyze how Socrates treats utility and egoism in the many different kinds of friendship he discusses in the dialogue, from parental love, like-to-like, and unlike-to-unlike relationships, to the accounts of friendship rooted in the human relation to the good and the ways in which we can belong with some other human beings. The upshot of my paper is twofold. I endeavor to prove that some of these relationships, as Plato’s Socrates discusses them, are not egoistic and that Plato represents and valorizes a particular type of friendship having to do with philosophy and philosophical way of life, which is for the sake of another.

Critical and pancritical rationalism were mainly debated in the second half of the XXth century, however a new important paper on pancritical rationalism has been published recently, and hence a critical commentary of this recent publication is required, one is offered here.

This paper addresses the profound sense of place in Gillian Flynn's crime fiction, which transpires through the locale of the small town. Distinguishing between setting and landscape, the analyses of Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl reveal a tendency in the genre towards more realistic and social narratives which blend melancholic atmospheres and characters into complex storyworlds highlighted with metaphysical overtones. The article's overall claim is that Flynn's crime fiction has an important social dimension reminiscent of the hard-boiled. Her novels indeed explore new avenues of a form of rural hard-boiled in which there are no tough guys or super villains, but rather ordinary men and women who struggle with their own epistemological and ontological limitations.

Abstract Vygotsky’s article about the psychology of the actor is a good example of continuities and connections between the early and late work of this psychologist and theater critic. Contrary to a divide between an “instrumental”, “mechanistic” and “reductionist” phase before 1930 and later a “holistic” phase (Yasnitsky, van der Veer, 2016, p. 92), the discourse about the actor and Diderot’s notion of “artificial feelings” (sensibilité artificielle) proves Vygotsky’s ongoing commitment regarding questions of experience (perezhivanie), catharsis and the status of emotions. The dichotomy of the actor’s emotions as shown by Diderot in Paradox of Acting is a key for Vygotsky to insist on the historicity of emotions and a transformation of psychology’s methods. As part of the creative work, the actor’s emotions are divided with opposing forces. In Vygotsky’s Psychology of Art, the formalist term for such a division is dvoistvennost’ (twofoldness). Only by overcoming naturalist assumptions and by placing emotions in the context of other mental functions, psychology with indirect methods would be capable of dealing with this historicity. This is a “psychology in terms of drama”, as suggested in “Concrete Psychology”. My paper will focus on the connections between early reviews, “The Psychology of Art” (1925), “Concrete Human Psychology” (1929) and “The Psychology of the Actor’s Creative Work” (1932).

This paper identifies causes of grammatical borrowing and related grammatical phenomena in L1 English L2 Czech immigrant speech. This study contributes to the literature on causes of grammatical borrowing and considers key ideas including social pressure (Thomason and Kaufman 1988), cognitive pressure (Matras 1998; Sanchez 2005) and gap filling (Campbell 1993). Thirteen semistructured interviews were conducted. Participants were affected by social pressure and cognitive pressure surrounding their language use, whether it acted as a driving or inhibiting factor in terms of grammatical borrowing. Participants also engage in borrowing akin to “language play” (Porte 2003: 116) with those close to them; it is a conscious choice to borrow in these cases and it usually represents matter (MAT) (Matras and Sakel 2007) borrowing (Castle 2021a). This paper proposes a new model which considers both conscious and subconscious borrowing whilst also considering factors inhibiting the possibility of borrowing.

This paper presents a study of directionality in word-class changing affixation. Specifically, it addresses the various semantic criteria proposed in Marchand (1964) for directionality in conversion as applied to a sample of affixation in English. The semantic criteria by Marchand have frequently been pointed out in the literature but have not been studied in detail in either conversion or affixation. The aim is to determine whether these criteria are applicable in overt affixation, where directionality does not seem to pose a problem (because, unless back-formation is attested, the affix signals the directionality of the process), or whether the criteria fail to apply even to these cases.

This paper reports on the effectiveness of teaching grammar explicitly, with a focus on form, function, and rules. The study tested the hypothesis that explicit instruction of grammar leads to increased accuracy in the grammaticality judgment, using a sample of 32 Macedonian learners of English at levels B and C. The structures selected for the task included subject-verb inversion, subject-verb inversion and it-insertion, omission of expletive and anticipatory it and omission of a referential subject, which are typical in the interlanguage of Macedonian learners of English due to cross-linguistic influence from their mother tongue and developmental factors. The study involved a pre-test, explicit instruction and controlled practice activities, and a post-test. The pre-test and post-test assessed the accuracy of a series of sentences, while the instruction involved contrastive analysis of examples in Macedonian and English, eliciting differences between the two languages. Results showed improved accuracy in the assessment of the grammaticality of the target structure at the post-test, but an experimental study with a control group is required to verify whether the improvement can be solely attributed to explicit instruction.

Eugenio Coseriu’s (1921–2002) seminal contributions to linguistic theory went largely unnoticed in mainstream linguistic research in the English-speaking world. This paper discusses three concepts that have loomed large in present-day linguistics and were already addressed in the work of Coseriu. The paper focuses on the question whether Coseriu’s contributions might be a stepping stone to establishing synergies with current strands of linguistic research, also with a view to determining the topicality of Coseriu’s approach to concepts that are at the centre of ongoing discussion. The three concepts dealt with in the paper are: 1) Coseriu’s well-established theory of language norms against the backdrop of the (Neo-)Gricean pragmatic theory of generalised conversational implicatures and default inferences; 2) Coseriu’s detailed exposition of schematic meanings in syntax and word formation as compared to cognitive approaches within the frameworks of Construction Grammar and Construction Morphology; 3) Coseriu’s elaborate account of general language-specific meanings (G. “Bedeutungen”, Fr. “signifiés”, Sp. “significados”) in light of recent developments in psycholinguistic research which focuses on the role of semantic underspecification in meaning representations. The paper argues that Coseriu’s work has the potential to offer solutions for a number of as yet unresolved issues in the study of pragmatics, syntax, word formation and semantics.

While refutation is usually related to Plato's early, Socratic, dialogues, this paper is aimed at exploring the link between refutation and dialectic in some of his middle and late dialogues. First, it argues that refutation assumes a constructive role in the Phaedo, where the best logos is the least refutable, and also in the Republic, where the philosopher is invited to fight his way through all elenchoi. Then, it tries to show that the gymnasia of Prm. 130a ff. is aimed at training young Socrates to come to the aid of the theory he embraces preventing it from being refuted. He should travel and explore all the paths, by assuming a hypothesis as well as the opposite one. This methodology paves the way on which Plato advances in the Sophist, where the antinomic structure of the gymnasia gives way to a “constructive” dialectic in which the aporia is solved and a thesis is established by refutation. The last section of this paper is devoted to analysing Sph. 251c-252e, where the positive and constructive function of the elenchus is especially clear. Plato argues for the symploke eidon by exploring all the hypotheses that are open to the search and refuting those that ultimately represent obstacles to his position. The symploke is the truth which remains when all the hypotheses that contradict it have been refuted. The conclusion is that the elenchus does not disappear but is put at the service of the truth, as an essential part of the method for attaining a positive doctrine.

By framing Aristotle’s dialectic in the broader context of scientific inquiry and demonstration, this paper is aimed at showing of what use the “reputable opinions” can be for grasping the principles of sciences, as declared in Topics I.2. It argues that such a use cannot imply ‒ at any stage of inquiry ‒ a replacement of the logic and intrinsic goals of demonstration by those proper to dialectic. However, it also defends a substantive (but still modest) contribution of dialectic ‒ beyond its well-attested methodological role in discarding contradictory opinions and its (possible though not germane to the context of Topics I.2) application to proving the principle of non-contradiction by means of refutation. This contribution consists in providing the preliminary accounts of facts in order to have scientific inquiry started, as required in Posterior Analytics II.8. To better appreciate how the proposed location of dialectic in a pre-demonstrative stage of inquiry is operational, the paper finally examines Physics IV.1-5.