A Year With Plato – Part 1.

Rudy Ruiz — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:53:47 +0000

A week before the new year arrived I set about creating the ever-famous list of resolutions. Each year, though, instead of the list becoming a recipe for failure, it becomes something that just might be achievable with the right balance. Well, this year (2011) one of the items on my list is to spend some serious time with Plato’s dialogues. No, not all of them. There are about 7 dialogues in my list. It has a heavy emphasis on the early dialogues according this site. Many of the dialogues I’ve read in the past and have even been the subject of a blog post or two. I’ll be attempting to extract from the dialogues Plato’s central themes, his philosophy as it develops and his methods. I’ll be using R.E. Allen’s translations instead of the collection of dialogues from my small Loeb library. My aim *here* is write about some of the observations I’ve made and my general musings. I’m writing to chronicle my brief journey for future reference.

The dialogues I’ll be reading:

Early Dialogues

Apology, Euthydemus, Euthyphro, Gorgias

Middle Dialogues

Meno, Republic

Late Dialogues

Thaeatetus

Security Semantics

Rudy Ruiz — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:43:37 +0000

Over the past several weeks a colleague and I have embarked on a mission that is probably akin to finding a sea route to the Indies in the 15th century. We call it a security ontology. I think this is a decent label. Since we’ve been trying to redefine and/or correct some of the old-school security maxims and practices for the past 4 years or so we thought that what better way than to revisit terminology. We could place that terminology within its semantic domain and, most importantly, map the relationships between these terms. In the end, we could all speak a similar language and sort of create or own linguistic community. It’s almost an experiment in more ways than one. Security terminology has always been an organic evolution. Hutton and Mortman would call this anarchy. I don’t know if I’d go *that* far, but it does catch the eye. So far, this project has gotten us through an information system model (necessary since that is usually an object of desire in most cases), typical vulnerability, adversary and attack language and now we’re right in the middle of everyone’s favorite, risk. Hopefully we’re not stuck in the Bermuda Triangle for too long. One of the primary epistemological measurements (or epistemic justification) that we’ll be using to determine if it “works” is coherence, or, how well do the individual pieces connect together to form a system of knowledge. Yes, it has it’s flaws, but I think this is a good first step. Anyone else working on something like this?

Epistemological Relativism » Philosophy

A Year With Plato – Part 1.

Security Semantics