General

And in judging of the general’s art, do you judge of it as a general or a rhapsode? ION: To me there appears to be no difference between them. SOCRATES: What do you mean? Do you mean to say that the art of the rhapsode and of the general is the same?

Socrates uses the general as a paradigm case to probe whether specialized competence — poetic or martial — constitutes a unified form of knowledge or a transferable skill, exposing the incoherence in Ion’s claims to universal expertise.

Plato, Ion, -390thesis

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The general [Yoritomo] replied, ‘Give your order to Rokuhara. He is the general of the Taira clan.’ The major councilor said, ‘But you are right here.’ The general said, ‘I am not the person [in charge of this].’

Dōgen presents the historical general Yoritomo as an exemplar of disciplined self-limitation, arguing that the capacity to govern depends upon knowing the boundaries of one’s legitimate authority and refusing to exceed them.

thesis

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it is precisely the concrete details of the evidence that prevail over the more general aspects of the evidence.

Jung’s experimental data demonstrate that maximally disturbed word-association reactions cluster around concrete rather than general stimulus-words, establishing an empirical hierarchy between particular and abstract within the psychology of evidence and guilt.

Jung, C. G., Experimental Researches, 1904supporting

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effects are produced which often cast doubt on the validity of general psychological laws.

Jung argues that individual habitual attitudes produce such decisive displacements of psychic energy that they regularly confound the application of general psychological principles, privileging the particular over the universal.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychological Types, 1921supporting

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It is not that a general rule about grandchildren constrains her mourning and has authority over it. Instead, her long commitment to this particular relationship… prepares her to respond to this tragedy as she does.

Nussbaum distinguishes between the constraining authority of general ethical rules and the preparatory illumination they offer, arguing that genuine moral perception is always achieved through response to the particular rather than application of the general.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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Epicurus, who insisted on the exceptionless truth of general dogmas, simply pointed out that they must be applied in the right way. Seneca, in addition to claiming that philosophy’s general wisdom is incomplete still progressing, insists that in the application

Nussbaum traces the Hellenistic debate over whether general philosophical wisdom suffices for therapeutic practice, with Seneca pressing beyond Epicurus to insist that general dogmas are both incomplete and insufficient without situation-specific application.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, 1994supporting

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The computation itself, calculation, is a process which conditions mental operations in general.

Benveniste observes, in passing, that the cognitive practice of calculation shapes mental operations generally, contextualizing the semantic history of Latin ratio within a broader claim about how technical practices structure thought.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside

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Comparing our results to the general population could generate a selection bias because psychiatric patients in general may have more symptoms in comparison with the general population.

Dorani flags a methodological limitation in comparing clinical samples to general population norms, noting that psychiatric patients as a group systematically differ in symptom burden from non-clinical populations.

Dorani, Farangis, Prevalence of hormone-related mood disorder symptoms in women with ADHD, 2021aside

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