So thorny is the difficulty of distinguishing the historical Socrates from the Socrateses of the authors of the texts in which he appears and, moreover, from the Socrateses of scores of later interpreters, that the whole contested issue is generally referred to as the Socratic problem.
But Saitou cautions that moving on to human research will require resolving thorny ethical issues and technical difficulties.
After this thorny matter had been settled, with some difficulty, he immediately became funny, generous, easy.
But even if the immediate difficulty passes, Europe remains a thorny issue for all three main parties.
Sadly, the difficulty of reaching agreement on other thorny issues such as regulation has kicked climate change into the long grass at just the wrong moment.
Gauss observed that a woman, "according to our customs and prejudices, must encounter infinitely more difficulties than men to familiarise herself with these thorny researches".
Thus, we are facing a thorny problem threatening many lives, and it seems that the difficulties of curing cancer are out of our grasp.
But the casting question is especially thorny when Dumont works with people who are disabled or who have learning difficulties, as in P'tit Quinquin.
THE assassination of three Kurdish activists in Paris only days after the Turkish government announced it had started peace talks with the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers Partyy, the P.K.K., underscores the difficulties of finding a lasting solution to Turkey's most acute and thorny internal problem.
(Determining how to handle the death penalty, however determining whether it can ever be a proportional punishment and whether it is ruled out as cruel or degrading is a particularly thorny problem, beyond the scope of this entry. For a brief survey of the difficulty, see Edmundson 2002).
