Poseidon has recently benefited from renewed scholarly attention, contributing to re-evaluate his role in ancient Greek imaginary. By opening the research previously limited to literary evidence to the archaeological and topographical evidence, new perspectives on “Poseidonian landscapes” have emerged. Arcadia, a land-locked region where Poseidon Hippios is celebrated with fervour, is here taken as a case study to try and go further in identifying the god’s realm of action. Areas with floods seem to be his preferred worship places, while (...) in other areas he plays a crucial part in myths but is hardly worshipped alone. There also seems to be a connection between his patronage over freshwater and horses. Overall, natural observation seems to have been instrumental in choosing the location of his worship places. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Blind Spots and Avenues for Transformation within the Utopian Canon: Toward A Terrestrial EcotopianismHeather Alberro (bio)Limitations and Exclusions of the (Western) Utopian CanonUtopianism in all of its manifestations often powerfully (re)surfaces during times of significant socio-ecological upheaval as a response to oppressive and exploitative realities. As such it is a fervent refusal against a given status quo and its purported inevitability. Utopianism and hope are rendered possible by, and (...) draw their transformative potential from, the boundless terrain of potentiality surrounding any given reality.1 Indeed, without such conditions of radical uncertainty, hope and utopianism would not be possible. Often and understandably, the seminal works of Plato, Thomas More, William Morris, H. G. Wells and others come to mind when we think of utopian studies. Hence Kumar’s parochial observation that there is no discernible utopian tradition beyond the West because other cultures lack the foundational myth of the Golden Age—that is, the Garden of Eden, Atlantis, and Arcadia—that has been so formative to the development of utopia in the West.2 These traditional or “transcendental” utopian modalities often feature a dichotomous opposition to their present reality, depicting time and historical movement [End Page 528] as linear successions of stages proceeding from an archaic past and toward a future wherein the utopian ideal is seen as occupying a “fixed space outside time and history.”3 Such temporally “transcendent” utopias marked the dawn of the modern phase of utopian thought, originating in the seventeenth century alongside new theories of social evolution that coalesced into modern Enlightenment notions of linear historical progress.4Prioritizing Pluralism: Critical Heterotopias of the “Here and Now”What kind of life? We are still confronted with the demand to state the “concrete alternative.” The demand is meaningless if it asks for a blueprint of the specific institutions and relationships which would be those of the new society: they cannot be determined a priori; they will develop, in trial and error, as the new society develops.5Tom Moylan’s notion of “critical utopianism,” which emerged during the “historic block” of political opposition of the 1960s and 1970s, marks one important step within the utopian canon toward praxis and the essential “Nowness” of critique and imaginative projection.6 This “critical” strand of utopianism is fueled by a fervent opposition to the exploitation and domination of people and the natural world that is increasingly characteristic of Western-capitalist societies.7 This opposition is coupled with a utopian desire for mutual aid, ecological resilience, liberation, and peaceful living—in effect, a longing for community.8 The “critical” in Moylan’s formulation has a bivalency: first, in the sense of critique through the debunking and deconstruction of the utopian genre itself, which was “colonized” by capitalism toward the 1970s and infused with technocratic dreams of material abundance through boundless economic expansion; and second, in the sense of the critical mass required to effect fundamental societal transformations.9 If the better is the enemy of the good, then perfection serves as “a stick with which to beat the possible.”10 Utopias do not offer rigid blueprints of a fixed or perfect ideal world but rather head toward “the ideal” by offering “a rich blending of creative fantasy, critical thinking, and oppositional activism” predicated on a demand for radically new relations between social and natural systems.11 Ever critically self-reflective, critical utopias continually remind us of the limitations of the utopian impulse, particularly the dangers of pursuing rigid and transcendental visions of “the better.” Nevertheless, these are desperate times that demand some orientation toward a better; utopianism’s [End Page 529] denunciative function is not enough. Thus, in his impassioned recent work Becoming Utopian, Moylan denotes the need for an intersectional, democratically unified leadership structure that can help sustain a political movement for counteracting the “global/neoliberal superpower order while reaching for a utopian horizon.”12 With a focus more on process than a fixed ideal, the critical utopia explores and articulates vibrant post-capitalist futures that are simultaneously open-ended, and far more socio-ecologically resilient than the “now” of late capitalism.Akin in function and style to critical utopias are the grounded and transgressive... (shrink)

This chapter examines some of the philosophical literature on idealizations in science and the epistemic challenges idealizations potentially pose for astrophysical methodology, particularly its use of computer simulations. We begin by surveying philosophical literature on idealization connected to (1) kinds of idealizations deployed in science, (2) the aims of idealization in science, and (3) various strategies for de-idealization. Using collisional ring galaxy simulations as a case study, we examine how these three themes play out in the context of astrophysical computer (...) simulations. Ultimately, we argue that deploying deidealization strategies is central to bolstering epistemic confidence in simulations in astrophysics. We conclude with some remarks on the role of idealization in the context of astrophysical computer simulations more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 509 Mytheli Sreenivas Birth Control in the Shadow of Empire: The Trials of Annie Besant, 1877–1878 In March 1877, two London activists provoked a debate about poverty and overpopulation that reverberated across metropole and colony. These activists, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, republished a book by the American physician Charles Knowlton that outlined methods to prevent conception. TheFruitsofPhilosophy,which (...) Bradlaugh and Besant provocatively subtitled An Essay on the Population Question, had been in limited circulation in Britain since 1833, but the book’s legality was called into question when its previous publisher was charged with obscenity in early 1877.1 Determined to establish the legal right to publish information about contraception, on March 23rd, 1877, Bradlaugh and Besant delivered copies of The Fruits of Philosophy to the police department, the city solicitor, and local magistrates, and they announced their intent to sell the book from their premises at the Freethought Publishing Company on Stonecutter Street in East London. The following day, a crowd filled the narrow space outside the publishing house, and the two activists sold hundreds of copies of Knowlton’s book. When no arrests were made, Besant and Bradlaugh renotified the authorities that they were selling a supposedly obscene book and were informed in turn that papers were 1. S. Chandrasekhar, “A Dirty, Filthy Book”: The Writings of Charles Knowlton and Annie Besant on Reproductive Physiology and Birth Control and an Account of the Bradlaugh-Besant Trial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 26. 510 Mytheli Sreenivas being prepared for their arrest and prosecution. On the 7th of April, 1877, Besant and Bradlaugh were arrested and taken into custody.2 In their subsequent trial, the two activists linked birth control advocacy to a Malthusian worldview. They argued that the urban working classes and the rural poor in Britain labored under the burden of overpopulation. Humanitarian concern for impoverished people, and not intent to promote obscenity, drove them to disseminate information about birth control. Besant and Bradlaugh were eventually acquitted on a legal technicality, and Bradlaugh moved on to other issues. Besant, however, was dissatisfied with The Fruits of Philosophy because its methods were outdated by the science of the day. She was determined to write a more up-to-date guide explaining contraceptive methods and went on to found a Malthusian League to disseminate birth control information. These events—the trial and Besant’s further campaigns promoting contraception —mark a watershed moment in the history of birth control activism.3 They would shape how reproduction came to be understood not as a private matter, but as a particular sort of social problem, whose implications reverberated from London to the empire in India and back again. To outside observers, Bradlaugh and Besant may have seemed an unlikely pair to set these events into motion. Bradlaugh, at age forty-four, had a long history of association with radical causes. A celebrated atheist and antimonarchical republican, he helped to shape a tradition of mid-nineteenth-century English radicalism that developed in the wake of Chartist decline. As a member of the National Reform League in the 1860s, he had participated in public demonstrations to extend the franchise. His leadership of the National Secular Society made him a popular lecturer among Freethinkers on issues of political democracy, anticlericalism, and occasionally on neo-Malthusianism.4 2. Anne Taylor, Annie Besant: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 110–12. 3. The term “birth control” was coined in a meeting of Margaret Sanger and her associates in 1914, and thus would not have been in use in the late nineteenth century. The term contraception was not unknown, but had only limited circulation in scientific discourses. Nevertheless, I use both “birth control” and “contraception” interchangeably to mean methods to prevent conception. See Peter C. Engelman, A History of the Birth Control Movement in America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2011), xviii. 4. Taylor, Annie Besant, 80–81. Mytheli Sreenivas 511 In comparison to Bradlaugh’s prominence, Besant was relatively unknown. Her public career began after a separation from her husband, the Anglican vicar Frank Besant. Perhaps the couple were ill-suited to each other from... (shrink)

One of the most influential works of this century, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide; the question of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Albert Camus brilliantly posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of (...) life lived with dignity and authenticity. (shrink)

The author endeavours to show two things: first, that Schrödingers (and Eckarts) demonstration in March (September) 1926 of the equivalence of matrix mechanics, as created by Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac in 1925, and wave mechanics, as created by Schrödinger in 1926, is not foolproof; and second, that it could not have been foolproof, because at the time matrix mechanics and wave mechanics were neither mathematically nor empirically equivalent. That they were is the Equivalence Myth. In order to make (...) the theories equivalent and to prove this, one has to leave the historical scene of 1926 and wait until 1932, when von Neumann finished his magisterial edifice. During the period 1926–1932 the original families of mathematical structures of matrix mechanics and of wave mechanics were stretched, parts were chopped off and novel structures were added. To Procrustean places we go, where we can demonstrate the mathematical, empirical and ontological equivalence of ‘the final versions of’ matrix mechanics and wave mechanics. -/- The present paper claims to be a comprehensive analysis of one of the pivotal papers in the history of quantum mechanics: Schrödingers equivalence paper. Since the analysis is performed from the perspective of Suppes structural view (‘semantic view’) of physical theories, the present paper can be regarded not only as a morsel of the internal history of quantum mechanics, but also as a morsel of applied philosophy of science. The paper is self-contained and presupposes only basic knowledge of quantum mechanics. For reasons of length, the paper is published in two parts; Part I appeared in the previous issue of this journal. Section 1 contains, besides an introduction, also the papers five claims and a preview of the arguments supporting these claims; so Part I, Section 1 may serve as a summary of the paper for those readers who are not interested in the detailed arguments. (shrink)

Until about thirty years ago, the extent of disclosure about and consent-seeking for medical interventions was influenced by a beneficence model of professional behaviour. Informed consent shifted attention to a duty to respect the autonomy of patients. The new requirement arrived on the American scene in two separate contexts: for daily practice in 1957, and for clinical study in 1966. A confusing double standard has been established. 'Daily consent' is reviewed, if at all, only in retrospect. Doctors are merely exhorted (...) to obtain informed consent; they often minimise uncertainties about 'best' treatment and they feel duty-bound to provide patients with an unequivocal recommendation for action. 'Study consent' in a clinical trial is reviewed prospectively, and doctors are compelled by regulation to point out that there is insufficient evidence to make a rational choice between two compared treatments. It has been impossible to devise informed consent practices that satisfy, in full, the competing moral imperatives of respect for autonomy, concern for beneficence with emphasis on the value of health, and a vigil for justice. A way must be found to experiment with various discretionary approaches that would strike a realistic balance among competing interests. (shrink)

McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness",1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, (...) and so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing. McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground-floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground-floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based. (shrink)

In 2014, the first three volumes of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks—the personal and philosophical notebooks that he kept during the war years—were published in Germany. These notebooks provide the first textual evidence of anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s philosophy, not simply in passing remarks, but as incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking itself. In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks, offers the first evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the (...) Black Notebooks. While Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism is well known, the anti-Semitic dimension of that engagement could not be fully told until now. Trawny traces Heidegger’s development of a grand “narrative” of the history of being, the “being-historical thinking” at the center of Heidegger’s work after Being and Time. Two of the protagonists of this narrative are well known to Heidegger’s readers: the Greeks and the Germans. The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or, more specifically, “world Judaism.” As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges as a racialized, destructive, and technological threat to the German homeland, indeed, to any homeland whatsoever. Trawny pinpoints recurrent, anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger’s adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philosophical decisions, his endorsement of a Jewish “world conspiracy,” and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers. Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger’s achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets. Unflinching and systematic, this is one of the most important assessments of one of the most important philosophers in our history. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that a broadly Kantian strategy for demonstrating and explaining the existence, semantic structure, and psychological function of essentially non-conceptual content can also provide an intelligible and defensible bottom-up theory of the foundations of rationality in minded animals. Otherwise put, if I am correct, then essentially non-conceptual content constitutes the semantic and psychological substructure, or matrix, out of which the categorically normative a priori superstructure of epistemic rationality and practical rationality - Sellars's "logical space of reasons" (...) - grows. (shrink)

Presents a study of mythology based on the analysis of nonlinear form, the self's confrontation with its world, and the nature of mythic truth. Drawing on texts world-wide and on many theorists, including Cassirer, Eliade, Jung, Levi-Strauss, and Buber, the book develops a complex view of the relation between consciousness and culture.

Wilfrid Sellars’ “myth of the given” had a momentous influence on 20th-century epistemology, putting under pressure the internalist foundationalism so prominent in early analytic philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the core themes in Sellars’ argument are anticipated in the work of the London philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell (1871-1948). Indeed, in some respects Edgell’s argument against the myth of the given is even more compelling than Sellars’. The paper logically reconstructs and historically contextualizes Edgell’s line of (...) argument, as emerging out of a critique of Russell’s epistemology, with the goal of showing that the “myth of the given” effectively predated Sellars by four decades. (shrink)

In a capitalist economy, taxes are the most important instrument by which the political system puts into practice a conception of economic and distributive justice. Taxes arouse strong passions, fueled not only by conflicts of economic self-interest, but by conflicting ideas of fairness. Taking as a guiding principle the conventional nature of private property, Murphy and Nagel show how taxes can only be evaluated as part of the overall system of property rights that they help to create. Justice or injustice (...) in taxation, they argue, can only mean justice or injustice in the system of property rights and entitlements that result from a particular regime. Taking up ethical issues about individual liberty, interpersonal obligation, and both collective and personal responsibility, Murphy and Nagel force us to reconsider how our tax policy shapes our system of property rights. (shrink)

Charles Baudouin was a French psychoanalyst. Born in Nancy, a town that played a significant role in the history of psychoanalysis, he was a contemporary of Freud, Jung and Adler. After receiving his degree in philosophy, he moved to Geneva where his early work and first book focused on suggestion and hypnosis, later becoming interested in literature and the relation between psychoanalysis and education. Largely forgotten, Charles Baudouin' s work warrants greater attention from both psychoanalysts and historians alike. He was (...) a prolific... (shrink)

or Browse over 3500 reviews in " by Valerie Hardcastle, Ph.D. " _Metapsychology_.

In the history of Archaic Greece no event stands out so clearly as the First Sacred War. The War took place in the years round 590 B.C., and ended with the capture and destruction of the great city of Crisa at the hands of a coalition of powers which included Sicyon, Athens, and Thessaly. Our sources provide a wealth of detail–the causes of the War, the names of half-a-dozen commanders and champions, the stages of the fighting, the victory celebrations and (...) dedications which ensued, certain Delphic oracles and Amphictyonic decrees. (shrink)

ExcerptTraditionally, Fascist antisemitism has not merited much consideration in either the Italian or foreign historiography. Italy is often described as an exceptional nation, virtually free of the anti-Jewish hatred that existed widely on the rest of the continent. Even the Italian debate on the subject was quite limited until the end of the 1980s. After the important research of Meir Michaelis and Renzo De Felice, who demonstrated definitively that Fascist racist policies were not imposed by Hitler on Mussolini, a general (...) stagnation persisted for several years in this field of research.1 However, those two very important works did not deal…. (shrink)

Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece that takesus far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon, and reveals a culture ofslavery, of blood sacrifice, of perpetual and ritualized warfare, of ceremonial hunting andecstasies.In his provocative discussions of various institutions and practices including war,marriage, and the city state, Vernant unveils a complex and previously unexplored intersection ofthe religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. He concludes with a genealogy ofthe study of (...) class='Hi'>myth from antiquity to the present, and offers a critique of structuralism.Jean-PierreVernant is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Study of Ancient Religions at the College de France inParis. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that the putatively non-epistemic nature of propositional truth presents an interesting problem for those who reasonably believe that truth is normatively distinct from warrant or evidence and that such truth is an irreducible condition on propositional knowledge. After arguing that McDowell’s direct realist approach is rather inadequate to deal with the issue I am raising here, I introduce the notion of ‘epistemic gradient’ to show that even if one may plausibly maintain that a significant portion (...) of our empirical beliefs are presumably true in the alethic realist sense, there is no unproblematic transition from conceding that point to making the realist truth a panepistemic condition of propositional knowledge. (shrink)

Collectivities, just like individuals, exist, can act, bear responsibility for their acts and omissions, and be guilty. It sometimes makes sense to hold them responsible for what they do, or don't do, and to punish them for their misdeeds. With respect to many collectivities there is no practical purpose in holding them responsible, since there is no way that we can bring them to justice. But there are exceptions from this rule. In particular it is plausible to assume that sanctions (...) against entire nations or peoples or populations living in open and democratic states may be an effective means to setting them straight where, collectively, they act wrongly. The best present example of this seems to be the Israelis. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between two conceptions of what it is to pursue philosophy without the myth of genius, but it also argues that both conceptions are overly restrictive.

The standard view of Cartesian sensations is that they present themselves as purely qualitative features of experience. Accordingly, Descartes view would be that in perceiving the color red, for example, we are merely experiencing the subjective feel of redness rather than seeming to perceive a property of bodies. In this paper, I establish that the argument and textual evidence offered in support of SV fail to prove that Descartes held this view. Indeed, I will argue that there are textual and (...) theoretical reasons for believing that Descartes held the negation of SV. Qualia aren't Descartes legacy. (shrink)

We can distinguish two senses of the Given, the nonconceptual and the non-doxastic. The idea of the nonconceptual Given is the target of Sellars’s severe attack on the Myth of the Given, which paves the way for McDowell’s conceptualism, while the idea of the non-doxastic Given is largely neglected. The main target of the present paper is the non-doxastic Given. I first reject the idea of the nonconceptual Given by debunking the false assumption that there is a systematic relation (...) between the conceptual and the nonconceptual. I then propose a constitutive understanding of experience and concept, which at once challenges the idea of the non-doxastic Given. Unlike the more familiar Davidsonian challenge, which questions the transition from the non-doxastic to the doxastic, the constitutive understanding implies that the idea of the non-doxastic Given endangers the very possibility of having thought about the world. I urge an exorcism of the Myth of the Given by proposing doxasticism, the view that experience is essentially a doxastic attitude towards that which is experienced. (shrink)

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the (...) limits of knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

This paper articulates and argues for the plausibility of the Presentation View of Perceptual Knowledge, an under-discussed epistemology of perception. On this view, a central epistemological role of perception is that of making subjects aware of their surroundings. By doing so, perception affords subjects with reasons for world-directed judgments. Moreover, the very perceived concrete entities are identified as those reasons. The former claim means that the position is a reasons-based epistemology; the latter means that it endorses a radically anti-psychologist conception (...) of reasons. First, I articulate and motivate the Presentation View. Then, I defend the view from three incarnations of a major objection levelled within the ranks of reasons-based epistemologies: McDowell’s version of the accusation that a view like this falls prey to the Myth of the Given. I argue that all three incarnations fail to show the Presentation View to be inadequate. The first version holds that a general characterization of the Myth clearly shows that it is an incoherent idea. The second version holds that endorsing the Myth makes it impossible to construe non-conceptual items as items that can stand in rational relations to judgements and beliefs. The third version holds that endorsing the Myth leads to a conception where perceptual experiences merely cause, but do not warrant, our perceptual beliefs and judgements. I explain in detail how the Presentation View has the elements to respond to each of these objections. (shrink)

In this work, published here as a single volume, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly non-classical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' (...) and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important intellectual figure. With a new foreword by Patrick Wilcken. (shrink)

"[An] important essay by a philosopher who more convincingly than any other I can think of demonstrates the continuing significance of his vocation in the life of our culture."—Karsten Harries, _The New York Times Book Review_ With _The Presence of Myth_, Kolakowski demonstrates that no matter how hard man strives for purely rational thought, there has always been-and always will be-a reservoir of mythical images that lend "being" and "consciousness" a specifically human meaning. "Kolakowski undertakes a philosophy of culture which (...) extends to all realms of human intercourse—intellectual, artistic, scientific, and emotional.... [His] book has real significance for today, and may well become a classic in the philosophy of culture."—_Anglican Theological Review_. (shrink)

As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults'; changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge. The simulations correctly identify greater variation in the cognitive performance of older adults, and successfully (...) predict that older adults will show greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences in the properties of test stimuli than younger adults. Our results indicate that older adults'; performance on cognitive tests reflects the predictable consequences of learning on information-processing, and not cognitive decline. We consider the implications of this for our scientific and cultural understanding of aging. (shrink)