Many prominent critiques of philosophical methods proceed by suggesting that some method is unreliable, especially in comparison to some alternative method. In light of this, it may seem natural to conclude that these (comparatively) unreliable methods should be abandoned. Drawing upon work on the division of cognitive labour in science, we argue things are not so straightforward. Rather, whether an unreliable method should be abandoned depends heavily on the crucial question of how we should divide philosophers’ time and effort between (...) different methods, in order to maximise our prospects of achieving epistemic success. We show that, in a range of cases, even a (comparatively) unreliable method deserves to be allocated some of these resources. (shrink)

What is it for philosophy to make progress? While various putative forms of philosophical progress have been explored in some depth, this overarching question is rarely addressed explicitly, perhaps because it has been assumed to be intractable or unlikely to have a single, unified answer. In this paper, we aim to show that the question is tractable, that it does admit of a single, unified answer, and that one such answer is plausible. This answer is, roughly, that philosophical progress consists (...) in putting people in a position to increase their understanding, where ‘increased understanding’ is a matter of better representing the network of dependence relations between phenomena. After identifying four desiderata for an account of philosophical progress, we argue that our account meets the desiderata in a particularly satisfying way. Among other things, the account explains how various other achievements, such as philosophical arguments, counterexamples, and distinctions, may contribute to progress. Finally, we consider the implications of our account for the pressing and contentious question of how much progress has been made in philosophy. (shrink)

Online social networks have rapidly become a prominent and widely used service, offering a wealth of personal and sensitive information with significant security and privacy implications. Hence, OSNs are also an important—and popular—subject for research. To perform research based on real-life evidence, however, researchers may need to access OSN data, such as texts and files uploaded by users and connections among users. This raises significant ethical problems. Currently, there are no clear ethical guidelines, and researchers may end up performing ethically (...) questionable research, sometimes even when more ethical research alternatives exist. For example, several studies have employed “fake identities” to collect data from OSNs, but fake identities may be used for attacks and are considered a security issue. Is it legitimate to use fake identities for studying OSNs or for collecting OSN data for research? We present a taxonomy of the ethical challenges facing researchers of OSNs and compare different approaches. We demonstrate how ethical considerations have been taken into account in previous studies that used fake identities. In addition, several possible approaches are offered to reduce or avoid ethical misconducts. We hope this work will stimulate the development and use of ethical practices and methods in the research of online social networks. (shrink)

On their journeys toward senior athletic status, junior endurance athletes are faced with a multitude of stressors. How athletes react to stressors plays a vital part in effective adaptation to the demanding, ever-changing athletic environment. Sleep, the most valued recovery strategy available to athletes, has the potential to influence and balance athletic stress, and enable optimal functioning. However, sleep is sensitive to disturbances by stress, which is described by the concept of sleep reactivity. Among athletes, poor sleep quality is frequently (...) reported, but our understanding of the associations between stress and sleep in junior athletes is currently incomplete. The present study therefore investigated the themes of stress and sleep, and the associations between these variables with the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews in six junior endurance athletes. Data was analyzed qualitatively based on the Grounded Theory. The qualitative material was supplemented with quantitative data on subjective sleep quality, sleep reactivity, and mental strain. The main results showed that stress could be differentiated into relevant stressors and reactions to stress. Sleep could be differentiated into sleep benefits and sleep quality. All athletes identified relevant stressors, and all athletes were aware of the benefits of sleep for athletic functioning. However, athletes formed two distinctive categories based on the interactions between stress and sleep: three exhibited facilitative reactions to stress and good sleep quality, as well as low sleep reactivity, and low mental strain. The remaining participants exhibited maladaptive reactions to stress and poor sleep quality, as well as high sleep reactivity and high mental strain. Conceptualizing sleep quality based on the evaluation of stressors, reactions to stress, degree of mental strain, and the propensity to stress-related sleep disturbance may offer a plausible explanation for why the occurrence of stressors leads to poor sleep quality in some athletes, but not others. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

The firing of clay is one of the most significant developments in the history of humankind. It is a technological advance, now taken so much for granted, that many have forgotten the ancient power that fire & change exercised over the lives of our ancestors & their imaginations. This book aims to redress that balance.

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science.... Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist.

Elliott Sober has recently argued that the cosmological design argument is unsound, since our observation of cosmic fine-tuning is subject to an observation selection effect (OSE). I argue that this view commits Sober to rejecting patently correct design inferences in more mundane scenarios. I show that Sober's view, that there are OSEs in those mundane cases, rests on a confusion about what information an agent ought to treat as background when evaluating likelihoods. Applying this analysis to the design argument shows (...) that our observation of fine-tuning is not rendered uninformative by an OSE. Design and the Anthropic Objection Previous responses to the Anthropic Objection Variations: experimental squads and survivor reunions Why there is no OSE in firing squad cases Application to the design argument. (shrink)

The human brain consists of approximately 100 billion electrically active neurones that generate an endogenous electromagnetic field, whose role in neuronal computing has not been fully examined. The source, magnitude and likely influence of the brain's endogenous em field are here considered. An estimate of the strength and magnitude of the brain's em field is gained from theoretical considerations, brain scanning and microelectrode data. An estimate of the likely influence of the brain's em field is gained from theoretical principles and (...) considerations of the experimental effects of external em fields on neurone firing both in vitro and in vivo. Synchronous firing of distributed neurones phase-locks induced em field fluctuations to increase their magnitude and influence. Synchronous firing has previously been demonstrated to correlate with awareness and perception, indicating that perturbations to the brain's em field also correlate with awareness. The brain's em field represents an integrated electromagnetic field representation of distributed neuronal information and has dynamics that closely map to those expected for a correlate of consciousness. I propose that the brain's em information field is the physical substrate of conscious awareness - the cemi field - and make a number of predictions that follow from this proposal. Experimental evidence pertinent to these predictions is examined and shown to be entirely consistent with the cemi field theory. This theory provides solutions to many of the intractable problems of consciousness - such as the binding problem - and provides new insights into the role of consciousness, the meaning of free will and the nature of qualia. It thus places consciousness within a secure physical framework and provides a route towards constructing an artificial consciousness. (shrink)

What is at stake in literature? Can we identify the fire that our stories have lost, but that they strive, at all costs, to rediscover? And what is the philosopher's stone that writers, with the passion of alchemists, struggle to forge in their word furnaces? For Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that the parable is the secret model of all narrative, every act of creation tenaciously resists creation, thereby giving each work its strength and grace. The ten essays brought together (...) here cover works by figures ranging from Aristotle to Paul Klee and illustrate what urgently drives Agamben's current research. As is often the case with his writings, their especial focus is the mystery of literature, of reading and writing, and of language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethico-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power. (shrink)

Fire is a force that links everyday human activities to some of the most powerful energetic movements of the Earth. Drawing together the energy-centred social theory of Georges Bataille, the fire-centred environmental history of Stephen Pyne, and the work of a number of ‘pyrotechnology’ scholars, the paper proposes that the generalized study of combustion is a key to contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic energy flows. We examine the relatively recent turn towards (...) fossil-fuelled ‘internal combustion’ in the light of a much longer human history of ‘broadcast’ burning of vegetation and of artisanal pyrotechnologies – the use of heat to transform diverse materials. A combustion-centred analysis, it is argued, brings human collective life into closer contact with the geochemical and geologic conditions of earthly existence, while also pointing to the significance of explorative, experimental and even playful dispositions towards energy and matter. (shrink)

This paper examines the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, specifically the impact of forestry science and fire management on land use and community dynamics in rural Portuguese mountains. It further traces the evolution of fire management from an ancestral rural practice to a scientific concern and the subsequent integration of vernacular knowledge with scientific methods. In the early twentieth century, fire was a common tool in rural Portugal for land clearance, pasture management, and (...) soil enrichment. Rooted in local knowledge, these practices were increasingly challenged by the rise of scientific forestry, which viewed fire primarily as a threat to be controlled. By the mid-twentieth century, Portuguese forestry policies had undergone a significant shift toward aggressive fire suppression and large-scale afforestation, reflecting a broader trend of prioritizing timber production and forest protection. Notable shifts occurred in the 1970s, marked, among other factors, by the increase in rural fires, a new socioecological vision for the forest and the introduction of prescribed fire techniques influenced by international models. The paper argues that the establishment of scientific fire management practices represents a merging of expert knowledge with local experience. This move represents a shift from exclusionary policies toward a more nuanced understanding of fire’s role in landscape management. An examination of these historical developments demonstrates the intricate interrelationship between science, the environment, policy, and local practices, illustrating the way knowledge systems both shape and are shaped by environmental governance. (shrink)

Genocide results from a complex process of intentions, ideologies, and actions that are put in motion to achieve an outcome that benefits the perpetrators. Genocide is part of the history of the United States and of the Fire Nation in Avatar: The Last Airbender that is typically unquestioned and underplayed. Avatar: The Last Airbender opening refers to the old days, a time of peace when the Avatar kept the balance between the Water Tribes, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and (...) Air Nomads. The United States' intentional extermination of diverse peoples is an inseparable part of the processes used to build its continental empire. Seen as a means to securing the land, destroying Indigenous peoples is understood as a necessity, rather than a tactic of empire building. The foundations of the Fire Nation and the United States were built on unstable grounds, causing one to collapse and the other to wrestle with a reckoning on its origins. (shrink)

Autonomous and automatic weapons would be fire and forget: you activate them, and they decide who, when and how to kill; or they kill at a later time a target you’ve selected earlier. Some argue that this sort of killing is always wrong. If killing is to be done, it should be done only under direct human control. (E.g., Mary Ellen O’Connell, Peter Asaro, Christof Heyns.) I argue that there are surprisingly many kinds of situation where this is false (...) and where the use of Automated Weapons Systems would in fact be morally required. These include cases where a) once one has activated a weapon expected then to behave lethally, it would be appropriate to let it continue because this is part of a plan whose goodness one was best positioned to evaluate before activating the weapon; b) one expects better long-term consequences from allowing it to continue; c) allowing it to continue would express a decision you made to be resolute, a decision that could not have advantaged you had it not been true that you would carry through with it; d) the weapon is mechanically not recallable, so that, to not allow it to carry through, you would have had to refrain from activating it in the first place, something you expected would have disastrous consequences; e) you must deputize necessary killings to autonomous machines in order to protect yourself from guilt you shouldn’t have to bear; f) it would be morally better for the burden of responsibility for the killing to be shared among several agents, and the agents deputizing killing to machines can do this, especially where it’s not predictable which machine will be successful; g) a killing would be morally better done with elements of randomness and lack of deliberation, and a (relatively stupid) machine could do this where a person could not; h) the machine would be acting as a Doomsday Device, so that it could not have had its hoped for deterrent effect had you not ensured that you would be unable to recall it if enemy action activated it; i) letting it carry through is a necessary part of its own learning process, and you expect that this learning will have salutary effects later on; j) human intervention in the machine’s operation would disastrously impair its precision, or its speed and efficiency; k) using non-automated methods would require human resources you just don’t have in a task that nevertheless must be done (e.g., using land-mines to protect remote installations); l) the weapon has such horrible and indiscriminate power that it is doubtful whether it could be actually used in ways compatible with International Humanitarian Law and the Laws of War, which require that weapons be used only in ways respecting distinctness, necessity and proportionality, but its threat of use could respect these principles in affording deterrence provided human error cannot lead to their accidental deployment, this requiring that they be controlled by carefully designed autonomous and automatic systems. I then consider objections based on conceptions of human dignity and find that very often dignity too is best served by autonomous machine killing. Examples include saving your village by activating a robot to kill invading enemies who would inflict great indignity on your village, using a suicide robot to save yourself from a less dignified death at enemy hands, using a robotic drone to kill someone otherwise not accessible in order to restore dignity to someone this person killed and to his family, and using a robot to kill someone who needs killing, but the killing of whom by a human executioner would soil the executioner’s dignity. I conclude that what matters in rightful killing isn’t necessarily that it be under the direct control of a human, but that it be under the control of morality; and that could sometimes require use of an autonomous or automated device. (This paper was formerly called "Fire and Forget: A Defense of the Use of Autonomous Weapons in War" on Philpapers; the current title is the title of the published version.). (shrink)

Fire over Luoyang: A History of the Later Han Dynasty 23–220 AD. Rafe de Crespigny. Sinica Leidensia, vol. 134. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Pp. xii + 580. €167, $200.

White Fire challenges the critical tradition that for nearly half a century has celebrated the power of blackness in American literature. This tradition presents Herman Melville as investigating, then rejecting the optimistic vision of Ralph Waldo Emerson because he lacked a viable sense of evil. Williams digs beneath the obvious contrasts between these two great contemporaries, asking three questions about their relationship: What was Emerson actually saying at the time Melville was serving his literary apprenticeship? How much did Melville (...) know of Emerson's provocative thought? What use did Melville make of ideas and images that Emerson, more than any other contemporary, espoused? In his findings, Williams views Melville as far less the independent critic of Emerson that modern critics have described and far more the responsive artist and opportunist, absorbing images and ideas from the most readily available sources and transforming them into art. (shrink)

This article details the personal involvement of the author in the early stages of the infamous Pinto fire case. The paper first presents an insider account of the context and decision environment within which he failed to initiate an early recall of defective vehicles. A cognitive script analysis of the personal experience is then offered as an explanation of factors that led to a decision that now is commonly seen as a definitive study in unethical corporate behavior. The main (...) analytical thesis is that script schemas that were guiding cognition and action at the time precluded consideration of issues in ethical terms because the scripts did not include ethical dimensions. (shrink)

Controlled fire use by early humans could have facilitated the evolution of human cooperation. Individuals with regular access to the benefits of domestic fire would have been at an advantage over those with limited or no access. However, a campfire would have been relatively costly for an individual to maintain and open to free riders. By cooperating, individuals could have reduced maintenance costs, minimized free riding and lessened the risk of being without fire. Cooperators were more likely (...) to survive and reproduce than uncooperative individuals because the former would have been better able to maximize a fire’s returns and enjoy regular access to its benefits. This is how the emergence of controlled fire use in Pleistocene human populations could have facilitated the evolution of cooperation. (shrink)

We set out by noting the preference for circular flows in ecological thought, and the related abhorrence of inefficiency and waste that Western ecology shares with mainstream economic thinking. This has often been manifest in a shared disdain both for uncontained, free-burning fire and for ‘unmanaged’ sexual desire. The paper constructs a ‘pyrosexual’ counter-narrative that explores the mutually constitutive and generative implication of sex and fire. Bringing together the solar ecology of Georges Bataille, feminist and queer thinking about (...) sexuality and reproduction, and a range of ways of theorising biological life and fire, we explore how fire mediates between organismic desire and the energetic dynamics of the earth and solar system. The first section takes a genealogical approach to fire and sex that traces their entanglement from the initial ‘assembling’ of fire through to the emergence of a fire-handling creature. The second section looks at how fire has been contained and intensified by human actors, and the role that heat-driven transformations of inorganic matter have played in the incitement and channeling of desire in urban spaces. The third section addresses the development of industrial ‘heat engines’ and the implications for desire and reproduction of tapping vast reservoirs of subterranean solar energy. We round off by beginning to consider what alternative possibilities might lie in the renegotiation of sex and fire on a planet undergoing rapid change. (shrink)

Sexual violence of various forms, be it sexual harassment or sexual abuse, perpetrated by male professors against their female students has gained societal visibility through media broadcasts. This article tells the tale of the 2013 recruitment to the University of Iceland of a former political party leader, minister and ambassador. He was publicly called out in 2012 for his alleged sexual offences, perpetrated some years earlier. The story is told from two different viewpoints: from that of the media and from (...) the article author’s own standpoint as assistant professor in gender studies with co-responsibility for his de-recruitment. In the media story, opinion leaders from the political, judicial and media spheres take centre stage. The author thus utilizes the concepts patriarchal homosociality and influencers. Based on the findings from the media analyses, the author lays out her defence and justification, using embodiment as the core of her argument. She draws on black feminist knowledge validation processes, more specifically, the ethic of caring and personal accountability. Furthermore, she explores affective feminist pedagogy, i.e. connecting mind and body through self-actualization. By contrasting the two accounts, that of the media and her own feminist standpoint, the author sheds light on the role that influencers play in preserving patriarchal power and the status quo against ‘fire-raising feminists’ in academia and society at large. (shrink)

A review of Michael Ignatieff's book, 'Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics', published by Harvard University Press, 2013.

This paper explores Heraclitus’s linguistic method as a structural expression of his cosmological philosophy. Through an analysis of the various kinds of motion that Heraclitus describes, including the crucial motion between opposites, this essay delineates the meaning of ‘everliving fire’ as emblematic of his cosmos. The image of the synapse frames this analysis as it is simultaneously a motion and an expression uniting two poles; ‘syn’ also invokes Heraclitus’s notion of ‘shared logos’ as xynon, contrasted with human incomprehension as (...) axynetoi. The divine principle of Zeus and his thunderbolt serve as a source of motion; these motions of fire govern not only the cosmos, but human perception and thought. (shrink)

In a recent discussion note1 C. D. C. Reeve investigates the reasons for Heraclitus assigning a primary position to fire, as contrasted with the other substances like earth and water which go to make up the physical universe. Reeve considers and rejects other reasons for the primacy of fire that have been put forward, such as the symbolic associations of fire, the role of fire in governing the universe, or the claim that everything becomes fire (...) at some time or other. Rather, Reeve argues, the primacy of fire in Heraclitus' physical theory can be explained purely in terms of that physical theory. (shrink)

Huge losses and serious threats to ecosystems are common consequences of forest fires. This work describes a forest fire controller based on fuzzy logic and decision-making methods aiming at enhancing forest fire prevention, detection, and fighting systems. In the proposal, the environmental monitoring of several dynamic risk factors is performed with wireless sensor networks and analysed with the proposed fuzzy-based controller. With respect to this, meteorological variables, polluting gases and the oxygen level are measured in real time to (...) estimate the existence of forest fire risks in the short-term and to detect the recent occurrence of fire outbreaks over different forest areas. Besides, the Analytic Hierarchy Process method is used to determine the level of fire spread, and, when necessary, environmental alerts are sent by a Web service and received by a mobile application. For this purpose, integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity of environmental information and alerts are protected with implementations of Lamport’s authentication scheme, Diffie-Lamport signature, and AES-CBC block cipher. (shrink)

pt. 1. Isabel Colegate's The shooting party -- pt. 2. Fire with water.

The motivation of someone who is locked-in, that is, paralyzed and mute, is to find relief for their loss of function. The data presented in this report is part of an attempt to restore one of those lost functions, namely, speech. An essential feature of the development of a speech prosthesis is optimal decoding of patterns of recorded neural signals during silent or covert speech, that is, speaking “inside the head” with output that is inaudible due to the paralysis of (...) the articulators. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the importance of both fast and slow single unit firings recorded from an individual with locked-in syndrome and from an intact participant speaking silently. Long duration electrodes were implanted in the motor speech cortex for up to 13 years in the locked-in participant. The data herein provide evidence that slow firing single units are essential for optimal decoding accuracy. Additional evidence indicates that slow firing single units can be conditioned in the locked-in participant 5 years after implantation, further supporting their role in decoding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 311-315 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Fire and Water: Basic Issues in Asian Buddhism and Christianity Fire and Water: Basic Issues in Asian Buddhism and Christianity. By Aloysius Pieris, S. J. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996. Aloysius Pieris, Jesuit priest and Buddhist scholar, is well known in theological and interreligious dialogue circles in Asia, and this is the third collection of essays of (...) his to be published in the Faith Meets Faith Series of Orbis Books. The eighteen essays which make up this book, all previously published elsewhere, are conveniently put together in three sections, under the following headings: 1) Women and Religion: Buddhist and Christian Appropriation of Feminist Criticism; 2) issues in Theology, Religion and Society; and 3) questions of Spirituality and Human Liberation. To merely summarize the content of the essays and offer a third-party critique would do injustice to the book, and could even mislead one who peruses such a summary into thinking one thereby "knows" what the book or Pieris is about. Such a hasty conclusion would deprive a would-be reader of the powerful experience that awaits in wrestling with Pieris through each essay of this volume. Judith Berling puts it well in her blurb at the back, pointing out that the author "uses poetry, evocative symbolism, and humor to offer a theological call to action in a voice that is liberationist, Asian, and feminist." Indeed, this volume invites one to a way of seeing that can also transform one's way of being in this world marked by increasing violence, poverty, and a systemic kind of oppression dehumanizing to both the perpetrators as well as the victims.The title of the present volume, Fire and Water, alludes to a dynamic dipolarity, masterfully sketched for the reader by Paul Knitter in his foreword, which underlies the author's vision of reality and vivifies much of his writing. The masculine and the feminine, the (Buddhist) gnostic and the (Christian) agapeic, the metacosmic (transcendent) [End Page 311] and the cosmic (immanent), the prophetic and the mystical, are different ways of naming this dipolarity. The way to ultimate liberation is in the effective embrace of both poles in complementarity and mutual interplay, whereas taking one pole in preference over the other results in a warped vision or mode of being, in imbalance, or even in abuse.In this review I would like to simply echo some key themes that will jump at one perusing the essays, reiterating that the very act of reading them can of itself be a transformative experience for an open-minded, open-hearted, and open-handed reader.The thrust of the six essays comprising the first section can perhaps be summed up in the thesis as formulated by the author himself: "Religion cannot survive in the future without appropriating the feminist critique, just as feminism cannot achieve its liberative goal without the aid of a religion so critiqued" (p. 62). Behind this statement is Pieris' emphatically critical stance, on the one hand, against all forms of patriarchal religion, whether Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or other, which has justified, lent a hand in, or continued to perpetrate the physical, psychological, and especially religious abuse of women, and on the other hand, against secularist (or anti-religious) kinds of feminist theory that take off on what he enumerates as "five false starts" (pp. 50-51), which only result in unnecessary dichotomies that truncate the understanding of the goal of liberation, and consequently of the human as such.Pieris offers a vision of liberation centered on what he terms the humanum. This refers to the point of ultimate perfection to which the human, that is, "whatever pertains to men and women as self-conscious, other-oriented, and dreaming components of the cosmos," has the capacity to carry the cosmos. In this context, the human is no other than "this self-transcendent capacity immanent in the cosmos, this power to unfold within itself the Other, which is ever present from the first moment of evolution." To be human is inherently to be endowed... (shrink)

Published on the birth centenary of J. Krishnamurti, Fire in the Mind is a book of important discussions conducted with Krishnamurti. Held from the end of the 1960s to 28 December 1985, seven weeks before his death on 17 February 1986, these dialogues cover a vast ocean of human concernsýfear, sorrow, death, time, culture, ageing and the renewal of the brain. They also explore subjects that are central to scientific research today, such as the questions of biological survival, the (...) nature of consciousness, artificial intelligence, computers and the mechanical mind. J. Krishnamurti needs no introduction. A sage, a seer, a religious revolutionary and a teacher of profound compassion, Krishnamurti negated all spiritual authority. He sought freedom from the Guru, the book, tradition and the authoritarian voice of another. ýTruth is within youý, he said, and to discover that truth in the luminous light of perception was to transform the very nature of thought and consciousness. It was to awaken intelligence, insight and an abundant compassion. The total responsibility lay with the individual. No one could free another from bondage. These dialogues reveal Krishnamurtiýs approach to self-knowing and his way of investigation into the brain, the mind and the consciousness. In a world brought to the edge of the abyss by growing violence, soaring religious fundamentalism, the desecration of nature and a massive assault on human integrity, they provide a new direction to those of us seeking an alternative way of life. (shrink)

Persae et Magi omnes qui Persicae regionis incolunt fines ignem praeferunt et omnibus elementis ignem putant debere praeponi. The Persians and all the Magi who dwell in the confines of the Persian land give their preference to fire and think it ought to be ranked above all the other elements.Iulius Firmicus Maternus was a Latin writer who lived in the fourth centurya.d. In the 340s, following his conversion to Christianity, he wrote theDe errore profanarum religionum, which has been preserved (...) only in the tenth-century manuscript Vaticanus Palatinus Latinus 165. In this work he argues against the pagan cults, calling for the emperors to suppress them. The first sections are dedicated to the pagan worship of the natural elements: objects of a cult are water among the Egyptians, earth among the Phrygians, air among the Assyrians. The chapter we are dealing with, the fifth, is dedicated to fire, a central element of the Zoroastrian religion. Greek and Roman writers, pagans and Christians alike, were aware of this, and references to some sort of fire-cult among Persians are numerous in literature and are found as early as Herodotus. Just like Firmicus Maternus, some authors also state that the Magi worship fire as a god or divine element and that they conduct fire-related rituals. In Greek and Latin authors there is a view that the Magi, these specialists of the rituals of the Persian religion, were originally a Median tribe. As shown by the passages of Ammianus and Basil, such knowledge was also available to Firmicus Maternus’ contemporaries, and there do not appear to be particular differences in the way in which Greek and Latin authors viewed the Magi in Achaemenid and Sassanid times. Regrettably, one cannot know for certain which of these sources Firmicus Maternus knew. (shrink)

At Georgics 2.303-14, a devastating fire rages through an olive grove with tragic consequences. The poet's description of the fire emphasizes that a major aspect oflabor, one of the poem's crucial themes, is the accuracy with which his precepts are carried out; the fire makes it clear that human error often lies at the root of human failure. This reading can shed light on current debates surrounding the overall tenor of the poem, which allows for the possibility (...) of both failure and success and, at least here, puts the choice between the two squarely in human hands. (shrink)

An important element in the ritual corpus of Shingon Buddhism, a tantric tradition in Japan, is the homa. This is a votive ritual in which offerings are made into a fire, and has roots that trace to the Vedic ritual tradition. One of the five ritual functions that the homa can fulfill is destruction, abhicāra. A destructive ritual with Yamāntaka as the chief deity is one such ritual in the contemporary Shingon ritual corpus. Consideration of this ritual provides entrée (...) into the history of destructive practices, including violent subjugation, that date from very early in the Buddhist tradition. Exploration of this theme is offered as a balancing corrective to the modern representation of Buddhism as an exception to the violent character of other religions. However, despite the history of destructive ritual practices, the contemporary homa examined in the latter part of the essay shows very few of the characteristics found historically. This indicates an ambiguity in the tradition between a historical understanding of such rituals as literally destructive of one’s enemies, and the contemporary understanding that the enemies to be destroyed are simply personifications of one’s own obscurations. (shrink)

It's nearly 10:00 AM on a Thursday morning and the courtroom is filled with more than 100 members of the jury pool. Court officials, state police officers, and defendants line the halls waiting to be called for pre-trial conferences and for jury selection to begin, then the fire alarm sounds. There is no obvious evidence of fire, no smoke, no shouts, and no other warnings. At the same time, no one announces that there is a fire drill (...) in progress, that the alarm is merely being tested, or that the alarm was pulled by accident. Sitting in the court room, what would you do? And, more importantly, why would you do it? What goes through your head when you hear the alarm? (shrink)

The French Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote provocatively about world civilization from his dual expertise as paleontologist and Catholic priest. This paper will extract from his many writings references to civilizational process in terms of his concept of the noosphere, that is, the transhuman accumulation of knowledge. Basing himself on the notion of a geogenetic process that he described in his important publication, Le Phenomenene Humain (1955), de Chardin considered the evolution of humankind to involve not merely the change (...) of individual members of the species, but in the development of the capacity to shape the earth and its forces by the invention of technology. He foresaw the human creation of a new level of understanding (some would say this is the cyberspace of the Internet) that would be the achievement of a unifying human civilization. The impulse to contribute to and benefit from this wealth of shared knowledge constituted for the Jesuit a quasi-magnetic force that brought together disparate human experiences. Borne in part by his religious faith, de Chardin described in a second masterpiece, Le Milieu Divin (1957) this unifying force as “love”. When a new world civilization learned to harness this kind of love in common purpose, said de Chardin, “for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire”. Possibly because of his religiously tinted language and mystical orientation, Teilhard has not always been viewed a contributor to the field. This paper will offer suggestions for ways to incorporate the French Jesuit among the sources for civilizational analysis. (shrink)

Aristotle described the earth as a cold and dry body and paid no attention to the phenomenon of terrestrial heat. Renaissance physicians, by contrast, when seeking to understand the origin of hot springs in the context of their balneological studies, came to defend a theory of subterranean fires. This tradition, which started in Italy, became widely known through the works of Georgius Agricola. But although it had implications for the explanation of further natural phenomena, it remained almost exclusively confined to (...) medical circles. As far as physics as an academic discipline was concerned, the ideas concerning subterranean fire were hardly taken note of. Only with the collapse of Aristotelian philosophy in the seventeenth century could these by then "old innovations" obtain a wider significance. (shrink)

In L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy story The Incomplete Enchanter (which set the mold for the many imitations that followed), the hero, Harold Shea, is transported from our own universe into the universe of Norse mythology. This world is based on magic rather than technology; so naturally, when Our Hero tries to light a fire with a match brought along from Earth, the match fails to strike.

In locating friendly fire in contemporary philosophy of religion, D.Z. Phillips shows that more harm can be done to religion by its philosophical defenders than by its philosophical despisers. Friendly fire is the result of an uncritical acceptance of empiricism, and Phillips argues that we need to examine critically the claims that individual consciousness is the necessary starting point from which we have to argue: for the existence of an external world and the reality of God; that God (...) is a person without a body, a pure consciousness; and that to assent to a religious belief is essentially to assign a truth value to a proposition independent of any confessional context. When these products of friendly fire are avoided, we arrive at a new understanding of belief, trust and the soul, and refuse to say more or less than we know about the realities of human life in the service of religious apologetics. (shrink)

In Saving Animals From Fires, readers will meet the courageous workers who risk their lives to rush into houses, forests, and rivers to rescue animals from fire ...

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability. During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens (...) more opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities. (shrink)

The genetic basis for animal social organization is poorly understood. Fire ants provide one of the rare cases where variation in social organization has been demonstrated to be under genetic control, which amazingly, segregates as a single Mendelian locus. A recent genetic, genomic, and cytological analysis revealed that this locus actually consists of over 600 genes locked together in a supergene that possesses many characteristics of sex chromosomes. The fire ant social supergene also behaves selfishly, and an interesting (...) evolutionary question is whether the genes incorporated first into the social supergene were those for social adaptation, selfish genetic drive, or something else. In depth, functional molecular genetic analysis in fire ants and comparative genomics in other closely related socially polymorphic species will be required to resolve this question.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays Social supergenes of superorganisms: Do supergenes play important roles in social evolution? Abstract. (shrink)

Explores the evolution of life and consciousness according to the cosmology and psychology of fire, viewing fire not only as a material but also as a spiritual principle.