First published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A. F. Norman has recently suggested that a hitherto overlooked passage in Suidas is a fragment from the history of Eunapius of Sardis. He is clearly correct in referring the passage to an incident at the siege of Maiozamalcha during the Persian campaign of the emperor Julian, but I am not so sure that he is right in ascribing it to Eunapius, or in the conclusions he draws from this ascription. I give in parallel columns the accounts of Ammianus Marcellinus, (...) Zosimus, and the passage from Suidas, together with a further version of the incident, unfortunately without names, from the pen of Libanius. (shrink)

Every perceptual experience has an objective and a subjective side. We see object size, independent of distance, but we also see that distant objects project smaller images. Early modern conceptions focused on local stimulation and thus on the subjective aspect. Helmholtz and Hering emphasized the objective aspect. Helmholtz split visual experience into two stages, with sensation representing the subjective side and perception, through cognitive processes, the objective side. Gestalt theory denied this dualism, rejecting both sensory and cognitive stages. Despite contrary (...) evidence, the sensation/perception dualism persists, in brightness models and past experience theories. That we can detect visual angle and luminance does not mean that these are raw sensations out of which perception of size and lightness is built. Size and color constancy are truly visual, not cognitive. Instructions to subjects in vision experiments must avoid the proximal mode on the one hand and cognitive judgments on the other. (shrink)

From Wodehouse to the White House: A Corpus-Assisted Study of Play, Fantasy and Dramatic Incongruity in Comic Writing and Laughter-Talk In this paper I consider two discourse types, one written and literary, the other spoken and semi-conversational, in an attempt to discover if there are any similarities in the ways in which humour is generated in such apparently diverse forms of communication. The first part of the paper is concerned with the explicitly comic prose of P. G. Wodehouse, whilst in (...) the second part of the paper, we investigate the laughter-talk, defined as the talk preceding and provoking, intentionally or otherwise, an episode of laughter, occurring during press briefings held at the White House during the Clinton era and the subsequent Bush administration. Both studies, by employing corpus analysis techniques together with detailed discourse reading, integrate quantitative and qualitative approaches to the respective data sets. (shrink)

The author emphasizes Moore's contributions to philosophy and discusses his appeals to common sense and to ordinary language and his concept of the theory of meaning. This is followed by a close examination of the method of analysis. The application of the method is then illustrated in chapters on Moore's ethics and on his views on visual perception.

Explores the extraordinary states of expanded consciousness that arise during comas, both positive and negative.

For several decades, a debate has been waged over how to interpret the significance of fossils from the Burgess Shale and Cambrian Explosion. Stephen Jay Gould argued that if the “tape of life” was rerun, then the resulting lineages would differ radically from what we find today, implying that humans are a happy accident of evolution. Simon Conway Morris argued that if the “tape of life” was rerun, the resulting lineages would be similar to what we now observe, implying that (...) intelligence would still emerge from an evolutionary process. Recent methodological innovations in paleontological practice call into question both positions and suggest that global claims about the history of life, whether in terms of essential contingency or predictable convergence, are unwarranted. (shrink)

(1981). From individuality to character: The Herbartian sociology applied to education. British Journal of Educational Studies: Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 69-79.

(1986). Reason and Nuclear Deterrence. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 16, Supplementary Volume 12: Nuclear Weapons, Deterrence and Disarmament, pp. 129-159.

It is widely accepted that stressful conditions can facilitate evolutionary change. The mechanisms elucidated thus far accomplish this with a generic increase in heritable variation that facilitates more rapid adaptive evolution, often via plastic modifications of existing characters. Through scrutiny of different meanings of stress in biological research, and an explicit recognition that stressors must be characterized relative to their effect on capacities for maintaining functional integrity, we distinguish between: (1) previously identified stress-responsive mechanisms that facilitate evolution by maintaining an (...) adaptive fit with the environment, and (2) the co-option of stress-responsive mechanisms that are specific to stressors leading to the origin of novelties via compensation. Unlike standard accounts of gene co-option that identify component sources of evolutionary change, our model documents the cost-benefit trade-offs and thereby explains how one mechanism—an immediate response to acute stress—is transformed evolutionarily into another—routine protection from recurring stressors. We illustrate our argument with examples from cell type origination as well as processes and structures at higher levels of organization. These examples suggest a general principle of evolutionary origination based on the capacity to switch between regulatory states related to reproduction and proliferation versus survival and differentiation. (shrink)

On the standard interpretation Rudolf Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Welt amounts to a highly derivative work-a rigorous thinking through of Russell's External World program. An examination of the aims and methods of logical analysis reveals significant differences between the epistemologies of Russell and Carnap, however. It is argued that Russell's reliance on acquaintance makes logical analysis subservient to empiricist epistemic concerns while Carnap is determined to carry out a broadly Kantian program of guaranteeing the objectivity of science through the (...) application of formal logic. (shrink)

In _Brill's Companion to the German Platonism_, an international team of scholars traces the interpretation and appropriation of Plato among German thinkers and writers from Nicholas of Cusa to Peter Sloterdijk, with special emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception.