We have identified a sample of 53 societies outside of the classical Himalayan and Marquesean area that permit polyandrous unions. Our goal is to broadly describe the demographic, social, marital, and economic characteristics of these societies and to evaluate some hypotheses of the causes of polyandry. We demonstrate that although polyandry is rare it is not as rare as commonly believed, is found worldwide, and is most common in egalitarian societies. We also argue that polyandry likely existed during early human (...) history and should be examined from an evolutionary perspective. Our analysis reveals that it may be a predictable response to a high operational sex ratio favoring males and may also be a response to high rates of male mortality and, possibly, male absenteeism. Other factors may contribute, but our within-polyandry sample limits analysis. (shrink)

The Shodagor of Matlab, Bangladesh, are a seminomadic community of people who live and work on small wooden boats, within the extensive system of rivers and canals that traverse the country. This unique ecology places particular constraints on family and economic life and leads to Shodagor parents employing one of four distinct strategies to balance childcare and provisioning needs. The purpose of this paper is to understand the conditions that lead a family to choose one strategy over another by testing (...) predictions about socioecological factors that impact the sexual division of labor, including a family’s stage in the domestic cycle, aspects of the local ecology, and the availability of alloparents. Results show that although each factor has an impact on the division of labor individually, a confluence of these factors best explains within-group, between-family differences in how mothers and fathers divide subsistence and childcare labor. These factors also interact in particular ways for Shodagor families, and it appears that families choose their economic strategies based on the constellation of constraints that they face. The results of these analyses have implications for theory regarding the sexual division of labor across cultures and inform how Shodagor family economic and parenting strategies should be contextualized in future studies. (shrink)

I argue that standard functionalism leads to absurd conclusions as to the number of minds that would exist in the universe if persons were duplicated. Rather than yielding the conclusion that making a molecule-by-molecule copy of a material person would result in two persons, it leads to the conclusion that three persons, or perhaps only one person, would result. This is absurd and standard functionalism should be abandoned. Social varieties of functionalism fare no better, though there is an Aristotelian variety (...) of functionalism that accepts irreducible finality that escapes this particular reductio. (shrink)

I argue that an examination of the analogy between the notion of a bug and that of a genetic defect supports an analogy not just between a computer program and DNA, but between a computer program designed by a programmer and DNA. This provides an analogical teleological argument for the existence of a highly intelligent designer.

This paper examines the effects of three different types of father absence on the timing of life history events among women in rural Bangladesh. Age at marriage and age at first birth are compared across women who experienced different father presence/absence conditions as children. Survival analyses show that daughters of fathers who divorced their mothers or deserted their families have consistently younger ages at marriage and first birth than other women. In contrast, daughters whose fathers were labor migrants have consistently (...) older ages at marriage and first birth. Daughters whose fathers died when they were children show older ages at marriage and first birth than women with divorced/deserted fathers and women with fathers present. These effects may be mediated by high socioeconomic status and high levels of parental investment among the children of labor migrants, and a combination of low investment, high psychosocial stress, and low alloparental investment among women with divorced/deserted fathers. Our findings are most consistent with the Child Development Theory model of female life history strategies, though the Paternal Investment and Psychosocial Acceleration models also help explain differences between women in low paternal investment situations (e.g., father divorced/abandoned vs. father dead). Father absence in and of itself seems to have little effect on the life history strategies of Bangladeshi women once key reasons for or correlates of absence are controlled, and none of the models is a good predictor of why women with deceased fathers have delayed life histories compared with women whose fathers are present. (shrink)

Independent of ecology, subsistence strategy, social complexity, or other aspects of socioecology, the altricial nature of young humans requires mothers to have help raising their offspring. What seems to be context-dependent, however, is who the helpers are, how they invest, and what the impacts of that investment are. In a series of papers that focus on parental and alloparental investment across five populations, this special issue of Human Nature uses evolutionary theory to examine how socioecological context influences modes of direct (...) parental investment among the boat-dwelling Shodagor of Bangladesh, modes of indirect paternal investment in the modern United States, and the biological outcome of paternal investment for men in Jamaica, as well as direct alloparental investment among village Bangladeshis and indirect alloparental investment in breastfeeding practices in the United States. (shrink)

Mill predicted that “[t]he Liberty is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written … because the conjunction of [Harriet Taylor’s] mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out in ever greater relief.” Indeed, _On Liberty_ is one of the most influential books ever written, and remains a foundational document for the understanding of vital political, philosophical and (...) social issues. In addition to its many useful appendices, this new edition includes a chronology, bibliography, and a substantial introduction which outlines Mill’s life and works, and sets this central work of 1859 in the context of both his own intellectual development and of the play of ideas and political forces in Victorian society. (shrink)

Banded geckos (Coleonyx variegatus) were trained, at the rate of five daily trials, on eight intradimensional spatial shifts to a criterion of 80% correct per reversal. In contrast to several previously reported failures to obtain reversal learning, Coleonyx demonstrated significant improvement on both errors and trials to criterion. Their reversal performance compares favorably with that of birds and mammals and a common index of reversal ability, the mean total error, did not differentiate between taxa.

This paper discusses two passages from Alexander of Aphrodisias’s commentary on Aristotle’s _ Topics _ that are transmitted in Ps-Jābir’s _ Kitāb al-Nukhab _. It argues that the Arabic translation of Alexander’s commentary may have been made from a fuller version than what came down to us in Greek. Especially since the author(s) of the Jābir-corpus form a tradition different from the school of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq (d. 873) and authors associated to the ‘Baghdad school’, whose earliest figure (...) is Abū Bishr Mattā b. Yūnus (d. 940), the Arabic fragments of Alexander’s commentary preserved in the _ Kitāb al-Nukhab _ promise to shed more light on the early reception of the _ Topics _ and the different contexts in which Aristotelian dialectic was studied in the Islamic world. (shrink)

R. W. Sharples provides a new edition, with introduction and commentary in English, of the Greek text. The Mantissa is a collection of short discussions, transmitted as a supplement to the treatise On the Soul by the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (c.200 AD).The collection includes discussion of a range of topics, among them the nature of soul and intellect, theories of how seeing takes place, issues in ethics, and the nature of fate. The text is based upon a (...) new collation of the principal manuscript, the ninth century Venetus Marcianus graecus 258, and the apparatus corrects Bruns' misreportings of the principal manuscript and of the others that he used. Account has also been taken of the medieval Arabic and Latin versions of some of the sections which circulated independently, notably On Intellect which had a substantial influence on medieval philosophy. The introduction is chiefly concerned with the manuscripts and the relation between them. The commentary is based on the notes to the editor's English translation of the work (London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); however, the commentary also takes into account more recent work on the collection by various scholars. (shrink)

Alexander Hamilton presents his early formative years, sharing the way his engagement with the cyanotype process has informed his art practice, from his time at Edinburgh College of Art, to his program of exhibitions and residencies, through to his work within the field of public arts. This personal history is combined with essays by academics, scholars and curators who engage with the intellectual roots of his work and practice. A comprehensive selection of Hamilton’s photography, including his unique plant-based cyanotypes, (...) completes this beautiful book. (shrink)

A. G. Baumgarten's foundation of aesthetics as a branch of philosophical reflection is itself deeply rooted in Leibnizian metaphysics. From this starting-point Baumgarten comes to a kind of monadological concept of the work of art, that gets now an inexhaustible and thruthrepresenting meaning. This truth of the work of art however cannot be recognized rationally, for it is impossible for human beings to be aware of a beautiful object's 'metaphysical truth', which can only be perceived by the senses as - (...) to quote Baumgarten - 'aesthetical truth'. Still it is possible, by rational and scientific hermeneutics, to transfer some aspects of aesthetical to logical truth. The interest in art is therefore at the same time an interest in the cognition of the metaphysical cosmic order, and Baumgarten's aesthetics similarly are the first foundation of philosophical hermeneutics of art. (shrink)

Ritual and Myth in the International Corona-Drama. A Conversation with Jeffrey Alexander.

Alexander Eliot, distinguished critic and art historian, breaks through to the silent world of masterpieces and makes them live anew in the eye of the imagination. Eliot plumbs the truths expressed by the greatest works of painting, sculpture and architecture. Eliot¿s style is crystalline, and his purpose plain: to bring art back to the center of our culture.

There is an underlying assumption in the social sciences that consciousness and social life are ultimately classical physical/material phenomena. In this ground-breaking book, Alexander Wendt challenges this assumption by proposing that consciousness is, in fact, a macroscopic quantum mechanical phenomenon. In the first half of the book, Wendt justifies the insertion of quantum theory into social scientific debates, introduces social scientists to quantum theory and the philosophical controversy about its interpretation, and then defends the quantum consciousness hypothesis against the (...) orthodox, classical approach to the mind-body problem. In the second half, he develops the implications of this metaphysical perspective for the nature of language and the agent-structure problem in social ontology. Wendt's argument is a revolutionary development which raises fundamental questions about the nature of social life and the work of those who study it. (shrink)

The article treated various concerns of Russian Marxists relating to the concept of personality. In fact, it was not the individual per se and the kindred conceptual constructs that shaped discussions inside Russian Social-Democracy. The individual, on the contrary, was seen as an alien concept, as a central idea of the opponents: the Narodniks, anarchists, Cadets, and liberals in general. The post-1907 Marxist writings demonstrated a significant shift of accent in their approaches to the category of individuality. This was the (...) result of polemics on the psychological particularities of the "reactionary" period (1907-1910). This profound and frequently concealed interest in the individual was typical, in general, of the new generation of Social-Democrats (Bogdanov, Bazarov, Lunacarskij) disillusioned with the classical positivism of the "fathers" and the dogmatic materialism of the "older comrades.". (shrink)

The "Supplement" transmitted as the second book of "On the Soul" by Alexander of Aphrodisias is a collection of short texts on a wide range of topics from psychology, including the general hylomorphic account of soul and its faculties, and the theory of vision; questions in ethics ; and issues relating to responsibility, chance and fate. One of the texts in the collection, "On Intellect", had a major influence on medieval Arabic and Western thought, greater than that of (...) class='Hi'>Alexander's "On the Soul" itself. The treatises may all be by Alexander himself; certainly the majority of them are closely connected with his other works. Many of them, however, consist of collections of arguments on particular issues, collections which probably incorporate material from earlier in the history of the Peripatetic school. This translation is from a new edition of the Greek text based on a collation of all known manuscripts and comparison with medieval Arabic and Latin translations. (shrink)

After the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists working in molecular biology embraced reductionism—the theory that all complex systems can be understood in terms of their components. Reductionism, however, has been widely resisted by both nonmolecular biologists and scientists working outside the field of biology. Many of these antireductionists, nevertheless, embrace the notion of physicalism—the idea that all biological processes are physical in nature. How, Alexander Rosenberg asks, can these self-proclaimed physicalists also be antireductionists? With clarity (...) and wit, Darwinian Reductionism navigates this difficult and seemingly intractable dualism with convincing analysis and timely evidence. In the spirit of the few distinguished biologists who accept reductionism—E. O. Wilson, Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins—Rosenberg provides a philosophically sophisticated defense of reductionism and applies it to molecular developmental biology and the theory of natural selection, ultimately proving that the physicalist must also be a reductionist. (shrink)

Alexander R. Pruss examines a large family of paradoxes to do with infinity - ranging from deterministic supertasks to infinite lotteries and decision theory. Having identified their common structure, Pruss considers at length how these paradoxes can be resolved by embracing causal finitism.

Some, notably Peter van Inwagen, in order to avoid problems with free will and omniscience, replace the condition that an omniscient being knows all true propositions with a version of the apparently weaker condition that an omniscient being knows all knowable true propositions. I shall show that the apparently weaker condition, when conjoined with uncontroversial claims and the logical closure of an omniscient being's knowledge, still yields the claim that an omniscient being knows all true propositions.

Das Bild vom glaubwürdigen Wissenschaftler? vom Universalgelehrten der Renaissance zu modernen Laborspezialist*innen - ist ein kulturelles Konstrukt, das die Ansprüche seiner Zeit widerspiegelt. Wie es entsteht, wird im Galvanismusdiskurs um 1800 deutlich.Dieser Band beschäftigt sich mit den Fragen: Wer gilt um 1800 als Naturwissenschaftler? Wie findet man als junger Forscher Aufnahme in die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft? Und worin manifestieren sich die wissenschaftskulturellen Unterschiede in Deutschland und Großbritannien zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts? Anhand der frühen Publikationen der jungen aufstrebenden Naturforscher Alexander (...) von Humboldt, Johann Wilhelm Ritter und Christian Heinrich Pfaff sowie ihrer britischen Kollegen untersucht der Autor die Konstruktion vom modernen Naturwissenschaftler durch die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft. (shrink)

In "The Philosophy of Living Experience," Alexander Bogdanov summarises his philosophy of empiriomonism, situates it in the history of materialist thought, explains the social genesis of each stage of that history, and anticipates his ultimate achievement universal organisational science.".