David Bowie’s swansong album Blackstar occupies a unique position in its proximity to the artist’s death: just two days. It thus provides an opportunity to examine how music, nostalgia, and mortali...

A motivational system approach to avoidance behavior is presented. According to this approach, a motivational state increases the probability of relevant response patterns and establishes the appropriate or “ideal” consummatory stimuli as positive reinforcers. In the case of feeding motivation, for example, hungry rats are likely to explore and gnaw, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with the reception of consummatory stimuli produced by ingestion of palatable substances. In the case of defense motivation, fearful rats are likely to (...) flee or freeze, and to learn to persist in activities correlated with consummatory stimuli produced by flight from a dangerous place. Defense system activation is distinct from alarm reactions. The latter prepare the animal for probable noxious events, involve relatively intense negative affect and extinguish rapidly in situations where the noxious event no longer occurs. In contrast, defense system activation potentiates innate and modified defense reactions, thus preparing the animal for possible, but not necessarily probable, noxious events; it involves little or no negative affect and extinguishes very slowly when the noxious event no longer occurs. With these assumptions and the resulting model we attempt to resolve several long-standing problems in avoidance learning, including the low correlation between negative affect and avoidance performance, differential rates of extinction for avoidance performance and conditioned emotional responses, and evidence that some avoidance responses are much more easily learned than others. In addition, the model has implications for the study of parallels between appetitive and aversive motivation, sign tracking in aversive conditioning, and orientation of flight responses. Historical antecedents and alternative approaches are discussed. (shrink)

The article considers a particular case of Richard Kearney's characteristic hermeneutical exploration of `the possible' as an `imaginative' way of casting light upon philosophical issues. This particular case is his recent hermeneutical and phenomenological consideration of `Otherness' in the context of philosophy of religion. This consideration, strongly influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Levinas, Ricoeur and Derrida, is developed in two of his recent works Strangers, Gods and Monsters and The God Who May Be . The article examines how he (...) seeks to navigate an interpretation of divine otherness as an ethical appeal which escapes the dilemma of a God either so transcendent as to be anonymous or so immanent as to be a mere projection. It outlines how, rejecting onto-theology in favour of eschatology, Kearney envisages the divine as an ethically enabling possibility. This possibility, he claims, enables us to achieve, beyond our own intrinsic resources, an ethical order of justice and love through which the kingdom of God — the God Who May Be — is accomplished. There is a co-relativity between the divine as enabling possibility and humanity which accomplishes this possibility. It investigates the way in which Kearney seeks to legitimize, within a phenomenological frame of reference, an experiential affirmation of this conception of divine transcendence as eschatological possibility. It argues that this phenomenological consideration needs to be qualified and complemented by certain metaphysical considerations which Kearney disputes. Key Words: eschatology • ethics • God • hermeneutics • metaphysics • Otherness • phenomenology • possibility. (shrink)

This article seeks to show the effect that Vitruvius’ probable social status had on the contents of the De Architectura. The education proposed for the architect, the receipt of a wage, and pleasure all shape the treatise in significant ways. The article supplements these discussions with a close reading of a section of the De Architectura hitherto neglected in the secondary literature: the cameo appearance of Aristippus in the preface to Book 6. Vitruvius arguably uses the figure of Aristippus, the (...) pleasure-loving philosopher whom Vitruvius offers to the reader as a stand-in for the architect, to focus and negotiate further the issues of status, pay, and pleasure. (shrink)

In his 2016 book, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion, Paul Bloom argues that “if we want to be good caring people, if we want to make the world a better place, then we are better off without empathy.” I’ve specifically chosen this formulation of Bloom’s position because it gets at the issue I will most directly challenge him on - that we would, or even could, be better off without empathy. The position I will defend is that our (...) empathy plays an indispensable role in the development of our moral conscience, and an ongoing role in the cultivation of our moral concepts, that would be compromised by suppressing our empathy. On this understanding, I argue that we would generally be better served by cultivating our empathy to mitigate and overcome its shortcomings, rather than suppressing our empathy as Bloom recommends. (shrink)

THE thought of G W F Hegel, undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of all time, is by any standard exceptionally difficult. The great variety of interpretations which it has inspired is evidence of its inherent complexity and perhaps even ambiguity. It has frequently been impatiently dismissed as distorting the rich texture of lived reality into a phantom maze of obscure metaphysical tensions. The view is widespread that it is a barren system of abstract thought whose relationship to concrete reality (...) is quite remote and artificial. (shrink)

In examining the question "what, in the final analysis, is the ultimate meaning and value of being in general and of human existence in particular?" the author considers 3 main approaches--humanism, scientism, and theism--arguing that he personally finds theism most convincing.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil WarMark MastersonCharles McNelis. Statius’ Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. x + 203 pp. Cloth, $90.In this well-focused study, Charles McNelis gives what is due both to the poetics of Statius’ epic and to what John Henderson has called its “political intelligence” (PCPS 37 [1991]: 52). Regarding the poem as a product of its time (...) both in terms of poetics and politics, McNelis shows that Statius uses the considerable arsenal of the Latin poets’ ability to be intertextual to create a work that addresses [End Page 436] the particular situation of post–civil wars Flavian Rome. McNelis finds that Statius proposes that the epic teleology of the Golden Age’s reestablishment under Augustus that Virgil presents (albeit with some ambiguity) “has been thwarted and/or challenged, thus suggesting the fragile nature of any claim—even claims that define a society—to have brought an end to civil war” (177). Instead, Statius suggests that while it is possible for a particular civil conflict to come to an end, the results of it are ever with us and, further, that resolution comes in the form of clementia which is available to all on an individual basis from an entity that takes no blood sacrifice and is aniconic (163; Theb. 12.487–88, 493–94). A multifaceted challenge to the Virgilian/Augustan narrative of communal imperium sine fine guaranteed by Jove is manifest here.In order to make the case that Augustan/Virgilian teleology does not fit Flavian Rome, Statius’ particular strategy is a resort to Callimachus whose criticism of the epic genre had already made frequent appearances in Latin poetry. McNelis sees Statius restaging over the course of the epic the conflict that Callimachus (in Aetia 1 and elsewhere) presents between finely worked poetry and overdone epic. This conflict then reflects the presence of civil war in the literary-generic contouring of the poem. The presence of this conflict also ensures, in McNelis’ estimation, that the Thebaid is most emphatically not the “one continuous song” (Aetia 1.1.3: ) that Callimachus presents as the undesirable goal of epic composition and instead “replicate[s]” civil war “in the very fibres of the poem” (1).After the introduction, McNelis presents in the first chapter (“Gods, Humans and the Literary Tradition”) a discussion of Thebaid 1 with special attention paid to the story of Coroebus and the particularly malevolent Apollo therein. McNelis underscores in this story (significantly an aetion) the essentially hostile nature of the gods in the poem and the blending of them with chthonic forces, exemplified by Apollo’s killing of Python and his revenge, via a baby-eating monster, for the death of a baby born to a young woman he had raped. This story promises—and it is a promise that the epic delivers—that humans can hardly expect a settled existence with Jove as beneficent ruler.The second chapter (“Beginning”) foregrounds discussion of the necklace made by Vulcan, the Cyclopes, and the Telchines for Harmonia. McNelis sees in the necklace a product from the god of the forge’s workshop that comments on this epic in as serious a manner as the shields of Achilles and Aeneas comment on their respective epics. It is here that McNelis makes a key connection to the Aetia, for it is the Telchines whom Callimachus takes to task at 1.1.1. While at times he overstates the power of the necklace to cause things to happen (e.g., 51), McNelis is right to emphasize its significance. The necklace promises communal dissolution from the hands of the gods just as surely as the shield of Aeneas promises reintegration, likewise overseen by divine forces. Too, it is fitting that the poet of the Silvae would focus on a luxurious item such as this.In the third chapter (“Nemea”), McNelis sees the Callimachean aspects of the plot derail the warlike plan of Vulcan and the Telchines in the famous [End Page 437] digression at Nemea. McNelis draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the great body of water that is epic has been reduced to but... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.3 (2003) 477-481 [Access article in PDF] Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, eds. The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. viii + 457 pp. Paper, $26. The Sleep of Reason derives from a conference held at the Finnish Institute at Rome in 1997. In their introduction to the volume, the editors, (...) Martha Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, note that the incommensurability between sexual behavior/desire and reason was a perennial concern to ancient philosophers and that the modern discipline of philosophy has avoided this topic because of skittishness about "emotional topics" (3) and a pronounced tendency to consider ancient philosophy in a decontextualized manner. The editors accordingly have assembled a mixture of papers on ancient philosophy and other aspects of ancient culture to bring philosophical rigor and context to discussions of ancient sexual ethics. With only a third of the papers specifically about philosophy, however, the volume is more "context" than philosophy. Of greater concern, however, is their claim that the book covers both Greece and Rome. With the exception of Cantarella's discussion of Roman marriage law, Konstan's of Catullus, and Goldhill's few pages on Tertullian, substantive discussion of Latin sources is lacking. The book treats classical Greece in some detail and then skips through Greek sources to the Second Sophistic. Indeed, the failure to engage imperial Rome substantively leaves Goldhill's essay damagingly decontextualized. The editors' tendentious sketch of modern scholarship on ancient sexual behavior (7-8), which overlooks important contributions of Eva Keuls and Amy Richlin, is likewise regrettable.In the first paper, "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," David Halperin prescribes a proper way to investigate ancient sexual activity. Beginning with a discussion of Michel Foucault's famous statement on the progress from sodomy ("a category of forbidden acts") to the homosexual ("a life form... a species"), Halperin persuasively argues that Foucault's statement has been misunderstood as social history when it is better regarded "as a claim about the internal logic and systematic functioning of two different discursive styles of sexual disqualification" (28). Elsewhere, however, Halperin's disciplining zeal is wearisome. Opposing the terms deviant sexual morphology and deviant sexual subjectivity (the former deviance in gender presentation and the latter identity based on sexual activity), Halperin predictably asserts that the cinaedus possessed a deviant sexual morphology whose non-normative sexual behavior sprang from innate effeminacy. According to ideology recoverable from the sources, this is correct. Consideration of the cinaedus latens (from Firmicus [End Page 477] Maternus; see below), to take an example, brings up a question: what are we to make of this cinaedus if "the kinaidos's betrayal of his masculine gender identity was so spectacular as to brand him a deviant type of person and to inscribe his deviant identity all over his face and body" (34)? Caution is called for here; discourse surely produces less schematic results (see, e.g., Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 [1978], 96, or Judith Butler, GenderTrouble [1990], 28).In "Eros and Ethical Norms: Philosophers Respond to a Cultural Dilemma," Nussbaum surveys different approaches to the uneasy coexistence of sexual desire and education in pederastic relationships: if Eros is about loss of control in the face of desire, will the ero \ menos be cared for properly or merely be the means for desire's satisfaction? Nussbaum compares Socrates' explication of a "generous madness," wherein reverence and gratitude inspire kindly care, to the Stoics' valuation of friendship undertaken with consummate self-control. Nussbaum's work here has considerable value in its explication of the Stoic position and in her conclusion on the usefulness of analysis of ancient philosophic responses to ero \ s in current debates about sexuality (86-87).The next two papers, Maarit Kaimio's "Erotic Experience in the Conjugal Bed: Good Wives in Greek Tragedy" and Stephen Halliwell's "Aristophanic Sex: The Erotics of Shamelessness," take us to the Athenian stage. Starting from the observation that words for "bed"... (shrink)

Strong evidence shows that exposure and engagement with the natural world not only improve human wellbeing but can also help promote environmentally friendly behaviors. Human-nature relationships are at the heart of global agendas promoted by international organizations including the World Health Organization’s “One Health” and the United Nations “Ocean Decade.” These agendas demand collaborative multisector interdisciplinary efforts at local, national, and global levels. However, while global agendas highlight global goals for a sustainable world, developing science that directly addresses these agendas (...) from design through to delivery and outputs does not come without its challenges. In this article, we present the outcomes of international meetings between researchers, stakeholders, and policymakers from the United Kingdom and Brazil. We propose a model for interdisciplinary work under such global agendas, particularly the interface between One Health and the UN Ocean Decade and identify three priority research areas closely linked to each other: human-nature connection, conservation-human behavior, and implementation strategies. We also discuss a number of recommendations for moving forward. (shrink)

To reconstruct the philosophy of St Thomas must we include, as an integral part of the system, his teaching concerning the heavenly bodies? One would hardly think so were we to judge by the attention devoted to this theme in classic expositions of Thomism such as those of Gilson and Sertillanges. However, in this study, Dr Litt argues that an historical examination of the writings of St Thomas clearly establishes that his references to the heavenly bodies are not merely incidental (...) and by way of example. In many important respects they are proposed by St Thomas as genuinely metaphysical assertions fulfilling an important and positive role in the elaboration of his philosophy. (shrink)

Wider possibilities for moral thought -- Objectivity revisited: a lesson from the work of J.L. Austin -- Ethics, inheriting from Wittgenstein -- Moral thought beyond moral judgment: the case of literature -- Reclaiming moral judgment: the case of feminist thought -- Moralism as a central moral problem.