We present behavioral lateralizations of spiders and ants and their probable survival value. They clearly conform to the vertebrate lateralizations reviewed by Vallortigara & Rogers and to earlier arthropod studies. We suggest two complementary reviews: differences in lesion susceptibility and muscle strength between left and right body side, and perceptual biases and predator inspection in invertebrates.

Are we able to make objective moral judgments? This perennial philosophical topic needs often to be revisited because it is central to human life. Judging how people conduct themselves, the institutions they devise, whether, in short, they are doing what's right or what's wrong, is ubiquitous. In this essay I defend the objectivity of ethical judgments by deploying a neo-Aristotelian naturalism by which to keep the “is-ought” gap at bay and place morality on an objective footing. I do this with (...) the aid of the ideas of Ayn Rand as well as, but only by implication and association, those of Martha Nussbaum and Philippa Foot. (shrink)

I address the problem of caring for our body-mind through neuropragmatism, cybernetics, and Larry Hickman’s work on John Dewey and the philosophy of technology. The problems of body-mind health are related to Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis. I address this crisis by drawing on Jay Schulkin’s conception of viability as the creative tension between stability and precarity. From this, I extend body-mind health to questions of democracy, leading to the proposal of body-mind-world as an elaboration of neuropragmatism’s evolutionary and ecological (...) conception of experience as Œ and Hickman’s distinction between the merely valued nature-as-nature and the valuable nature-as-culture. I conclude with a reimagination of creative democracy as a moral ideal for dealing with the care crisis. (shrink)

Studies in Stoicism contains six unpublished and seven republished essays, the latter incorporating additions and changes which Brunt wished to be made. The papers have been integrated and arranged in chronological order by subject matter, with an accessible lecture to the Oxford Philological Society serving as Brunt's own introduction.

In this book Tibor R. Machan analyses the state of the debate on libertarianism post Nozick. Going far beyond the often cursory treatment of libertarianism in major books and other publications he examines closely the alternative non-Nozickian defences of libertarianism that have been advanced and, by applying these arguments to innumerable policy areas in the field, Machan achieves a new visibility and prominence for libertarianism.

Dio-Xiphilinus, Herodian, and the Historia Augusta give three apparently contradictory accounts of the circumstances in which Commodus' all-powerful praetorian prefect, Sex. Tigidius Perennis, was overthrown in A.D. 185. My purpose here is not to try to decide between them, but primarily to correct what I think a patent misinterpretation, now current, of a crucial statement in that given by Xiphilinus in his epitome of Dio.

In pathological conditions associated with persistent increases in hemodynamic workload (old myocardial infarction, high blood pressure, valvular heart disease), a number of signalling pathways are activated in the heart, all of which promote hypertrophic growth of the heart, characterised at the cellular level by increases in individual cardiac myocyte size. Some of these pathways are required for a successful adaptation to cardiac injury. Other pathways are maladaptive, however, as they lead to progressive contractile dysfunction and heart failure. The free radical (...) gas nitric oxide and natriuretic peptides, both of which are produced in the heart, have emerged as endogenous inhibitors of maladaptive hypertrophy signalling. Overall, it appears that cardiac hypertrophy is controlled by an interplay of pro‐ and antihypertrophic signalling networks. This delicate balance can tip towards adaptation or heart failure. In the future, patients living with cardiac disease may benefit from therapeutic strategies targeting maladaptive hypertrophy signalling pathways. BioEssays 26:608–615, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Classical Iiberalism has at least two distinct strains. Its natural rights version requires extensive use of moral concepts. Some denigrate this tradition on grounds that it has been made obsolete by empiricist epistemology and materialist metaphysics. Since that tradition requires knowledge of moral truth and since empiricism precludes this, the tradition is hopeless. Since it also requires a teleological explanation of human action, and since mechanism precludes this, the hopelessness of the tradition is compounded. I argue that neither the empiricist (...) nor the mechanistic view may be taken for granted - indeed, if anything, they are obsolete, and the road is open to a philosophy which makes the natural rights tradition even more credible than it was when developed by John Locke. (shrink)

S’il n’existe qu’un seul problème intellectuel et culturel vraiment sérieux concernant le capitalisme, c’est celui du manque d’une défense morale soutenue et largement connue, pour ne pas dire acceptée, de l’institution des droits de propriété privée.Il n’y a pas de doute, dans le monde actuel, qu’une société dotée d’une infrastructure légale où cette institution fait défaut connaisse un grave désordre économique. Le fait de ne pas respecter et protéger légalement l’institution de la propriété privée — et ses corollaires, comme la (...) liberté de contracter et de poser les termes par les parties en affaire — a provoqué les faiblesses économiques à travers le monde.Sans une défense morale, l’institution de la propriété privée, qui est la source de beaucoup d’ avantages pour nous tous, restera pour toujours vulnérable aux critiques, du style de celle de Karl Marx qui disait que “le droit de l’homme à la propriété est le droit de jouir de ses possessions et d’en disposer arbitrairement, sans souci des autres hommes, indépendamment de la société, le droit de l’égoïsme”.Cet essai proclame que contrairement aux sentiments et impressions répandus, l’institution des droits de propriété privée est en accord avec la conception pratique de la moralité humaine.If there is one really serious intellectual and cultural problem with capitalism it stems from the lack of a sustained and widely known, let alone accepted, moral defense of the institution of private property rights.Few doubt, in today’s world, that a society with a legal infrastructure that lacks this institution is in serious economic trouble. The failure to respect and legally protect the institution of private property — and its corollaries, such as freedom of contract and of setting the terms by the parties to trade — has produced economic weakness across the globe.Without a moral defense, however, the institution of private property, which is the source of a great many benefits to us all, will forever remain vulnerable to the critics, such as Karl Marx who said that “the right of man to property is the right to enjoy his possessions and dispose of the same arbitrarily, without regard for other men, independently from society, the right of selfishness.”This essay argues that contrary to such widespread sentiments and impressions, the institution of private property rights fully accords with a sensible conception of human morality. (shrink)

Roy Scranton argues for a new philosophical humanism as the best response to the existential crisis of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch for which human industrial activity is responsible. This threat from climate change, Scranton argues, is better met through what he calls photohumanism than by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) alone. This new humanism shares many affinities with pluralistic humanism. A key concern is political action, which is problematized by what Tschaepe calls dopamine democracy. Scranton shares this (...) concern, but his approach puts too great an emphasis on binaries, such as culture and nature, mind and body, and life and death. I offer the philosophical method of reconstruction, as situated within pluralistic humanism and the philosophy of John Dewey. In introducing the need for reconstruction as a method for doing philosophy in a new but ancient sense of learning to die, I reconstruct photohumanism and offer the Deweyan ideal of democracy for overcoming the problem of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This highly readable theory of life and its origins offers a non-technical discussion of a chemical perspective on the fundamental organisation of living systems. Essays on the biological and philosophical significance of Ganti's work of thirty years indicate not only its enduring theoretical significance, but also the continuing relevance and heuristic power of Ganti's insights.

The philosophical problem of pictorial conversational implicatures can be summarized as follows: We have three propositions that are independently plausible and jointly inconsistent. -/- (Non-P) Anti-propositionalism: pictures do not have context-independent, conventionally encoded propositional content (propositional function). -/- (C) Only those representations can be used to convey conversational implicatures which have associated with them a context-independent, conventionally encoded propositional content (function). -/- (I) Pictures can be used to convey conversational implicatures. -/- There are three ways of responding to the problem: (...) affirm (Non-P) and (C) while denying (I); affirm (C) and (I) while denying (Non-P); or affirm (Non-P) and (I) while denying (C). (shrink)

We articulate a conception of resilience via allostasis and the free energy principle to augment Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s conception of antifragility. Creative resilience is resilience 3.0, after robustness (1.0) and antifragility (2.0), because creative resilience is the deliberate effort to construct ecological niches toward a more caring and thus more viable world for more people – what Dewey proffered as the moral ideal of creative democracy. Viability is understood as the healthy tension between stability and precarity. Viability is related to (...) regulatory mechanisms of homeostasis and allostasis. Along with discussion of the free energy principle, we situate these processes of the internal milieu within the external milieu. Ecological niche construction and ecological psychological affordances are related to human practices as means of generating culture. Culture is both a product and producer of the process of valuation, which originates in evolution but is further developed by the free energy principle and social allostasis. The collective languishing exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic can be ameliorated through creative resilience so conceived as social allostasis writ large. (shrink)

Recent work in neurophilosophy has either made reference to the work of John Dewey or independently developed positions similar to it. I review these developments in order first to show that Dewey was indeed doing neurophilosophy well before the Churchlands and others, thereby preceding many other mid-twentieth century European philosophers’ views on cognition to whom many present day philosophers refer (e.g., Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). I also show that Dewey’s work provides useful tools for evading or overcoming many issues in contemporary neurophilosophy (...) and philosophy of mind. In this introductory review, I distinguish between three waves among neurophilosophers that revolve around the import of evolution and the degree of brain-centrism. Throughout, I emphasize and elaborate upon Dewey’s dynamic view of mind and consciousness. I conclude by introducing the consciousness-as-cooking metaphor as an alternative to both the consciousness-as-digestion and consciousness-as-dancing metaphors. Neurophilosophical pragmatism—or neuropragmatism—recognizes the import of evolutionary and cognitive neurobiology for developing a science of mind and consciousness. However, as the cooking metaphor illustrates, a science of mind and consciousness cannot rely on the brain alone—just as explaining cooking entails more than understanding the gut—and therefore must establish continuity with cultural activities and their respective fields of inquiry. Neuropragmatism advances a new and promising perspective on how to reconcile the scientific and manifest images of humanity as well as how to reconstruct the relationship between science and the humanities. (shrink)

We investigate properties of accessible categories with directed colimits and their relationship with categories arising from ShelahʼsElementary Classes. We also investigate ranks of objects in accessible categories, and the effect of accessible functors on ranks.

To the modern student of fourth-century Greece nothing at first sight seems so surprising as the almost kaleidoscopic changes in relations between Greek cities, especially in the fourth century. Mortal enemies become allies suddenly, and alliances, though made for all time, are rapidly dissolved. In his old age Sophocles had summed up the harsh experience of a lifetime in words that might serve as an epigraph for the mutability of Greek ‘international’ politics.

Discussions of the constitution of the Principate are usually focused on the powers of the emperor, and relatively little attention is given to the role of the senate; by exception much has been written on its jurisdiction, with which I shall not be concerned. Despite his theory of a dyarchy of emperor and senate, which I do not wish to revive, Mommsen, partly because he devoted separate volumes to each, did I not exhibit the extent to which Augustus and Tiberius (...) at least worked through the senate, and on occasions attributed to them legal powers to act by their own authority, when in reality they caused the senate to take action as the only proper means of effecting their wishes. More recently, F. de Martino in his admirable account of the Principate dedicates only one out of twenty-seven chapters to the composition, functions and procedure of the senate. For Syme it was simply an ‘organ that advertised or confirmed the decisions of the government’. This description does not bring out the truth that it was performing a role essential to Augustus' design. For though in effect he founded a monarchy, he commonly thought it expedient on necessary obtain for his measures senatorial approval. That this was the practice of Tiberius in his early years is clearly attested, and some suppose that he behaved in an entirely different manner from Augustus. This view seems to be mistaken, and the mistake is of some consequence. (shrink)

Some consequences of direct realism and William James’s philosophy of mind are considered in terms of American naturalism as seen in the debate between John Dewey and Roy Wood Sellars. Sellars’s critical realism and evolutionary naturalism is compared and contrasted with Dewey’s pragmatic realism and emphatically evolutionary naturalism. Though these naturalisms are similar, there are significant differences between methodology, their critiques of James’s reflex arc concept in his Principles of Psychology, and the mind-body problem. Sellars’s critical realism and naturalism retains (...) a priori commitments to fixed categories and concepts, whereas Dewey’s emphatically evolutionary pragmatic naturalism is empirical and sees continuities where Sellars insists on discontinuities. One significant difference is Sellars’s maintaining a place for introspection as methodologically appropriate and Dewey’s’ rejection of it. These differences are illustrated through Sellars’s modification of the reflex arc to include an organic but interpretative step, and Dewey’s radical criticism of approaches like James’s and Sellars’s as recapitulating the Cartesian dualism that such views intended to overcome. These differences are finally contrasted in Sellars’s maintaining a privacy of mind by constraining it to the brain in a dual-aspect theory, while Dewey advocates mind as sociocultural, expanding mind into body and world. (shrink)

In Classical Individualism , Tibor R. Machan argues that individualism is far from being dead. Machan identifies, develops and defends what he calls classical individualism - an individualism humanised by classical philosophy, rooted in Aristotle rather than Hobbes. This book does not reject the social nature of human beings, but finds that every one has a self-directed agent who is responsible for what he or she does. Machan rejects all types of collectivism, including communitarianism, ethnic solidarity, racial unity, and (...) gender identity. The ideas expressed here have important social and political implications, and will be of interest to anyone concerned with the notion of individuality and individual responsibility. (shrink)

Neuropragmatism offers a non-dualistic conception of experience from which scientific inquiries can provide resources for sociocultural critique. This reconstructive effort addresses what Emma Dowling calls the care crisis without succumbing to what Mike W. Martin calls therapeutic tyranny. This tyranny relies on problematic dualisms, between mind/body, mind/world, and fact/value, that are also found in neuropsychoanalysis. While pragmatism and psychoanalysis more generally share an evolutionary perspective and can overlap in therapeutic approaches, neuropsychoanalysis diverges from this effort in its dual-aspect monism and (...) positivistic conception of science. Where neuropsychoanalysis seeks to reconcile the first-person subjectivity of lived experience with the third-person objectivity of science, neuropragmatism offers reconstruction. In taking the neuropragmatic turn, neuropsychoanalysts can better utilize Freudian therapies in conjunction with active inference principles, such as the free-energy principle and allostasis. Along with neuropragmatism’s conception of experience as organism-environment dynamic engagement, neuropsychoanalysis can benefit from allostatic approaches to experience and inquiry without reducing experience to brute mechanism or denying the utility of such mechanisms for prediction and intervention. Understanding the value-ladenness of experience, primary and secondary, in everyday waking life and in reflective inquiry, empowers people to better care for themselves without succumbing to merely coping with neoliberal oppression. (shrink)

After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, organized rescue operations in both Europe and the United States were put in place to save European intellectuals before or after their exile. However, it was mostly the brilliant and the productive who were helped in coming to America. From among the victims of Nazism, American foundations and endowments, universities, and research institutions primarily supported those who were viewed as having the greatest potential usefulness for the United States. This (...) chapter discusses the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation, the New School for Social Research, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. (shrink)

The issue of whether logic has an ontological base—rests, ultimately, on the principles or nature of reality—is constantly with us. In this paper I revisit it, drawing on a piece I wrote back in 1969, for the early incarnation of Reason magazine. I conclude that the Aristotelian idea that logic tracks reality is sound and those opposed—conventionalists, pragmatists, conceptualists, Kantians, et al.—have it wrong.

A. Collins once argued that time travel is only imaginable if we relate the "event" out of context. John Hospers argues that it is logically possible for an iron bar to float in water even if it is actually (empirically) impossible. My point in this piece is that Hospers relies on viewing the floating out of context, in Walt Disney fashion; but that is no way to establish any kind of possibility. I also discuss "conceivability", a term frequently used either (...) to clarify logical possibility or to interchange for the same. I argue that it cannot do either. (shrink)

Abstract The Joyless Economy focused on the boredom of the idle rich and neglected the boredom of the idle and idled poor. However, their boredom is much more serious than what the book dealt with, because it is chronic and often incurable. It usually begins with the neglect of destitute children who never learn how to concentrate on learning in school, become unruly and often end up unemployable, and have no better way than violence to release their energies.

Tibor Machan responds to James Franklin's response to the problem of evil (in Think issue 5).

This book brings together both new and previously published essays on the Greek political history of the fifth century BC and historiography. It examines the relationship between philosophy and social/political conditions, and includes a new analysis of Aristotle's views on slavery and a discussion of the practicality of Plato's political theories.

The paper examines the fundamental concepts of the political publicist Miloš Štefanovi?, which in the 1980ies and 1990ies suggested the transformation of Slovak political thinking as well as abandoning the voluntarily adopted passive attitude. Štefanovi? developed a consistent conception of national politics based on self-respon- sible, independent, bottom up political work grounded in patriotic self-criticism. He was also one of the prime movers of the cooperation between nationalities in Hungary as well as a critique of the distorted political culture of (...) the government establishment. (shrink)

When this classic work was first published in 1976, its central tenet--more is not necessarily better--placed it in direct conflict with mainstream thought in economics. Within a few years, however, this apparently paradoxical claim was gaining wide acceptance. Scitovsky's ground-breaking book was the first to apply theories of behaviorist psychology to questions of consumer behavior and to do so in clear, non-technical language. Setting out to analyze the failures of our consumerist lifestyle, Scitovsky concluded that people's need for stimulation is (...) so vital that it can lead to violence if not satisfied by novelty--whether in challenging work, art, fashion, gadgets, late-model cars, or scandal. Though much of the book stands as a record of American post-war prosperity and its accompanying problems, the revised edition also takes into account recent social and economic changes. A new preface and a foreword by economist Robert Frank introduce some of the issues created by those changes and two revised chapters develop them, discussing among others the assimilation of counter-cultural ideas throughout American society, especially ideas concerning quality of life. Scitovsky draws fascinating connections between the new elite of college-educated consumers and the emergence of a growing underclass plagued by drugs and violence, perceptively tracing the reactions of these disparate groups to the problems of leisure and boredom. In the wake of the so-called "decade of greed" and amidst calls for a "kindler, gentler" society, The Joyless Economy seems more timely than ever. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues that generosity as a moral virtue is only consistently and fully possible to practise in the kind of polity that upholds natural individual human rights, including the basic negative right to private property. The paper sketches a characterisation of generosity and explains the sense in which it can be a moral virtue. Some of the assumptions underlying the concept of moral virtue are considered and it is argued that contrary to some recent claims, it is possible (...) to conceptualise as well as to practise moral virtues in our age. Yet it is also shown that certain political prerequisites are necessary for practising generosity. Furthermore, it is shown that there cannot be any generosity involved in a polity in which one is forced to share one's wealth with those who might be the beneficiaries of generous conduct. Finally, it is argued that even in a polity with a very limited government some acts of official generosity are possible. (shrink)