Elliott Sober''s selection for/selection of distinction has been widely used to clarify the idea that some properties of organisms are side-effects of selection processes. It has also been used, however, to choose between different descriptions of an evolutionary product when assigning biological functions to that product. We suggest that there is a characteristic error in these uses of the distinction. Complementary descriptions of function are misrepresented as mutually excluding one another. This error arises from a failure to appreciate that selection (...) processes can be described at several different theoretical levels. (shrink)

The Hadza foragers of Tanzania are currently experiencing a nutritional shift that includes the intensification of domesticated cultigens in the diet. Despite these changes, no study, to date, has examined the possible effects of this transition on the food collection behavior of young foragers. Here we present a cross-sectional study on foraging behavior taken from two time points, 2005 and 2017. We compare the number of days foraged and the type and amount of food collected for young foragers, aged 5–14 (...) years, in age- and season-matched samples. Compared with 2005, in 2017 fewer subadults left camp to forage, and overall, they targeted a smaller variety of wild foods, with the noticeable absence of wild honey, figs, and tubers. In addition, participants in 2017 were significantly more likely to have attended school. Despite the increased presence of domesticated plant foods in the diet and increased attendance at school, some young foragers continue to be highly productive in collecting wild, undomesticated foods. Despite the preliminary nature of our results, our findings suggest that the range of wild foods targeted by subadults is decreasing as the amount of domesticated cultigens in the diet increases. These data underscore the importance of studying diet composition and foraging decisions across temporal, nutritional, and ecological landscapes. (shrink)

This paper looks at the themes of nature, humanity, and military and industrial development in the nineteenth century American painter Winslow Homer through the lens of the Hegelian theory of art. Robert Pippin's After the Beautiful has recently put the Hegelian framework to very fruitful use in understanding pictorial modernism. This study of Homer follows a similar approach but argues that Homer's canvases represent a development in the modern spirt which, in many ways, goes beyond the canvases of Manet – (...) a very tight modernist contemporary of Homer's. Homer communicates a presentment of the immense and, in certain profound respects, horrifying power of humanity's growing industrialization. I trace the development of this idea over the course of his career, from this early Civil War canvases to his final seascapes and argue that an understanding of Homer's work is important for understanding the modern spirit of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (shrink)

We challenge the standard interpretation of pain asymbolia (PA), a neuropsychiatric condition that causes unusual reactions to pain stimuli. The standard interpretation asserts that PA subjects experience pain but lack important features of the experience. However, we argue that the clinical evidence for PA does not support this interpretation and that the arguments put forward by the defenders of the standard interpretation end up making self-contradicting claims. Finally, we suggest that the best interpretation of the available evidence is to take (...) a deflationist stance toward PA, at least until further evidence becomes available. (shrink)

Norms provide a valuable mechanism for establishing coherent cooperative behaviour in decentralised systems in which there is no central authority. One of the most influential formulations of norm emergence was proposed by Axelrod :1095–1111, 1986). This paper provides an empirical analysis of aspects of Axelrod’s approach, by exploring some of the key assumptions made in previous evaluations of the model. We explore the dynamics of norm emergence and the occurrence of norm collapse when applying the model over extended durations. It (...) is this phenomenon of norm collapse that can motivate the emergence of a central authority to enforce laws and so preserve the norms, rather than relying on individuals to punish defection. Our findings identify characteristics that significantly influence norm establishment using Axelrod’s formulation, but are likely to be of importance for norm establishment more generally. Moreover, Axelrod’s model suffers from significant limitations in assuming that private strategies of individuals are available to others, and that agents are omniscient in being aware of all norm violations and punishments. Because this is an unreasonable expectation, the approach does not lend itself to modelling real-world systems such as online networks or electronic markets. In response, the paper proposes alternatives to Axelrod’s model, by replacing the evolutionary approach, enabling agents to learn, and by restricting the metapunishment of agents to cases where the original defection is observed, in order to be able to apply the model to real-world domains. This work can also help explain the formation of a “social contract” to legitimate enforcement by a central authority. (shrink)

Background: Community-based education (CBE) involves educating the head (cognitive), heart (affective), and the hand (practical) by utilizing tools that enable us to broaden and interrogate our value systems. This article reports on the use of virtue ethics (VE) theory for understanding the principles that create, maintain and sustain a socially accountable community placement programme for undergraduate medical students. Our research questions driving this secondary analysis were; what are the goods which are internal to the successful practice of CBE in medicine, (...) and what are the virtues that are likely to promote and sustain them? -/- Methods: We conducted a secondary theoretically informed thematic analysis of the primary data based on MacIntyre’s virtue ethics theory as the conceptual framework. -/- Results: Virtue ethics is an ethical approach that emphasizes the role of character and virtue in shaping moral behavior; when individuals engage in practices (such as CBE), goods internal to those practices (such as a collaborative attitude) strengthen the practices themselves, but also augment those individuals’ virtues, and that of their community (such as empathy). We identified several goods that are internal to the practice of CBE and accompanying virtues as important for the development, implementation and sustainability of a socially accountable community placement programme. A service-oriented mind-set, a deep understanding of community needs, a transformed mind, and a collaborative approach emerged as goods internal to the practice of a socially accountable CBE. The virtues needed to sustain the identified internal goods included empathy and compassion, connectedness, accountability, engagement [sustained relationship], cooperation, perseverance, and willingness to be an agent of change. -/- Conclusion: This study found that MacIntyre’s virtue ethics theory provided a useful theoretical lens for understanding the principles that create, maintain and sustain CBE practice. (shrink)

Many of the problems studied in cognitive science are inductive problems, requiring people to evaluate hypotheses in the light of data. The key to solving these problems successfully is having the right inductive biases—assumptions about the world that make it possible to choose between hypotheses that are equally consistent with the observed data. This article explores a novel experimental method for identifying the biases that guide human inductive inferences. The idea behind this method is simple: This article uses the responses (...) produced by a participant on one trial to generate the stimuli that either they or another participant will see on the next. A formal analysis of this “iterated learning” procedure, based on the assumption that the learners are Bayesian agents, predicts that it should reveal the inductive biases of these learners, as expressed in a prior probability distribution over hypotheses. This article presents a series of experiments using stimuli based on a well-studied set of category structures, demonstrating that iterated learning can be used to reveal the inductive biases of human learners. (shrink)

The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine, and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents argue that this (...) analysis of biological teleology has the unique advantage that the selected effect function of a trait is also a causal explanation of the trait: the trait exists because it performs this function. We show, however, that selected effect functions as currently defined explain the existence of traits only under highly restrictive assumptions about evolutionary dynamics. In many common scenarios in which traits evolve by natural selection, selected effect functions do not explain those traits. This is because definitions of selected effect function extract from any evolutionary scenario only the information that would be explanatorily relevant in the simple evolutionary scenario implicit in those definitions. When applied to more complex scenarios, selected effect functions omit the key information that is explanatorily relevant in those scenarios. The assumptions required for selected effect functions to be explanatory are particularly unlikely to hold in the domain that its proponents care most about—the evolution of representation. A more adequate selected effects theory of Proper functions may be possible, but will require much greater attention to the structure of actual evolutionary explanations. (shrink)

Can a businessman be moral? What are the values implicit in a business deal? How can we think responsibly about economic decisions? An academic philosopher and a practical businessman together examine the fundamental principles of economic activity to discover how we can think responsibly about economic decisions. Ethics must play a part as business relations are only sustainable when the parties have some values in common, but significant divergences of interest can limit the importance of ethical considerations. The responsibilities of (...) business towards employees, employers, customers, competitors, the state, the environment and the third world are all discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Homeric ΔΙΙΠΕΤΕΟΣΠΟΤΑΜΟΙΟand the Celestial NileR. Drew GriffithHomeric διιπετής, which occurs only in the verse–end formula διιπετέος (Il. 16.174, 17.263, 21.268, 326; Od. 4.477, 581, 7.284; cf. Hes. fr. 320 Merkelbach–West), is usually interpreted as "fallen from Zeus, i.e., from heaven,... fed or swollen by rain" (LSJ),1 for high–thundering, cloud–gatherer Zeus is the sky who rains and snows (Il. 12.25; Od. 9.111, 14.457, Alc. Z 14.1 Lobel–Page 5 338.1 Voigt; (...) Ar. Nub. 368, 373; Babrius 65.1; Marcus Aurelius 5.7), and rivers can be "swollen by rain and melted snow" (). Yet it only takes a moment for the desperate nature of this interpretation to become clear: it has at least four flaws.2First, there is διι–. We may explain the quantity of the second iota (long in διιπετής, short in Διί) either as metrical lengthening, or as a survival of the Mycenaean, with or without the emendation to διειπετής proposed by one Zenodorus (schol. E2Od. 4.477, var. l. Zenodotus, HQ) and supported by some moderns,3 but the form itself is unexpected. Even supporters of the usual interpretation admit that διι is a very odd way of saying "from Zeus," which should be expressed by a [End Page 353] genitive of source:4 indeed, when Euripides wants to characterize a statue as having "fallen from the sky," he uses διοπετής (IT 977; cf. fr. 971 Nauck2 ). They account for διι- in one of three ways: either as chosen on the analogy of διίφιλος where the dative is appropriate,5 or as a compendious expression meaning "by (the command of) Zeus,"6 as an Arcado– Cypriot use of the dative as an ablative.7 This last approach relies in turn on the hypothesis (itself controversial) of an Achaean stratum of the Homeric language, in which are alleged to persist forms specific to the Mycenaean dialect.8Second, the final element, πετής, is elsewhere in Homer derived from πέτομαι (Il. 12.201, etc.;Il. 8.42, etc.; cf. Hes. Theog. 267). Unlike διιπετής, these words are accented paroxytone (but note παλιμπετές Il. 16.395, Od. 5.27, which means "falling or flying backward"; Pind. Pyth. 3.105; and Aesch. Supp. 782), but this shows only that during the Alexandrian period, when the written accents were devised, scholars associated them with a different root from διιπετής. Leaving our word aside, for examples of -πετής derived from πίπτω we must look to Aeschylus, Pindar, and subsequent authors.9 (Words with πετής from πετάννυμι are attested in later Greek.)10Third, the earliest post–Homeric uses of διιπετής (Eur. Bacch. 1267, Rhes. 43, Hypsipyle fr. 1. sp. IV, 1.31 Bond; Hippoc. Morb. Mul. 1.24) demand the translation "translucent" vel sim. (Etym. Magn. s.v.), and Zenodotus (apud schol. Il. 17.263) glosses the word in its Homeric use as διαυγής,11 yet the semantic development from "fallen from Zeus, etc." (on the usual interpretation) to "translucent" can only be seen as "encore inexpliqué."12 [End Page 354]Fourth, one of the three named rivers to which Homer applies διιπετής is the Nile (Od. 4.477, 581; the others are Spercheius, Il. 16.174, and Scamander, Il. 21.268, 326), yet if ever there were a river that is not "fed or swollen by rain" it is the Nile: rainfall is scarce in Egypt (Hdt. 3.10.3), and, knowing this, Diogenes hypothesized that the Nile was fed by subterranean springs (64 A18 Diels–Kranz; cf. Sen. Q.Nat. 4.2.28–30, 6.8.3–5; schol. Ap. Rhod. 4.269 = p. 277 Wendel). The application of the epithet to the Nile would have, therefore, to be classed among Homer's (admittedly numerous) formulary illogicalities.13Not all scholars accept the usual view. In 1958 M. Treu pointed to a then newly discovered papyrus fragment of Alcman containing the adjective διαιπετής in the phrase (III 66–67 PMG, PMGF = fr. 26.66–67 Calame), which was taken to describe a star "falling through..., less prob.... flying through" heaven (LSJ Suppl. s.v.),14 to hypothesize that the Homeric instances of διιπετής are all miscorrections of an original διαιπετής, "flying through." This theory has won few adherents,15 and R. Renehan (1972b) has with more... (shrink)

Meta-learning is even more broadly relevant to the study of inductive biases than Binz et al. suggest: Its implications go beyond the extensions to rational analysis that they discuss. One noteworthy example is that meta-learning can act as a bridge between the vector representations of neural networks and the symbolic hypothesis spaces used in many Bayesian models.

Cross-cultural sex differences in mobility and harm avoidance have been widely reported, often emphasizing fitness benefits of long-distance travel for males and high costs for females. Data emerging from adults in small-scale societies, however, are challenging the assumption that female mobility is restricted during reproduction. Such findings warrant further exploration of the ontogeny of mobility. Here, using a combination of machine-learning, mixed-effects linear regression, and GIS mapping, we analyze range size, daily distance traveled, and harm avoidance among Hadza foragers during (...) middle childhood and adolescence. Distance traveled increased with age and, while male adolescents had the longest daily ranges, average daily distance traveled by each sex was similar. We found few age- or sex-related patterns in harm-avoidant responses and a high degree of individual variation. When queried on the same issues, children and their parents were often in alignment as to expectations pertaining to harm avoidance, and siblings tended to behave in similar ways. To the extent that sex differences in mobility did emerge, they were associated with ecological differences in physical threats associated with sex-specific foraging behaviors. Further, we found no strong association between harm avoidance and mobility. Young Hadza foragers of both sexes are highly mobile, regardless of how harm avoidant they are. Taken together, our findings indicate that the causal arrows between harm avoidance and mobility must be evaluated in ecologically specific frameworks where cultural expectations of juvenile mobility can be contextualized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Temple as Ship in Odyssey 6.10R. Drew GriffithLike the good eighth-century oecist that he was,1 the founder of Scheria, Phaeacian king Nausithous, son of Poseidon and grandfather of Nausicaa and Clytonaus, adorned his new city with temples of the gods (, Od. 6.10). This phrase, a hapax in Homer, occupies the same metrical seat immediately before the hephthemimeral caesura as the common ship formula (cf., 24.299, also a hapax). (...) It is plausible, therefore, that the bard who described the work of this ship-loving king used the formula as a formal model. The note argues that this bard thought that temples were ships in which gods traveled. Though this claim may seem surprising at first, cultic, architectural, and linguistic aspects of the epics all support it.Let us begin with cult. From Iliad 1 on, epiphanies are common (43-47, 194-95, 359-61).2 While some gods like Apollo work from afar, most need physical contact, for example, in helping suppliants, and human travel to Olympus like that of Otus and Ephialtes or Bellerophon is out of the question. Gods periodically irrupt into the natural world: Zeus comes down in lightning (e.g., Ar. Pax 42); drinkers take in Dionysus and grow giddy (e.g., Soph. Ant. 964); one sees Pan in any sudden skittishness of the flock (e.g., Eur. Med. 1172). The trick, then, is to channel the gods' [End Page 541] strength to make it propitious. Perhaps for this reason, the basic prayer is the cletic hymn (Men. Rhet. 334.25-336.4) that asks the god to come to the worshipper (carm. pop. 871.1 PMG; Sappho fr. 1.5, 25, 2.1 Lobel-Page, Voigt; Anacreon 357.7 PMG = fr. 14.7 Gentili; Pl. Leg. 712B; Apocalypse 22.20) and may describe a magic vehicle for the purpose (Sappho fr. 1.8-9 Lobel-Page, Voigt),3 like the self-moving aerial car, vimāna, of Sanskrit verse to which a boat is compared at Raghuvanśa 16.68.4 Those who pray often do so by the sea (Il. 1.34, 348-51; Od. 2.260-61; Pind. Ol. 1.71-73, 6.58), and ships may be the site of epiphanies (e.g., Hymn. Hom. Dion. 2, etc.; cf. Exekias ABV 146,21; Hymn Hom. Ap. 388-451).When the Trojan women dedicate a robe to Athena (Il. 6.269-78), we are not told that they use a ship to carry it, but in the similar offering at the Panathenaea, such was indeed the case.5 This ship may have been a comparatively late addition to the Athenian festival, but it has a good Bronze Age antecedent as proved by the Theran ship-fresco.6Turning now to architecture, we note that early temples were perhaps quite small, since as adyta (Il. 5.448, etc.) or abata, which worshippers did not enter,7 they have no functional lower size limit. Surviving Greek temples, all of archaic date or later, are imposing stone structures but bear traces of wooden prototypes, pillars having replaced roughhewn logs and decorative guttae treenails. Excavators have found terracotta model-shrines at Perachora and in the Argive Heraeum,8 some of which may have been portable like those of the Egyptian Amun, Mut, and Chonsu, the juggernaut of Puri in Orissa, or the Tent of Meeting, the earliest Israelite shrine (Exod. 33.7, etc.).Greek temples were astronomically oriented, typically facing sunrise on the foundation day (cf. Plut. Num. 14.4; Lucian De Domo 6), while snubbing humbler coordinates like roads or nearby buildings.9 In [End Page 542] this, they resemble Khufu's pyramid in Egypt, the so-called air shafts of which helped the pharaoh's soul sail to its eternal home in the constellation Orion, giving like an alidad the angles between the tomb itself, the pharaoh's "horizon of eternity," (3ḫ.t (nt), Papyrus Abbott 2.2; The Great Harris Papyrus 3.6),10 the pole-star, and his final destination.11 This fact suggests a link with navigation, for Greeks connected ships and stars, thanks to the navigator's art. With both magnetite and iron,12 but... (shrink)

In Aristophanes’ Clouds, Socrates vents his frustration at his new pupil Strepsiades’ inability to see the eponymous chorus with the line ‘You would see them unless you have drops of rheum in your eyes as big as gourds (κολοκύνταις).’ This line is problematic, because gourds relate to eyesight in no obvious way. However, Aristophanes might have ended the verse by referring to Socrates’ initiation of Strepsiades sixty-five lines earlier by a liberal sprinkling of barley, and written ‘or you're blear-eyed with (...) barley-groats (οὐλοχύταισι)’. If some reader added κρομ(μ)ύοις ‘with onions’ to his text as a more universally valid explanation for an eye-affliction, a later scribe might have thought this an attempted correction, and substituted κολοκύνταις, which is both metrically correct and palaeographically closer to οὐλοχύταισι than is κρομ(μ)ύοις. (shrink)

The success of models of human behavior based on Bayesian inference over logical formulas or programs is taken as evidence that people employ a “language-of-thought” that has similarly discrete and compositional structure. We argue that this conclusion problematically crosses levels of analysis, identifying representations at the algorithmic level based on inductive biases at the computational level.

Spontaneous mutations that perturb myelination occur in a range of species including man, and together with engineered mutations have been used to study disease, normal myelination and axon/glial inter‐relationships. Only a minority of the currently defined mutations have an apparently simple pathogenesis due to lack of a functional protein. Mutations in the myelin basic protein gene lead to a lack of protein, resulting in changes in the structure of myelin, which can be rescued by transgenic complementation. The pathogenesis of autosomal (...) dominant and X‐linked mutations affecting either oligodendrocytes or Schwann cells is more complex. Point mutations may act in a dominant negative manner and gene dosage is clearly linked to phenotypic change. Mutations in regulatory genes, such as those encoding transcription factors, can also disturb myelination by selected cell types. Other less‐well studied and unexpected consequences of myelin mutations, such as seizures in mutations affecting genes expressed in Schwann cells and axonal changes associated with dysmyelination, are also considered. With the major developments in gene mapping and cloning it is now relevant to study mutations in a variety of species with the real prospect of defining their molecular basis. Examples are given of unusual, but potentially useful, uncharacterised mutations in dog and bovine. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Homeric ΔΙΙΠΕΤΕΟΣΠΟΤΑΜΟΙΟand the Celestial NileR. Drew GriffithHomeric διιπετής, which occurs only in the verse–end formula διιπετέος (Il. 16.174, 17.263, 21.268, 326; Od. 4.477, 581, 7.284; cf. Hes. fr. 320 Merkelbach–West), is usually interpreted as "fallen from Zeus, i.e., from heaven,... fed or swollen by rain" (LSJ),1 for high–thundering, cloud–gatherer Zeus is the sky who rains and snows (Il. 12.25; Od. 9.111, 14.457, Alc. Z 14.1 Lobel–Page 5 338.1 Voigt; (...) Ar. Nub. 368, 373; Babrius 65.1; Marcus Aurelius 5.7), and rivers can be "swollen by rain and melted snow" (). Yet it only takes a moment for the desperate nature of this interpretation to become clear: it has at least four flaws.2First, there is διι–. We may explain the quantity of the second iota (long in διιπετής, short in Διί) either as metrical lengthening, or as a survival of the Mycenaean, with or without the emendation to διειπετής proposed by one Zenodorus (schol. E2Od. 4.477, var. l. Zenodotus, HQ) and supported by some moderns,3 but the form itself is unexpected. Even supporters of the usual interpretation admit that διι is a very odd way of saying "from Zeus," which should be expressed by a [End Page 353] genitive of source:4 indeed, when Euripides wants to characterize a statue as having "fallen from the sky," he uses διοπετής (IT 977; cf. fr. 971 Nauck2 ). They account for διι- in one of three ways: either as chosen on the analogy of διίφιλος where the dative is appropriate,5 or as a compendious expression meaning "by (the command of) Zeus,"6 as an Arcado– Cypriot use of the dative as an ablative.7 This last approach relies in turn on the hypothesis (itself controversial) of an Achaean stratum of the Homeric language, in which are alleged to persist forms specific to the Mycenaean dialect.8Second, the final element, πετής, is elsewhere in Homer derived from πέτομαι (Il. 12.201, etc.;Il. 8.42, etc.; cf. Hes. Theog. 267). Unlike διιπετής, these words are accented paroxytone (but note παλιμπετές Il. 16.395, Od. 5.27, which means "falling or flying backward"; Pind. Pyth. 3.105; and Aesch. Supp. 782), but this shows only that during the Alexandrian period, when the written accents were devised, scholars associated them with a different root from διιπετής. Leaving our word aside, for examples of -πετής derived from πίπτω we must look to Aeschylus, Pindar, and subsequent authors.9 (Words with πετής from πετάννυμι are attested in later Greek.)10Third, the earliest post–Homeric uses of διιπετής (Eur. Bacch. 1267, Rhes. 43, Hypsipyle fr. 1. sp. IV, 1.31 Bond; Hippoc. Morb. Mul. 1.24) demand the translation "translucent" vel sim. (Etym. Magn. s.v.), and Zenodotus (apud schol. Il. 17.263) glosses the word in its Homeric use as διαυγής,11 yet the semantic development from "fallen from Zeus, etc." (on the usual interpretation) to "translucent" can only be seen as "encore inexpliqué."12 [End Page 354]Fourth, one of the three named rivers to which Homer applies διιπετής is the Nile (Od. 4.477, 581; the others are Spercheius, Il. 16.174, and Scamander, Il. 21.268, 326), yet if ever there were a river that is not "fed or swollen by rain" it is the Nile: rainfall is scarce in Egypt (Hdt. 3.10.3), and, knowing this, Diogenes hypothesized that the Nile was fed by subterranean springs (64 A18 Diels–Kranz; cf. Sen. Q.Nat. 4.2.28–30, 6.8.3–5; schol. Ap. Rhod. 4.269 = p. 277 Wendel). The application of the epithet to the Nile would have, therefore, to be classed among Homer's (admittedly numerous) formulary illogicalities.13Not all scholars accept the usual view. In 1958 M. Treu pointed to a then newly discovered papyrus fragment of Alcman containing the adjective διαιπετής in the phrase (III 66–67 PMG, PMGF = fr. 26.66–67 Calame), which was taken to describe a star "falling through..., less prob.... flying through" heaven (LSJ Suppl. s.v.),14 to hypothesize that the Homeric instances of διιπετής are all miscorrections of an original διαιπετής, "flying through." This theory has won few adherents,15 and R. Renehan (1972b) has with more... (shrink)

IntroductionAlthough the topic of consciousness is both mysterious and controversial, psychedelic drugs are popularly believed to provide unique insights into the nature of consciousness despite a lack of empirical evidence.MethodsThis study addresses the question of whether psychedelics change the attribution of consciousness to a range of living and non-living entities. A survey was conducted in 1,606 respondents who endorsed a belief changing psychedelic experience.ResultsParticipants rated their attributions of consciousness to a range of living and non-living entities before and after their (...) psychedelic experience. Superstitious beliefs and belief in freewill were also assessed. From before the experience to after, there were large increases in attribution of consciousness to various entities including non-human primates, quadrupeds, insects, fungi, plants, inanimate natural objects, and inanimate manmade objects. Higher ratings of mystical experience were associated with greater increases in the attribution of consciousness. Moreover, the increased attributions of consciousness did not decrease in those who completed the survey years after the psychedelic experience. In contrast to attributions of consciousness, beliefs in freewill and superstitions did not change. Notably, all findings were similar when restricted to individuals reporting on their first psychedelic experience.DiscussionThis study demonstrates that, among people who reported belief-changing psychedelic experiences, attribution of consciousness to various entities increases. Future prospective psychedelic drug administration studies that control for expectancies are needed. (shrink)

In Eum. 1028–9 the Furies mark their transformation into Eumenides by donning red robes over their black costumes in imitation of the robes worn in the Panathenaea by metics . Greek epic was sensitive to the symbolic value of clothing and Aeschylus had experimented in the Persians with the greater scope that drama offered for clothing-symbolism. Scholars have detected a wealth of associations in the Furies' robing-scene: this culmination of the trilogy echoes the red carpet upon which Agamemnon walks to (...) his death in the first play, which is actually referred to as ‘garments’ , and the net in which Agamemnon is caught , which is brought on stage in the middle play . Another series of stage-actions of equal importance in preparing for the robing of the Furies has not been so well explained. (shrink)

Revising Clouds for publication some five years after its third-place showing in the City Dionysia of 423 b.c., Aristophanes retooled the first parabasis to praise the play's propriety, omitting as it did distasteful matter and gratuitous buffoonery, which—along with the judges’ crassness—accounted, he says, for its failure.

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09403-x.

First published in 2000, this translation of one of the great works of Western political thought is based on the assumption that when Plato chose the dialogue form for his writing, he intended these dialogues to sound like conversations - although conversations of a philosophical sort. In addition to a vivid, dignified and accurate rendition of Plato's text, the student and general reader will find many aids to comprehension in this volume: an introduction that assesses the cultural background to the (...) Republic, its place within political philosophy, and its general argument; succinct notes in the body of the text; an analytical summary of the work's content; a full glossary of proper names; a chronology of important events; and a guide to further reading. The result is an accomplished and accessible edition of this seminal work, suitable for philosophers and classicists as well as historians of political thought at all levels. (shrink)