Did Beethoven and Mozart have more in common with each other than Clapton and Hendrix? The current research demonstrated the widely reported Mozart Effect as only partly significant. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from 16 professional classical and rock musicians during a standard 2 stimulus visual oddball task, while listening to classical and rock music. During the oddball task participants were required to discriminate between an infrequent target stimulus randomly embedded in a train of repetitive background or standard stimuli. Consistent (...) with previous research, the P3 and N2 ERPs were elicited in response to the infrequent target stimuli. Own genre preference resulted in a reduction in amplitude of the P3 for classical musicians exposed to classical music and rock musicians exposed to rock music. Notably, at the pre-attentive stage of processing beneficial effects of exposure to classical music were observed for both groups of musicians. These data are discussed in terms of short and long-term music benefits on both conscious and unconscious cognitive processes. (shrink)

Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.

Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences examines the long-recognized and striking similarities between features of mental disorders and features of religions. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of humans' natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language (...) processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity. (shrink)

The paper surveys different notions of implicit definition. In particular, we offer an examination of a kind of definition commonly used in formal axiomatics, which in general terms is understood as providing a definition of the primitive terminology of an axiomatic theory. We argue that such “structural definitions” can be semantically understood in two different ways, namely as specifications of the meaning of the primitive terms of a theory and as definitions of higher-order mathematical concepts or structures. We analyze these (...) two conceptions of structural definition both in the history of modern axiomatics and in contemporary philosophical debates. Based on that, we give a systematic assessment of the underlying semantics of these two ways of understanding the definiens of such definitions, by considering alternative model-theoretic and inferential accounts of meaning. (shrink)

Historians and economists will find here what their fields have in common - the movement since the 1950s known variously as 'cliometrics', 'economic history', or 'historical economics'. A leading figure in the movement, Donald McCloskey, has compiled, with the help of George Hersh and a panel of distinguished advisors, a highly comprehensive bibliography of historical economics covering the period up until 1980. The book will be useful to all economic historians, as well as quantitative historians, applied economists, historical demographers, (...) business historians, national income accountants, and social historians. (shrink)

This book presents the foundations of a general theory of algebras. Often called “universal algebra”, this theory provides a common framework for all algebraic systems, including groups, rings, modules, fields, and lattices. Each chapter is replete with useful illustrations and exercises that solidify the reader's understanding. The book begins by developing the main concepts and working tools of algebras and lattices, and continues with examples of classical algebraic systems like groups, semigroups, monoids, and categories. The essence of the book lies (...) in Chapter 4, which provides not only basic concepts and results of general algebra, but also the perspectives and intuitions shared by practitioners of the field. The book finishes with a study of possible uniqueness of factorizations of an algebra into a direct product of directly indecomposable algebras. There is enough material in this text for a two semester course sequence, but a one semester course could also focus primarily on Chapter 4, with additional topics selected from throughout the text. (shrink)

The cognitive science of religions’ By-Product Theory contends that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of maturationally natural cognitive systems. Those systems address fundamental problems of human survival, encompassing such capacities as hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Across cultures they typically arise effortlessly and unconsciously during early childhood. They are not taught and appear independent of general intelligence. Theory of mind undergirds an instantaneous and automatic intuitive understanding (...) of minds, mental representations, and their implications for agents’ actions. By-Product theorists hypothesize about a social cognition content bias, holding that mentalizing capacities inform participants’ implicit understanding of religious representations of agents with counter-intuitive properties. That hypothesis, in combination with Baron-Cohen’s account of Autistic Spectrum Disorder in terms of diminished theory of mind capacities, suggests an impaired religious understanding hypothesis. It proposes that people with ASD have substantial limitations in intuitive understanding of and creative inferences from such representations. Norenzayan argues for a mind-blind atheism hypothesis, which asserts that the truth of these first two hypotheses suggests that people with ASD have an increased probability, compared to the general population, of being atheists. Numerous empirical studies have explored these three hypotheses’ merits. After carefully pondering distinctions between intuitive versus reflective mentalizing and between explicit versus implicit measures and affective versus cognitive measures of mentalizing, the available empirical evidence provides substantial support for the first two hypotheses and non-trivial support for the third. (shrink)

This volume examines some of the most contentious social justice issues present in the corpus of Augustine's writings. Whether one is concerned with human trafficking and the contemporary slave trade, the global economy, or endless wars, these essays further the conversation on social justice as informed by the writings of Augustine of Hippo.

Philosophy Then and Now provides an innovative and engaging blend of introductory text with classic and contemporary readings. Each of the eight parts begins with an introductory section on the major ideas associated with a seminal figure from the history of philosophy. This is followed by key selections from the essential writings of that philosopher, as well as influential selections from contemporary figures. Key figures covered include: Socrates, Aquinas, Locke, Descartes, Mill, Nietzsche, Marx, and Sartre. By focusing on the core (...) themes, issues and problems of philosophy, the volume motivates student interest in the subject, and represents a distinctive text for all introductory courses in philosophy. (shrink)

Webb's scheme for classifying behavioral models is applicable to a wide range of theories and simulations, nonrobotic as well as robotic. It is suggested that a meta-analysis of existing models, characterized according to the proposed scheme, could identify regions of the seven-dimensional modelling space that are particularly likely to lead to new insights in understanding behavior.

La lecture des documents modernes (rapports techniques des ingénieurs grecs et français et cartes minières de la Compagnie Française des Mines du Laurium, élaborés lors de la reprise des travaux miniers à Camariza du Laurium au xixe s.) qui décrivent les restes des travaux miniers antiques à Camariza, qu’il s’agisse des terres accumulées en quantités considérables au fur et à mesure de l’extraction (haldes), des plynites rejetées au cours de la concentration ou des scories issues de la fusion, permet de (...) localiser en ce lieu la Maronée antique, ainsi baptisée par analogie avec la Maronée de Thrace. Ils nous livrent même une image étonnamment précise de ces travaux pionniers, réellement gigantesques, très précisément aux puits miniers Hilarion N° 1, Serpieri N° 1, Jean Baptiste N° 1. Les rapports relatifs au puits Jean Baptiste N° 1 mettent particulièrement en exergue l’antique extraction des veines à une profondeur d’à peine 28 m et la présence d’un riche gisement de plomb argentifère à 76 m, sur une longueur de 500 m et une épaisseur de 2 à 8 m, qui est, très probablement, le fameux « contact » repéré en 483 av. J.‑C. (shrink)

Focusing on political and interpersonal conflict in the U.S., particularly racial conflict, but with an eye to similar conflicts throughout the world, we argue that the enactive approach to mind as life can be elaborated to provide an exigent framework for present social-political problems. An enactive approach fills problematic lacunae in the Western philosophical ethics project by offering radically refigured notions of responsibility and language. The dual enactive, participatory insight is that interactional responsibility is not singular and language is not (...) an individual property or ability, something that someone simply and uniformly 'has' or 'controls'. These points have not been integrated into our self-understanding as moral actors, to everyone’s detriment. We first advocate for adequate appreciation of Colombetti and Torrance’s 2009 suggestion that participatory sense-making necessarily implies shared responsibility for interactional outcomes. We argue that the enactive approach presents open-ended cultivation of virtue as embodied, contextualized, and dynamic know-how and destabilizes an individualist metaphysics. Putting this framework to work, we turn to the interactional challenges of conversations that concern differences and that involve potentially oppositional parties, offering a reading of Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. Finally, we make explicit Rankine’s normative project of mindful navigation of multiple perspectives in an interaction. We abstract three interrelated spheres of participatory intervention: location, language, and labor. These also indicate routes for empirical investigation into complex perspective-taking in dynamic interactions. (shrink)

Presented alongside these seminal essays are aphoristic fragments from Simmel’s last journal, providing a beguiling look into the mind of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers.