Knowledge about ethical judgments has not advanced appreciably after decades of research. Such research, however, has rarely addressed the possible importance of the content of such judgments; that is, the material appearing in the brief vignettes or scenarios on which survey respondents base their evaluations. Indeed, this content has seemed an afterthought in most investigations. This paper closely examined the vast array of vignettes that have appeared in relevant research in an effort to reduce this proliferation to a more concise (...) set of overarching vignette themes. Six generic themes emerged from this process, labeled here as Dilemma, Classic, Conspiracy, Sophie’s Choice, Runaway Trolley, and Whistle Blowing. Each of these themes is characterized by a unique combination of four key factors that include the extent of protagonist personal benefit from relevant vignette activities and victim salience in vignette descriptions. Theme identification enabled inherent ambiguities in vignettes that threaten construct validity to come into sharp focus, provided clues regarding appropriate vignette construction, and may help to make sense of patterns of empirical findings that heretofore have seemed difficult to explain. (shrink)

Philosophy courses face unique problems in that students generally have no previous encounter with the subject and have serious misconceptions about its nature and relevance. This paper presents an essay “What Makes the Examined Life Worth Living” that provides students an accessible introduction to philosophy; one that corrects their suspicion that philosophy is nothing more than opinion, where no progress is made, and has no practical importance. The essay begins by replacing the practice of philosophy as merely asserting one’s opinion (...) with philosophy as analysis and argument about fundamental questions, turns to a discuss of progress in philosophy, and concludes with four replies to the view that philosophy lacks practical relevance. (shrink)

It has been suggested that God can act on the world by operating within the limits set by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (HUP) without violating the laws of nature. This requires nature to be intrinsically indeterministic. However, according to the statistical interpretation the quantum mechanical wavefunction represents the average behavior of an ensemble of similar systems and not that of a single system. The HUP thus refers to a relation between the spreads of possible values of position and momentum and so (...) is consistent with a fully deterministic world. This statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics is supported by reference to actual measurements, resolves the quantum paradoxes, and stimulates further research. If this interpretation is accepted, quantum mechanics is irrelevant to the question of God's action in the world. (shrink)

Hugely facilitated by the Internet, plagiarism by students threatens educational quality and professional ethics worldwide. Plagiarism reduces learning and is correlated with increased fraud and inefficiency on the job, thus lessening competitiveness and hampering development.In this context, the present research examines 48 licenciatura theses and 102 masters theses from five of Mozambique’s largest universities. Of the 150 theses, 75% contained significant plagiarism (>100 word equivalents) and 39%, very much (>500 word equivalents). Significant plagiarism was detected in both licenciatura and masters (...) theses. By using both Turnitin and Urkund to identify potentially plagiarized passages, professionally verifying whether those passages contain plagiarism, and, if confirmed, counting the words involved, the study presents a new method for classifying the quantity and significance of plagiarism. The use of two text-similarity-recognition programs also improved the rate of detection and, in some theses, significantly increased the classification of the gravity of the plagiarism encountered.Based on a broad review of the literature, the article argues that, to combat wide-scale plagiarism, academic institutions need to cultivate a consensus among faculty and students about the definition and types of plagiarism, the appropriate penalties, and the paramount professional and economic need to nurture professional ethics. However, to achieve even partial success requires significant involvement by administrators, faculty, students and student leaders guided by a holistic strategy using technological, pedagogical, administrative and legal components to prevent and detect plagiarism and then reeducate or discipline students caught plagiarizing. (shrink)

Two contrasting types of individuals were each predicted to agree, for different reasons, that conventional ethical standards of society need not be upheld if organizational interests appear to demand otherwise. The hypotheses were investigated using questionnaire responses from two samples (employed and student, total N=308). Clear support was obtained for the prediction that individuals inclined toward self-interest and behavior counter to conventional standards would agree with the preceding position. Partial support was obtained for the hypothesis that individuals who simply feel (...) obligated to support an employing organization would also agree. While the latter's perspective may be somewhat narrow or perhaps even cynical, they do not seem to reflect the self-interest profile of the first group. This study also extends the groundbreaking work of Froelich and Kottke by exploring individual difference correlates of their promising ethics scale assessing the extent of agreement that organizational interests legitimately supersede more conventional ethical standards. (shrink)

This essay examines Adorno's notoriously puzzling concept of metaphysical experience with special attention to Adorno's remarks on the concept in his 1965 lecture‐course, “Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems.” The essay argues that the concept of metaphysical experience is best understood in the light of Adorno's philosophical critique of metaphysics in the traditional sense. It was Adorno's view that in the age of modern catastrophe, the category of traditional metaphysics (as theorized chiefly by Aristotle, Plato, and Empedocles) could no longer retain its (...) validity, and the notion of “experience” itself was withering away. Adorno concluded that metaphysics in the modern era would have to be reconceived as a category of loss that reflected the damage that had been done to human life. “Metaphysical experience” attached itself especially to special places or childhood memories, even while such privileged experiences also reflected the disappointment and imperfection that marks all experiences today. (shrink)

In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor appeals to the metaphysical?normative distinction between ?immanence? and ?transcendence? as definitive for post-Axial religion. On Taylor's view, therefore, those of us who embrace a fully secular modernity can be described as having abandoned ?transcendence? to take up our lives wholly within the confines of the immanent frame, though he grants we may seek alternative satisfactions or ?substitutes? for eternity. But the notion that any metaphysical?normative model of sacred experience can serve as an (...) irresistible foundation is open to doubt if one recalls the Heideggerian insight that any metaphysical picture both reveals and conceals aspects of our experience. Taylor's own description of sacred and non-sacred experience within the immanent frame seems to rely upon this foundational distinction, without entertaining the possibility that the language itself may very well actually distort what our experience is like. This paper pursues the above objections to Taylor's argument, focusing special attention on the assumption that one can judge aesthetic experience (such as listening to a Beethoven string quartet) with the criteria we have inherited from post-Axial religion. The overwhelming authority of the Axial tradition might seem to validate questions such as, ?Is there an object?? or ?Is the experience purely immanent?? But to such questions we might respond that such language simply has no grip on the phenomena. Any such talk of ?substitution? might therefore be understood as an historical remnant in Taylor's book of the traditional monotheist's critique of idolatry. (shrink)

Einstein’s special theory of relativity has had a wide influence on fields far removed from physics. It has given the impression that physics has shown that there are now no absolute truths, that all beliefs are relative to the observer, and that traditional stable landmarks have been washed away. We each have our own frame of reference that is as good as any other frame, so that there are no absolute standards by which our actions may be judged. The predictions (...) of relativity theory, such as the elimination of simultaneity, the variation of mass with velocity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, are all highly counterintuitive and yet are precisely confirmed by detailed measurements. The clear rocklike mechanical physics of Newton seems to have dissolved into a swirling mist of unintelligible concepts, and familiar certainties seem to have disappeared. A detailed analysis of relativity theory shows, however, a completely different picture. Properly understood, it is a logical extension of Newtonian physics that expresses the relations of space and time in a more exact and elegant way and in the process shows forth more clearly the invariant features of the world. The apparently counterintuitive features appear as natural consequences that extend and refine our classical concepts. The traditional landmarks remain, but God’s world is more subtle than we had previously imagined. (shrink)

This chapter is intended to provide the reader with a brief biographical overview of Adorno's life and thought, with an emphasis on the key turning points in his career. It discusses his childhood, his education in Frankfurt, his musical studies, his emigration first to Oxford and then to the United States, his return to Germany after the Second World War, his tenure as professor at the Goethe Universität Frankfurt and his prominence as a public intellectual, and his confrontation with students. (...) Together with biographical details the chapter also offers a simple overview of Adorno's major concerns as a philosopher. (shrink)

"A learned work of rhetoric... compiled and made in the English tongue, of [one] who in judgment is profound, in wisdom and eloquence most famous." Thus in 1563 rhetorician Richard Rainolde praised _The Art of Rhetoric_, the work that brought into English the procedures of Ciceronian rhetoric-invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery—the core of the academic curriculum in Renaissance England. Written in vigorous, native English, the _Art_ went through eight editions between 1553 and 1585. At least part of its appeal (...) was practicality. On the final page of his copy on Quintilian, Gabriel Harvey noted that _The Art of Rhetoric _is the "Daily bread of our common pleaders and discoursers." But its appeal was also academic. In 1619, nearly forty years after the _Art_ had lapsed from print, John Milton's teacher Alexander Gill invoked Wilson as he ridiculed the affectations of pretentiously learned language. Seen in its historical context, Wilson's _The Art of Rhetoric _reveals a great deal about the formal education of such authors as Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Milton. Since it bears directly on what is basic to imaginative literature—the art of language—the _Art_ encapsulates a literary context relevant to all those studying the English Renaissance, whether their approach is historicist, structuralist, deconstructionist, or new historicist. In addition, it will be of interest to students of rhetoric, education, and intellectual history in general. There have been four editions of the _Art_ in the twentieth century: two facsimiles and two original-spelling texts, none of which is in print. Peter Medine's edition modernizes the spelling and punctuation of the text of the second edition, which Wilson revised and expanded in 1560, and furnishes a fully critical apparatus, including introduction, textual notes, commentary, and glossary. As such, this edition makes available a central work of the English Renaissance in an accessible format. (shrink)

Among the artifacts produced by nineteenth-century Quellenforschung, few have exerted more influence or endured more censure than the lost Hellenistic epyllion which, as reconstructed by G. Knaack, told of the journey of Phaethon to the palace of the sun-god and his disastrous ride in the solar car. Relying chiefly upon the two versions of the story told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses and Nonnus in the Dionysiaca , and applying techniques comparable to the stemmatic method of textual criticism, Knaack traced (...) every shared feature of these two accounts to the inevitable lost Hellenistic ‘original’. Details from Lucian and Philostratus , who were also presumed to have read this lost poem, helped to fill in the blanks. Knaack's thesis illustrates the extremes of which source criticism was capable at a time when it was naively assumed that Roman poets were capable of little more than literal translation of their Greek models. In the early part of this century, a reaction set in against Knaack's method, when it was alleged that there was no common source for the two poets and that Nonnus derived his account of Phaethon directly from his reading of Ovid. The case was first made by J. Braune, who examined four episodes common to both works – Phaethon, Cadmus, Actaeon, and Daphne – and argued that correspondences between the two are due to imitation of Ovid by Nonnus. Braune's arguments did not win complete acceptance; it is noteworthy that even his supporters were not entirely convinced by three of his four test passages, for which abundant evidence survives of sources earlier than Ovid. (shrink)

Byrne & Russon's notion of program-level imitation is based on the ability of apes to plan novel sequences of behavior and on how information gleaned by observation can aid the planning process. Byrne & Russon would have made a stronger case by focusing on social learning and planning and expending less effort interpreting their results as a new category of imitation.

Webb compares robots to other behavior models in a novel space, but neglects significant portions of this space. The article's analysis of models would have been strengthened by including a broader coverage of physically embodied models and of models of social behavior. Nevertheless, Webb is correct to claim that robot construction will contribute to understanding behavior.

Al-Kindī, honoured as the 'philosopher of the Arabs', was the first philosopher of Islam. His pioneer philosophical writings engage with ideas that became available through the Graeco-Arabic translation movement. This volume makes his entire philosophical output-some two dozen works-available in English, most of them for the first time. An overall introduction, introductions to each work and extensive notes explain al-Kindī's ideas, sources, and influence.

When did historians begin to put quotation marks around the wordreal? There are many examples of this habit and some of them will be set forth as evidence in what follows. But before doing so we might ask a preliminary question: What are the quotation marksthemselvessupposed to mean? Today we find them so familiar they hardly need to be written and they are more frequently consigned to the everyday repertoire of silent gesture: two fingers on either hand clutch at the (...) air as if they meant to tickle the flanks of the invisible beast between them. The popular term is “scare-quotes,” a pun on the word “scarecrow.” Its etymology is revealing: just as a mere representation of a body in a field may scare off birds, so too scare-quotes permit someone to deploy a word without sincere commitment to what it normally means. But further reflection tells us that the effects are not so similar after all: To use a term without sincerity robs it of its original meaning and holds up its lifeless corpse to ridicule. The more knowing sort of crow can settle on the shoulder of the figure on the pole precisely because it recognizes that such a sorry excuse for a man can in fact harm no one. Similarly when one putsrealityin quotation marks we are put in mind of the living concept but we are immediately alerted to the fact that, for the user at least, the new term enjoys no metaphysical prestige. How did this happen? When and why did the single most privileged word in the entire lexicon of metaphysics begin to lose its authority such that in certain spheres of intellectual sophistication its sincere use would only seem an embarrassment and a sign of naïveté? (shrink)

SummaryIn this article, I offer a series of responses to comments by four scholars on my book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. In my remarks, I take up various questions of both methodology and interpretation, clarifying, for example, why the term “Continental” still seems to me an apt description for the philosophies of both Cassirer and Heidegger, how the two thinkers related to the tradition of philosophical anthropology, how each philosopher conceived of the relation between myth and science, and so (...) forth. Along the way, I also clarify why the terms “spontaneity” and “thrownness” still strike me as helpful for distinguishing between the two rival philosophies, and I explain why it is misguided to believe that philosophical disputes must conclude in dialectical reconciliation. (shrink)

"Many of today's moral conflicts concerning family values and medical ethics have their basis in different conceptions of man and the nature and purpose of human life. Fr Bristow argues that contemporary utilitarianism and the various forms of permissive morality are insufficient for dealing with these matters and that only a natural law morality is adequate to the needs and dignity of the human person. He goes on to apply its principles to the issues that derive from advancing technology, such (...) as genetic engineering, in vitrio fertilization, embryo research, drugs and painkillers and ecology."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

A special issue of_ New German Critique_ The posthumous publication of Theodor W. Adorno’s works on music continues to reveal the special relationship between music and philosophy in his thinking. These important works have not, however, received as much scholarly attention as they deserve. Contributors to this issue seek to provide insight into some of the key themes raised in these works, including the sociology of musical genre, the historical transformation of music from the "heroic" or high-bourgeois era to late (...) modernity, the meaning of both performance and listening in the era of mass communication, and the specific challenges or deformations of the radio on musical form, a theme that implicates many of the digital practices of our own age. There is much left to discover in these new publications, and they pose again, with renewed vigor, the question of Adorno’s _Aktualität_—his polyvalent, untranslatable term for, among other things, the intellectual relationship between the present and the past. Contributors Daniel K. L. Chua, Lydia Goehr, Peter E. Gordon, Martin Jay, Brian Kane, Max Paddison, Alexander Rehding, Fred Rush, Martin Scherzinger. (shrink)

This essay places some conceptual pressure on the model of a “learning process” in Jürgen Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, and it asks whether this model introduces a subtle asymmetry into the relationship between religion and secular philosophy. Such an asymmetry would seem to obtain insofar as religious tradition is granted a privileged or unique status as the source of normative insights that are then available for rational scrutiny and translation into secular life. The essay also draws a comparison (...) between Lessing and Habermas: Lessing, like Habermas, saw revelation as a source of instruction for humanity, and affirmed that religion could thereby play a role in the Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. But Lessing was careful to say that no valuable normative contents are found in religion that could not also be derived by secular reason alone. Habermas’s genealogy of post-metaphysical thinking does not seem to confirm Lessing’s idea; instead, it appears to confirm an asymmetry in the relation between religion and secular philosophy. (shrink)

A study of the development of Eisenman's architectural theory, taken from the 'texts' which he himself wrote every time he designed a house.

The production of manuscripts can be an indication for the scientific, linguistic or medical interests of a community. In this paper the author argues that Parisinus Graecus 2293, a bilingual Greek-Arabic manuscript, containing parts of the first three books of Paul of Aegina's medical encyclopaedia, was produced in Sicily or Southern Italy, probably in Palermo during the reign of the Hohenstaufen. It is thus a testimony to the fervent scientific and medical interest of the Swabian court which promoted cultural exchange (...) between the East and the West. The purpose of the manuscript was not so much to help medical practice but rather to further bilingualism by giving the reader a tool with which he could improve his knowledge of either language. (shrink)

Summary The pharmacological tradition in the medieval Islamic world developed on the basis of the Greek tradition, with the works of Dioscorides and Galen being particularly popular. The terminology was influenced not only by Greek, but also Middle Persian, Syriac, and indigenous Arabic words. Through recent research into Graeco-Arabic translations, it has become possible to discern the evolution of pharmacological writing in Arabic: in the late eighth century, the technical terms were being developed, with transliterations being used; by the mid-ninth (...) century, many standard Arabic translations for Greek words have been established. Various authors, however, expanded the pharmacology inherited from the Greeks. Galen had established a system of degrees of primary faculties (dry or moist, and warm or cold) that various physicians in the Islamic world modified. Al-Kindī, for instance, invented a theory of how to calculate these degrees in compound drugs, whereas ar-Rāzī criticised the epistemology that underlies Galen's theories. Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) complemented the various degrees in his description of simple drugs. Furthermore, both Ibn Sarābiyun and al-Kaskarī integrated new drugs from the Islamic heartland, and the Far East into the Greek system. In these ways, the Arabic pharmacology developed in a creative tension of tradition and innovation. (shrink)

Ibn Sarābiyūn is one of the last exponents of classical Syriac medical writing, and one of the most influential authors for the development of medical theory and practice in late ninth-century Baghdad in particular, and for the Arabic medical tradition in general. During the last thirty years, three important studies have been published regarding the life and work of Ibn Sarābiyūn, each of which dealing with a different aspect of the transmission of this important author’s œuvre. Likewise, during the last (...) twenty-five years, a number of texts associated with Ibn Sarābiyūn's works have been edited, allowing us today to shed new light on the relation between the original Syriac and the numerous translations into Arabic, Latin and Hebrew. Furthermore, through analysing and comparing a number of manuscripts containing different parts of Ibn Sarābiyūn's work which have not hitherto been considered together, progress can be made towards answering the question how Ibn Sarābiyūn was translated and used during the medieval period. (shrink)

Codes of ethics are directly aimed at behavioral control, but they also affect a company’s ethical culture, which in turn concerns compliance and ethical behavior. To positively influence a company’s ethical culture, employees must be familiar with its code of ethics, perceive that top management is committed to the code, and believe that their peers also comply with the code. The evidence on whether a code’s design affects a company’s ethical culture is limited. This study’s factorial survey experiment contributes to (...) this gap in two ways: first, it investigates whether a code’s design affects how easily the code can be learned and, therefore, contributes to code familiarity. Second, it examines how a code can convey expectations regarding top management’s commitment and peers’ behavior, both of which are part of ethical culture. The results indicate that a positive tone increases code familiarity, and a code signed by top managers sends a strong signal of their commitment to the code. Finally, various implications of the results for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Individuals who disagree that organizational interests legitimately supersede those of the wider society may experience conflict between their personal standards of ethics and those demanded by an employing organization, a conflict that is well documented. An additional question is whether or not individuals capable of complex moral reasoning experience greater conflict than those reasoning at a less developed level. This question was first positioned in a theoretical framework and then investigated using 115 survey responses from a student sample. Correlational analysis (...) and hierarchical regression indicated that individuals scoring high on the Defining Issues Test measure of Kohlberg's stages of moral development experienced significantly greater workplace ethical conflict than low scorers. The finding that complex moral reasoners perceive greater conflict between their personal standards and typical organizational demands raises the issue of what reasoning orientation is rewarded in organizations. Individuals capable of complex moral reasoning may be likely to leave traditional organizations due to high conflict but more ethically friendly organizations for complex reasoners seem unlikely unless these people occupy influential positions. (shrink)

Self–other discrimination was investigated with point-light displays in which actions were presented with or without additional auditory information. Participants first executed different actions in time with music. In two subsequent experiments, they watched point-light displays of their own or another participant’s recorded actions, and were asked to identify the agent . Manipulations were applied to the visual information and to the auditory information . Results indicate that self-recognition was better than chance in all conditions and was highest when observing relatively (...) unconstrained patterns of movement. Auditory information did not increase accuracy even with the most ambiguous visual displays, suggesting that judgments of agent identity depend much more on motor cues than on auditory or audiovisual information. (shrink)

A. F. Losev, one of the most important Russian philosophers and historians of ancient aesthetics and culture in the 20th century, develops in his ‘Dialectics of the Myth’ (Dialektika mifa), 1930, a personalistic ontology by using elements of neoplatonic philosophy and Orthodox Christian belief. According to Losev reality in all its different expressions and ontological strata must be understood as “mythical”, i.e. as “living mutual exchange of subject and object”. The subjective and personal aspect of reality is not grounded in (...) man’s epistemic relation to it alone; reality in itself has to be characterized as personal and subjective. The main philosophical opponent is Descartes, the founder of “modern rationalism and mechanism”. (shrink)

Mooney, in his particularly well-written commentary on Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, attempts to fill a conspicuous void which exists in Kierkegaard scholarship in the English-speaking world. This void is attested to by the fact that there is no book-length commentary in English on Fear and Trembling, which was viewed by Kierkegaard as one of his greatest works, and which has a certain claim to literary renown. Mooney attributes the lack of specific consideration given to this "dialectical lyric" to its (...) provocative and easily misunderstood content. (shrink)

If someone commits the mereological fallacy, then he ascribes psychological predicates to parts of an animal that apply only to the (behaving) animal as a whole. This incoherence is not strictly speaking a fallacy, i.e. an invalid argument, since it is not an argument but an illicit predication. However, it leads to invalid inferences and arguments, and so can loosely be called a fallacy. However, discussions of this particular illicit predication, the mereological fallacy, show that it is often misunderstood. Many (...) misunderstandings concern the use of this illicit predication in the course of discussions of understanding the mind/body problem. Our aim here is to provide an accessible overview through discussing common misconceptions of the fallacy. We also discuss how conceptual investigations of the relation between living organisms and their parts fit within the framework of modern evolutionary theory, i.e. inclusive fitness theory. (shrink)

Some researchers interested in assessing moral reasoning among business practitioners or students have developed their own vignettes or scenarios set in business contexts, based on assumptions that the situations presented in the often-used Defining Issues Test (DIT) will somehow be inappropriate for these specific types of respondents. This paper is the first to examine in depth both the actual details contained in these business-oriented scenarios and empirical findings emerging from them. Among this paper’s conclusions are: (1) assumptions underpinning the presumed (...) superiority of business-oriented vignettes have yet to be tested; (2) the DIT possesses considerable advantages unavailable in alternative measures; (3) many business-oriented scenarios have underlying Dilemma themes that seem inherently ambiguous and thus of questionable relevance for assessing moral reasoning; (4) these scenarios have no obvious equivalent in the DIT and thus cannot definitively be placed under the umbrella of the latter’s demonstrated construct validity; and (5) meaningful empirical findings have not clearly emerged from investigations using business-oriented vignettes. In light of these conclusions, we recommend that investigators interested in moral reasoning advance knowledge in a coherent and unified way by using the DIT that seems entirely appropriate for use among respondents with business experience or training. Although alternative measures may have value for assessing ethical judgments, evidence of their validity as a measure of moral reasoning is lacking. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that Wittgenstein's conception of grammar and the role he allocated to grammar (in his sense of the term) in philosophy changed between the Big Typescript and the Philosophical Investigations. It is also held that some of the grammatical propositions Wittgenstein asserted prior to his writing of the Philosophical Investigations are theses, doctrines, opinions or dogmatism, which he abandoned by 1936/37. The purpose of this paper is to show these claims to be misunderstandings and misinterpretations. On all (...) important matters, his conception of grammar and of grammatical investigations, of grammatical statements or propositions and of grammatical clarification did not change between the Big Typescript and the Investigations. Grammatical propositions (e.g. the meaning of a word is its use; a sample in an ostensive definition belongs to the means of representation; belief is not a mental state) are no more theses, doctrines or opinions than is “a bachelor is an unmarried man.” Nor are they in any way dogmatic. (shrink)

Derrida’s writings on the question of religion have played a crucial role in the transformation of scholarly debate across the globe. The Trace of God provides a compact introduction to this debate. It considers Derrida’s fraught relationship to Judaism and his Jewish identity, broaches the question of Derrida's relation to the Western Christian tradition, and examines both the points of contact and the silences in Derrida's treatment of Islam.

Despite acknowledging that musicality evolved to serve multiple adaptive functions in human evolution, Savage et al. promote social bonding to an overarching super-function. Yet, no unifying neurobiological framework is offered. We propose that oxytocin constitutes a socio-allostatic agent whose modulation of sensing, learning, prediction, and behavioral responses with reference to the physical and social environment facilitates music's social bonding effects.