Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical visual processing are yet to be determined. Here, we investigated the integration of visual and linguistic input during a reasoning task. Participants listened to sentences containing conjunctions or disjunctions and (...) looked at visual scenes containing two pictures that either matched or mismatched the nouns. Degree of match between nouns and pictures and between their expected and actual spatial positions affected fixations as well as judgments. We conclude that language induces incremental processing of visual scenes, which in turn becomes susceptible to reasoning errors during the language-meaning verification process. (shrink)

The reputation Theologoumena Arithmeticae has acquired is largely that of being an odd, and frequently opaque, compilation of arithmological lore. As a sourcebook for this aspect of the Pythagorean tradition it is, of course, invaluable. However, its poor reputation is increased, and its historical value lessened, by the depredations time has wrought on the text. ThA was never great prose: it is a compilation, largely from the lost Theologoumena Arithmeticae of Nicomachus of Gerasa and from Anatolius' Peri Dekados; and the (...) text which cannot be safely or conjecturally assigned to these two sources often reads like little more than the written-up notes of some student. However, the treatise contains passages of considerable lucidity, within the context of its peculiar framework. (shrink)

The explanatory gap refers to the lack of concepts for understanding “how it is that . . . a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue.” By assuming that there are colours in the outside world, Block needlessly widens this gap and Lycan and Kitcher simply fail to see the gap. When such assumptions are abandoned, an unnecessary and incomprehensible constraint disappears. It then becomes clear that the brain can use its own neural language for (...) representing aspects of the outside world. While this may not close the gap, it becomes clearer where we need new concepts. (shrink)

Everybody knows the phenomena summarized with the term attention: concentration, focalization, limitation, selection, and intensification . The explanation of these phenomena is, however, a different matter. Problems easily arise with regard towhathas to be explained and with regard to thestyleof explanation. A problem of the first kind is the “methodology of ‘bad focus’”: the explanation starts with and is fixated on an intuitively striking but nonessential behavioral feature or cognitive achievement. A problem of the second kind is a “virtus dormitiva” (...) explanation: the explanation starts with emphasizing one aspect of the observed phenomena, the emphasized aspect receives an interesting and suggestive name, and that name with its connotations is used as a concept in the explanation. At the start of contemporary, behavior-based, information processing psychology, avirtus dormitivaexplanation infiltrated the functional accounts of the phenomena of attention; the empirical observation that people show performance limitations was translated into the theoretical concept of a communication channel with a limited capacity. That limited capacity notion became the core concept in what can be called the standard theory of attention. This standard theory of attention faced severe difficulties in explaining the guidance of attention by the information processor's goals and intentions. Subsequent modifications, concerned with removing these difficulties, revealed that selection, guided by goals and intentions, is the essential behavioral feature and that the observed performance limitations are a result of this selection. So, the limited capacity theorizing was not only plagued by avirtus dormitivaexplanation, it also suffered from the methodology of bad focus. (shrink)

In the early 1970s, we and others in the economics profession became enamored with the notion of externalties—a cost or benefit imposed on or provided to others but not taken into account by the economic agents who generate the effect. We, and others, seemed to see external effects everywhere. There was polluted water and air, noise, urban blight, traffic congestion, and other features of modern life that seemed to call out for some form of corrective action. As the externalities revolution (...) unfolded, economists and other social scientists overlooked the importance of evolved legal and other institutions that formally and informally establish property and liability rules that cause decision makers to face the cost of their actions, including what otherwise could be external costs imposed on unwilling third parties. While markets seemed always to fail, political institutions were seen systematically as without blemish, or so it seemed. It was this two-pronged failure, 1) a failure to consider and state assumptions about background institutional arrangements and 2) a disregard for special interest politics, that became the Achilles Heel of the otherwise elegant externality arguments. Eventually, it was the modern institutionalists, scholars who focused on laws, regulation, and rules of the marketplace, who attempted to close the lid and drive the nails on the externality coffin. In this paper, we reach back to 1920 and trace the rise and decline of the policy importance of externalities theory. Beginning with A. C. Pigou and Alfred Marshall, our story includes some of the great figures in economic history of thought. But while theory was being built, institutions were overlooked. Pigou continues to be a dominant player in the story until the 1960s and 1970s when externalities theory was challenged by James M. Buchanan, Ronald Coase and other scholars. It is here in the twilight years of the externalities revolution that the prospects of government failure are raised as being more daunting than the likelihood of market failure. Finally, in the late 1970s and beyond, the externalities revolution is replaced by a property rights revolution. (shrink)

This is the first-ever critical history of sociology in Britain, written by one of the world's leading scholars in the field. A. H. Halsey presents a vivid and authoritative picture of the neglect, expansion, fragmentation, and explosion of the discipline during the past century. The book examines the literary and scientific contributions to the origin of the discipline, and the challenges faced by the discipline at the dawn of a new century.

"The studies collected in this book are all concerned with aspects of the Platonic tradition, either in its own internal development in the Hellenistic age and the period of the Roman Empire, or with the influence of Platonism, in one or other of its forms, on other spiritual traditions, especially that of Christianity." [Book jacket].

A. H. Louie's More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms (...) are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings. (shrink)

The Bhagavad-Gītā is the most important text in the smrti literature of India, as distinct from the śruti literature which is traditionally regarded as ultimately authoritative. The Bhagavad-Gītā has been assigned a date ranging from the fifth century B.C. to the second century B.C. The Indian religious tradition places the Gītā at the end of the third age of the present cycle of the universe and the beginning of the fourth, namely the Kali Yuga to which we belong.

The democratic principle in its extreme form is the assertation that the mere fact of free birth is alone sufficient to constitute a claim to all offices. It is never the claim of a majority to rule, but it is the demand that every one, whether rich or poor, high- or low-born, shall be equally represented in the constitution. This is what Aristotle calls the principle of numerical equality.-from "Chapter VI: Democracy"One of the most renowned classical scholars of the turn (...) of the 20th century here offers a lucid and highly readable overview of a difficult and little understood aspect of Greek history: its public law, not just how it was structured but how it behaved in action. This 1896 book-perfect for university students, amateur historians, and readers of the history of the law-covers the full range of Greek legal development, from the origin of the city-state and the beginnings of the Greek monarchy to the social and political institutions of the far-flung Greek civilization to the rise of federalism and its long-term historical impact on the cultures that came after.British classical scholar A.H.J. GREENIDGE was a lecturer in ancient history at Brasenose College, Oxford. He is also the author of Roman Public and Private Law (1894), Legal Procedure in Cicero's Time (1901), and Roman Public Life (1901), among many other works of ancient history. (shrink)

Description from a book review by J. G. Beebe-Center: "Mr. Allen's book develops in detail the view that pleasure and unpleasure are essentially manifestations of the progression and thwarting of impulses. Part one is a brief summary of the principal theories of feeling. Part two is devoted to "sensory" or "bodily" pleasure and unpleasure. These forms of feeling, it is argued, 'depend on an analogue of conation existing in the organism, a nisus to maintain, or to carry out to the (...) full extent, the functioning proper to the bodily system.' Part three -- the piece de resistance (about half the book) -- deals with the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to the main instincts. Parts four, five and six take up a number of classical problems: the relation of pleasure and unpleasure to sensation, their relation to desire, the relativity of feelings, the qualitative variety of feelings, and the psychology of values. The author shows throughout a rare combination of historicophilosophical sophistication and of first-hand familiarity with the modern experimental literature.". (shrink)

Edited with New Translation by Richard McKirahan With a New Preface by Malcolm Schofield This book is a revised and expanded version of A.H. Coxon's full critical edition of the extant remains of Parmenides of Elea—the fifth-century B.C. philosopher by many considered "one of the greatest and most astonishing thinkers of all times." Coxon's presentation of the complete ancient evidence for Parmenides and his comprehensive examination of the fragments, unsurpassed to this day, have proven invaluable to our understanding of the (...) Eleatic since the book's first publication in 1986. This edition, edited by Richard McKirahan and with a new preface by Malcolm Schofield, is released on the 100th anniversary of Coxon's birth. This new edition for the first time includes English translations of the testimonia and of any Ancient Greek throughout the book, as well as an English/Greek glossary by Richard McKirahan, and revisions by the late author himself. The text consists of Coxon's collations of the relevant folios of manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus, Proclus and Simplicius and includes all extant fragments, a commentary, the testimonia, a complete list of sources, linguistic parallels from both earlier and later authors, and the fullest critical apparatus that has appeared since Diels’ _Poetarum Philosophorum Fragmenta _. The collection of testimonia includes the philosophical discussions of Parmenides by Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists, most of which had been omitted by Diels. The introduction discusses the history of the text, the language and form of the poem, Parmenides’ use and understanding of the verb ‘to be’, his place in the history of earlier and later philosophy and the biographical tradition. In the commentary Coxon deals in detail with both the language and the subject matter of the poem and pays full attention to Parmenides’ account of the physical world. The appendix relates later Eleatic arguments to those of Parmenides. (shrink)

ResumeMeans-centered approach to science is contrasted with a problem-centered orientation. Overstress on and too exclusive concern with method, instrument, technique or procedure fosters the following mistakes:1) Emphasis on polish and elegance rather than on vitality, significance and creativeness.2) Giving the commanding positions in science to technicians rather than discoverers.3) Over-valuation of quantification for its own sake.4) Fitting problems to techniques rather than vice-versa.5) Creation of a false and pernicious hierarchical system among the sciences.6) Overstrong compartmentalization between the sciences.7) Emphasis on (...) the difference rather than the similarities between scientists and other truth-seekers.8) Creation of a scientific orthodoxy, which in turn a) tends to block the development of new methods, b) tends to exclude many problems from the jurisdiction of science and c) tends to make scientists “safe” rather than daring and unconventional.9) Neglect of the problems of values, with a consequent blurring of the criteria for judging the worth or importance of an experiment. (shrink)

Aristophanes' last two surviving plays, Assemblywomen and Wealth, have long been regarded as something of an enigma. The changes in structure – the diminution in the role of the chorus, the disappearance of the parabasis, etc. –, as well as the shift of interest away from the immediacies of current politics towards broader social themes, can reasonably be interpreted as an early stage of the process that ultimately transformed Old Comedy into New, even if it is unlikely ever to be (...) finally agreed whether Aristophanes was leading or following this trend. The decline in freshness, in verbal agility, in sparkle of wit, in theatrical inventiveness, which is perceptible in the earlier play and very marked in the later, may be put down to advancing years and diminishing inspiration. Such an explanation squares with the evidence of a marked decline in Aristophanes' productivity towards the end of his life. Whereas in the first seven years of his career he seems to have produced, or had produced for him, not less than ten plays, and in the years 420–405 approximately another eighteen, the twenty years or so that followed Frogs yielded a further eleven at the very most unless some titles have been completely lost; and since it is not likely that after the outstanding success of Frogs, and the public recognition that followed it, Aristophanes would have experienced any difficulty in securing a chorus, the explanation can only be that he was writing less. But the truly puzzling feature of the two late plays we possess is the apparent sea-change in the author's social orientation. In his fifth-century plays, from Acharnians toFrogs, as has been shown by de Ste Croix, Aristophanes reveals himself as one who instinctively speaks the language and thinks the thoughts of the well-to-do, even if at the same time he can laugh with the common man at ostentatious and useless wealth in the shape of Pyrilampes' peacocks, Leogoras' pheasants or the sultan-like garments of an Athenian imperial official – as one who was happy for the Demos to be sovereign so long as it was willing to be guided by the advice of its' betters', the καλоί тε κáγоθоί of Knights 738 or Frogs 727–9, and to leave them in the quiet enjoyment of their property. At first sight in Assemblywomen and Wealth this seems to have changed almost diametrically. (shrink)