On the text and translation of the De mysteriis -- Iamblichus the man -- The De mysteriis : a defence of theurgy, and an answer to Porphyry's letter to Anebo -- Iamblichus's knowledge of Egyptian religion and mythology -- The nature and contents of De mysteriis -- Iamblichus, De mysteriis : text and translation.

Using a nationally representative survey of farm operators in Ireland, this study examines the effect of non-pecuniary benefits from farm work on labor allocation choices. Results suggest that non-pecuniary benefits affect both the decision to enter the off-farm labor market and also once that decision is made, the amount of time spent working off-farm. We find our derived variable representing non-monetary benefits associated with farm work to have a substantial impact similar to the effect of other more widely reported personal (...) and farm structural variables such as the age of the farm operator, farm size, and farming system. The existence of these non-pecuniary benefits serves to increase the implied wage to farmers for their farm work. This in turn can lead to allocations of labor that would seem suboptimal from a purely financial point of view. Rural development policies aimed at creating off-farm opportunities could fail unless returns to off-farm work are high enough to compensate the farmer for losing the benefits associated with the farming lifestyle. From a methodological perspective, our analysis indicates that failure to model off-farm labor allocation choices as a two-part process may lead to some incorrect conclusions regarding the effect of certain explanatory variables. Outside of explaining farmers’ off-farm labor supply it would be useful to incorporate farmer perceptions regarding the non-pecuniary benefits from farming in economic models of farm behavior across a range of activities as this could lead to much more accurate predictions of farmers’ responses to policy changes. (shrink)

Animal health is a key factor affecting the economic efficiency of the dairy industry. Improvements in animal health are also of relevance to society more broadly, given important implications for animal welfare, food safety and quality. Although the economic gains of best practice with regard to animal health have been well documented, many farmers are not adopting optimal herd management techniques. This paper utilises nationally representative farm-level data from Ireland for 2013 to identify drivers and barriers to the adoption of (...) best practice with regard to on-farm mastitis management. Exploratory factor analysis is used to derive measures of farmers’ attitudes towards animal health and mastitis and econometric techniques are employed to empirically assess the influence of these on the uptake of beneficial herd health management practices. A number of focus groups were also undertaken to complement the analysis. This paper concludes that farmers’ attitudes towards animal health are not a key driver in the uptake of best practice, although perceived disease risk is of relevance. A number of interesting issues arise in identifying barriers to the uptake of best practice, these include the possibility of routine inertia, i.e., farmers do not deviate from the routine developed around mastitis prevention until there is an indication of infection, as well as constraints around the availability of labour and time. Farmer behaviour with respect to mastitis management can thus be considered as reactionary as opposed to precautionary. This research highlights the valuable role of the extension agent but concludes that engagement around knowledge transfer and technology adoption is particularly complex. (shrink)

How do scientific explanations for beliefs affect people's confidence that those beliefs are true? For example, do people think neuroscience-based explanations for belief in God support or challenge God's existence? In five experiments, we find that people tend to think explanations for beliefs corroborate those beliefs if the explanations invoke normally-functioning mechanisms, but not if they invoke abnormal functioning (where “normality” is a matter of proper functioning). This emerges across a variety of kinds of scientific explanations and beliefs (religious, moral, (...) and scientific). We also find evidence that these effects can interact with people's prior beliefs to produce motivated judgments. (shrink)

In many cultures arrogance is regarded as a serious vice and a cause of numerous social ills. Although its badness is typically thought to lie in its harmful consequences for other persons and things, I draw on Kant to argue that what makes it a vice is first and foremost the failure to respect oneself. But arrogance is not only a problem inside individuals. Drawing on feminist insights I argue that it is a systemic problem constructed in and reinforcing unjust (...) distributions of social power. I identify ways in which arrogance is connected with social arrangements of domination and subordination, then discuss implications of a power-focused analysis Among the implications: (1) contrary to the widely-held view, humility is not the personal virtue opposing arrogance, self-respect is; (2) arrogance is not always a vice, for in circumstances of oppression a certain kind of arrogance is a virtue of self-respecting resistance to domination. (shrink)

This book presents a lively and accessible way to use the ancient figure of Socrates to teach modern psychology that avoids the didactic lecture and sterile textbook. In the online age, is a living teacher even needed? What can college students learn face-to-face from a teacher they cannot learn anywhere else? The answer is what most teachers already seek to do: help students think critically, clearly define concepts, logically reason from premises to conclusions, engage in thoughtful and persuasive communication, and (...) actively engage the franchise of democratic citizenship. But achieving these outcomes requires an intimate, interpersonal learning community. This book presents a plan for using the ancient figure of Socrates and his Method to realize humane learning outcomes in the context of psychology. (shrink)

In show business lore, a “trouper” perseveres without complaint no matter how arduous or dangerous the circumstances. In the camaraderie-driven, show-must-go-on world of entertainment, the appellat...

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently “feel” and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology in (...) order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body. (shrink)

In Searle’s social ontology, collective intentionality is an essential component of all institutional facts. This is because the latter involve the assignment of functions, namely "status functions," on entities whose physical features do not guarantee their performance, therefore requiring our acceptance that it be performed. One counter-example to that claim can be found in Carl Menger’s individualistic account of the money system. Menger’s commitment to the self-interest assumption, however, prevents him from accounting for the deontic dimensions of institutional facts.

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how (...) we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

John Dillon presents an English translation of Alcinous' Handbook of Platonism, accompanied by an introduction and a philosophical commentary which explain the ideas in the work and show their intellectual and historical context. The Handbook purports to be an introduction to the doctrines of Plato, but in fact gives us an excellent survey of Platonist thought in the second century AD.

This chapter contains sections titled: Note.

William James is known as a nineteenth-century philosopher, psychologist, and psychical researcher. Less well-known are the medical fixations that united his multiple identities and drove his ambition to change the way American society conceived of itself in body, mind, and soul. William James, M.D. offers an account of the development and cultural significance of James's ideas and works, and establishes, for the first time, the relevance of medical themes to his major lines of thought. James lived at a time when (...) old assumptions about faith and the moral and religious possibilities for human worth and redemption were increasingly displaced by a concern with the medically "normal" and the perfectibility of the body. Woven into treatises warning of the degeneration of humanity, these ideas comprised the origins of the eugenics movement and were manifest in a growing social stigma attached to illness and invalidism, a disturbing intellectual current in which James felt personally implicated. Most chronicles of James's life have portrayed a distressed young man, a psychological or spiritual crisis, followed by the emergence of a mature thinker who threw off his pallor of mental sickness for good. In contrast, Emma Sutton draws on his personal correspondence, unpublished notebooks, and diaries to show that James considered himself a genuine invalid to the end of his days. Sutton makes the compelling case that his philosophizing was not an abstract occupation but an impassioned response to his own life experiences and challenges. To ignore the medical James is to misread James altogether. Sales points: First book to map William James's preoccupation with medical ideas, concerns, and values across the disciplinary breadth of his work Reveals how themes of invalidism, health, and healing underpinned the genesis of many of James's major philosophical, psychological, and political ideas Draws on the approximately 9,400 items of Jamesian correspondence, together with his private notes and reading lists. (shrink)

A passer du temps dans des studios de danse, voilà ce qu'on peut apprendre : nous, mammifères humaines, habitantes de Terra, sommes mouvementées par une multitude de forces. Loin d'être automobiles, loin d'être contenues ou contenables dans la petite usine de nos corps, nous débordons. Les écologies scientifiques nous en convainquent, les écologies politiques nous appellent à en faire une force insurrectionnelle. Et si nous apprenions, avec les écologies somatiques, à sentir et à célébrer nos débordements plus qu'humains? A l'heure (...) où les soulèvements de la terre se multiplient, ce livre examine la manière dont certaines formes de danse (improvisations collectives, pratiques somatiques, installations chorégraphiques) tentent d'élaborer, dans les plis du monde mondialisé, des antidotes à l'anesthésie. Des manières de nouer nos gestes au-delà des fausses frontières de l'individu et de l'humain. des manières de danser-sentir- penser l'enchevêtrement de nos mouvements"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

A corporate executive is miserable and seeks the help of a psychotherapist. A college student is unhappy in her current major and goes to her academic advisor. A married couple struggles with discord and seeks the help of a licensed counsellor. In each case, the diagnosis and prescription will likely be the same: you are miserable because you are not doing what you want. Your path to happiness thus lies in figuring out what you enjoy doing, coming up with a (...) strategy to satisfy these desires, and then executing your plan. This is the standard approach to happiness used in much of today's counselling and psychotherapeutic practice. The Socratic, Stoic, and Confucian philosophical traditions tell a different story: you are miserable because you are not doing what you must. Through historical and contemporary case studies, analyses of key novels, reviews of modern psychological research, interviews with struggling people, and close readings of philosophical texts, The Joy of Duty illuminates the intimate connection between human joy and the performance of ethical obligation. (shrink)

When we accept oppression of some, we feed the oppression of others, and we make space for domination driven by false ideas of inferiority and lesser worth. When we discount the inherent preciousness of animals who think and feel, we erase precious parts of ourselves. When we consider living beings as "livestock," it's no wonder we pillage the unthinking yet irreplaceable living earth. Sub-Human is a robustly researched, sharply critical yet comfortingly human call to arms, diving deeply into the theory (...) behind oppression, liberation, and the intersections within it. Exploring the history of animal consumption and commodification, this book deconstructs the current sociopolitical climate surrounding animal enterprises by looking at how we got here. Most importantly, it unravels how we can work towards a collectively liberated world. (shrink)

How does a school of thought, in the area of philosophy, or indeed of religion, from roots that may be initially open-ended and largely informal, come to take on the features that later mark it out as distinctive, and even exclusive? That is the theme which is explored in this book in respect of the philosophical movement known as Platonism, stemming as it does from the essentially open-ended and informal atmosphere of Plato's Academy. John Dillon focuses on a number (...) of key issues, such as monism versus dualism, the metaphysical underpinnings of ethical theory, the theory of Forms, and the reaction to the Sceptical 'deviation' represented by the so-called 'New Academy'. The book is written in the lively and accessible style of the lecture series in Beijing from which it originates. (shrink)

relevant to the differences between the two speakings, Odile’s words in the first case said what was false, while in the second case they said what was true. Both spoke of the same state of the world, or the same refrigerator in the same condition. So, in the first case, the words said what is false of a refrigerator with but a milk puddle; in the second case they said what is true of such a refrigerator.

Research on emotion and emotion regulation is expected to improve our understanding of psychopathology. However, achieving this understanding requires overcoming several obstacles, including the paucity of objective markers of specific emotions or psychiatric diagnoses, and the fact that emotion regulation is a concept that can be difficult to operationalize. We review affective neuroscience research that has addressed these issues by focusing on psychological and neural mechanisms implicated in approach and avoidance behaviors, as revealed by studies of fear, anxiety, and reward (...) processing. Dysfunction in these mechanisms may serve as risk markers for psychopathology, while emotion regulation research demonstrates that some of them are susceptible to volitional control. The conclusion acknowledges limitations of affective neuroscience and highlights goals for future work. (shrink)

Scientists, philosophers, and policymakers disagree about how to define microaggression. Here, we offer a taxonomy of existing definitions, clustering around (a) the psychological motives of perpetrators, (b) the experience of victims, and (c) the functional role of microaggression in oppressive social structures. We consider conceptual and epistemic challenges to each and suggest that progress may come from developing novel hybrid accounts of microaggression, combining empirically tractable features with sensitivity to the testimony of victims.

Iamblichus is the only Platonist philosopher whose philosophical letters have survived from the ancient world. These nineteen letters, which are translated into English here for the first time, address such topics as providence, fate, concord, marriage, bringing up children, ingratitude, music, and the cardinal virtues, with some letters addressed to students and others to prominent members of Syrian society and the imperial administration. The letters reflect the concerns of popular moral philosophy and illustrate the more public aspects of Iamblichus s (...) philosophy. This volume provides a useful complement to Iamblichus: On the Mysteries, and On the Pythagorean Way of Life, both published by the Society of Biblical Literature, and will be of interest to students of late antiquity, of Neoplatonic philosophy, and of early Christianity. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of medical necessity as it relates to mental health care rationing, arguing that the normal functioning model of medical necessity is insufficient because it fails to cohere with an important aim and function of mental health care, which is to provide support for individuals in abusive or otherwise difficult personal relationships.

The breadth and depth of the Platonic tradition, from Antiquity through to the early Middle Ages, is evidenced by the studies gathered in this volume, written by an international team of contributors in honour of John Dillon. The first papers, on Plato, include a discussion of the problem of evil and of the theme of love n the Symposium. There follows a section of the Middle-Platonists, dealing with how this tradition adapted and developed themes such as the world-soul as (...) a mirror and the notion of an intellible cosmos. Five papers then focus on aspects of the thought of Plotinus, and a final group covers the later Neoplatonic tradition, from Augustine to John Scotus Eriugena, including a survey by the late Henry Blumenthal on perception and memory. (shrink)

Writing Migration through the Body builds a study of the body as a mutable site for negotiating and articulating the transnational experience of mobility. At its core stands a selection of recent migration stories in Italian, which are brought into dialogue with related material from cultural studies and the visual arts. Occupying no single disciplinary space, and drawing upon an elaborate theoretical framework ranging from phenomenology to anthropology, human geography and memory studies, this volume explores the ways in which the (...) skin itself operates as a border, and brings to the surface the processes by which a sense of place and self are described and communicated through the migrant body. Through investigating key concepts and practices of transnational embodied experience, the book develops the interpretative principle that the individual bodies which move in contemporary migration flows are the primary agents through which the transcultural passages of images, emotions, ideas, memories - and also histories and possible futures - are enacted. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how (...) we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)