Contemplative practices, such as meditation and yoga, are increasingly popular among the general public and as topics of research. Beneficial effects associated with these practices have been found on physical health, mental health, and cognitive performance. However, studies and theories that clarify the underlying mechanisms are lacking or scarce. This theoretical review aims to address and compensate this scarcity. We will show that various contemplative activities have in common that breathing is regulated or attentively guided. This respiratory discipline in turn (...) could parsimoniously explain the physical and mental benefits of contemplative activities through changes in autonomic balance. We propose a neurophysiological model that explains how these specific respiration styles could operate, by phasically and tonically stimulating the vagal nerve: respiratory vagal nerve stimulation. The vagal nerve, as a proponent of the parasympathetic nervous system, is the prime candidate in explaining the effects of contemplative practices on health, mental health, and cognition. We will discuss implications and limitations of our model. (shrink)

J.S. Mill argued that Bentham was ‘not a great philosopher’, asserting that one reason for his judgment was ‘the incompleteness of his [i. e. Bentham’s] own mind as a representative of universal human nature’. This paper argues that Mill’s judgment of Bentham on human nature and his assumptions about Bentham’s ‘own mind’ were seriously mistaken. In fact, Bentham understood many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature; he recognized spiritual or mental perfection, and recognized many pleasures associated (...) with a desire for self-perfection, or at least self-improvement; he never denied the importance of the faculty of imagination; he was by no means cut off from life’s graver experiences; his conception of arts and sciences was much broader, more metaphysically-based, consistent and sophisticated than Mill appreciated; and he enthusiastically embraced and encouraged arts and sciences. Mill’s mistake was partly caused by his limited reading of Bentham’s works, but mainly because he failed to grasp the ontological basis and fundamental principles of Bentham’s philosophy. (shrink)

This article seeks to analyze how the phenomenon of dance presents itself in philosophy, especially from the reflections of the German philosopher F. Nietzsche. To enhance our hypotheses, we will resort to the literary work The Steppenwolf by the German writer Hermann Hesse. We know that dance as a metaphor for thought is presented both throughout Nietzsche's work and in the aforementioned book by Hermann Hesse. Therefore, our analysis seeks to demonstrate how dance involves a situation of surrender and acceptance (...) of Life. It is about dance as a thought of overcoming oneself. This overcoming takes place in the instant. The instant when we understand Life as a movement towards its infinite possibilities. Based on the philosophical investigation, in this work, we will start by presenting the concept of dance in Nietzsche's philosophy, then we will exemplify this concept in the work of Hesse and, finally, we will demonstrate the relationship between dance, thought and affirmation of life. (shrink)

Protagoras, of all the ancient philosophers, has perhaps attracted the most interest in modern times. His saying ‘Man is the measure of all things’ caused Schiller to adopt him as the patron of the Oxford pragmatists, and has generally earned him the title of the first humanist. Yet the exact delineation of his philosophcal position remains a baffling task. Neumann, writing on Die Problematik des ‘Homo-mensura’ Satzes in 1938,2 concludes that no certainty whatever can be reached on the meaning of (...) the dictum, since ‘man’, ‘measure’, and ‘things’ are all ambiguous, nor can we tell which of the three is the predicate. The time is past when it was believed that a man's philosophy could be understood apart from the events of his life and the circumstances of his age: yet in the case of Protagoras the historical method of approach has hardly been attempted, although the impact of environment was perhaps more decisive in the formation of philosophical concepts in the Greek world than anywhere else. The reality about which the Greek philosopher spoke had three aspects: it was either the one universe of physics, or the political unity, or God. For example, the book of Heracleitus Περ φσεως was divided into three chapters or logoi, About the Whole, a political, and a theological. Neither physics nor theology supplies from its own subject-matter the form in which this reality was described. (shrink)

The influence which the Pythagorean society and its leading doctrines exercised upon Athenian intellectual and political developments in the late fifth century leads us to seek in Pythagoras a figure of greater stature and more clear-cut features than modern scholarship is prepared to allow. To us he is a great name but little more, the large body of detailed information about his life which is available in later writers being dismissed as fabulous. This scepticism was reasonable enough when the reader (...) was faced with the garbled hotchpotch of an Iamblichus or a Porphyry. But since the task has been put in hand of determining what portions of this tradition can safely be attributed to the various authorities who concerned themselves with the Pythagorean story in the fourth century, and of considering the respective historical value of these authorities, the scepticism of, for example, Burnet's account becomes unjustified. It is now possible to present a fairly detailed account of Pythagoras' activity, which has at least as much claim to credence as a great deal of what we now readily accept as ancient history, and is furthermore consistent with the general picture of the man that emerges from a careful scrutiny of classical sources. Not only for its own sake, but in the context of the increasingly fruitful investigation of fifth-century Athenian movements, I feel that it may be useful to put together such an account of Pythagoras. It will certainly be regarded by some as mere fiction, but may nevertheless provide others with a convenient summary of what the fifth- and fourth-century writers thought and believed about a man and a movement that had profound influence upon their times. I hope at the same time to suggest some links between what Pythagoras thought and did and the main tradition of Greek social behaviour. If Pythagoras was, as I believe, not so much an innovator as a reformer and developer of some of the central institutions of Greek life, the possibility will be opened of regarding various phenomena in mainland Greece which we have been asked to call Pythagorean, e.g. the Socratic phrontisterion as it appears in the Clouds, not as deriving from Pythagoras but as a parallel growth to the Pythagorean synedria and nourished by the same root. (shrink)

'Uncertainty and chance' is a subject with a broad span, in that there is no academic discipline or walk of life that is not beset by uncertainty and chance. In this book a range of approaches is represented by authors from varied disciplines: natural sciences, mathematics, social sciences and medical sciences. At one extreme, this volume is concerned with the foundations of probability. At the other extreme, we have scholars who acknowledge the concept of chance and uncertainty but do not (...) cope with it by means of systematic measurement or quantative analysis. (shrink)

Scholars have long seen that Horace's treatment of Homer in this Epistle demands to be read in the tradition of moral allegory in which Ulysses becomes the type of the ‘man of virtue’ : on such a reading, Circe becomes an allegory of foolish passion ‘to which Ulysses’ companions give in through their stultitia, and because of which they lose their reason and become no better than animals. Antisthenes, from whose writings such an allegorising approach probably developed, was regarded as (...) an early Cynic, and the idea became the special province of Cynic-Stoic philosophy; scholars have therefore felt justified in seeing this epistle as a criticism of Epicureanism, represented by the sponsi Penelopae, nebulones, Alcinoique … iuventus, from the point of view of a Cynic or a syncretistic Stoic. (shrink)

At 10.17.6–16 Polybius relates how Scipio seized the opportunity offered by his capture of New Carthage in 209 B.C. to increase his fleet of quinqueremes by half as much again. There is a briefer passage on the same subject in Livy 26.47.1–3. Polybius says that the total number of prisoners taken was nearly ten thousand, from whom Scipio separated two groups: first citizens, men and women with their young children, and secondly craftsmen. He freed the former, and made the latter, (...) numbering about 2000, public slaves of Rome. In Livy's account women and children are not mentioned; the prisoners are said to be ten thousand free men. As in Polybius, the citizens are said to have been set at liberty and the two thousand craftsmen made public slaves. In Polybius Scipio is said to have selected from all those not in the first two groups ‘the strongest, the fittest looking and the youngest and mixed them up with his own crews. And making the whole body of oarsmen half as many again as before he succeeded in manning the captured ships as well as his own στε τος νδρας κστ σκει βραχ τι λεπειν το διπλασους εναι τος πρχοντας τν προγενομνων, for the captured ships were eighteen in number and the original ships thirty-five’. The corresponding passage in Livy is as follows: ‘the remaining multitude [multitudinem, a word suggesting a larger number than the two former groups together] of young inhabitants and of strong slaves he handed over to the fleet to increase the number of oarsmen . And [an increase was needed because] he had added eight captured ships to the fleet’. (shrink)

At the Editors' request, I have given this paper the final revision which Mr. Morrison has not time to give. This was needed chiefly in II, in the establishment of the stemma, and in the early part of IV. In these parts Mr. Morrison must not be held responsible for the details, though I have endeavoured to give his conclusions. In II the credit is his for the identification of the sororis filius in Quintilian, Inst. Or. xi. 2. 14, as (...) Antiochus, for the view that Antiochus is an Aleuad, and therefore the three Echecratidae also, and for the consequent interpretation of Thuc. i. i n . In IV I found it difficult to revise Mr. Morrison's detailed interpretation of ‘Herodes’ and have omitted much. It will be understood that this procedure does little justice to his views, though I have tried to suppress nothing which bore directly on his main argument. (shrink)

In Professor W. B. Anderson's interesting paper on this subject there seems a certain hesitation about the treatment of Lucan's famouset quantum mihi restat ad Culicem ? .The following passages may be cited as fixing the sense of this rather rare idiom:1…crebro querens incolumi filio adiutorem imperii alium uocari. Et quantum superesse ut collega dicatur ? ,i.e. from adiutor to collega is ‘a mere step.’.

Rhetoric and domination generally are considered to be exclusionary phenomena. In the case of women and the suffrage movement in the USA for example, rhetoric is regarded as a neutral art that women used to overcome masculine domination. There is another less considered phenomenon however. Drawing upon phenomenological insights of M. Merleau-Ponty and M. M. Bakhtin’s chronotope, this essay constructs a theoretical apparatus out of classical rhetoric and P. Bourdieu’s writings, particularly Masculine Domination. It displays the relation between domination and (...) rhetoric and explores the question of authority as it pertains to the female/feminine body in concrete terms. (shrink)

In his paper, “Human Germline Genome Editing: On the Nature of Our Reasons to Genome Edit,” Rob Sparrow argues that “genome editing is highly unlikely to be person affecting for the foreseeable fut...