Models of risk-taking as used in the social sciences may be improved by including concepts from life history theory, particularly environmental unpredictability and life expectancy. Community college students completed self-report questionnaires measuring these constructs along with several well-known correlates. The frequency of risk-taking was higher for those with higher future unpredictability beliefs and shorter lifespan estimates (as measured by the Future Lifespan Assessment developed for this study), and unpredictability beliefs remained significant after accounting for standard predictors, such as sex and (...) temperament. The results demonstrate the usefulness of applying concepts from life history theory to enhance our understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

This paper addresses Socrates’ claim in the Cratylus that he and Hermogenes must learn of the correctness of names from “Homer and the other poets.” I argue that, in treating poetry as the starting point for investigating the relationship of language to reality, Plato reveals language to be a discursive articulation of non-discursive divine Being. Thus, while language cannot fully capture Being once and for all, it can function as a moving image of it by being kept in continual motion. (...) Poetic language, as divinely inspired, sits at the threshold between language’s discursivity and the unified reality it strives to articulate, and can therefore reinvigorate philosophical contemplation by de-sedimenting concepts articulated in language that have become stagnant, re-opening them for examination in new, previously unarticulated, ways. This vision of philosophical contemplation through language is part of a greater theme of the tension between mortal and divine modes of knowing. Humans desire divine understanding but only approach it through the motion of contemplation. Plato’s treatment of Apollo at 404e–406a reveals the two-fold nature of philosophical contemplation as relying on a certain tension between the revelation of the inarticulable, unchanging divine Being and the attempt to employ reason to test and interpret such disclosures through the unfolding motion of dialectic. (shrink)

Gangestad & Simpson present an evolutionary functional analysis of mating strategies. This commentary interprets their argument using a central concept from life history theory, return from investment. Incorporating return from investment allows further specification of costs and benefits from short-term mating in women as well as men and in ecological settings of high environmental variation in mortality and resource availability.