In the target article, Schilbach et al. defend a perspective that focuses on the neural basis of social cognition during live, ongoing interactions between individuals. We argue that a second-person neuroscience would benefit from formal approaches borrowed from economics and behavioral ecology and that it should be extended to social interactions in nonhuman animals.

The contributors to The Moral of the Story, all preeminent political theorists, are unified by their concern with the instructive power of great literature. This thought-provoking combination of essays explores the polyvalent moral and political impact of classic world literatures on public ethics through the study of some of its major figures-including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Jane Austen, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Robert Penn Warren, and Dostoevsky. Positing the uniqueness of literature's ability to promote dialogue on salient moral and intellectual virtues, (...) editor Henry T. Edmonson III has culled together a wide-ranging exploration of such fundamental concerns as the abuse of authority, the nature of good leadership, the significance of "middle class virtues" and the needs of adolescents. This collection reinvigorates the study of classic literature as an endeavor that is not only personally intellectually satisfying, but also an inimitable and unique way to enrich public discourse. (shrink)

"Souls Without Longing" was Allan Bloom's own title for his Closing of the American Mind. "Souls Without Eros," eros of any kind, he might have titled it, for in it Bloom described vividly the unerotic students typical of the elite schools to which his teaching was limited, their equally unerotic mentors whose specialized activity and general indifference set American Academe adrift, and the more spirited than erotic Nietzsche, whose thoughts, first inevitably degraded by lesser men and now abused by celebrity (...) nihilists, have contributed to both unerotic students and unerotic teachers. The current book is the positive to that negative. It could have been entitled Souls With Longing. And it could have been subtitled: Me Too. (shrink)