Enhanced by over one thousand pictures and fifty maps, tells the story of Chicago and how it grew from a frontier outpost to become one of the great cities of the world.

The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico is significant both as a source of insight into the influences on the eighteenth-century philosopher's intellectual development and as one of the earliest and most sophisticated examples of philosophical autobiography. Referring to himself in the third person, Vico records the course of his life and the influence that various thinkers had on the development of concepts central to his mature work. Beyond its relevance to the development of the New Science, the Autobiography is also of (...) interest for the light it sheds on Italian culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Still regarded by many as the best English-language translation of this classic work, the Cornell edition was widely lauded when first published in 1944. Wrote the Saturday Review of Literature: "Here was something new in the art of self-revelation. Vico wrote of his childhood, the psychological influences to which he was subjected, the social conditions under which he grew up and received an education and evolved his own way of thinking. It was so outstanding a piece of work that it was held up as a model, which it still is.". (shrink)

Mele questions the prevalence and ontological status of strong forms of self-deception, as well as our attempt at experimental demonstration. Without validated indicators outside laboratory contexts, statements about prevalence are purely speculative. Conceptualizing self-deception without positing the motivated lack of awareness of a contradictory belief is unsatisfactory in dealing with issues of “agency,” that is, how can we stop the processing of threatening information unless we recognize that the information is threatening?

Book reviewed in this article: Ethics in Social and Behavioral Research. By Edward Diener and Rick Crandall The Ethics of Social Intervention. Gordon Bermant, Herbert C. Kelman, Donald P. Warwick.

Griffiths and Tenenbaum (2006) asked individuals to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday events (e.g., cake baking times), and reported that predictions were optimal, employing Bayesian inference based on veridical prior distributions. Although the predictions conformed strikingly to statistics of the world, they reflect averages over many individuals. On the conjecture that the accuracy of the group response is chiefly a consequence of aggregating across individuals, we constructed simple, heuristic approximations to the Bayesian model premised on the (...) hypothesis that individuals have access merely to a sample of k instances drawn from the relevant distribution. The accuracy of the group response reported by Griffiths and Tenenbaum could be accounted for by supposing that individuals each utilize only two instances. Moreover, the variability of the group data is more consistent with this small‐sample hypothesis than with the hypothesis that people utilize veridical or nearly veridical representations of the underlying prior distributions. Our analyses lead to a qualitatively different view of how individuals reason from past experience than the view espoused by Griffiths and Tenenbaum. (shrink)

This paper is the report of a meetingthat gathered many of the UK's most senioranimal scientists with representatives of thefarming industry, consumer groups, animalwelfare groups, and environmentalists. Therewas strong consensus that the current economicstructure of agriculture cannot adequatelyaddress major issues of concern to society:farm incomes, food security and safety, theneeds of developing countries, animal welfare,and the environment. This economic structure isbased primarily on competition betweenproducers and between retailers, driving foodprices down, combined with externalization ofmany costs. These issues must be addressed (...) by acombination of legislation, restructuring ofthe market, and use of public funds. Themeeting included workshops that made otherrecommendations for research and education. Themost urgent requirement is recognition thatchange is needed and development of a visionfor what that change must achieve. (shrink)