This study describes metonymic argument alternations, in which a constructional slot can be filled by any of a set of semantic roles that index one another, and provides a diachronic corpus analysis of two such alternations in French. In the Reveal secret frame and other communication frames, the Medium can indexically replace the Speaker and the Topic can indexically replace the Information. A regression analysis shows that while topic for information metonymy is more syntactically and pragmatically restricted, medium for (...) speaker metonymy has seen an increase in usage over time across the frame. This change is related to sociocultural developments and has implications for the study of figurative language and lexical semantic change. While it is well understood that figurative mechanisms such as metonymy affect language change, here it is demonstrated that cultural shifts drive changes in metonymies themselves, with corresponding impacts for linguistic structure. (shrink)

This paper asks whether geographically localised, or ‘hyperlocal’, uses of Twitter succeed in creating peer-to-peer neighbourhood networks or simply act as broadcast media at a reduced scale. Literature drawn from the smart cities discourse and from a UK research project into hyperlocal media, respectively, take on these two opposing interpretations. Evidence gathered in the case study presented here is consistent with the latter, and on this basis we criticise the notion that hyperlocal social media can be seen as a community (...) in itself. We demonstrate this by creating a network map of Twitter followers of a popular hyperlocal blog in Brockley, southeast London. We describe various attributes of this network including its average degree and clustering coefficient to suggest that a small and highly connected cluster of visible local entities such as businesses form a clique at the centre of this network, with individual residents following these but not one another. We then plot the locations of these entities and demonstrate that sub-communities in the network are formed due to close geographical proximity between smaller sets of businesses. These observations are illustrated with qualitative evidence from interviews with users who suggest instead that rather than being connected to one another they benefit from what has been described as ‘neighbourhood storytelling’. Despite the limitations of working with Twitter data, we propose that this multi-modal approach offers a valuable way to investigate the experience of using social media as a communication tool in urban neighbourhoods. (shrink)

Human rights discourse has been likened to a global lingua franca, and in more ways than one, the analogy seems apt. Human rights discourse is a language that is used by all yet belongs uniquely to no particular place. It crosses not only the borders between nation-states, but also the divide between national law and international law: it appears in national constitutions and international treaties alike. But is it possible to conceive of human rights as a global language or lingua (...) franca not just in a figurative or metaphorical sense, but in a literal or linguistic sense as a legal dialect defined by distinctive patterns of word choice and usage? Does there exist a global language of human rights that transcends not only national borders, but also the divide between domestic and international law? Empirical analysis suggests that the answer is yes, but this global language comes in at least two variants or dialects. New techniques for performing automated content analysis enable us to analyze the bulk of all national constitutions over the last two centuries, together with the world’s leading regional and international human rights instruments, for patterns of linguistic similarity and to evaluate how much language, if any, they share in common. Specifically, we employ a technique known as topic modeling that disassembles texts into recurring verbal patterns. The results highlight the existence of two species or dialects of rights talk—the universalist dialect and the positive-rights dialect—both of which are global in reach and rising in popularity. The universalist dialect is generic in content and draws heavily on the type of language found in international and regional human rights instruments. It appears in particularly large doses in the constitutions of transitional states, developing states, and states that have been heavily exposed to the influence of the international community. The positive-rights dialect, by contrast, is characterized by its substantive emphasis on positive rights of a social or economic variety, and by its prevalence in lengthier constitutions and constitutions from outside the common law world, especially those of the Spanish-speaking world. Both dialects of rights talk are truly transnational, in the sense that they appear simultaneously in national, regional, and international legal instruments and transcend the distinction between domestic and international law. Their existence attests to the blurring of the boundary between constitutional law and international law. (shrink)

Stephen Law follows THE PHILOSOPHY FILES with a second book of philosophical conundrums for teenagers. This time he asks such questions as Do Miracles Happen? Why Do These Words Mean Something? and Do I Know the Sun will Rise Tomorrow? You can dip into the arguments that interest you, in eight chapters where the themes are set up in witty scenarios and then debated. There are wacky thought experiments to work out and a variety of characters appear - some of (...) them Martians. As in THE PHILOSOPHY FILES, there are hundreds of lively cartoons running through the book. Stephen Law is a brilliant communicator with a passion to make young people think for themselves. As the GUARDIAN said: 'It's philosophy in action rather than philosophy in aspic... a real philosophy book for kids - which students and adults could enjoy too - finally exists'. (shrink)

Is there a God, should I eat meat, where does the universe come from, could I live for ever as a robot? These are the big questions readers will be wrestling with in this thoroughly enjoyable book. Dip into any chapter and you will find lively scenarios and dialogues to take you through philosophical puzzles ancient and modern, involving virtual reality, science fiction and a host of characters from this and other planets. The text is interspersed on every page with (...) lively cartoons, and there is a list of philosophical jargon at the end.. Stephen Law has a gift for communicating complex ideas. He offers few answers, but his unstuffy, highly personal approach will have the reader thinking and arguing with as much pleasure as he does himself. (shrink)

Who is the 'I' that performs? The arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have pushed us relentlessly to reconsider our notions of the self, expression, and communication: to ask ourselves, again and again, who we think we are and how we can speak meaningfully to one another. Although in other performing arts studies, especially of theatre, the performance of selfhood and identity continues to be a matter of lively debate in both practice and theory, the question of how (...) a sense of self is manifested through musical performance has been neglected. The authors of 'Voices, Bodies, Practices' are all musician-researchers: the book employs artistic research to explore how embodied performing "voices" can emerge from the interactions of individual performers and composers, musical materials, instruments, mediating technologies, and performance contexts. (shrink)

Despite the long history of beliefs about the therapeutic properties of work for people with mental ill health, rarely has therapeutic work itself been a focus for historical analysis. In this article, the development of a therapeutic work ethic (1813—1979) is presented, drawing particular attention to the changing character and quality of beliefs about therapeutic work throughout time. From hospital factories to radical ‘antipsychiatric’ communities, the article reveals the myriad forms of activities that have variously been considered fit work for (...) people with mental health problems. While popular stereotypes of basket-weaving paint a hapless portrait of institutional work, a more nuanced reading of therapeutic work and its political and philosophical commitments is advanced. The article concludes by arguing that the non-linear and inherently contested development of therapeutic work is less the effect of paradigmatic shifts within the therapeutic professions, but rather evidence of a broader human struggle with work. (shrink)

Theory of Mind is the ability to predict and understand the mental state of another. While ToM is theorized to play a role in language, we examined whether such a mentalizing ability plays an important role in establishing shared understanding in conversation. Pairs of participants engaged in a Lego model building task in which adirectorinstructed abuilderon how to create duplicate models from a prototype that only the director could see. We manipulated whether the director could see or could not see (...) the builder’s workspace. As predicted, the Mind in the Eyes test predicted accuracy when the workspace was hidden. A high mentalizing ability was an advantage when instructing, resulting in fewer errors, but may be a disadvantage when following instructions. This research indicates that ToM plays a key role in communicating information effectively in conversation. (shrink)

This brief position paper is stimulated from the continued need to define and redefine the area of transpersonal psychology. Understandably, being able to articulate what ‘transpersonal psychology’ is enables discussions within the wider academic and public community, yet all existing definitions are complex, conveying a number of inherent meanings in their definition, which in turn, can cloud others’ perceptions on the area.

Sexual and reproductive health is a challenge worldwide, and much progress is needed to reach the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals. This paper presents cross-sectional data collected in Sierra Leone on sexual and gender-based violence, family planning, child, early and forced marriage, and female genital mutilation using an innovative method of measurement: situational judgment tests, as a subset of questions within a larger survey tool. For the SJTs, respondents saw hypothetical scenarios on these themes and had to indicate how they (...) would react. The objective is to give an impression of beliefs and norms on specific behaviors, which provide insights for social and behavior change interventions. Data was collected by enumerators traveling to villages randomly selected in six districts of the country. The sample is composed of 566 respondents. Results show that FGM in particular seem to be a priority topic, in comparison to the other topics for which the norms seem to be stronger against those practices. Age differences emerged and suggest priority groups to be targeted. In terms of validity of the measurement methods, situational judgment test answers correlated positively with other items in the survey, but the magnitude of the association is often small, and sometimes not significant. Thus, more studies are needed to further explore the validity of this measure by comparing against a reference value. Using SJTs could complement other data collection tools to perform community assessment, and orient the direction of the program in its planning phase. (shrink)

Australia is second only to Israel in being the world’s most culturally diverse nation, based largely on high levels of immigration in the second part of the 20th century. From the 1970s onwards, Australia formally recognized the massive social changes brought about by postwar immigration, and provided legislation to incorporate cultural diversity into everyday lives. One such ‘legislative’ enactment saw the establishment of multicultural broadcasting in Australia, as arguably a world-first, both in its comprehensiveness and diversity. Today, Australia has a (...) public sector corporation, the Special Broadcasting Service, administering five radio services in 68 languages. Also, the Community Radio sector produces multicultural programming in 100 languages through a number of its 330 broadcast and 207 narrowcast stations. This article examines the relationship between radio and its communities. It argues that despite the ‘profile’ of SBS television, radio is much closer to its constituent communities, and therefore plays a greater role in enabling those communities to speak their own histories, beyond the confines of a consensual Anglophile paradigm. (shrink)

Theory of Mind is the ability to predict and understand the mental state of another. While ToM is theorized to play a role in language, we examined whether such a mentalizing ability plays an important role in establishing shared understanding in conversation. Pairs of participants engaged in a Lego model building task in which a director instructed a builder on how to create duplicate models from a prototype that only the director could see. We manipulated whether the director could see (...) or could not see the builder’s workspace. As predicted, the Mind in the Eyes test predicted accuracy when the workspace was hidden. A high mentalizing ability was an advantage when instructing, resulting in fewer errors, but may be a disadvantage when following instructions. This research indicates that ToM plays a key role in communicating information effectively in conversation. (shrink)

Ms. X is a person with cerebral palsy and schizophrenia. She has intractable bedsores that are a result of her immobility and to poor wound care related to her delusional thinking. Despite intensive community support, the wounds have worsened to the point that she has needed multiple hospitalizations to prevent systemic sepsis, a life‐threatening condition. She is capable of placement decisions and wishes for independence at home but is incapable of making wound care decisions and does not appreciate that immediately (...) returning home from the hospital, instead of going into a special care facility, would likely result in sepsis. The resulting dilemma about discharge planning highlights the complexity involved in weighing concerns around mental illness and capacity for treatment and placement of care. The extent of the care that is required and available in a community or health care system and the slow but relatively certain progression of the symptoms also make the decision challenging. Two commentaries take very different approaches in exploring the question whether Ms. X should be supported to go home or to a special care facility. (shrink)

The past century has seen various studies on the nature of Matthew’s community, and conclusions are still being debated. The study on which this article is based acknowledges the past studies, but further proposes that the nature of the Matthean community was one of coexistence. The Matthean community implied in the book of Matthew coexisted in three ways. Firstly, Jews and Gentiles coexisted within the community: the Jewish–Christian-centred community had started to accept Gentiles and became a community where Gentiles and (...) Jews lived together. Secondly, the community was in a state where both the Jewish law and the teachings of Jesus were followed. Finally, the community tended to set both Jews and Gentiles as targets for the mission. This means that there was missionary coexistence within the community. These three main reasons are the basis for the claim that the Matthean community maintained the nature of coexistence. (shrink)

After the French Revolution, the codification movement led to the introduction of the Dutch Civil Code and the Commercial Code of 1838. These codifications were generally regarded as the bedrock of a dogmatic system in which little space was left for customs and customary law. Mercantile jurists, such as Holtius and Levy, were opponents of the legalistic approach of the new codifications. They tried to separate mercantile law from civil law in order to protect mercantile law from excessive legalistic influences. (...) According to them, mercantile law was characterised by internationality, custom as its main source of law, continuity through an extended mercantile legal history and by good faith and mutual trust between the merchants. Out of these, the historicity and homogeneity of a strong community of merchants are particularly in line with a traditional and conservative view on society. Holtius and Levy, however, had little in common with their Christian-conservative contemporaries. On the one hand, they rather seemed to foreshadow the kind of liberal-conservatism as expressed by Hayek during the 20th century. On the other hand, their ideas have much in common with different lex mercatoria –traditions developed by authors as Goldman and Schmitthoff. On the aspects of historicity and internationality Holtius and Levy seem to have much in common with Hayek whereas concerning communality and the legal nature of customary law there are more similarities with the lex mercatoria-traditions. (shrink)

Communication in law provides a space for alternatives, a Third Space, wherein boundaries between various systems are strongly anchored to a country’s language, history and societal development. Transfers, modifications, and integrations of such systems into other target languages may result in many effects of distortions and appropriations, reformulations and renewals as well as of misinterpretations in communication. Hence, Third Space is a necessary prerequisite for negotiation, transformation and translation from culture A to culture B, since it operates as (...) a multi-stage dynamic where such mechanisms should be analyzed in a fair and equitable manner. (shrink)

What does mean in constitutional First Amendment law and in ordinary language and the philosophy of language? Under what circumstances does intentional action count as speech? Can communication be unintentional? And what follows (in law) from the fact that almost any action can be made expressive?

Increasingly, taxonomies are being developed and used by industry practitioners to facilitate information interoperability and retrieval. Within a single industrial domain, there exist many taxonomies that are intended for different applications. Industry specific taxonomies often represent the vocabularies that are commonly used by the practitioners. Their jobs are multi-faceted, which include checking for code and regulatory compliance. As such, it will be very desirable if industry practitioners are able to easily locate and browse regulations of interest. In practice, multiple sources (...) of government regulations exist and they are often organized and classified by the needs of the issuing agencies that enforce them rather than the needs of the communities that use them. One way to bridge these two distinct needs is to develop methods and tools that enable practitioners to browse and retrieve government regulations using their own terms and vocabularies, for example, via existing industry taxonomies. The mapping from a single taxonomy to a single regulation is a trivial keyword matching task. We examine a relatedness analysis approach for mapping a single taxonomy to multiple regulations. We then present an approach for mapping multiple taxonomies to a single regulation by measuring the relatedness of concepts. Cosine similarity, Jaccard coefficient and market basket analysis are used to measure the semantic relatedness between concepts from two different taxonomies. Preliminary evaluations of the three relatedness analysis measures are performed using examples from the civil engineering and building industry. These examples illustrate the potential benefits of regulatory usage from the mapping between various taxonomies and regulations. (shrink)

In the process of cultural dissemination, the dissemination of false information will have a negative impact on the entire environment. In this case, it is an effective method to regulate the behavior of cultural dissemination participants. Based on the community network structure and the improved classic network communication model, this paper constructs the susceptible-infected-recovered model for the grassroots communication of engineering safety culture and discusses the law of grassroots transmission of engineering safety culture. The communication process is (...) simulated, and it is concluded that a good engineering safety culture will be the first to be covered by low-level engineering safety culture in the process of dissemination. With a modularity coefficient of 0.5 as the boundary, it will affect the scale of good safety culture in different directions; the dissemination infection rate of low-level engineering safety culture changes in the same direction with the speed and scale of transmission; the maximum transmission scale of low-level engineering safety culture does not decrease with the increase of the initial value of the susceptible state. When the initial value of the immune state is 15%, the low-level safety culture scale is the lowest value of 0.135, which is the low initial value of employees with low-level engineering safety culture and is more conducive to control its maximum spread. It also puts forward management recommendations for the subjects and objects of the grassroots dissemination of engineering safety culture. This paper transforms cultural communication into an evolutionary game model, uses a game tree to describe it, and analyzes that the model has a Nash equilibrium point by adding a penalty function to the income matrix. This model can encourage cultural communication participants to take honest behaviors, effectively restrain the transmission of false information, and promote a virtuous circle of cultural communication. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of the first work of Otto von Gierke, arguably the greatest historian of ideas of the nineteenth century. Community in Historical Perspective includes much of the first volume of Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, originally published in 1868, and the texts translated here have become essential reading for anyone interested not only in the history of ideas and alternatives to conventional socialism and liberalism, but also, as recent experience has shown, contemporary European affairs. Von Gierke's represented (...) an unparalleled attempt to justify a political programme of structural pluralism, and to interpret the entire course of European history from the Dark Ages onwards as a progressive interaction between 'fellowship' (or 'comradeship') and 'lordship' (or 'sovereignty'). This interaction was to generate a polity of autonomous associations within a constitutional state based upon consent and federal unity, and von Gierke here laid the basis for a distinctively Germanic programme of federalism and quasi-pluralism, with a strongly nationalist emphasis upon the unique capacity of Germans, despite long periods of absolute rule, for corporate self-management. (shrink)

Existing theoretical literature on justice, law, and community typically treats them as ideas studying them through an analytical and rational approach. In this article, I propose to investigate these concepts through aesthetic experience as an attempt to both sharpen our imagination of such concepts and demonstrate they are inseparable. I do this by painstakingly examining the movies Shoplifters by Kore-eda and The House That Jack Built by Von Trier. Rather than focusing on thematic analysis, I claim and show that film (...) form is crucial for aesthetic and affective experience. Furthermore, and against the conventional view, I argue that both movies articulate a spatialized vision of justice defined by its materiality. Together these aspects help us to keep (re)imagining law, justice, and community, and grasp better their worldmaking properties and powers. (shrink)

This article examines Plato's claim that the founders of the ideal city ought to establish a law compelling the philosophers to rule. This claim is perplexing as it seems to suggest that in the ideal city justice is not in the best interests of its possessor, for by obeying the law and ruling the philosopher will in turn be made very unhappy. Following a critical appraisal and ultimate rejection of a number of different attempts to make sense of this tension, (...) this article advances a 'communitarian' interpretation. According to this interpretation, the existence of a law compelling the philosopher to rule is ultimately in her best interest because her ruling will lead to a well-educated and intellectually virtuous community. The existence of this virtuous community will, in turn, allow the philosopher better to achieve her principal goal -- the attainment and preservation of truth. (shrink)

This article examines Plato’s claim that the founders of the ideal city ought to establish a law compelling the philosophers to rule. This claim is perplexing as it seems to suggest that in the ideal city justice is not in the best interests of its possessor, for by obeying the law and ruling the philosopher will in turn be made very unhappy. Following a critical appraisal and ultimate rejection of a number of different attempts to make sense of this tension, (...) this article advances a ‘communitarian’ interpretation. According to this interpretation, the existence of a law compelling the philosopher to rule is ultimately in her best interest because her ruling will lead to a well-educated and intellectually virtuous community. The existence of this virtuous community will, in turn, allow the philosopher better to achieve her principal goal—the attainment and preservation of truth. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 216 Seiten: 1-18.

Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam. By Lev E. Weitz. Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. viii + 340. $65.

In the Medieval period, Roman law and canon law formed ius commune or the common European law. The similarity between Roman and canon law was that they used the same methods and the difference was that they relied on different authoritative texts. In their works canonists and civilists combined the ancient Greek achievements in philosophy with the Roman achievements in the field of law. Canonists were the first who carried out research on the distinctions between various legal sources and systematized (...) them according to a hierarchical order. The Medieval civilists sought solutions in canon law for a large number of problems that Justinian’s Codification did not hinge on or did it only superficially. Solutions offered by canon law were accepted not only in the civil law of Continental Europe, but also in the English law. (shrink)

This volume provides a critical roadmap through the major historical sources of legal semiotics as we know them today. The history of legal semiotics, now at least a century old, has never been written (a non-event itself pregnant with semiotic possibility). As a consequence, its sources are seldom clearly exposed and, as word, object and meaning change, are sometimes lost. They reach from an English translation of the 1916 inaugural lecture of the first Chair in Legal Significs at the Amsterdam (...) University, via mid 20th century studies on "property" or "contract," to equally fascinating essays on contemporary semiotic problems produced by former students of the Roberta Kevelson Semiotics Roundtable Seminar at Penn State University 2012 and 2013. Together, the materials in this book weave the fabric of semiotics and significs, two names for the unfolding of semiotics in law and legal discourse at least until the second half of the 20th century, and both of which covered a lawyer's focus on sign and meaning in law. The latter is embedded within the cultural imperatives of the civilization that gave these terms meaning and made them an effective tool for the dissection of law, its reconstitution as an instrument to be used by the lawyer to advance the interests of her clients, and for judges as a means to restructure language as a narrative of law whose power could bend behavior to its strictures. Legal semiotics has become an indispensible part of the elite lawyer's toolkit and a fundamental approach to analysis of legal texts. Two previous volumes published in 2011 and 2012 explored the conceptual, methodological and epistemological progress in the field of legal semiotics, the modern forms of semiotics study, and the mechanics of meaning making processes by lawyers. Yet the great lessons of semiotics requires a focus on the origins of the concepts and frameworks that would become contemporary legal semiotics, its origins as an object of the consciousness of meaning making-one whose roots, as lessons for the oracular conversations of law, are expanded in this volume. (shrink)

Peter Fitzpatrick’s intellectual relationship with Jean-Luc Nancy centred on the related problems of myth and community. In this article, I will explicate the ‘restlessness of the negative’ that Nancy describes in Hegel, in order to further develop Fitzpatrick’s notion of ‘law as resistance’. Set against the backdrop of myth and community, law can be understood as a community’s fragmentary attempt to explicate its essence. Modern law becomes an artefact of the negative twisting through a community’s attempts to construct itself through (...) a Nancian ontology of ‘being singular plural’. In this manner, one might understand Fitzpatrick’s claim that there is ‘always more to be done’ as affirming the necessity of some extra-formal legality—that is, the political—that must be opened through the resistance wrought by negativity. (shrink)

Dürziler, gerek itikadi açıdan gerekse de hukuki prensipleri bağlamında Osmanlı-Hanefi ideolojisi dışında kalan bir cemaatti. Bununla birlikte Dürzi liderler 19. Yüzyılın başlarına kadar devletin Cebel-i Lübnan’daki idari tem-silcileri olarak siyasi otoriteyi ellerinde tutmayı başardılar. Bunun yanı sıra geleneksel hukuklarını da koruyan Dürziler, Osmanlı Devleti’nin sosyal yapısını oluşturan Millet Sistemi içinde farklı bir pozisyonda kimlik edindiler. Tanzimat reformlarının Cebel-i Lübnan’da uygulanmaya başlaması ise Dürzilerin kimlik tanımlarında siyasi paradigmaların dışına çıkmalarına sebep olmuş, Osmanlı kimliğini İslami terminolojiyle tamamlamak adına hareket eden cemaat, hukuki (...) statülerini bir meşruiyet aracı olarak kullanmaya başlamış ve devletin değişen reformist duruşu karşısında farklı bir hukuki yer edinmeye çalışmışlardı. Bu çalışma, Cebel-i Lübnanlı Dürzilerin Osmanlı Devleti’nin son zamanlarında ortaya çıkan kimlik problemine bakışlarını ele almakta, cemaatin meşruiyet kaygılarına karşı aldığı tedbir ve devletin hukuk politikasını incelemektedir. Araştırmada kendi kaynaklarında ve Osmanlı arşivinde yer alan bazı Dürzi davalarından örnekler verilerek cemaatin iç hukukuna değinilmiş, ayrıca devletin mezhep siyasetinde izlediği yöntemin Dürziler üzerindeki etkisi analiz edilmiştir. (shrink)

Law bends the past of a community's common life towards its future. Precedent is one of law's favored tools for doing the bending, and legal systems that assign precedent a starring role seem especially mindful of time. Yet, mindfulness of time goes far deeper into law's DNA. It is not limited to the doctrine of precedent or unique to common‐law jurisdictions. Recognizing that time is an elemental dimension of human experience and basic ordering principle of practical agency, law utilizes and (...) orders time. Temporality is essential to law's distinctive mode of governance and guidance. (shrink)

Since its inception, Shannon's information theory has attracted interest for the study of language and music. Recently, a wide range of converging studies have shown how efficient communication pervades language, from phonetics to syntax. Efficient principles imply that more resources should be assigned to highly informative items. For instance, average information content was shown to be a better predictor of word length than frequency, revisiting the famous Zipf's law. However, in spite of the success of the efficient communication (...) framework in the study of language and speech, very little work has investigated its relevance in the analysis of music. Here, we examine the organization of harmonic information in two large corpora of Western music, one made of MIDI files directly sequenced from scores, and the other made of MIDI recordings of live performances of highly skilled piano players. We show that there is a clear positive relationship between (contextual) information content of harmonic sequences and two essential musical properties, namely duration and loudness: the more unexpected a harmonic event is, the longer and the louder it is. (shrink)

In the ultimate analysis, all philosophical differences are verbal. If by some intellectual X-Ray we could see into the minds of others, and perceive the exact nature of their concepts, we should be force to concede the correctness of their conclusions. The only alternative is that the mental processes—the laws of thought—differ from individual to individual.

THE TENTH BOOK OF THE LAWS, which contains Plato's last word on cosmology and theology, has often been considered as presenting Plato's views in a more exoteric way in contrast with the more esoteric style of the Timaeus. And there are good reasons to think that this view is correct. Whereas the Timaeus stresses that "to find the maker and father of this All is difficult, and, having found it, it is impossible to communicate it to the crowd", Plato is (...) in Laws 10 intending to establish a "proemium" or rational foundation for his laws against impiety, which are supposed to be known by all. In this proemium Plato tries to argue for three propositions: that the gods exist ; that they take care of human affairs ; that they cannot be bribed by sacrifices or prayers. The underlying assumption is that learning these facts about the gods will also help to prevent impiety which, like any kind of vice, is often due to ignorance. (shrink)