SummaryThis article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of (...) unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation, but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland. (shrink)

As the above quote clearly highlights, it is the responsibility of researchers and research supervisors to be certain that their research staff and students assistants are very familiar with all of the ethical principles and current standards relevant to the research they are conducting. Indeed, they must take an active role in being certain that their research staff and students complete appropriate training in these ethical principles and standards, and how they apply them to the research context in which they (...) are working. This is especially important in areas in which there may be physical harm such as chronic pain research. (shrink)

The jaw movements of speech are most probably derived from jaw movements associated with vocalisation. Cyclicity does not argue strongly for derivation from a cyclic pattern, because it arises readily in any system with feedback control. The appearance of regular repetition as a part of ritualisation of a display may have been important.

Presents a review of all the main aspects of work on learning and plasticity in behaviour and neural mechanisms in the chick, together with related topics such as the development of behaviour and lateralization of function.

This introductory text divides into two sections - the subject of philosophy, and the history of western philosophy from the Greeks to the present day.

The possibility that the Greeks used heraldic symbols or blazons was first explored a long time ago. The question has been revived recently by a French scholar in an article entitled ‘Les “blazons” des villes grecques’. It is of wide general interest, and of particular interest to numismatists who are concerned with the curious group of coins of Euboic standard bearing various simple devices , sometimes placed within what appears to be the circle of a shield. Various scholars, including C. (...) T. Seltman, ascribed these coins to sixth-century Athens; Seltman's particular contribution to the problem of their identification consisted in the explanation of the diverse anepigraphic types of this group of coins as the ‘heraldic’ devices or blazons of the great gene or noble houses of early Athens. In particular he pointed out that the same devices appeared also in Attic black-figured vases on the shields of deities, heroes, and unidentified hoplites, and proposed the theory that the vase-painters were copying what they saw in the streets of Athens, namely the shield-devices of the men-at-arms of Athens' leading families. (shrink)