According to familiar accounts, Rousseau held that humans are actuated by two distinct kinds of self love: amour de soi, a benign concern for one's self-preservation and well-being; and amour-propre, a malign concern to stand above other people, delighting in their despite. I argue that although amour-propre can (and often does) assume this malign form, this is not intrinsic to its character. The first and best rank among men that amour-propre directs us to claim for ourselves is that of occupying (...) 'man's estate'. This does not require, indeed it precludes, subjection of others. Amour-propre does not need suppression or circumscription if we are to live good lives; it rather requires direction to its proper end, not a delusive one. (shrink)

Life, but not as we know it -- Still life in nearly present time -- Driving and the city -- Movement-space -- Afterwords -- From born to made -- Spatialities of feeling -- But malice aforethought -- Turbulent passions.

How do we refer to people in everyday conversation? No matter the language or culture, we must choose from a range of options: full name ('Robert Smith'), reduced name ('Bob'), description ('tall guy'), kin term ('my son') etc. Our choices reflect how we know that person in context, and allow us to take a particular perspective on them. This book brings together a team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists to show that there is more to person reference than meets (...) the eye. Drawing on video-recorded, everyday interactions in nine languages, it examines the fascinating ways in which we exploit person reference for social and cultural purposes, and reveals the underlying principles of person reference across cultures from the Americas to Asia to the South Pacific. Combining rich ethnographic detail with cross-linguistic generalizations, it will be welcomed by researchers and graduate students interested in the relationship between language and culture. (shrink)

Liberal critics of plato's republic criticise him for ignoring the moral autonomy of persons, their right to form and to express their own moral ideas. It is argued that this criticism is superficial. Neither plato, nor his liberal critics, wish all moral views to be held and acted on; they both wish to set limits to what is acceptable. The true source of disagreement is over the scope of reason in human affairs; plato understands that narrowly; his liberal critics in (...) a broad, permissive, way. (shrink)

This part of the philosophy of psychology I refer to as 'moral psychology'; and, therefore, this book is offered as a contribution to moral psychology. ...

The Homeric Scholia are not the most obvious source for literary criticism in the modern sense. And yet if one takes the trouble to read through them one will find many valuable observations about poetic technique and poetic qualities. Nowadays we tend to emphasize different aspects from those which preoccupied ancient critics, but that may be a good reason for looking again at what they have to say.

There were five kinds of cyber deterrence presented at the workshop on Landscaping strategic cyber deterrence, hosted at the Oxford Internet Institute. They were the well-studied areas of deterrence by ‘punishment’ and ‘denial’, and the novel concepts of deterrence by ‘association’, ‘norms and taboos’, and finally, ‘entanglement’. In the following workshop commentary, I present these five kinds of deterrence and explain them in light of recent developments in the academy and industry. I argue for analytical congruence between all three novel (...) concepts, since they aim to alter the behaviour of actors by adding a social cost in response to breaking norms and conventions. Throughout, I argue that we are beginning to understand how cyber deterrence works, both in theory and practice, and when all concepts are taken together, they become more than the sum of their parts. Finally, I point out an omission of the workshop, where computational modelling and simulation could be added to the landscape of strategic cyber deterrence. (shrink)

All we know of this law is to be found in Cicero's Pro Cluentio. Elsewhere we have only one passing reference to it. However, this speech seems to give us the main clause of the bill as it appeared after incorporation in the Lex Cornelia de sicariis el veneficis: ‘Qui tribunus militum legionibus quattuor primis quive quaestor, tribunus plebis’ —deinceps omnes magistratus nominavit—‘quive in senatu sententiam dixit dixerit, qui eorum coiit, coierit, convenit, convenerit quo quis iudicio publico condemnaretur de eius (...) capite quaerito. (shrink)

Anthropologists and linguists have long been aware that the body is explicitly referred to in conventional description of emotion in languages around the world. There is abundant linguistic data showing expression of emotions in terms of their imagined ‘locus’ in the physical body. The most important methodological issue in the study of emotions is language, for the ways people talk give us access to ‘folk descriptions’ of the emotions. ‘Technical terminology’, whether based on English or otherwise, is not excluded from (...) this ‘folk’ status. It may appear to be safely ‘scientific’ and thus culturally neutral, but in fact it is not: technical English is a variety of English and reflects, to some extent, culture-specific ways of thinking (and categorising) associated with the English language. People — as researchers studying other people, or as people in real-life social association — cannot directly access the emotional experience of others, and language is the usual mode of ‘packaging’ one’s experience so it may be accessible to others. Careful description of linguistic data from as broad as possible a cross-linguistic base is thus an important part of emotion research. All people experience biological events and processes associated with certain thoughts (or, as psychologists say, ‘appraisals’), but there is more to ‘emotion’ than just these physiological phenomena. Speakers of some languages talk about their emotional experiences as if they are located in some internal organ such as ‘the liver’, yet they cannot localise feeling in this physical organ. This phenomenon needs to be understood better, and one of the problems is finding a method of comparison that allows us to compare descriptions from different languages which show apparently great formal and semantic variation. Some simple concepts including feel and body are universal or near-universal, and as such are good candidates for terms of description which may help to eradicate confusion and exoticism from cross-linguistic comparison and semantic typology. Semantic analysis reveals great variation in concepts of emotion across languages and cultures — but such analysis requires a sound and well-founded methodology. While leaving room for different approaches to the task, we suggest that such a methodology can be based on empirically established linguistic universal (or near-universal) concepts, and on ‘cognitive scenarios’ articulated in terms of these concepts. Also, we warn against the danger of exoticism involved in taking all body part references ‘literally’. Above all, we argue that what is needed is a combination of empirical cross-linguistic investigations and a theoretical and methodological awareness, recognising the impossibility of exploring other people’s emotions without keeping language in focus: both as an object and as a tool of study. (shrink)

We present a dynamic programming model which is used to investigate hypothermia as an adaptive response by small passerine birds in winter. The model predicts that there is a threshold function of reserves during the night, below which it is optimal to enter hypothermia, and above which it is optimal to rest. This threshold function decreases during the night, with a particularly sharp drop at the end of the night, representing the time and energy costs associated with returning to normal (...) body temperature. The results of the model emphasise the trade-off between energy and predation, not just between foraging options, but also between foraging during the day and entering hypothermia at night. The value of being able to use hypothermia represents not just energy savings, but also reduced predation risk due to changes in the optimal foraging strategy. Conditions which give a high value of hypothermia are short photoperiod, variable food supply, low temperatures, poor and scarce food supplies. (shrink)