Meno: I admit the cogency of your argument, and therefore, Socrates, I wonder that knowledge should be preferred to right opinion-or why they should ever differ. Socrates: And shall I explain this wonder to you? Meno: Do tell me. Socrates: You would not wonder if you had ever observed the images of Daedalus; but perhaps you have not got them in your country? Meno: What have they to do with the ...

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is an imposing monument to the wealth and power of scientific medicine. Set on its own block in upper Manhattan, its rhetorical centre is the Stern Auditorium. Here, just over a year after 9/11, a group of gurus and self-seekers assembled to confer on the nature of the self. I was there too, looking for help in constructing a grand unified theory of soul and b...

Plants have a long evolutionary history, during which mass extinction events dramatically affected Earth's ecosystems and its biodiversity. The fossil record can shed light on the diversification dynamics of plant life and reveal how changes in the origination-extinction balance have contributed to shaping the current flora. We use a novel Bayesian approach to estimate origination and extinctio...

The question of the nature of life, and therefore of the soul and spirit, has troubled people since time immemorial, especially if they are seen as essentially immaterial. It is suggested that the soul may be understood as the process of life, the inter-relationship between the parts of the body, and that the spirit is the driving force that motivates life. This is then related to the role of G...

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Some molecular clock estimates of divergence times of taxonomic groups undergoing evolutionary radiation are much older than the groups' first observed fossil record. Mathematical models of branching evolution are used to estimate the maximal rate of fossil preservation consistent with a postulated missing history, given the sum of species durations implied by early origins under a range of spe...

While much has been written about the theory of intentionality that is sketched by Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint of 1874, comparatively little effort has been invested in Brentano’s other works, in spite of the fact that the Psychology itself reveals new and interesting perspectives when viewed within the wider corpus of Brentano’s writings. In what follows I shall att...