This paper is about Arthur Prior’s first published piece of philosophy, “The Nation and the Individual” (1937). Its aims are (1) to show that Prior made a remarkable contribution to social ontology in the 1930s; (2) to interpret Prior’s proposal as a promise of reduction by translation; (3) to connect Prior’s ideas with Searle’s social ontology. I. Arthur Prior was 23 when he published his firs...

This article suggests that due to a restricted understanding of the nature and scope of ethical theory, particularism discounts prematurely the possibility of a metatheory of Buddhist ethics. The textual evidence presented in support of particularism is reconsidered and shown to be consistent with a metatheoretical reading. It is argued that writers who have adopted a particularist approach bas...

Costly individual participation in intergroup conflict can be motivated by ‘‘in-group love’’—a cooperative motivation to help the in-group, by ‘‘out-group hate’’—an aggressive or competitive motivation to hurt the out-group, or both. This study employed a recently developed game paradigm (Halevy, Bornstein, & Sagiv, 2008) designed specifically to distinguish between these two motives. The game ...

Few seem to have difficulty in distinguishing between religious and secular institutions, yet there is widespread disagreement regarding what “religion” actually means. Indeed, some go so far as to question whether there is anything at all distinctive about religions. Hence, formulating a definition of “religion” that can command wide assent has proven to be an extremely difficult task. In this...

Recent constraint-satisfaction models of explanation, analogy, and decision making claim that these processes are influenced by bidirectional constraints that promote coherence. College students were asked to reach a verdict in a complex legal case involving multiple conflicting arguments, including alternative analogies to the target case. Participants rated agreement with the individual argum...