This paper urges a reconsideration of Hume’s role in the philosophy of history. It begins by challenging the common perception of Hume as a proto-positivist hoping to draw from history a mechanical causal account of the unchanging human nature. It draws attention instead to his grasp of historical contingency, the sui generis nature of the social world, and the complexity of the relationships o...

We study the formation of structure for a universe that undergoes a recent loitering phase. We compare the nonlinear mass distribution to that in a standard, matter dominated cosmology. The statistical aspects of the clustered matter are found to be robust to changes in the expansion law, an exception being that the peculiar velocities are lower by a factor of ∼ 3 in the loitering model. Furthe...

Wild rhesus monkeys have been found to attend to causal anomalies, suggesting that they make inferences about possible and impossible physical transformations in the absence of direct relevant experience.

We tend to put our notion of the soul, the self, the “I” in a different category than other objects we think about. This is not only a common attitude in the general population, but it is also reflected in many examples of philosophical discourse. Philosophers differ, however, in their opinions of how and why the self attains its special status. The two traditional extreme points of view, which...