Epistemology

‘Epistemology’ argues that controlled psychedelic administration can have significant epistemic benefits consistent with a naturalistic worldview. The most obvious candidate for propositional knowledge, or knowledge that, is psychodynamic insight into one’s previously unknown mental states. This chapter argues that such insights are probably often accurate, but cannot be trusted uncritically: sober scrutiny is essential. It further argues that psychedelics offer knowledge by acquaintance with various aspects of the human mind, including its potential for diverse and beneficial modes of attention and cognition. At later times, subjects can re-evoke these beneficial modes. Therefore, psychedelics also make available ability knowledge, or knowledge how. The chapter argues that psychedelic experiences also facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge of old facts, allowing subjects to experience existing beliefs in more vivid and motivating ways. Finally, the chapter argues that psychedelic experiences can cause epistemic benefits indirectly, via their psychological benefits. In Lisa Bortolotti’s terminology, therapeutic psychedelic experiences are epistemically innocent.

The Historical Background: Brownian Motion as of 1905

The mystery of Brownian motion had been announced with its discovery by Robert Brown in 1828: the persistence of the motion of solid particles in liquids for indefinite periods of time instead of sinking as sediment to the bottom. Once molecular-kinetic theory emerged more fully a few years later, it was the obvious candidate for explaining the phenomenon. Nevertheless, those developing kinetic theory in the second half of the century, Maxwell and Boltzmann, appear to have ignored it. The chapter summarizes research on Brownian motion during the nineteenth century, indicating why leading physicists ignored it, and what developments in the first five years of the twentieth century led to its suddenly becoming so important to kinetic theory. This background supplements that of Chapter 2, completing the historical context for the developments covered in subsequent chapters.

On the polymorphemic genesis of some Proto-Quechuan roots

In the Proto-Quechuan lexicon, many two-segment phonetic substrings recur in semantically related roots, even though they are not independent morphemes. Such elements may have been morphemes before the Proto-Quechuan stage (i.e., in Pre-Proto-Quechuan). On the other hand, this may simply be due to chance, or to phonesthesia. In this paper, we introduce the Crosslinguistic Colexification Network Clustering (CCNC) algorithm, as well as an accompanying test statistic, which allow us to evaluate our claims against a neutral standard of semantic relatedness (the CLICS2 database; List et al. 2018). We obtain very strong statistical evidence that there are hitherto unexplained recurrent elements within Proto-Quechuan roots, but not within roots reconstructed for Proto-Aymaran, the proto-language of a neighboring language family whose members are otherwise structurally very similar to Proto-Quechuan, and which has therefore long been considered an obvious candidate for deep shared ancestry. Some of these elements are explainable as phonesthemes, but most appear to reflect archaic Quechuan morphology. These findings are consistent with an emerging picture of the early Quechuan-Aymaran contact relationship in which Quechuan structure was reformatted on the Aymaran template.

Oman’s new sultan faces a difficult balancing act

Significance Oman was unique among Arab monarchies in that Qaboos refused to name an heir during his lifetime, creating uncertainty. Not necessarily the obvious candidate, Sultan Haitham’s background is in economic development, national heritage and foreign policy, rather than the military. Impacts Haitham’s former oversight of Oman’s “Vision 2040” will be useful as he addresses pressing challenges to diversify the economy. There is a risk of internal repression as Muscat implements austerity without being able to draw on Qaboos’s personal legitimacy. Oman may increasingly look east, especially to China, for much-needed new investment.

Tentacles

This chapter tracks the growing influence of Lenny Patrick during the 1960s. His notoriety as the man who ran Chicago Jewish organized crime for more than a generation made him an obvious candidate for others' imagination, even if he was not involved in high-profile cases such as the Kennedy assassination. Because he was suspected of having killed so many in his work as a Syndicate operative, he was a character who could be plugged into the stories that others were telling. Casting Patrick as Kennedy’s assassin makes him into a villain who changed the trajectory of American history. It should have been enough that he had changed the trajectory of Chicago Jewish organized crime when he led the Syndicate’s takeover of Benjamin Zuckerman’s operation.

Reallocation and the Role of Firm Composition Effects on Aggregate Wage Dynamics

Aggregate wages display little cyclicality compared to what a standard model would predict. Wage rigidities are an obvious candidate, but the existing literature has emphasized the need to take into account the growing importance of worker composition effects, especially during downturns. This paper seeks to understand the role of firm heterogeneity for aggregate wage dynamics with reference to the Italian case. Using a newly available dataset based on social security records covering the universe of Italian employers between 1990 and 2015, we document that firm composition effects increasingly matter in explaining aggregate wage growth and largely reflect shifts of labor from low-paying to high-paying firms, especially in the most recent years. We find that changes in reallocation of workers across firms accounted for approximately one-fourth of aggregate wage growth during the crisis.

Early Doors and the Working-class Idyll

This article offers an analysis of Early Doors, a situation comedy set in a dowdy Manchester pub where the downbeat regulars are badly out of step with the enterprising and modernising tendencies of contemporary Britain. With its sepia-tinged style and depiction of a white, working class surviving intact, Early Doors is not an obvious candidate for inclusion in a volume on radical television drama. But this article argues that The Grapes, the pub at the centre of the sitcom, represents a working-class idyll, where the virtues of welfare, solidarity and free time prevail. This might not make the comedy radical in any conventional sense, but in its eschewing of aggressive individualism, competition and joyless, endless and flexible labour, Early Doors is a small antidote to an era defined by austerity imposed from above.

New Nothosaurus skulls from the Lower Muschelkalk of the western Lower Saxony Basin (Winterswijk, the Netherlands) shed new light on the status of Nothosaurus winterswijkensis

Three nothosaur skulls from the Lower Muschelkalk (Lower Anisian) locality of Winterswijk, the Netherlands, were recently acquired by museum Twentse Welle (Enschede) and have thereby become available for scientific description. Thus, these skulls had been identified as Nothosaurus winterswijkensis, but upon examination these skulls challenge the status of this Nothosaurus species. All diagnostic characters are somehow discredited, but the material can also not be unequivocably be considered as Nothosaurus marchicus, which is the only other obvious candidate. As these fossils originate from the same strata as the type of Nothosaurus winterswijkensis and there is no reason to assume that the animals occupied different ecological niches they are more plausibly considered one species, and Nothosaurus winterswijkensis therefore becomes a junior synonym of Nothosaurus marchicus. The diagnosis of Nothosaurus marchicus is enlarged to include all finds.

'Sewing in the Next World': Mary Hays as Dissenting Autodidact in the 1780s*

Mary Hays believed that "in the intellectual advancement of women […] is to be traced the progress of civilization." This essay traces the trajectory of Hays's own "advancement," focusing on Robert Robinson's tutelage from 1781 to her initial encounters with Wollstonecraft. The rational culture of late-eighteenth-century radical Dissent encouraged Hays to venture into the masculine strongholds of Enlightenment understanding, but here, as in the larger world, the "insuperable barriers" of gender obtained. Despite these obstacles, Hays forged an identity as female autodidact in the 1780s, readying herself to embrace Wollstonecraft's "revolution in female manners." Hays's initial contribution was to urge a new cognitive freedom, the recognition that women, too, may aspire to "the emancipated mind [which] is impatient of imposition, nor can it, in a retrogade [sic] course, unlearn what it has learned, or unknow what it has known." Hays's unfinished transition from sheltered puritan to Nonconformist apprentice to ardent feminist provides the missing link in our appreciation of her collaboration with Wollstonecraft and Godwin in the 1790s. I show how Hays was transformed into the obvious candidate for public denunciation as chief living "unsex'd female" in Wollstonecraft's stead.

Christ’s Descent into Hell in Reformation Controversy

By far the shortest of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England is the third, ‘Of the going down of Christ into Hell’. In its entirety it reads: ‘As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell’. One might be forgiven for thinking that the brevity of the article, together with the notable absence of polemic, indicates the doctrine’s relative unimportance amid the other great debates of the day. In fact, the descent of Christ into hell was one of the most controverted of all the creedal articles in the Reformation era. Article III is so short, not because it was a routine recital of the Apostles’ Creed, but because no further elaboration or explanation of the doctrine could command consent in the febrile climate of early Elizabethan England: disagreement over what was meant by ‘hell’, what was meant by Christ’s ‘descent’, and over the doctrine’s fundamental significance, was rife. This particular manifestation of the afterlife – be it only Christ’s afterlife, and only a temporary destination at that – is not the most obvious candidate as a theological cause célèbre of the Reformation era. But the intensity and the longevity of trie debates it fuelled make it at least an intriguing footnote to the study of the period.