In contrast to Plato, Aristotle allowed and argued for the possibility that all human lives have some non-instrumental value. This valuation of life is premised on his teleological conception of nature: insofar as all human lives are natural ends of some sort, they are thus a good. However, this non-instrumental value of mere living is in itself not sufficient to make a life worth living. As in Plato, whether a life is lived well or badly is the decisive factor, and again the state of virtue or vice is the most important consideration. Vice makes a life worse than death, regardless of the other good things in it, but fully fledged virtue is not necessary for a life worth living. In contrast to those who are fully virtuous, other non-vicious humans may need other goods, or at least freedom from other bads, such as serious illness or grave misfortunes, to pass the threshold of a life worth living. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle is less optimistic about the chances of the non-educated elite having a life worth living, though he does not flatly deny that possibility.

Focusing on the Republic, this chapter argues that Plato regards psychological health, or the virtue of justice, as the necessary – and sufficient – condition of a human life worth living. This healthy condition amounts to a good exercise of soul’s function (ergon), which is premised on a good exercise of an individual’s function, or job, in the city. This account allows even peasants or craftsman in Plato’s ideal city to have a life worth living, even though they fall short of the best possible human life lived by the rulers-philosophers. It is argued that this non-elitist account of a life worth living is compatible with the famous claim from Plato’s Apology that an unexamined life is not worth living for humans. For in the ideal city all citizens live an examined life, at the very least in the sense of being ruled by the wise philosophers. At the same time, Plato decisively denied the possibility that the mere fact of being alive, or the fact of having a soul, would be a good. It can be a good, if a life is lived well, or it can be an evil, if a life is lived badly.

Freud’s intense faith in Jung, a man he had called the “Joshua” to his Moses, and whom he declared would be his successor at a time when psychoanalysis needed a “Christ,” ended in a hermeneutic battle over the Prophet Jonah. This chapter explores how the biblical story of Jonah became the site for working out the differentiation between the Viennese school and Zurich school of psychoanalysis. I argue that the forgotten Jonah trail is worth recovering because Freud’s repudiation of the Biblical hermeneutics surrounding the myth of Jonah largely determined the end of Freud and Jung’s collaboration and, at the same time, influenced Freud’s subsequent attitude to and writings on Biblical prophets. Freud’s taciturn, oppositional, and hitherto unanalyzed discursive relationship with the prophet Jonah sheds new light on psychoanalytic literature on Biblical myth, its reception, and even its consequent influence on the movement after 1913.

This appendix collects a review of the calculus and analysis in one and several variables that the reader should be familiar with. Notions of convergence, continuity, differentiability and integrability are recalled here.

Oral glands underwent substantial modification during the origin and diversification of snakes. Oral glands have provided rich data for snake systematics, and for informing evolutionary scenarios about the adaptive radiation of snake feeding. However, sampling has been patchy, and many questions remain about gland homology, function and evolution. This chapter addresses labial (supra- and infralabial), temporomandibular, rictal, sublingual, premaxillary, accessory and dental (= venom and Duvernoy’s) glands. We review and synthesize developments and data and present new histological sections and high-resolution tomography of some snakes and lizards, providing descriptions and illustrations of oral glands and associated structures. We comment on labial and dental glands of some toxicoferan and non-toxicoferan lizards, and report the first observation of a possible infralabial gland in a dibamian lizard. There are insufficient data to resolve all outstanding questions about gland homology across lizards and snakes, but the ancestral snake possibly had rictal and lacked dental (venom) glands, the latter perhaps evolving only within colubroidean caenophidians.

Morphosyntax describes the form and function of grammatical constructions in the world’s languages. The form of constructions includes both syntactic structure and relevant morphology. The function of constructions includes both information content (semantics) and information packaging of the content. The same semantic content can be packaged in different ways. The approach in this textbook is crosslinguistic and empirical: we compare grammatical constructions across languages and describe patterns of variation, universals constraining variation, and diachronic processes that give rise to the variation. Crosslinguistic comparison is done using crosslinguistically valid concepts (comparative concepts). Crosslinguistic constructions are defined as all grammatical forms expressing a particular function. Strategies are crosslinguistically defined formal means for expressing a function. The analysis of grammatical structure in a particular language is the categorization of constructions in the language by their form and their function. Language-particular analysis of constructions and crosslinguistic analysis of constructions can be united via the function of the construction.

After a brief overview of the advent of functional approaches to language in the mid– and late 1900s, stressing the importance of investigating pragmatic, i.e. implicit aspects of language use, and of simultaneously approaching language from different perspectives, this overview stresses the importance of understanding – rather than of finding some definite truth about language. The analysis of pragmatic particles (you know, like, well) in the mid–1960s showcased a plethora of challenges for investigations of language function and use that had previously not attracted scholars’ attention. This strand of research has fruitfully continued, especially so within the DiPVaC community, and constantly opens up new avenues of research. This overview lastly offers a reinterpretation of the author’s 1981 study of you know in terms of aspects of responsibility, suggesting that precisely responsibility – and its various facets – need to be given a more central task in future studies of language function and use, discourse, and pragmatics.

When age-related physical impairments affect a person’s performance of functional tasks, rehabilitation may restore function and improve an elder’s independence and participation in society. Included is a review of how to perform a functional assessment, a description of the members of a rehabilitation team, and an introduction to the various settings where an elder can receive rehabilitation. The chapter describes geriatric assistive devices that improve self-care and mobility and reviews specific rehabilitation interventions for common debilitating conditions such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease, hip fracture, and lower-extremity amputation.

Argues that Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms relies on an account of human subjectivity that he deliberately keeps in the background of his writings. Remarkably, even though Cassirer considers a systematic account of human subjectivity to be an essential component of a philosophy of culture, he never seems to develop one (5.1). This omission is the result of Cassirer’s belief that consciousness can only be approached through the mediation of diverse cultural products (5.2). Cassirer solves this difficulty by developing a ‘functional conception of human subjectivity’ that forms the exact counterpart of his account of objectivity and therefore needs no separate treatment (5.3). This conception allows him to characterize the human being as an ‘animal symbolicum’ in An Essay on Man (5.4). Cassirer’s posthumous text The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms then merely translates this view of the human being into the language of his contemporaries ‒ rather than deviating from his published writings, as is usually maintained (5.5). In sum, this chapter retrieves the hidden, anthropological foundation of Cassirer's philosophy of culture.

Reconsiders the stakes of the Davos debate on the basis of my previous findings. I first summarize the established similarities and differences between Cassirer and Heidegger's philosophical projects. Next, I reinterpret their issues of contention in light of the starting point and aim (the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem, as they put it in Davos) of their philosophies, which, I argue, Cassirer and Heidegger failed to accurately compare. In this way, I show that Cassirer's and Heidegger’s thought, despite being grounded in irreconcilable ontological and methodological assumptions, can nevertheless positively incite each other. After all, they share a philosophical concern: to comprehend and aid the human being’s capacity to orient itself in and towards the world. This means that the Davos debate was an elaborate disagreement about a shared interest of profound significance for human life after all, or in other words a true philosophical debate.

Returns to Cassirer’s notion of function to argue that it continuously informs his conception of philosophy. Cassirer first develops this notion in his 1910 work Substance and Function: the mathematical idea of a function connects disparate elements under a variable rule, establishing a unity through diversity (8.1). Subsequently, his early historical writings (1906‒1919) invoke the idea of a functional unity in order to explain the continuity and progress in the history of thought while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of each historical epoch (8.2). Cassirer’s mature, systematic, writings (1923‒1942) reconcile the unity of human culture and the synchronic diversity of our cultural domains by means of the same idea (8.3). Finally, the ethical reflections that we find in Cassirer’s latest writings (1935‒1946) are also rooted in this ‘functional conception of philosophy’ (8.4).

Chapter 8 presents a summary of the findings. The limitations of the study are also discussed, including the subtle nature of function, more cross-linguistic verification, comparisons in greater detail, the need for both diachronic and synchronic investigations, and so on. More significantly, spoken language should also be taken into consideration for further improvement.

If you’re coming to this book from a traditional grammar or with little or no background in grammar, or if you plan to read only individual chapters, then this chapter was written to orient you to our approach and make your life easier.

We start by discussing words, different senses of what a word is, and the ways that words are categorized. Then show how words can be combined into phrases with heads and dependents, where each phrase category is named after the category of its head word. These phrases build into a special larger phrase called a clause.

With this framework in hand, we move into the core of the chapter. Beginning with §2.3, each of the sections corresponds with a chapter. So, Ch. 3 and §2.3 are Verbs and verb phrases, Ch. 4 and §2.4 are Complements in clauses, etc.

The chapter also includes an appendix explaining the book’s notational conventions.

The analysis in the last chapters reveals a convergence across the various models and jurisdictions considered in addressing the ‘substantive content’ of the obligations of non-state actors. This chapter attempts to describe and systematise what emerges from these judgments into an analytical framework which I term the ‘multi-factoral approach’. An optimal articulation of this approach, I argue, requires a series of steps, three of which I seek to accomplish in this chapter: namely, identifying the various factors at play in a situation; examining their normative grounding and understanding their relevance to the imposition of corporate obligations; and, developing presumptive principles, that help us understand their implications for corporate obligations. I identify and explore the relevance and weight to be accorded to three beneficiary-orientated factors (interests, vulnerability and impact) as well as three agent-relative factors (capacity, function and autonomy). This chapter also shows that none of these factors is alone sufficient to determine corporate obligations.

This chapter argues that, for Aristotle, human emotions are both different from, and also importantly continuous with, the emotions experienced by non-human animals. On the one hand, the repertoire of emotions experienced by human beings differs significantly from the repertoire experienced by non-human animals. The difference stems from the fact that only human beings have reason. Some human emotions (for example, shame) require the possession of reason and hence cannot be experienced by non-human animals. Other human emotions have counterparts in non-human animals, but they differ from these counterparts because, when functioning correctly, they are guided by reason. For instance, the disposition to feel fear is reason-governed in a human being but not in an animal. On the other hand, in spite of these striking differences between human and animal emotions, Dow argues that the emotions also reveal an important continuity between human beings and other animals: both human and animal emotions are fundamentally capacities to respond with pleasure or pain to situations that are apparently good or harmful to the subject. In this sense, emotion plays a similar role in the lives of humans and non-human animals.

This chapter reviews five decades of research on reactions to mirrors and self-recognition in nonhuman primates, starting with Gallup’s (1970) pioneering experimental demonstration of self-recognition in chimpanzees and its apparent absence in monkeys. Taking a decade-by-decade approach, developments in the field are presented separately for great apes on the one hand, and all other primates on the other (prosimians, monkeys, and so-called lesser apes), considering both empirical studies and theoretical issues. The literature clearly shows that among nonhuman primates the most compelling evidence for something approaching human-like visual self-recognition is seen only in great apes, despite an impressive range of sometimes highly original procedures employed to study many monkey species. In the past decade, research has been shifting from simple questions about whether great apes can self-recognize (now considered beyond doubt), to addressing possible biological bases for individual and species differences in the strength of self-recognition, analysis of possible adaptive functions of the capacity for self-visualization, and searching for evidence of self-recognition in a range of nonprimate species.

The origins of even familiar objects are frequently mired in mystery. The violin is one such example. Nevertheless, we have recently learned much more about the evolution of the violin over time – specifically, its overall shape and the length of its twin sound-holes. The research yielding this increased understanding focused on the makers of the violin, its so-called luthiers, thus putting behavior prominently into the spotlight. Each of the two studies under consideration proposed provocative parallels between structural changes in the violin and the Law of Natural Selection. But, the more appropriate analysis rests on the Law of Effect shaping the behavior of the luthiers. What is revealed is, first, that increasing the length of the sound-holes amplified the acoustic power of the violin, thus leading luthiers to lengthen the sound-holes; and, second, that the aesthetic tastes of their customers led luthiers to modify the overall shapes of their violins.