Contemporary societies are awash in rumor. For better and worse, we live in an information surround in which there is simultaneously too much information and too little. Many wish to persuade us of truth claims, or, at the very least, to share them. These claims may have an uncertain provenance, but, under the right circumstances, we incorporate them into our belief system, act upon them, and recall them through collective memory.

Given these claims, the question becomes who, what, where and when do we trust. To the extent that reactions to assertions about society channel our actions, judgment is necessary, even if it is only implicit and tacit. The analysis of rumor belongs to the sociology of action. To produce a response, we must judge both those who communicate and what they communicate. As an everyday practice, we engage in the politics of credibility and the politics of plausibility. These concepts are tied to issues of public trust within civil society.

Philosophy has never been and never will be a science. Nevertheless it is a body of knowledge, a field of autonomous being and the subject’s ontic foundation as knowledge of itself. This paper provides an analysis of the nature of philosophy as an autonomous form of Western spirit during its historical development. The dialectic between reason, knowledge and freedom is studied through multiple historical examples from the Antiquity to modern times.

The Upper Palaeolithic Revolution, sometimes called ‘the Creative Explosion’, is seen as the period when the forefathers of modern forager societies emerged. Similarly to the Industrial and Neolithic Revolutions, it represents a short time span when numerous inventions appeared and cultural changes occurred. The inventions were in the domain of technology, that is, shaping of new stone tool forms, longdistance exchange of raw materials, the use of bone, antler and ivory as well as rare minerals for the production of domestic and ritual objects. Spatial analysis of ‘living floors’ indicates the presence of a kitchen area, sleeping grounds, storage facilities (in certain regions) and a discard zone. We can also detect a certain increase in social hierarchy and the presence of shamans. Body decorations indicate the appearance of personal individuality. Several hypotheses were offered as an explanation for the initiation of all these cultural changes often grouped under the term ‘modern behaviour’. It stands to reason that attributing the new successful technologies observed in the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic to intrinsic social processes and economic innovations by local Middle Palaeolithic populations would need a better archaeological demonstration than that available today. For the time being, the emergence of Modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa, their socio-economic dynamism that caused their expansion through the Nile Valley into the Near East, and their migration along the ‘southern route’ of Asia as far as Australia, is the most plausible scenario though it still leaves much to be desired from future archaeological research.

On 14 and 15 December 2005, on the eve of the Sixtieth Anniversary of the adoption of UNESCO's Constitution, a group of scholars from a wide range of cultural and scholarly backgrounds assembled at UNESCO Headquarters.

This paper reports the text of the intervention pronounced by Claude Lévi-Strauss for the 60th anniversary of Unesco in 2006. Lévi-Strauss recalls the intersections between his activity in the field of anthropology and ethnology and Unesco since its foundation, and the role Unesco can play nowadays in the preservation of cultural diversity and biodiversity.

Among the cultural innovations by which the Upper Palaeolithic period is characterized, those relating to burial practices furnish the possibility of evaluating the profound changes which differentiated this era from the Middle Palaeolithic. The graves of the Upper Palaeolithic offer us a sometimes very compelling glimpse of the complexity of the symbolic, cognitive and social environment of those peoples, as well as of the evolution and diversification over time and space of their rituals associated with death. This article considers the set of burials discovered to date within the boundaries of Italy as particularly representative of these features. Numerous, diverse and well-endowed, they provide important information about the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic and of the way they responded to death. These graves also represent a significant body of evidence for the debate on the degree to which Palaeolithic man can be considered culturally fully human and the extent to which he intentionally buried his dead.

This paper traces back on a personal tone a provocative evocation of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The author considers existentialism as a laboratory of existence that influenced a generation's manner of living and writing and made one's existential desires into historical and political acts. Its most representative mode of expression, literature, was as an indicator of the presence of the private throughout the public world and time. In this view, de Beauvoir's presence is approached both from the perspective of her understanding of the female, and from the particular kind of couple she formed with Sartre.;

The terms ‘gossip’ and ‘urban legend’ are often used interchangeably with ‘rumor’ by both naïve laypersons and professional scholars. Consider our students as naïve laypersons: When asked to evaluate the terms ‘rumor’ and ‘gossip’ along certain dimensions, they rate them almost identically. When asked to ‘think of a rumor’, they frequently report a scandalous tidbit of gossip. Similarly, some of our colleagues - professional scholars of rumor, gossip and/or urban legends - also tend to use these terms interchangeably. For example, participants at a recent interdisciplinary conference on rumor and legend came to no consensus over what distinguishes rumor from legend; scholars of rumor and gossip at a recent conference of social psychologists also argued over whether rumor could be differentiated from gossip. This conceptual fuzziness has been noted for some time (Ojha, 1973). And though much progress has been made in sharpening the construct of rumor (Fine, 1985; Rosnow and Georgoudi, 1985; Rosnow and Kimmel, 2000), ambiguities still remain.

Meaningful and important differences do exist, however. In this article we further clarify the concept of rumor and distinguish it from its two cousins, gossip and urban legend. The source of conceptual difficulties has arisen from insufficient attention to the context and function of these genres of informal communication, and conversely, overmuch attention to content.2 We therefore posit a definition of rumor focused upon contexts, functions and contents. We also examine contexts, functions and contents of gossip and urban legends, and explore similarities and differences between these three forms of social discourse. We begin with rumor.

Sartre's thought and practice cannot be separated from the experience of the Second World War. Emerging from the war, Sartre formed the idea that the human comes forth out of the subhuman. This paper analyses aspects of Sartre's humanism from the point of view of his political commitment, and presents Sartre's work as an antidote to contemporary economic and scientific determinism. Sartre credit was always given to the growth of freedom in action out of the most unexpected subjectivization. He firmly supported the founding idea of democracy – the power of everyman – and projected the intellectual's mission into each of us once we try to rethink critically our actions in the light of human purposes.

To associate the theory of rumour with the theory of problems may seem incongruous. And yet a rumour may easily be perceived as a solution, one that is quite circumstantial and wholly marked by mental improvisation, to a problem of collective relevance: to explain, for example, why one is right to be worried, to account for whatever reason one might have for showing hostility to an innovation, to show what face we should put on our uncertainties, to argue the distance which separates us from others unlike us and to prove, by this example, how hateful are our oppressors and those who exploit us. But there is more. Explicitly or otherwise, rumour ends up generating practical advice, an injunction to action or to refrain from action (‘don't do this’, ‘don't go there’, ‘don't eat that’, ‘watch out’, ‘check up on that …) which also links it to a concrete solution. Which goes to suggest that, antecedent to the rumour, there existed a need to know or to know how.

Such a way of looking at things permits an advance in parsimony, since there must exist fewer originating ‘problems’ than attested ‘solutions’. On the other hand, this point of view installs rumour in the function of a revelation or symptom of a social state which encompasses it. Finally, this perspective reconnects the production and development of rumours to the set of cognitive mechanisms of the computational type. One rediscovers therein the continuity of processes of social thought, and rumours cease to be confined to their status of monstrous singularities.

Beads and other ‘body ornaments’ are very widespread components of the archaeological record of early modern humans (Homo sapiens). They appear first in the Middle Stone Age in Africa, and somewhat later in the Early Upper Paleolithic of Eurasia. The manufacture and use of ornaments is widely considered to be evidence for significant developments in human cognition. In our view, the appearance of these objects represents the interaction of evolved cognitive capacities with changing social and demographic conditions. Body ornamentation is a medium or technology for communication, particularly of socially-relevant information. The widespread adoption of beads and other discrete objects as media for communication implies changes in the complexity and stability of social messages, as well as the scale of social networks. The relatively sudden appearance of beads in the Paleolithic archaeological record coincides with genetic and archaeological evidence for expansion of human populations. We argue that these changes reflect expanding scales of social interaction and more complex social landscapes resulting from unprecedentedly large and internally differentiated human populations.

The idea of dignity seems indissociable from that of humanity, whether in its universal dimension of ‘human dignity’, or in the individual ‘dignity of the person’. This paper provides an outlook on the ethics governing the sciences and technology, in particular the biological sciences and biotechnology, and recalls the notion of ‘glory’, both human and divine, as it infuses a great part of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance cultures, just before the scientific revolution in Europe.

This paper provides a rich reconstruction of the notion of dignity and rights of people and individuals in its Assyrian origins in ancient Mesopotamia. It analysis several particular positions. Among them, Bardaisan, Yacoub Aphraates (Aphrahat), Michael the Syriac, as well as, much later, the missionary policy of the Eastern Church in Asia and the influential of the Nestorian church in Asia.

We can construct a typology of rumours - defined broadly as unverified news - according to their relation to reality after their degree of veracity has been established, at least in the current state of knowledge, by experts (historians, scientists, police officers, journalists, and so on). If a rumour turns out to be correct it becomes an item of information. If a rumour is untrue it comes into the categories of affirming or denying rumours. Affirming rumours, which are the most common type, state the reality of imaginary facts, for instance the rumour claiming that bananas from Costa Rica pass on to people flesh-eating bacteria that cause general necrosis. Denying rumours, which are rarer, deny the reality of established facts, for example rumours claiming that Elvis Presley is not dead or that Americans have never walked on the moon.

It seems useful to distinguish various terms indicating negation. Rumours will be termed negative when they state facts associated with fear or hostility, whereas positive rumours evoke happy, welcome events. French researchers, who assign colours to rumours, talk about ‘black’ rumours or ‘rose-tinted’ ones. Specialists agree that there are around nine black rumours for every rose-tinted one. Rouquette (1975, 1990) has thoroughly studied this ‘bias towards negativity’, which is one of the main features of rumours. I shall talk about denying rumours and ideas when they deny commonly accepted events. These rumours are not necessarily negative: for instance survival legends often express the wish that a loved person were not dead. Finally, among denying rumours and ideas, we shall reserve the word negationist for revisionist claims that the gas chambers did not exist, or that a Nazi did not plan to exterminate the Jews during the Second World War.

This article seeks to show the interaction between cultural and anatomic evolution in the birth and differentiation of cultures and languages. The diversity which characterizes our world does not preclude logical regularities due to the coherence of the human mind, which evolved slowly through the paleontological phases of its emergence over millions of years. The anatomical retroaction of the hominids is analyzed to show that, in the long run, anatomy reflected ‘cultural selection’. With the anatomic evolution of man, culture became a crucial component for all human beings and their anatomy simply adapted progressively to this fact.

The author recalls his encounters with Jean-Paul Sartre in Cuba and Moscow, during the 1960s. Sarte?s views on Castro, the Cuban and Russian revolutions, as well as Sartre's behaviours in the different countries he visited, are lively evoked in this short first-hand portrait.

This paper discusses the positions of Italian philosopher Giulio Preti (1911-1972) in relation to the quarrel between Analytic and Continental philosophy. Preti?s thought appears as a systematic thought permitting to overcome, through his logical, epistemological and linguistic reflection, the divide between these two approaches. The different features of his philosophy are analyzed here in detail and compared to the main theoretical assumptions of Analytic and Continental philosophy.

The question of the origin of ‘natural’ human language has fascinated the scientific world for a very long time and seems to be generating a renewed level of interest. This paper will show that all elements converge to indicate a long and slow process of separation by which the hominids very progressively became distinguished from the other higher primates and more generally from other animal species. Biological and neurological developments created favourable structures for the future emergence of human languages. These developments were further potentialized by the appearance of new forms of co-operation within human communities. Such anthropological, socio-cultural and ‘political’ elements were determinant in allowing the transition to the specifically human functions of language. If these elements are not taken into consideration, researchers are reduced to imaging the appearance of a mutation from which solely Homo sapiens would have benefited and from which Homo neanderthalensis would have been excluded, as must equally be excluded any intermingling between the various varieties of hominids.

Multiculturalism has become a central theme in many academic disciplines from philosophy to education, social work and psychology, ultimately reaching political science and law. What seems to be unique in current studies on multiculturalism is not merely the observance and display of societies that happen to be diverse in terms of the religious, cultural, national and ethnic affiliation of their members. Rather, it is the central argument that such divergence is legitimate and should be accommodated. Accepting other groups in society and the legitimacy of accommodating them has become a virtue of tolerance.

This paper argues that we must first look into multicultural theory itself to discover what can be called ‘multicultural qualifications’. These are in essence pre-conditions without the presence of which group accommodations, even if granted based on group membership, should not be considered as multicultural in nature. With multicultural theory as a backdrop, this article intends to identify such multicultural qualifications. The Palestinian-Arab minority in Israel is studied in its constellation as both a national minority group and as a religiously diverse group as an object for testing the application of the identified multicultural qualifications.

This paper examines the stability of the concept of rumor in the past century. It is suggested that not only do models of explanation change, but rumors themselves also change - not just in content, but perhaps in the way they are believed or disbelieved. Social scientific interest in rumors begins with the birth of modern psychology in the 19 th century, shifts to social psychology and sociology in mid-20th century, prompted by governmental concern over subversion through rumor during the Second World War, and is finally revived by folklorists in more recent decades. Understood variously as a conduit of the unconscious and otherwise unendorsable thoughts, a mundane communication drift, or an intentional form of deception and provocation, many of our rumor model assumptions are drawn from that era and remain basically unchallenged. A central assumption emerged that ambiguous situations create a vacuum which rumor fills. By the late 1960s, despite a decline in social scientific interest in the topic, a handful of significant empirical and theoretical challenges emerge from scattered studies. The discipline of folklore begins to take more interest in contemporary rumor in the 1970s, and by the early 1990s the rubric of the rumor is almost entirely supplanted in English language scholarship by the ‘urban legend’ (Brunvand, 1981).