The aim of this chapter is to establish that children are owed a sense of their own interiority. The chapter argues that although the literature on philosophy of childhood constitutes an advance on the deficit model of childhood insofar as it supports children’s rights and childhood goods, it risks reifying adult-child relations by continuing to essentialize childhood. While Gareth B. Matthews’ theory of development as socially and linguistically mediated begins to shift the focus toward the child’s own inner life, it falls short insofar as it fails to challenge the fact/value dichotomy. Drawing upon Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, the chapter concludes that a rejection of this dichotomy is in fact necessary for developing the notion of a morally inflected consciousness that is as available to children as it is adults.

In this chapter, we look at Mesoamerican views on human activity and life. How did precolonial Mesoamerican philosophers think about proper or right action, in the case of the individual and the wider community? This includes issues such as the role of the state, the ruler, and the individual’s duties toward each. The chapter focuses on key ethical concepts and views in Mesoamerican traditions, such as those concerning humility, sacrifice, and the situational and temporary nature of goodness.

With special reference to Diotima’s teaching in Plato’s Symposium, this chapter discusses the central importance to Hermetic spirituality of beauty and reverence (eusebeia), Hermetic psychological theory, and the centrality of imagination to the Hermetic concept of “becoming aiōn” and gaining cosmic consciousness.

The constituent elements of the book: Hermetic spirituality, the historical imagination, alterations of consciousness, the relation between language and experiential knowledge, and radical agnosticism in the study of religion. Narrative historiography and historical-comparative methods.

Christopher Rowe argues that Aristotle in the Eudemian Ethics develops a naturalised account of Socrates’s divine sign: even people lacking in practical wisdom, Aristotle proposes, can act appropriately, and achieve a kind of happiness, because of something divine in them. But this ‘something divine’ is not (as it is for Socrates) a private inner voice, rather a kind of well-naturedness. For Aristotle, goodness is natural. The goodness of human nature explains how it is possible to do the appropriate things even without reasoning, and even do so reliably. This offers Aristotle an answer to a puzzle about our relation to the natural world. Humans, he holds, are good by nature, yet he also holds fully virtuous human beings to be relatively rare: two claims that are hard to reconcile, given Aristotle’s usual view that what occurs ‘by nature’ occurs ‘always or for the most part’. By allowing there to be a level of decency that is achievable through well-naturedness, even by those who lack full virtue, Aristotle can answer this puzzle. If this decency is achieved by many people, then there is, after all, a kind of good human development that occurs by nature and occurs regularly.

The Conclusion sketches two notions: a metaphysical one – that much human goodness depends on implicit or explicit rankings and positionality; and an epistemic one – that we use implicit or explicit comparison to know what position we occupy in this continuum of goodness. Envy’s signaling value may be much more important than previously thought. If most of human goodness is relational, comparative, competitive, or positional, then it is not surprising that envy is a universal emotion. It safeguards our chance at happiness.

Two non-native phones can be discriminated well if each one is perceived as a different native phonological category. In that case, the perceiver’s prior attunement to a phonological distinction in the native language supports discrimination in the non-native language. Discrimination of non-native phones is more challenging when both are perceived as similar to the same native phonological category, but a perceived difference in phonetic goodness-of-fit to the native category can nevertheless support discrimination. There are four different sources of information that a perceiver might use to discriminate contrasting non-native phones: 1) sensitivity to a native phonological contrast; 2) sensitivity to the phonetic goodness-of-fit to a native phonological category; 3) language-independent phonetic distance, and; 4) perceptual salience of a non-linguistic auditory difference. Using the Perceptual Assimilation Model (Best, 1995) as an example, the aim of this paper is to outline how a theoretical model of cross-language speech perception might account for these sources of information. On the basis of that review an evaluation will be made of the methodological requirements for determining which sources of information listeners use for discrimination.

As in Chapter 4, the list of Proverbial virtues produced in Chapter 3 is again compared with Aristotle’s list of moral virtues in order to discover the underlying factors that explain both. Assessing in depth the similarities and differences between the virtue lists of Proverbs and Aristotle, this chapter focuses on their notions of courage, work, speech and friendship. I examine apparent and actual differences in these virtues and discuss the historical, social and doctrinal factors that underlie them. Why, for instance, do Aristotle and Proverbs show marked interest in honor? Or how might Proverbs’ focus on work and Aristotle’s omission of the subject be explained?