A common view of the Gorgias is that Plato is portraying the limits of Socratic discussion. Interlocutors become hostile, little agreement seems reached, and conversation breaks down. Furthermore, non-rational forces, by which may be included pleasures, pains, epithumiai, and the pathos of eros, come to the fore at various points. These twin factors have led to a growing consensus that what is shown is that discussion is not effective with persons in whom non-rational forces are strong. This chapter questions this consensus, bolstering Socrates’ optimistic reply to Callicles, that if the same things are examined “often and better”, Callicles will be persuaded. It argues that dialogue is a normative practice, which exemplifies the virtues that constitute its subject matter; this enables greater appreciation of how it can play a role in shaping cognition and behaviour. If values are involved in the very operation of dialogue, then participants can become accustomed to the values that form the explicit content of discussion by learning to adhere correctly to its form. Seen as such, Socratic argument is not just determined by the desires of its participants (unlike rhetoric), but is capable of shaping them.

This chapter charts soldiers’ journeys across the Western Front. Drawing on the concept of ‘place attachment’, it explains how men developed an emotional relationship with Belgium and France. Beginning with their arrival by boat, it narrates their experiences in ports, bases, and camps and from there through the countryside and towns to the frontlines. It follows this journey, investigating the processes by which English infantrymen explored and were exposed to the war zone. This allowed them to internalise and reconceptualise Belgium and France. Subtle psychological processes allowed men to familiarise the sights, sounds, and scents that they encountered. These were both conscious and unconscious products of both purposeful action and unconscious psychological mechanisms. Repeated exposure habituated soldiers to the sights, sounds, and scents that confronted them, even in the frontlines. Elsewhere, men made use of language to craft new narratives and to normalise the violence and death that surrounded them. They developed very personal relationships with landscapes, spaces, and places. The Western Front became the locus of important life experiences and memories and was littered with graves that represented personal and collective loss. The landscapes of Belgium and France became a metaphysical space as their features were increasingly associated with ideas of duty, German barbarity, and sacrifice.

Chapter 10 discusses various characteristics of the overall developmental progression of language acquisition. We first discuss some general properties of this process and then show how it can be studied both with respect to language production and language perception. We discuss the stages and milestones that children go through for different aspects of grammar and ask whether the properties and timing of stages lend support to the Innateness Hypothesis for language. We then formulate the argument from stages. Here the idea is that a complex system like language “unfolds” in the human mind, step by step, each step occurring at more or less regular points in time, as determined by a biological clock. This process of unfolding is called maturation. Just as our body gradually changes into a mature system, so does our mind. This process of unfolding is biologically determined and largely outside the control of the organism, although external factors (“nurture“) play a role. We critically evaluate the argument from stages, asking how precisely it might support the Innateness Hypothesis.

In this chapter, I outline Aristotle’s theory of moral education and the central role friendships can play in the cultivation of virtue in students. I pay special attention to what are referred to as friendships of virtue, or perfect friendships, or character friendships. I examine the necessary connection Aristotle sees between virtue and a flourishing life, as well as how Aristotle believes virtue is developed in human beings. Then, I discuss the way friendships can contribute to the virtue-formation process. Finally, after examining Aristotle’s theory of friendship I discuss the implications of his theory for contemporary educational settings, and I make a case for how educators might encourage moral growth in their students by helping them develop the right kinds of friends.

As the breadth and scope of primate cognition research continues to evolve, it remains essential that the ethical considerations of such work do so as well. The evaluation of ethics is shaped by time and place and centers on a variety of factors, including the questions being asked, the methods used, the setting, and the species studied. Here, we take a pragmatic approach in examining ethical considerations as they relate to cognitive research with primates in both captive and wild settings. We encourage primatologists to consider how primates’ lives are impacted prior to, during, and following the research. In addition, we highlight the importance of considering how such research activities interface with the people who work or live alongside the primates. Thus, we aim to help guide those studying and working with primates to plan and conduct ethically sound research.

Comparisons across species have long been used to explore biological, medical, social, and behavioral phenomena. Throughout the twentieth century, behavioral psychologists and ethologists approached the problem of cross-species comparisons from different perspectives: Behaviorists focused on tightly controlled sterile laboratory experiments that mostly used a select few species, whereas ethologists utilized a more naturalistic approach to observe a diverse set of animals in their natural habitats. The behaviorist approach allowed for a systematic exploration of the processes unique to and common across species, whereas the ethologist approach highlighted how ecological pressures shape cognitive capacity. In this chapter, we explore how the convergence of these two approaches can be used to explore the evolution of cognition using organisms’ capacity for learning (behavior adaptation due to experience) as a framework. For this purpose, we review the existing literature on the relatively simple nonassociative phenomenon of stimulus habituation, which has been observed in a wide range of animals, ranging from unicellular organisms to complex vertebrates, with only quantitative differences in the extent to which the phenomenon is observed across species. The common characteristics of habituation across species, and its potential role in defensive survival mechanisms and mate selection, suggest that some basic phenomena have been conserved through evolution. We also review the occurrence of associative learning across species, and how the capacity to make predictions about their environment can serve to increase survival and reproductive success. The emergence of associative learning has been suggested as a critical step in cognitive development that was a cause or consequence of the diversification of species that occurred during the Cambrian period. The capacity for associative learning also seems to be shaped by ecological pressures, such that certain associations are more easily learned than others. That is, associations are not genetically encoded, but each species’ evolutionary history leads to some associations being preferentially acquired over others. Associative learning also appears to exhibit qualitative differences across species, with some species appearing to lack a capacity to exhibit certain associative phenomena. However, the failure to observe a phenomenon should be used carefully when drawing conclusions about a given species’ cognitive capacities because a failure to accomplish a task may reflect instead physical limitations to successfully completing the task. Different species’ biological adaptations mean that widely different methodologies may be needed to uncover phenomena that could serve each species in their respective ecological niches. These methodological issues may limit the extent to which species can be directly compared. Finally, the capacity for learning may not be limited to animals, as a handful of studies have suggested that plants can exhibit learning-like capabilities. We conclude that cross-species comparisons are an essential tool to understand the phylogeny of cognition.

A desire for belonging is a fundamental feature of humans. Securing and maintaining a bond is rewarding, whereas abandonment, jilting and loneliness trigger strongly aversive feelings. The chapter’s emphasis is upon belonging,and the theoretical basis of understanding Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen is different from those in the preceding chapters. They seem to be motivated by a combination of sexual desire and an abnormally powerful desire to avoid rejection and loneliness. This led them in a perverse direction whereby the need might even be met by a zombie partner. This raises the question of whether finding early on a conventional secure and compliant attachment could have prevented their killings. There is little or no evidence to suggest that they enjoyed killing or held sadistic desires. Dahmer suffered from neglect. Nilsen seemed to imprint upon the image of his dead grandfather.

Although fear can protect us from harm and prepare us for danger, disproportionately extreme fear can turn into a specific phobia when it leads to extreme avoidance of and distress in feared situations, thereby interfering with our lives and mental well-being. This chapter gives instructions and examples of how an assessment and mini formulation for specific phobias can help to construct a ‘fear hierarchy’ and to understand which ‘safety behaviors’ can maintain phobias. With case illustrations, the chapter describes how to apply exposure therapy, the cornerstone CBT method for specific phobias, in which an individual gradually confronts each trigger in the fear hierarchy while refraining from safety behaviors. The chapter also outlines how to overcome common difficulties with exposure therapy and how to measure therapy outcomes. Finally, cognitive restructuring is discussed as a CBT approach for specific phobias in which exposure-based activities are used to test and challenge exaggerated or unhelpful ideas about feared situations.

According to Aristotle there is an important distinction between human beings and the rest of nature: while all other creatures develop as they do ‘necessarily or for the most part’, the development of human beings depends on their own efforts. This applies not only to their acquisition of technical and intellectual accomplishments, but to their character as well. Emotions or affections (pathē) play an important role in that development; they have an interesting ‘passive-cum-active’ character. Although their experience is not determined by choice, it is due to understanding and evaluating the particular situation. Reasoning is therefore in a way involved in the formation of human affections by habituation. The process of habituation determines not only how human beings act, but also how they feel. The affective part of the soul, though it is non-rational, is capable of ‘listening’ to reason more or less well and thereby the person acquires good or bad dispositions to act. Thus, in a human being, affections can be reasonable or unreasonable: The distinctive reason-responsiveness of the affections helps to explain why, despite certain natural predispositions, successful human development cannot simply be attributed to nature.

This chapter describes the primary interventions for the fear of aversive consequences presentation of ARFID, including:

• Examples of how avoidance of feared food or eating situations keeps the problem going

• Examples of how facing fears through exposure can actually reduce anxiety

• Creating a hierarchy of feared food and eating situations

• How to design and implement at-home exposures to these feared food and eating situations

addresses the question how one develops the correct (or incorrect) thought and feelings, a crux in Aristotelian scholarship, and how exactly thought and feeling become interdependent in the good person. When Aristotle says that thoughtfulness (phronēsis) comes mostly by teaching and that virtue of character comes by habituation, it may sound as if there are two processes taking place separately, one in relation to thinking and one in relation to feeling, with the process in relation to feeling coming first. I disagree, and show how virtues of thought like comprehension (sunesis) and consideration (gnōmē) emerge in habituation along with the correct feelings. I also discuss how one may become bad, using the case of Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, discussed by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics VII, to show how a young person’s thought and feeling can become interdependent even if they are thrown off track by pernicious influences like those of the lying Odysseus in this play. Finally, I argue that shame is not a separate stage in moral development.

Physical reasoning is the ability to go beyond the information in the immediate perceptual array. For example, if I were to dangle my keys in front of me with the intention of letting go of them, everyone would predict that the moment I let go of the keys, they will fall towards the ground. Similarly, if I hide my keys behind my back, everyone has the expectation that the keys continue to exist and that the shape and size of the keys remain the same as they were before they were hidden from view. These two examples demonstrate that people share the same basic ideas about how objects behave and interact. These expectations may be universal across all humans, and they may even be shared by some other species. However, researchers are still puzzled by some aspects of these fundamental abilities. For instance, even though most people can effortlessly draw similar predictions about these events, we have yet to build a computer that can rival the physical reasoning abilities of a typically developing 1-year-old infant. In this chapter, we argue that one way to resolve some of the mysteries about physical reasoning is to look at the origins of the abilities and how they change over time. We start by reviewing the literature on the physical reasoning abilities of human infants.

This chapter addresses the compelling questions of whether infants are intelligent and whether infant intelligence predicts future mental development. The chapter first tackles the perennially intransigent challenges of defining infancy and intelligence. The chapter next reviews the history of infancy study from the point of view of what we thought we knew about infant intelligence. The chapter then draws the reader into an intuitive perspective on what might be everyday intelligent behaviors on the part of infants; that perspective is buttressed with scientific investigations. That laboratory work is subsequently elaborated on with reference to new paradigms followed by a focus on two prominent interrelated methods and measures of studying cognition in infants: habituation and novelty preference. Their interpretation as measures of cognition in infancy is supported with evidence from studies of concurrent and predictive validity. The chapter concludes with comments and thoughts about the future promise of a new view on infant intelligence.