Recent years have seen a proliferation of academic and popular writings on the relationship among Islam, secularism, and democracy. Often, this topic is approached through the question of compatibility: Is Islam compatible or incompatible with secular democracy? Regardless of whether one answers this question with a yes or with a no, such an approach does little to help one in achieving a more nuanced understanding of Islam or secular democracy as discursive traditions. The two works under review here do not follow this pattern. Though distinct in their disciplinary persuasions and in their questions and objects of research, both works offer critical insights into the interaction between Islam and the conditions and structures of secular modernity.

Animal models of human disease play a central role in modern biomedical science. Developing animal models for human mental illness presents unique practical and philosophical challenges. In this article we argue that (1) existing animal models of psychiatric disease are not valid, (2) attempts to model syndromes are undermined by current nosology, (3) models of symptoms are rife with circular logic and anthropomorphism, (4) any model must make unjustified assumptions about subjective experience, and (5) any model deemed valid would be inherently unethical, for if an animal adequately models human subjective experience, then there is no morally relevant difference between that animal and a human.

This article provides an overview of the six other contributions in the Neuroethics and Animals special section. In addition, it discusses the methodological and theoretical problems of interdisciplinary fields. The article suggests that interdisciplinary approaches without established methodological and theoretical bases are difficult to assess scientifically. This might cause these fields to expand without actually advancing.

This is a follow-up to the article ‘Could Captain Scott have been saved? Revisiting Scott's last expedition’, published in this journal in January 2012. Additional research in the expedition's primary documents reveals that there was a clear opportunity for One Ton depot to have been re-stocked with dog food in January 1912, preparatory to the final relief journey to meet the polar party that February, and that the dog driver Cecil Meares failed to follow Scott's relevant orders. The consequences will be examined in this article. All distances are given in geographical miles.

The essay opens by situating Dipesh Chakrabarty’s recent work on climate change and the anthropocene (the new geological period of time in which humans have become a planet-reshaping “force of nature”) together with a broader contemporary discourse on the human/nonhuman in relation to Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Paul Sartre’s 1960s debate on the nature of history and the dialectic. Although not explicitly advanced under the sign of that debate, these recent discourses, I suggest, share and extend some of its crucial features, taking something from both sides. From Sartre: the call for a search for critical method adequate to addressing Marx’s observation that we make our own history, but not under circumstances of our own choosing. From Lévi-Strauss: the argument that “history” is inadequately addressed by the “historian’s code,” that the situation of our time encompasses multiple scales and orders of time: most significantly, an array of “extra-historical,” “infra-historical,” and “supra-historical” registers of human/nonhuman time. From there, I return to Chakrabarty, to discuss the ways in which his work takes up those twin challenges. I pursue this reading by considering the relation between his earlier conceptualization (in Provincializing Europe) of History 1 and History 2 and the new theory of history emerging from his work on climate change, which I call History 3. I conclude by suggesting that despite its enormously rich considerations of the multiscaled temporality of the anthropocene, Chakrabarty’s recent work also sometimes bends the time of climate linear in the progress toward catastrophe, thereby bypassing the full possibility of a multitemporal ontology of the present that would include the persistence into the anthropocene of History 1 and 2. I suggest, therefore, that while drawing on his recent work, we need to continue in a search for a method adequate to the situation of our time; a time that knots together (minimally) Histories 1, 2, and 3; a time that I am provisionally calling History 4°.

Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. All the men didn't go). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward & Hirschberg 1985; Kadmon & Roberts 1986) disentangled the link between prosody and scope. Even though these pragmatic accounts predict variability in production, they still allow for some correlation between scope and prosody. To date, we lack systematic evidence to bear on this discussion. Here, we present findings from two perception experiments aimed at investigating whether prosodic information – including, but not limited to, sentence-final contour – can successfully disambiguate such sentences. We show that when speakers provide consistent auditory cues to sentential interpretation, hearers can successfully recruit these cues to arrive at the correct interpretation as intended by the speaker. In light of these results, we argue that psycholinguistic studies (including language acquisition studies) investigating participants’ ability to access multiple interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences – quantificational and otherwise – should carefully control for prosody.