What is human nature? How is language related to thought -- and should the connection be investigated socially or scientifically? Is external reality coherent or fragmented? What are the foundations of rationality, and how trustworthy are they? Such questions have bedevilled thinkers for millennia. Contemporary scholars have harnessed enormous resources to find answers, yet their inquiry is invariably constrained by the tunnel vision of academic specialisation. This issue of The Dolphin seeks to establish common ground among the disciplines examining the mind–brain continuum. Among those meeting the editors' challenge to think outside the disciplinary box are Noam Chomsky, John Searle and Steven Pinker, as well as a dozen others from the fields of neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, English, computer science and ethnography. The implicit framework that results should help researchers in all fields locate the diversity of human knowing within a joint ontological perspective.

Globalisation has become a buzzword that typically refers to the intensifying integration of the world economy, especially as midwifed by technological advances. It also implies a growing political and cultural sense that all humanity is globally interdependent. There have always been individuals of course who have advocated such awareness, one of them being the founder of the Baha'i faith, who formulated a spiritual equivalent as the religion's central doctrine in the late 19th century: 'Ye are the fruits of one tree, and the leaves of one branch'. Its emphasis on global unification made Baha'i an obvious candidate for a case study on new religions and globalisation. The chapters in this volume fall into two sections, diachronic and synchronic. The first part is organised chronologically, beginning with the emergence of the globalist tendency in the messianic vision of Babism, the precursor to Baha'i, and concluding with an analytic history of its leaders' changing attitudes to international politics. The second part considers a variety of global themes in contemporary Baha'i practice, including global thought in Baha'i writings, the impact of the internet, and the triumphalist and secular strains in Baha'i identity. Though five million members make it one of the world's most successful new religions, Baha'i has attracted little scholarly attention. Most of the academics concentrating on Baha'i have contributed to this volume, which will appeal not only to students of modern religious movements, but to anyone interested in the ways religions can adapt to -- and embrace -- the modern world.

It has been said that democratic populism is Scandinavia's gift to the modern world. But the critical role that sports has played in the development of this particular form of society has gone largely unremarked. In these 10 essays, Niels Kayser Nielsen analyses how the growth of physical culture in the region has both reflected and contributed to the parallel rise of Scandinavian nationalism during the last two hundred years. Along the way, Nielsen uses contemporaneous travel journals and poetry to show how cultivation of the body began to factor into educational projects in the late 18th century; explores how four Nordic artists painted "the new body" in the early 1900s; and explains why the 1912 "Sunshine Olympics" in Stockholm is a pivotal moment in the cultural history of sport. He also describes how athletics provided Scandinavian workers and peasants in the 20th century with a level playing field, as it were, on which they could compete as equals with the members of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and he examines the ways sports halls today promote the consensus thinking and conformity that are hallmarks of the Scandinavian character.

By Working at the intersection of ecology and evolutionary biology, evolutionary ecologists tend to rely on the dominant mathematical models from one of the two parent fields. Yet these transplanted models have their shortcomings. On the one hand, the frequency models used in evolutionary biology have a hard time accounting for certain factors (like resource limitations) that are central to many ecological problems. On the other hand, there is a strong tradition in ecology, especially plant ecology, to eschew mathematical models altogether in favour of qualitative description. Even when such a model is used, it is too often an inappropriately applied standard linear model. The result has been a call for simple models that enable greater biological and environmental realism than heretofore -- models that will allow for more rigorous testing of hypotheses and more accurate predictions. Such predictions are increasingly in demand not only in the scientific pursuit of plant ecology, but also in public policy applications, such as conservation management and the risk assessment of genetically modified organisms. This volume seeks to address this need by presenting several simple empirical models that have proven invaluable to quantitative and statistical analysis in evolutionary plant ecology. Moreover, it provides conceptual links among the various models, e.g. describing the underlying ideas and relative strengths of plant-size explicit modelling and mean-field modelling. The overall approach is empirical rather than mechanistic, acknowledging at the same time the sedentary nature of most plants and the central role of neighbouring plants.

The main aim of the book is to provide a forum for opinions held by Arabs who are neither Western puppets nor fanatical nationalists or Islamists, but rather academics with a vast knowledge of the Middle East as well as of the West. The authors all support the building of a democratic secular Middle East, but their writings also show that although there is no easy way to achieve this goal, neither is there any excuse for not making the attempt. Contributors: Nader Fergany author of the Arab Human Development Reports; Raymond Hinnebusch professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics, University of St. Andrews; Yezid Sayigh consultant to the international donor community in Palestine; Samir Aita Syrian scholar and dissident; Graham Usher British journalist; Hanan Rabbani Palestinian consultant for Amnesty International; Mai Yamani (Saudi Arabia) research fellow with the Middle East Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House; Fowziyah Abu-Khalid Saudi sociologist; Amal Shlash Iraq; Huda Al-Nu'aimi Iraq; Jørgen S. Nielsen Professor, director of the Danish Institute in Damascus.

Text in Danish.

Until recently the opinion shared by many people was that learning history had lost all significance. But today we discover that the sense of history has not disappeared, but is present both as a vision of a past that can teach us something about how to overcome difficulties, and also as a vision of a future that passes down a peaceful world to our descendants, without wars and terrorism, exploitation of resources and pollution of nature. It is probably inevitable that this sense of history will become the guiding perspective of all education from nursery school to university, and it must be our task to reflect on the meaning of history for the moral and political formation of ourselves. In this book philosophers and historians from all parts of the world take this task seriously.

The essays in this collection combine historical, cultural, and literary analyses in their treatment of aspects of exile in Irish writing. Some are 'structuralist' in seeing exile as a physical state of being, often associated with absence, into which an individual willingly or unwillingly enters. Others are 'poststructuralist', considering the narration of exile as a celebration of transgressiveness, hybridity, and otherness. This type of exile moves away from a political, cultural, economic idea of exile to an understanding of exile in a wider existential sense. The volume presents readings of Irish literature, history and culture that reflect some of the historical, sociological, psychological and philosophical dimensions of exile in the 1800s and 1900s. The theme of exile is discussed in a wide range of texts including literature, political writings and song-writing, either in works of Irish writers not normally associated with exile, or in which new aspects of ‘exile' can be discerned. The essays cover, among others: Butler, D'Arcy McGee, Mulholland, Joyce, Hewitt, Van Morrison, Ní Chuilleanáin, Doyle, and Banville.

A renewed interest in chronological problems has surfaced in recent years. In this volume deriving from the first international conference of the Danish National Research Foundation's Centre for Black Sea Studies thirteen contributions by scholars from Russia, Ukraine, Romania, USA, Canada, Belgium and Denmark review and discuss the elements on which the chronology used in Black Sea archaeology and history in the period c. 400-100 BC is built up. The subjects include: amphora and amphora stamp chronologies (Mark Lawall; Sergej Ju. Monachov; Niculae Conovici; Vladimir Stolba), coin chronology (François de Callataÿ), the Athenian pottery (Susan I. Rotroff), epigraphic evidence (Jakob Munk Højte), and a number of case studies presenting the material on which is based the dating of a series of Greek and barbarian/non-Greek sites and burial monuments on the northern shores of the Black Sea (Valentina V. Krapivina; Valeria Bylkova; Lise Hannestad, Miron I. Zolotarev, Ju. P. Zaytsev, Valentina I. Mordvinceva).

Text in Danish and Latin.

The cultural-historical approach started in the 1930s by Lev Vygotsky, who held that learning and instruction are the means to development, is the foundation for the Radical-Local Theory of Teaching and Learning formulated by Mariane Hedegaard and Seth Chaiklin in the first part of the book. The central concern in this approach to education is how to integrate particular historical and cultural conditions that the children encounter into educational practices. The second half of the book is an extensive case study of an after-school programme for Puerto Rican primary students in East Harlem, New York conducted in a radical-local perspective. This programme focussed on the history of the community and of Puerto Rican immigration, and the study describes how it helped students become both more positive and more critical about their backgrounds. By acquiring basic academic skills in a theoretical framework the children learn how to analyse their own local situation, addressing not only immediate issues (housing conditions, family life, community dynamics) but also historical issues. Unlike apparently similar culturally responsive approaches to teaching underprivileged children, radical-local teaching explicitly uses subject matter teaching to encourage children's development in relation to their social conditions. Hedegaard and Chaiklin detail how they developed concrete lesson plans in a radical-local perspective, and enumerate the accomplishments as well as the difficulties they encountered in implementing this approach.

As the analytical concept of ‘youth' gained importance, and was generally accepted as a period with its own cultural values and norms, social scientists began to analyse how social change was linked to youth. In the Middle East, a new concept of youth already began to find its way into the region in the late 19th century, and played a role in the anti-colonialist struggle. The same concept still plays a leading role today in the way young people act in relation to traditional values, political systems, and the West. In the Arab world in general, some 50% of the total population is 18 years of age or below, which means that ‘youth' as a social group is of growing importance in the area. This also means that for decades to come Middle Eastern governments will be challenged as their young citizens demand work, a place to live, and access to enjoyable and challenging activities for the ever-expanding leisure time embedded in a modern way of life. Drawing on extensive research, which covers a wide geographical area, this volume includes, among others, articles on: Youth, History and Change in the Modern Arab World; The Discovery of Adolescence in the Middle East; Discovering the Other: "Arab/Jewish" Youth Encounters in Arab Films; Youth, Moral and Islamism: Spending Leisure Time with Hamas in Palestine; The Construction of "Youth" in Public Discourse in Turkey; and, Youth Culture and Official State Discourse in Iran. This is a comprehensive work which describes and analyses the forms of youth culture presently being exposed throughout the contemporary Middle East. It will appeal not only to scholars, but also to those with a general interest in Middle Eastern culture.

Papers from the Software Art and Cultures Conference and project features from Runme.org Software Art Repository. The Software Art and Cultures conference aims at providing an opportunity to share its findings with people doing research in software art and culture. The art movement known under the name 'software art' has been active for a few years, and similar phenomena under different names have been developed and researched for a few decades. It is the movement's belief that there is at present a sufficient body of thinking in this and neighbouring areas, which needs a platform for uncovering and enrichment.

As Peacock and Williams have noted, amphorae provide us "not with an index of the transportation of goods, but with direct witness of the movement of certain foodstuffs which were of considerable economic importance ..

Traditionally, the Mesolithic has been regarded a time of cultural regression in northern Europe, relieved only around 4000 BCE when the enlightened villagers of the Neolithic arrived on the scene, bringing with them the beginnings of agriculture. But new evidence in the last 30 years has led archaeologists to think of the early postglacial foragers that lived in the Mesolithic as complex, sedentary coastal dwellers who made the era a time of innovation, interaction and successful adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. The excavations at Smakkerup Huse help to flesh out this revised portrait. Al though the settlement area (5000 to 3900 BCE) on land had suffered marine erosion, submerged deposits adjacent to the settlement included a midden and a fishing and boat-landing area in excellent condition, with numerous organic materials surviving intact. Deposits included fire-cracked rock, charcoal, oyster shells, amber and teeth pendants, a complete rack of antlers, pieces of dugout canoes and a bow, pointed wooden stakes, large pieces of bark and fungus, thousands of hazelnut shells and fishbones, a fish trap fragment, fishhooks, worked bone and antler tools, potsherds and more than 350 projectile points. The most intriguing artefact was a small painted cobble, a type previously unknown from the Danish Mesolithic. The site also yielded remains from some of the earliest domestic cattle in Denmark, raising important questions about foraging adaptations and the transition to agriculture. Besides specialist reports from geology, archaeozoology, palaeoethnobotany, archaeological chemistry and conservation science, there are useful chapters describing the Mesolithic in southern Scandinavia and situating the Smakkerup Huse finds within the context of this time of critical transition.

This is the fourth volume of the journal of the Danish Institute at Athens with articles in the fields of Greek archaeology, history, philology and literature. The present volume contains two philological articles: Alkibiades and The Phaedrus: The Politics of the Appetites by Doug Al-Maini, and The Platonic Corpus in Antiquity by Jørgen Mejer. Birte Lundgreen's article, Use and Abuse of Athena in Roman Imperial Portraiture: The Case of Julia Domna, discusses the uses of Imperial Roman portraiture, particularly in the eastern provinces. Anne Marie Carstens has investigated Rock-Cut Tombs in the Halikarnassos Peninsula in Asia Minor and highlights the regional character of burial customs in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Death in Aetolia: The Hellenistic Graves at Aetolian Chalkis by Jonas Eiring also draws attention to the regionality of burial customs with examples from Western Greece. The article includes the publication of a multiple-burial, Early Hellenistic tomb in Aetolian Chalkis. From the same site, and in continuation of the reports published in Proceedings II and III, Greek-Danish Excavations in Aetolian Chalkis 1999-2001: Third Preliminary Report covers the three final seasons of the excavations at this site on the northern shore of the Gulf of Patras. A general account of the results of excavations, by Sanne Houby-Nielsen and Ioannis Moschos, is followed by the second article on the coins from the site, by Georgia Alexopoulou, and a detailed discussion of the shellfish found on site, by Kaj Strand Pedersen. It also contains a report by Efy Saranti on a Middle- and Late Helladic site in the nearby village of Gavrolimni, as well as an account of the Stone Age remains in the cave of Hagios Nikolaos by Lasse Sørensen.