The composition of R. G. Collingwood's The New Leviathan

Collingwood's The New Leviathan is a difficult text. It comprises philosophy, political theory, political opinion and history in what is sometimes an uneasy amalgam. Despite its being the culmination of thirty years of work in ethics and political theory, the final text was clearly affected by the adverse circumstances under which it was written, these largely being Collingwood's illness which increasingly affected his ability to work as the writing of The New Leviathan progressed. This paper seeks to disentangle the composition of the book thereby shedding light on its distinctive character as the last substantial piece of philosophical work published in Collingwood's lifetime.     

The kidnapping of W. S. Gilbert

Gilbert's probable screen memory of having been kidnapped, along with his persistent preoccupations with babyhood, remembering and forgetting, stress the intensity of his struggle against remembering the painful experiences from his childhood. His creative efforts function as an obsessional defense; they divert his attention from the experiences themselves to a fascination with the process of remembering and forgetting, while the painful affects are reversed into playful, good-natured humor. The results are some of his most treasured anecdotes. Watson (1918) quotes Gilbert's story of the amateur burglar who badly bungled an attempted robbery and ended up being arrested and jailed under the most humiliating circumstances. For years afterward, every time he though of the incident, he felt wretchedly uncomfortable, and he tried vainly to drive the occurrence from his mind. The story concludes with a statement which, remarks Watson, only Gilbert could have written: "Gradually one detail after another slipped from my recollection, and one lovely morning last May I found to my intense delight that I had absolutely forgotten all about it" (p. 94).     

The Work of J. G. A. Pocock

J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Vol. 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764. Vol. 2: Narratives of Civil Government. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1999, xi+339 pp. and xiv+422 pp., $90.00, 2 vols., ISBN 0 521 77921 9.     

The detection of malingering.

A 60-item paper-and-pencil inventory showed a 98% "hit-rate" in distinguishing between honest and simulated malingering protocols produced by 29 nonclinical subjects who took the inventory in both the honest and faked conditions. When instructed to take the Wildman Symptom Cheklist "as if applying for some kind of disability compensation," subjects endorsed a significantly higher number of the self-statements which appear clinically unbelievable. Independent replication is now required.     

The sounds of dominance.

A study was conducted to determine the effects of vocal cues on judgements of dominance in an interpersonal influence context. Physical measures of human vocal cues and participant ratings of dominance were obtained from videotapes of actors delivering short influence messages. After controlling for linguistic and visual content of messages, results indicated that mean amplitude and amplitude standard deviation were positively associated with dominance judgments, whereas speech rate was negatively associated with dominance judgments. An unexpected interaction revealed that mean fundamental frequency (F₀) was positively associated with dominance judgments for male speakers but not significantly associated with dominance judgments for female speakers. F₀ standard deviation was not significantly associated with dominance judgments. Results support the conclusion that dominance judgments are inferred from multiple sources of information and that some vocal markers of dominance are more influential than others.     

The acquisition of observing.

Pigeons were exposed to stimuli correlated with the presence or absence of a variable-interval 60-second schedule of reinforcement only while they depressed a crossbar or "perch." In the first experiment, the stimuli were different tilts of a line displayed on the key. When the difference in brightness between the line and the background (salience) was maximal, seven of eight birds acquired the discrimination, but when the difference was reduced by 50%, only one succeeded. In the second experiment, wavelength of chamber illumination served as the relevant dimension. Neither experiment showed a large effect attributable to the magnitude of the difference (disparity) between the positive and the negative stimulus. Individual differences in time spent observing were positively correlated with level of discrimination in the presence of the stimuli. All birds produced the positive stimulus for a greater proportion of the available time than they did the negative stimulus. This may be the mechanism that provides selective reinforcement of observing. Finally, the formation of a discrimination was analyzed in terms of changes in the proportion of time spent in contact with the discriminative stimuli.