Dr. Martineau's "Messianic Mythology."

Henry Maudsley on Swedenborg's messianic psychosis.

BACKGROUND Creativity, religiosity and madness have long been thought to be aetiologically interrelated. METHOD Henry Maudsley's little known pathography of the 17th century Swedish philosopher and polymath, Emanuel Swedenborg, was examined. RESULTS Swedenborg developed a messianic psychosis in middle life, considered by Maudsley to be a monomania, possibly due to epilepsy. Many of Swedenbo...

Context and Mythology

In this thesis, I will survey some philosophically representative approaches to the problem of the relationship between context and meaning. Starting from G.W.F. Hegel’s discussion of the meaninglessness of indexical terms in the Phenomenology of Spirit, I will investigate Gottlob Frege’s notion of context and the legacy of this notion in the formal sciences of language, showing that this appro...

Greek technology or mythology?

The study by Stefanadis et al. in this issue indicates that treatment with a variety of statins reduces the release of heat from atherosclerotic plaques in the human coronary artery. This observation suggests that statins exert a beneficial effect on the inflammatory process that exists in the vascular wall in a variety of acute coronary syndromes. The finding that this effect was most pronounc...

The Philosophy of Mythology

Heavy Weight Training Mythology

The mythological story of the association of lifting maximal amount of weight and muscle mass gain during resistance training has been perpetuated for a very long time. Passed on from gym meatheads, athletes, to coaches, moms, dads, even children can identify and promote this after watching a Saturday morning Incredible Hulk cartoon. Big muscles are made by lifting big weights, right? Not neces...