The Aesop's Fable Paradigm is a collection of essays that explore the cutting-edge intersection of Folklore and Science. From moralizing fables to fantastic folktales, humans have been telling stories about animals—animals who can talk, feel, think, and make moral judgments just as we do—for a very long time. In contrast, scientific studies of the mental lives of animals have professed to be investigating the nature of animal minds slowly, cautiously, objectively, with no room for fanciful tales, fables, or myths. But recently, these folkloric and scientific traditions have merged in an unexpected and shocking way: scientists have attempted to prove that at least some animal fables are actually true. These interdisciplinary chapters examine how science has targeted the well-known Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" as their starting point. They explore the ever-growing set of experimental studies which purport to prove that crows possess an understanding of higher-order concepts like weight, mass, and even Archimedes' insight about the physics of water displacement. The Aesop's Fable Paradigm explores how these scientific studies are doomed to accomplish little more than to mirror anthropomorphic representations of animals in human folklore and reveal that the problem of folkloric projection extends far beyond the "Aesop's Fable Paradigm" into every nook and cranny of research on animal cognition.

We often assume that science and myth stand in opposition--with science providing empirically supported truths that replace the false ideas found in traditional mythologies. But the rhetoric of contemporary popular science and related genres tells a different story about what contemporary readers really want from science. In The Science of Myths and Vice Versa, Gregory Schrempp offers four provocative vignettes that bring copious amounts of research on both traditional and modern mythologies to bear on the topic of science in contemporary popular culture. Schrempp shows how writers such as Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Pollan successfully fuse science and myth to offer compelling narratives about how we can improve our understanding of ourselves and our world. The most effective science writers, he finds, are those who make use of the themes and motifs of folklore to increase the appeal of their work. Schrempp's understanding of science and myth as operating not in opposition but in reciprocal relation offers an essential corrective to contemporary mischaracterizations.

A fascinating and sophisticated exploration of cosmology, Magical Arrows connects the Western philosophical tradition with the cosmological traditions of non-Western societies, particularly those of Polynesia. Using the mythology and philosophy of the Maori of New Zealand as a counterpoint to Western thought, Schrempp finds a philosophical common denominator in the thought of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Zeno of Elea. Schrempp suggests that the paradoxes of Zeno, together with the philosophical speculations that they have historically inspired, contain sophisticated insights which are nevertheless general enough to form the foundations of a comparative cosmology. Schrempp suggests that perhaps the most noteworthy Zenoian insight is that paradox is intrinsic to cosmological speculation. But he points out that there are many other characteristics of Zeno's approach, including the strategy of juxtaposing concrete images to mathematical forms of representation, that reappear persistently in Western intellectual history. Schrempp proceeds through a series of juxtapositions-between Zeno, Kant, Lovejoy, and Levi-Strauss, and between Western cosmologists and those from other cultures-to highlight subtle similarities and differences among intellectual traditions and to examine the conceptual apparatus of Western social science. Schrempp concludes that a meaningful comparative cosmology is possible and that the tradition of Zeno provides a propitious starting point for such a perspective.

Myth: A New Symposium offers a broad-based assessment of the present state of myth study. It was inspired by a revisiting of the influential mid-century work Myth: A Symposium (edited by Thomas Sebeok). A systematic introduction and 15 contributions from a wide spectrum of disciplines offer a range of views on past myth study and suggest directions for the future. Contributors blend theoretical analysis with richly documented historical, ethnographic, and literary illustrations and examples drawn from Native American, classical, medieval, and modern sources.