bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Knowing Our Limits
Authors: Ballantyne Nathan
Published: September 2019

Changing our minds isn’t easy. Even when we recognize our views are disputed by intelligent and informed people, we rarely doubt our rightness. Why is this so? How can we become more open-minded, putting ourselves in a better position to tolerate conflict, advance collective inquiry, and learn from differing perspectives in a complex world? In this engrossing, provocative book, Nathan Ballantyne defends the indispensable role of epistemology in tackling these issues. For early modern philosophers, the point of reflecting on inquiry was to understand how our beliefs are often distorted by prejudice and self-interest, and to improve the foundations of human knowledge. Ballantyne seeks to recover and modernize this classical tradition by vigorously defending an interdisciplinary approach to epistemology, blending philosophical theorizing with insights from the social and cognitive sciences. We need tools to help us think more circumspectly about our controversial views. Ballantyne develops a method for distinguishing between our reasonable and unreasonable opinions, in light of evidence about bias, information overload, and rival experts. This method guides us to greater intellectual openness—in the spirit of skeptics from Socrates to Montaigne to Bertrand Russell—making us more inclined to admit that sometimes we don’t have the right answers. With vibrant prose and fascinating examples from science and history, Ballantyne shows how epistemology can help us know our limits.
The Epistemologies of the Humanities and the Sciences
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: September 2019

In this essay, the author provides an overview of some of the main themes of his book, The Geography of Insight: The Humanities, the Sciences, How They Differ, Why They Matter (2018). In particular, he argues that there are four core differences between the sciences and the humanities: (1) it is proper for the sciences but not the humanities to seek insights not limited to particular locations, times, or things; (2) the sciences but not the humanities value findings as independent as possible of the perspectives of the inquirers; (3) the sciences should be wholly descriptive, while the humanities can also be concerned with prescriptive claims, which give expression to values; and (4) the sciences are organized to increase collective knowledge, whereas in the humanities individual insight is highly valued independently of its ability to generate consensus. Associated with these differences are a set of secondary distinctions: different attitudes about the possibility of endpoint of inquiry; different notions of intellectual progress; different roles for expertise; and different working assumptions about simplicity and complexity.
Are Humans Intuitive Philosophers?
Authors: Sloman Steven , Zemla Jeffrey C. , Lagnado David , Bechlivanidis Christos , Hemmatian Babak
Published: September 2019

What are the criteria that people use to evaluate everyday explanations? This chapter focuses on simplicity, coherence, and unification. It considers various operationalizations of each construct within the context of explanations to measure how people respond to them. With regard to simplicity, some of the psychological literature suggests that people do have a preference for simple explanations that have few causes, but the authors find that a more complete assessment shows that this preference is moderated by a number of factors when evaluating everyday explanations. For one, people prefer explanations that elaborate on causal mechanisms and provide a greater sense of understanding, even if this increases complexity. Measures of coherence are highly predictive of explanation quality. Moreover, people prefer explanations that cohere with the evidence. But the meaning of coherence remains mysterious; it seems to be a placeholder for a complex system of evaluation. There is surprisingly little evidence that people value unification in the form of abstract explanation. Indeed, people often respond positively to extraneous detail. Detail may enhance our understanding of particular events and might help us better visualize mechanisms. The authors also find that people prefer explanations that use words entrenched in a community even if the explanation offers no real information. The authors conclude that people are not merely intuitive philosophers. How a person evaluates an explanation depends on what that person is trying to achieve.
Introduction
Authors: Stohr Karen
Published: September 2019

This short introductory chapter sets out the aims and scope of the book as a whole, with the goal of orienting the reader. It explains the motivation for the project and the philosophical inspirations for the approach, as well as the limitations. The chapter begins by explaining the gap referenced in the title in terms of a gap between moral ideals and the reality of human beings and human life. Moral improvement is the practical project of trying to narrow that gap as far as possible. Understood as a practical project, it is fundamentally first-personal. It is also, however, fundamentally social. Moral improvement is something we do together. The social aspect of moral improvement consists in constructing joint normative spaces in which we can make ourselves better. The chapter concludes with brief summaries of individual chapters.
Making the Woman Worker
Authors: Boris Eileen
Published: September 2019

Founded in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the International Labor Organization (ILO) establishes labor standards and produces knowledge about the world of work, serving as a forum for nations, unions, and employer associations. Making the Woman Worker illuminates the ILO’s transformation in the context of the long fight for social justice. Before 1945, it focused on enhancing conditions for male industrial workers in Western, often imperial, economies, while restricting the circumstances of women’s labors. After WWII, the ILO—then a UN agency—highlighted the global differences in women’s work, focused on bringing women into “development,” began to combat sexism in the workplace, and declared care work essential to women’s labor participation. Today, it enters its second century with a mission to protect the interests of all workers in the face of increasingly globalized supply chains, the digitization of homework, and cross-border labor trafficking. The ILO’s treatment of women provides a window into the modern history of labor. The historic relegation of feminized labor to the part-time, short-term, and low-waged prefigures the future organization of work. How we treat workers in the next century will inevitably build upon evolving ideas of the woman worker, shaped significantly through the ILO.
Equality
Authors: Boris Eileen
Published: September 2019

When the 1944 Philadelphia International Labour Conference set forth to imagine the woman worker’s place amid postwar demobilization, it unearthed old fissures. This chapter explores discourses of equality in the making of the woman worker, when equal remuneration and non-discrimination came to stand for universal progress for women workers, displacing deliberation on the home as a workplace, in terms of both industrial home work and domestic service. Women inside and outside of the ILO pushed for equality measures. The “double-difference” of colonized women, however, produced a notion of “equality” with multiple and unequal tiers of meaning. Ultimately, “equal rights” would enable women in “non-metropolitan territories” to produce goods or reproduce labor power for the benefit of the Global North. The developing Cold War and institutional rivalry between the ILO and the new United Nations Commission on the Status of Women influenced agenda setting. Labor feminists won a revised maternity protection convention, which did not challenge the ideal of the male breadwinner. A shift from interwar policy occurred, but reluctantly and incompletely as a strategic measure rather than as a step toward decolonization or as an affirmation of women’s rights.
Introduction
Authors: Fair C. Christine
Published: September 2019

"In Their Own Words" informs contemporary discussions and analysis of this organization by mobilizing the vast corpus of Lashkar-e-Tayyaba's (LeT) own writing. In this work, I analyze a sample of LeT's own publications and present new information about the organization, its recruits, the families that produce them and the external and domestic political imperatives that motivate LeT's operations within and beyond Pakistan. I draw from these materials to advance two key claims about the organization.
First, LeT's ability to conduct complex terror attacks in India and Afghanistan--coupled with its loyalty to the Pakistani security establishment--render it incredibly useful as a reliable and obedient proxy. Second, because LeT argues against violence against other Muslims and Pakistan's religious minorities, it is a critical partner of the deep state's efforts to quell violence within Pakistan.
A Book History of Mountstuart Elphinstone’s
Authors: Hanifi Shah Mahmoud
Published: September 2019

This chapter examines Mountstuart Elphinstone's "An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul" (AKC) from a book history perspective. The general concerns are the para-narrative elements of the text, including the footnotes, appendices and visuals. The specific foci are the map and the epistemological positioning of the Pashto language, and Afghan populations in relation to one another and in relation to the polity described in AKC. Elphinstone's published map is compared to the archived map produced by Lieutenant John Macartney, and situated within a larger set of maps reflecting the increasing cartographic consciousness of a global imperial public. The epistemological positioning of Pashto at the cultural core of the Afghan nation is interrogated through the compendium of Pashto poetry ascribed to Ahmad Shah Abdali, and the structural location of attention to the Pashto language in AKC. The essay's conclusion addresses visuals beyond the map in AKC, including the ethnographic portraiture and archeological sketch of a Buddhist monument.
Information and Affect in Charles Metcalfe’s Mission to Lahore, August 1808–May 1809
Authors: Nichols Robert
Published: September 2019

Charles Metcalfe's 1808–1809 diplomatic mission from Delhi to the court of Ranjit Singh in Lahore was coordinated with Elphinstone's efforts in Peshawar – but Metcalfe was more successful politically. A skilled linguist and political observer, Metcalfe established over many months official and personal relationships that ensured decades of border stability between the Sikh and British-Indian empires. Metcalfe returned to Delhi with a Sikh wife. They had three sons. His personal story resonated with Christopher Bayly's sense that successful colonial era connections with South Asian communities often involved degrees of "affective knowledge" grounded in long-term personal empathy and understanding. The life stories of Metcalfe's wife and sons revealed the complex realities of colonial era gender and racial sensitivities and hierarchies.
Can Imperialists Produce Knowledge?
Authors: Leonard Spencer A.
Published: September 2019

Mountstuart Elphinstone's administration as Governor of Bombay consolidated East India Company rule over large tracts of Central, Western, and Northwestern India. It represented a new and unmistakable projection of both British armed force and knowledge production. In this chapter, the work of a prominent soldier-administrator scholar whose work was strongly encouraged by Elphinstone, the father of Maratha history, James Grant Duff, is taken up. The line of argument is that, despite the imperial and military conditions that made Grant Duff's research possible, it is a mistake to see it simply as a project of colonial hegemony and not a major, even foundational intellectual production and act of public reason submitted to the cosmopolitan world of letters from which Indians were not, in principle, excluded. The chapter thus suggests grounds for breaking with the Saidian paradigm not simply on positivist grounds, but in favor of finer grained historical and more discerning ideological analysis. This means paying close attention to Grant Duff's (and his History's) struggle against the East India Company itself, whose chief interest was not knowledge so much as secrecy.
The Soviet Elphinstone
Authors: Nunan Timothy
Published: September 2019

This chapter offers a brief history of how the thought of Mountstuart Elphinstone was received among Soviet scholars of Afghanistan. The connection may not be obvious at first, but Russian language scholarship on Afghanistan outpaced that in any other language from the early twentieth century onward owing to the special nature of Soviet-Afghan relations following the October Revolution and Afghan independence. Likewise, close Soviet-Afghan relations during the Cold War – culminating in the decade-long occupation of the country by the Soviet Army – framed the context for later Soviet scholarship on the country. This chapter demonstrates that "Elphinstonian epistemes" very much had an afterlife in Soviet scholarship on the country, because many authors were misled about the identity of the Afghan state in Kabul with Pashtun populations on both sides of the Durand Line. Worse, these readings of Afghanistan had intermingled with crude readings about the "revolutionary" nature of Afghan Communists and their opponents. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, attentive scholars urged more nuanced concepts to make sense of Afghanistan, but as this chapter demonstrates, Elphinstonian tropes very much framed the Soviet romance with – and disaster in – twentieth century Afghanistan.
Elphinstone and the Afghan-Pathan Elision
Authors: Leake Elisabeth
Published: September 2019

Mountstuart Elphinstone's writings on Afghanistan have had lingering effects throughout the twentieth (and into the twenty-first) century. Even with the end of British colonial rule in 1947, western interest in Afghanistan, and particularly the Pathan borderlands spread across southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, has remained. Both British and American observers have continued to value this region for its strategic locale, even as both have wrestled with the "tribal" nature of the local Pathan population and its longstanding autonomy from neighboring states. While Cold War competition replaced the rivalry of the Great Game, colonial-era understandings of Afghanistan and local and regional politics continued to color western policies towards this region. This chapter reflects on the legacies of Elphinstone's work for western policymakers, particularly in the aftermath of partition and in the emergent Cold War. Using the works of Olaf Caroe and James W. Spain, it considers how Elphinstone's ideas and rhetoric concerning Afghan politics and tribal society and organization have resounded in western conceptualizations of Afghanistan, and neighboring Pakistan. It compares British and American understandings of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their relative reliance on Elphinstone's ideas. Ultimately it considers the similarities and differences in the ways that British and American officials have perceived and valued Afghanistan's place in a broader world political order.
Resistance and Treason, 1765–1775
Authors: Larson Carlton F.W.
Published: September 2019

This chapter discusses two broad themes that emerged following the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765. First, there was a growing desire in Great Britain to punish acts of colonial resistance as treason and to bring resistance leaders to England for trial under the statute of 35 Henry VIII. Colonial Americans responded that resistance activities did not legally constitute treason and that trials of alleged American traitors in England, far from a local jury, were illegal. Second, and somewhat paradoxically, colonial Americans readily hurled accusations of treason at their political enemies, ranging from colonial governors to Parliament, its ministers, and even the king himself. “Traitors” (and “enemies to their country)” were now denounced for betraying America, their “country,” and even liberty itself. Once the War for Independence had begun, it was easy to conclude that these individuals were no longer traitors in a rhetorical sense, but real traitors who directly threatened the American cause.
Treason against America, 1775–1776
Authors: Larson Carlton F.W.
Published: September 2019

This chapter discusses how Americans were at open war with British forces, while claiming to be formally loyal to the king. Persons who aided the British could not be tried for treason in a court of law, so Pennsylvania employed committees of safety to conduct trials of disloyal persons. At the county level, committees punished primarily verbal offenses, but the state committee in Philadelphia heard cases of actual disloyalty. The persons convicted were imprisoned on charges of “high treason.” These ad hoc and legally questionable detentions were an impetus for the Declaration of Independence, which put the punishment of traitors on a sounder footing. For their part, British efforts to punish disloyal Americans all faltered and the suspension of habeas corpus permitted American prisoners to be effectively treated as prisoners of war.
The Philadelphia Treason Trials, 1778–1779
Authors: Larson Carlton F.W.
Published: September 2019

This chapter begins by introducing the defendants, who were predominantly Quaker and Anglican artisans of relatively modest means. Some had actively supported resistance activities and many had connections to the jurors and grand jurors. The chapter then turns to the role of defense counsel, the witnesses and testimony presented at trial, the court’s rulings on contested issues, and jury deliberations. It argues that the verdicts were shaped in significant part by aversion to the death penalty as a punishment for treason. Even the few juries that convicted defendants petitioned the state’s executive authority for clemency, as did hundreds of other Philadelphians. Although treason was nominally the highest crime, juries simply didn’t view it that way. Persons who had sided with the enemy were not incorrigible criminals, but friends and neighbors who had made an unfortunate political choice and were fully capable of redemption.
Riding the Wanderlust Express
Authors: DiGirolamo Vincent
Published: September 2019

Railroads reigned supreme in industrial America. They were the engines that drove the postbellum economy, stimulated western expansion, and imposed their corporate time zones on the nation. Local, state, and transcontinental railways employed thousands of men, carried millions of passengers, and brought a cornucopia of goods—including newspapers—to distant markets. Three types of newsboys emerged from this transportation network: salaried news agency hands who regularly met trains to ship and receive local and out-of-town papers, uniformed “news butchers” who plied passengers with reading material and sundry items, and footloose “tramp newsboys” who hitched rides on freight or passenger cars in search of work, adventure, or family. Each of these types occupied a separate niche in the distribution process and a different rung on the social ladder, but they shared a dependence on railroads and newspapers for their daily bread. Their experiences offer a crucial bottom-up perspective on the circulation of newspapers and the role of children and railroads in the development of print capitalism.
Bell Nonlocality
Authors: Scarani Valerio
Published: September 2019

Nonlocality was discovered by John Bell in 1964, in the context of the debates about quantum theory, but is a phenomenon that can be studied in its own right. Its observation proves that measurements are not revealing pre-determined values, falsifying the idea of “local hidden variables” suggested by Einstein and others. One is then forced to make some radical choice: either nature is intrinsically statistical and individual events are unspeakable, or our familiar space-time cannot be the setting for the whole of physics. As phenomena, nonlocality and its consequences will have to be predicted by any future theory, and may possibly play the role of foundational principles in these developments. But nonlocality has found a role in applied physics too: it can be used for “device-independent” certification of the correct functioning of random number generators and other devices. After a self-contained introduction to the topic, this monograph on nonlocality presents the main tools and results following a logical, rather than a chronological, order.
Formalizing Bell Nonlocality
Authors: Scarani Valerio
Published: September 2019

This chapter covers the essential mathematical tools for the study of nonlocality. It begins with the main object under study: a collection of several probability distributions usually called “behavior”. The crucial definition of locality is then given, followed by Fine’s theorem that relates local behaviors to pre-existing values and clarifies the role of local deterministic processes. In turn, one finds that local behaviors belong to a polytope, whose facets are Bell inequalities. The simplest scenario, called CHSH, is studied in detail.
Device-Independent Self-Testing
Authors: Scarani Valerio
Published: September 2019

This chapter is devoted to deviice-independent self-testing. This refers to the fact that some extremal behaviors in the quantum set can actually be realised only with specific measurements on a specific shared entangled state. The two main examples, namely the maximal value of CHSH and the Mayers-Yao test, are described in detail before the abstract definition of self-testing is given.
Hume’s Jurisprudence
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: September 2019

This chapter considers Hume's theory of justice. Situating Hume's discussion in the tradition of British legal theory will be beneficial not only because Hume's theory and the arguments for it are clarified, but they also illuminate the jurisprudential landscape stretching back to Coke and forward to Bentham, Burke, and the nineteenth century. Hume, in fact, is pivotal in the development of British legal theory. Furthermore, Hume's reflections on justice and law shaped Bentham's perception of the problems of jurisprudence and his struggle to solve them, although he rarely acknowledges his debt to Hume in this respect. Especially in Bentham's early formative years, his formulation of problems regarding the foundations, nature, and basic tasks of law, as well as strategies for solving them, are silently shaped by Hume.
Utilitarian Positivism
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: September 2019

Professor Hart claims that Bentham's utilitarianism at times gets in the way of his analytical vision. This chapter defends Bentham against this criticism which rests on two mistakes. First, it seriously misunderstands Bentham's theoretical motivations; second, it rests on a mistaken view of the jurisprudential enterprise generally. It is argued that Bentham's reliance on normative considerations in his criticism of Common Law theory, and his argument for his positivist theory of law, would not be regarded by him as a mistake, but rather as an essential part of the programme he set for himself at the outset of his career. This programme is not incoherent, but in fact rests on a more plausible understanding of the jurisprudential enterprise than that inherited from Austin and Analytical Jurisprudence.
Meaning, Analysis, and Exposition
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: September 2019

Bentham trained his intellectual energy primarily on law and political ordering, but he looked to every mode of inquiry available for analytic and normative tools with which to “rear the fabric of felicity.” Some he adopted and adapted from other thinkers (e.g., the Greatest Happiness Principle), but others he invented. The most important of his theoretical innovations, in his view, was his theory of meaning, the heart of which was his analysis of language in terms of “real” and “fictitious” entities (conventionally but misleadingly referred to as his “theory of fictions”). He sought to understand the way our language facilitates and misleads thought, reasoning, deliberation, and action. He devised a theory of meaning and the technology of thought in order to allow language the room it needs to do its essential work, while controlling its excesses. He devised a method of analysis—definition by “paraphrasis”—that enabled systematic ordering of thought. With this technology, Bentham sought to discipline potentially wayward language and thereby to deprive arbitrary power of one of its favorite weapons.
Human Psychology, Individual and Social
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: September 2019

The second main pillar of Bentham’s thought was his “practicable” psychology. On his view, human beings always act from what they take their most dominant interests at the time to be, but these may be disinterested concerns for the well-being of others, even those of humanity in general. It is trivial and misleading to insist that only their own interests motivate human beings, yet this claim, recast into something more meaningful, can be understood to call attention of moral advisors and designers of political institutions alike to the fact that voluntary human action issues from the subjectively recognized interests of human agents. While self-regarding interests are always powerful, Bentham thought it is possible to construct institutions that cultivate socially oriented motives, even extensive benevolence, to counter powerful self-regarding interests. Human affections are rooted in the constitution of human nature, but they are plastic, responding to education and enlightenment.
Interests, Universal and Particular
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: September 2019

The ultimate end of government, and the aim of all morality, Bentham insisted, is the advancement of the universal interest. The universal interest, according to Bentham, is that interest of a person common to himself and every other member of the community. It (1) excludes all particular interests; (2) includes interests common to all members of community; and (3) that in it each member has a share. Social institutions designed to serve the universal interest are likely to call for the sacrifice of personal interests, but they also make pursuit of such personal interests possible, and always include each member in the benefits resulting from the realization of the universal interest. While the (personal or private) interests of individual members may be sacrificed, individuals are not. Each member is accorded a substantial share in the interest of all.
Facts, Fictions, and Law
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: September 2019

Bentham’s analysis of the probative force of evidence appears to be skeptical and relativist. Bentham was convinced that in all aspects of the judicial assessment of evidence, there was no place for formal, rule-bound reasoning, and it is tempting to trace this rule-skepticism to a deeper epistemological skepticism. Yet his monumental Rationale of Judicial Evidence shows few signs of this epistemologically skeptical foundation. Rather, seen in light of his theory of language and fictitious entities, the empiricist, quasi-pragmatist elements of his theory become clear. Bentham was no skeptic or radical subjectivist regarding the evaluation of evidence. Statements of probability, or of the persuasive force of some piece of evidence, on Bentham’s view, are subject to rational assessment. Judgments of the probative value of evidence, like moral judgments, are expressions of the speaker’s state of mind; they express degrees of conviction of the speaker, which are subject to the discipline of rational method.
In Defense of “French Nonsense”
Authors: Postema Gerald J.
Published: September 2019

Buried beneath the intemperate rhetoric of Bentham’s attack on natural rights lies a serious challenge to the jurisprudence of rights in constitutional adjudication. The political rhetoric of rights, Bentham charged, is not the rhetoric of rational deliberation, but rather the rhetoric of mere assertion and counter-assertion. The language of rights supplies no determinate basis for deciding particular cases. However, Bentham saw clearly that indeterminacy threatens not objectivity—in the sense of a decision’s being ideally correct, or rationally preferred when seen “from nowhere”—but rather publicity. He argued that the indeterminacy of rights language weakens the rule of law, because it undermines conditions of genuine public justification. The language of rights provides no public standards for evaluating rights assertions. Bentham was correct to insist upon the importance of publicity in a democratic constitutional order. However, he mistakenly assumed that public justification is possible only if the demonstrability condition is met. In defense of constitutional rights jurisprudence, this chapter sketches an alternative conception of public justification and argues that public justification understood in this way is not threatened by indeterminacy.
Perestroika and Post-Soviet Afterlives
Authors: Jones Polly
Published: September 2019

This chapter focusses on the dramatic changes that the ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ series underwent over the last decade of Soviet power. It first analyses the difficult conditions for the series in the early 1980s, as official suspicion of the series and its ‘niche’ mounted, and as censorship became more oppressive. However, these conditions of the late Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko periods ultimately proved easier and more productive than the Gorbachev era: glasnost and perestroika marked the peak of popular interest in Soviet history nationwide, but also a full-blown crisis for the series. It came under threat in the mid- to late 1980s, as both public and internal criticism singled out ‘Fiery Revolutionaries’ for its historical falsifications and declining literary quality; sales and popular interest went into free fall, and the series closed in 1990. The conclusion traces Politizdat’s transformation into a post-Soviet philosophical publishing house, and shows that the series itself has been selectively reimagined, from the late 1990s to the present, as a dissident and liberal project, rather than fully revived in all its diversity.
Heaney and Virgil’s Underworld Journey
Authors: Falconer Rachel
Published: September 2019

Tracing echoes, allusions to, and transformations of three motifs—the golden bough, Charon’s boat, and Aeneas’ three attempts to embrace his father—this chapter aims to assess the developing significance of Virgil’s presence in Heaney’s writing. Initially filtered through his response to Dante’s Commedia, Heaney’s early reading of the Virgilian underworld journey seems best encapsulated in the image of gravitas—the image of a man (both Aeneas, and Virgil the poet) who has shouldered the weight of his people’s history, and who bears a sense of irreparable loss into the future. By the time we reach his last volume, Human Chain, however, this image of Virgil has been astonishingly and lovingly transformed so that the poet of melancholy gravitas becomes the harbinger of a sense of a light-winged or delicately unfurling new life. The transformation of Virgil in Heaney, from Seeing Things (1991) and District and Circle (2006), to Human Chain (2010), is on one level also a story about the process of translation itself: how the very sense of losing the body of the original text gives birth to a new shape, a possible new world. The chapter concludes with consideration of Heaney’s posthumous translation of Aeneid VI (2016).
The pattern of open ecosystems and the climates in which they occur
Authors: Bond William J.
Published: September 2019

Climate has long been considered the prime factor determining the distribution of major vegetation based on climate–vegetation correlations. These correlations underlie the common assumption that there is a single stable vegetation state for a given climate. Thus tropical forests are characteristic of climates that are warm and wet, deserts where climates are dry. But the assumption of ‘one climate = one vegetation’ is not true for large parts of the world. These have strikingly different vegetation states, such as forests and grasslands, occurring in the same landscapes and sharing the same climate. Correlative approaches are being challenged by process-based biogeographic models which reveal the extent of the vegetation–climate mismatch. For most of the twentieth century the non-forested ecosystems were thought to be secondary vegetation produced by deforestation and anthropogenic burning. While deforestation has occurred and is increasing at an alarming rate, there is also growing evidence for ancient origins of many naturally non-forested ecosystems.
Soils and open ecosystems
Authors: Bond William J.
Published: September 2019

Boundaries between open and closed ecosystems often coincide with soil differences of greater or lesser degree. It has long been argued that these soil differences explain the striking differences in vegetation structure. But the nature of the vegetation itself feeds back on soil properties so that it is far from trivial to determine whether soil differences are a cause or consequence of the vegetation growing at a site. This chapter reviews soil physical and chemical characteristics and their potential to determine open and closed vegetation mosaics. The chapter also explores competitive exclusion of forest trees by grasses, herbs, and shrubs.
Vertebrate herbivory and open ecosystems
Authors: Bond William J.
Published: September 2019

Can herbivores account for the widespread occurrence of open ecosystems? Some suggest that Pleistocene megafauna did so, and large mammal herbivory is still important in some regions today. Exclosure studies have been widely used to test herbivore impacts on trees, but global patterns of the ‘brown world’ are not readily seen from satellites. Areas of mammal consumer dominance occur in cool temperate/boreal regions (e.g. Tibetan montane grasslands) and savannas in Africa, but not in those in Australia or South America. Herbivores vary in their impact on openness of vegetation because of differences in body size, feeding mode, predator avoidance behaviour while plants also differ in their defences and accessibility. Unlike fire, proxies are lacking for how extinct herbivores, even giant sauropods, impacted vegetation. Very few studies deal explicitly with how vertebrate herbivores help create and maintain open ecosystems where climates are suitable for forests, and there is an urgent need to find out more.
Journey’s End
Authors: Leventhal Fred , Stansky Peter
Published: September 2019

In this concluding chapter the book elucidates the tension in Leonard’s life between Hebraism and Hellenism, which provided the dynamic for his moral and spiritual evolution. His Jewish background helped shape his identity, imposing on him an obligation to duty and strictness of moral conscience, while the Hellenism, imparted by his education, his membership of the Apostles, and his Bloomsbury friends, opened him to ideals of beauty, rationality, and human progress. Abandoning religious belief at an early age, Leonard retained a “Semitic vision” of justice and mercy as the foundation of civilized life. His ethical values drew partly from parental influence, but even more from that of the philosopher G. E. Moore. In maturity he came to believe that “nothing matters” and developed a fatalistic view of death, his own and those who pre-deceased him, especially his father and his wife. In the final volume of his autobiography, he concludes that the thousands of hours he devoted to political activity and writing were ultimately futile, but that for him it was right that he should have done it. This book contends that his significant accomplishments were multifaceted—personal, political, literary, and commercial. As a publicist for the League of Nations and as a Labour activist, he strove to achieve international peace and to undermine faith in the merits of British imperialism. He also provided the security and support in which Virginia could flourish as a writer.
Introduction
Authors: McCready Elin
Published: September 2019

This chapter introduces the concept of honorifics and provides examples of different honorific types from several languages. It then proceeds to outline the remainder of the book and it structure. Finally, it discusses the relation between honorification and politeness, suggesting that the two can be cleanly separated.
Argument honorifics
Authors: McCready Elin
Published: September 2019

This chapter discusses argument honorifics, forms which target a particular argument of the sentence for honorification. It is argued that, semantically, these forms can be analysed by allowing abstraction over registers. The problem of finding the proper argument to target during semantic composition is discussed and several options are explored.
Pronouns and honorification
Authors: McCready Elin
Published: September 2019

This chapter discusses honorific pronouns in Thai and Japanese. It is argued that Thai honorific first and second person pronouns directly refer to discourse registers, which has empoirical implications for their distribution; Japanese pronouns, conversely, are argued to introduce speaker commitments of a particular kind which have implications for register but don't reference It directly, resulting in a different distribution o fpronouns from Thai. Gender specifications on Japanese fjirst-person pronouns are claimed to result from expressive predications of properties related to gender stereotypes rather than direct predication of gender.
The Bounds of Nonsense
Authors: Moore A.W.
Published: September 2019

This essay is about the distinction between sense and nonsense, or more strictly the distinction between truth-valued propositions and nonsensical pseudo-propositions, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Two questions that are raised are: whether ‘truth-valued’ in ‘truth-valued propositions’ is pleonastic; and whether ‘nonsensical’ in ‘nonsensical pseudo-propositions’ is pleonastic. Neither question, it is conceded, has much exegetical or philosophical significance. But there is an associated question that does: namely, whether we have any understanding of what it is for something to be a pseudo-proposition without a truth-value independently of what it is for something to be a proposition with one. It is urged that, for Wittgenstein, we do not: a pseudo-proposition without a truth-value is an item that appears, falsely, to be a proposition with one. In an appendix the question is raised whether Kant would have done well to say something similar about empty thoughts.
The Bounds of Sense
Authors: Moore A.W.
Published: September 2019

This essay was written for a special issue of Philosophical Topics on the links between Kant and analytic philosophy. It explores these links through consideration of: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; the logical positivism endorsed by Ayer; and the (very different) variation on that theme endorsed by Quine. It is argued that in all three cases we see analytic philosophers trying to attain and express a general philosophical understanding of why the bounds of sense should be drawn where they should—but thereby confronting the aporia, which Kant too confronted, that it is impossible to do this without transgressing those very bounds. It is suggested in conclusion that the problem is in trying to attain and express such an understanding; in other words, that such an understanding is attainable, but not expressible.
Apperception and the Unreality of Tense
Authors: Moore A.W.
Published: September 2019

The aim of this essay is to characterize the issue whether tense is real. Roughly, this is the issue whether, given any tensed representation, its tense corresponds in some suitably direct way to some feature of reality. The task is to make this less rough. Eight characterizations of the issue are considered and rejected, before one is endorsed. On this characterization, the unreality of tense is equivalent to the unity of temporal reality. The issue whether tense is real, so characterized, is then related to Kant’s deduction of the categories in his Critique of Pure Reason. It is argued that Kant’s deduction does not provide the argument for the unreality of tense that it may appear to. The conclusion drawn at the end of the essay is that the unreality of tense cannot be argued for—not because tense is real, but because, even if it is unreal, its unreality is basic.
Introduction to scattering amplitudes
Authors: Kosower David A.
Published: September 2019

This chapter covers the new on-shell methods that have been developed over the past twenty years for computing scattering amplitudes in quantum field theory. These methods break free from the traditional approach of Feynman diagrams. The chapter covers a subset of topics, setting up the basic kinematics, spinor helicities, spinor products, and the calculation of tree amplitudes.
Mountains
Authors: Woollings Tim
Published: September 2019

The jet stream hits the Rocky Mountains and is strongly affected by them. Arguments of fluid dynamics show how a semi-permanent anticyclone is formed over the mountains, and then a stationary Rossby wave train follows downstream. This extends across North America and beyond, with profound consequences for regional climate, for example allowing frequent surges of cold, Arctic air down over eastern North America. A brief discussion also considers how the jet stream may have differed in climates of the distant past.
Mobilizing Memory
Authors: Hassett Dónal
Published: September 2019

This book provides the first detailed account of the political legacies of the Great War in colonial Algeria. Drawing on archival and press sources from both sides of the Mediterranean, it traces the ways in which political actors from across interwar Algerian society mobilised the memory of the conflict to legitimise their visions of a just post-war order. At the heart of this book is the contention that the First World War gave rise to a common political language that transcended boundaries of race, religion, class, ideology, and gender in the colony. The book’s analysis of a broad range of debates in interwar Algeria illustrates how most political actors in the colony, from the Governor General to the illiterate indigenous war widow, believed that evoking the Great War was the best means of advancing their agendas. Without diminishing the coercive power of the colonial state, it stresses the agency of the citizens and subjects of Algeria who sought to leverage their contribution to the war to enhance their positions within colonial society. In doing so, Mobilising Memory explores the consequences, often unintended, of framing political, social, and economic demands in terms of the Great War. It argues that the predominance of this shared language — grounded in notions of loyalty to and sacrifice for the Empire — meant that most actors in interwar Algeria sought not to break with the imperial polity but rather to renegotiate their place within it. While these efforts rarely proved successful, the book demonstrates how they transformed the practice of politics in the colony.
Remaking the Post-War Colonial Order
Authors: Hassett Dónal
Published: September 2019

This chapter focuses on the question of colonial reform in interwar Algeria, asking how political actors sought to redefine their place within the imperial polity in the wake of the war. Through a close reading of the debates that surrounded the two major moments of prospective colonial reform, the Jonnart reforms (1919) and the Blum-Viollette Project (1936), it shows how activists across ideological and ethnic divides mobilized the memory of the war to reimagine the system of colonial rule in Algeria. Underlining the limited appeal of Wilsonian rhetoric in the colony, this chapter explores the dominance of arguments grounded in concepts of the ‘moral economy of wartime sacrifice’ and ‘mutual obligation’. It considers how political actors sought to legitimize their visons of a just post-war colonial order by maximising their contribution to the war effort while minimising the wartime participation of their opponents, thus undermining their rival claims on the post-war state.
Conclusion
Authors: Hassett Dónal
Published: September 2019

This conclusion ties together the different cases studied throughout the book to illustrate the centrality of the Great War to political discourse in the Algeria of the 1920s and 1930s. It analyses the effectiveness of the evocation of the Great War as a framing strategy for political, economic, and social demands in a colonial context. In particular, it considers how efforts to shroud rival conceptions of the relationship between the colonial state, its citizens, and its subjects in the cloak of legitimacy conferred by the war often had unforeseen consequences. The book concludes by arguing that the predominance of the Great War in political discourse in colonial Algeria may have, in the short term, ensured that most political actors envisaged reform within the bounds of the imperial polity, but it also created expectations that, in the long term, the colonial state proved unwilling and unable to satisfy.
The Scribe as Performer and the Ptolemaic Wild Papyri of the Homeric Epics
Authors: Ready Jonathan L.
Published: September 2019

This chapter offers a new way to think about the scribal activity that produced the texts one sees in the Ptolemaic wild papyri of the Homeric epics. After reviewing previous research in Homeric studies on these texts, the chapter introduces the model of the scribe as performer put to work by students of several literatures, such as Anglo-Saxon and Israelite texts. Per this model, the scribe performs in the act of copying. The chapter then demonstrates the model’s relevance to the study of the wild Homeric papyri and considers at what point in time people capable of generating the texts one finds in the papyri would most likely have been around—much rests on the extent of the oral performance of Homeric poetry in the Classical and Hellenistic periods—and who these capable people might have been.
Community ecology’s roots
Authors: Mittelbach Gary G. , McGill Brian J.
Published: September 2019

This chapter introduces the field of community ecology and reviews its history. The first community ecologists were botanists who noted what appeared to be repeated associations between plant species along environmental gradients. From these studies arose the concept of ecological succession. Laboratory and field studies of animal populations generated the important concepts of density-dependence, the competitive exclusion principle, and the ecological niche. The idea that interspecific competition limited the membership of communities to certain kinds of species produced the historically important theory of limiting similarity, which specified how different species must be in their niche in order to coexist. This theory appeared to provide a framework for predicting both the number and types of species found in natural communities, however, it failed to deliver on its promise. The failure of simple competition-based models to explain community diversity led to important new directions that continue to influence how ecologists study communities today.
The fundamentals of predator–prey interactions
Authors: Mittelbach Gary G. , McGill Brian J.
Published: September 2019

This chapter introduces the concept of the consumer-resource link, the idea that each species in a community consumes resources and is itself consumed by other species. The consumer–resource link is the fundamental building block from which more-complex food chains and food webs are constructed. The chapter continues by exploring what is arguably the simplest consumer–resource interaction—one predator species feeding on one species of prey. Important topics discussed in the context of predator–prey interactions are the predator’s functional response, the Lotka–Volterra predator–prey model, the Rosenzweig–MacArthur predator–prey model, and the suppression-stability trade-off. Isocline analysis is introduced as a method for visualizing the outcome of species interactions at steady-state or equilibrium. Herbivory and parasitism are briefly discussed within the context of general predator–prey models.