bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Understanding Veterans’ Résumés and Conducting Veteran Interviews
Authors: McLennan William R.
Published: June 2021

This chapter teaches recruiters and hiring managers how to become fluent in translating the language of military experience used on résumés and during interviews to create a competitive hiring advantage for veteran talent. It provides an example of a veteran’s résumé and dissects it to show how military occupations can translate to civilian careers and how military promotions indicate employability. Charts are provided to compare military to civilian levels of responsibility, and government information sources are listed to further understand the composition of military occupations and population cohorts to improve targeting of talent. It provides further information sources to gain a better understanding of military knowledge, skills, and abilities. It also discusses current best practices of leading employers of veterans and offers useful tips on how to conduct a productive hiring interview. A top 10 list is presented to help practitioners create and maintain a successful veteran hiring program.
The Employment Situation of Military Spouses
Authors: Bradbard Deborah A.
Published: June 2021

This chapter examines military spouse employment, the business case for hiring military spouses, and barriers to their employment. The unemployment rate among military spouses remains high compared to civilian peers even though their educational attainment, pursuit of employment, volunteerism, and engagement in related professional development activities tends to support a strong business case for hiring them. Also, there is no evidence to suggest that military affiliation negatively impacts success or ability to perform in the workplace. Thus, there is a compelling business case to hire military spouses, but they are often overlooked as human capital resources. This chapter will help human resource professionals learn more about the value of military spouse job candidates and the issues that impact their employment across the human resource life cycle from recruitment to retention.
A Deflationary Account of Mental Representation
Authors: Egan Frances
Published: June 2021

Among the cognitive capacities of evolved creatures is the capacity to represent. Theories in cognitive neuroscience typically explain our manifest representational capacities by positing internal representations, but there is little agreement about how these representations function, especially with the relatively recent proliferation of connectionist, dynamical, embodied, enactive, and Bayesian approaches to cognition. This paper sketches an account of the nature and function of representation in cognitive neuroscience that couples a realist construal of representational vehicles with a pragmatic account of representational content. The resulting package is called a deflationary account of mental representation, and the chapter argues that it avoids the problems that afflict competing accounts.
Reifying Representations
Authors: Rescorla Michael
Published: June 2021

The representational theory of mind (RTM) holds that the mind is stocked with mental representations: mental items that represent. They can be stored in memory, manipulated during mental activity, and combined to form complex representations. RTM is widely presupposed within cognitive science, which offers many successful theories that cite mental representations. Nevertheless, mental representations are still viewed warily in some scientific and philosophical circles. This chapter develops a novel version of RTM: the capacities-based representational theory of mind (C-RTM). According to C-RTM, a mental representation is an abstract type that marks the exercise of a representational capacity. Talk about mental representations embodies an ontologically loaded way of classifying mental states through representational capacities that the states deploy. Complex mental representations mark the appropriate joint exercise of multiple representational capacities. The chapter supports C-RTM with examples drawn from cognitive science, including perceptual representations and cognitive maps, and applies C-RTM to long-standing debates over the existence, nature, individuation, structure, and explanatory role of mental representations.
First Sounds
Authors: Reiter Walter S.
Published: June 2021

Instrumental treatises from the sixteenth century onward stress the importance of imitating the human voice, an ideal that is advocated throughout this book. Lesson Four begins with the student investigating the qualities of individual words and ends with the student declaiming Shakespeare, using the newly liberated “speaking” bow. Simple words such as “beautiful” or “Michelangelo” are reproduced on open strings, bringing attention to the nature of rhythm and the living qualities of vowels. These exercises may reveal how playing is controlled by acquired technique rather than by the imaginative voice. Many violinists find this challenging, having mastered the myriad technical elements that make up the ideal sound of the modern violin. They simplify subtle rhythms, ignore the nuances of vowels, and use their bow in a conditioned manner. Learning the Baroque violin involves ‘unlearning’ those modern techniques that contradict how the violin was played in the Baroque era.
More Basic Concepts and Techniques
Authors: Reiter Walter S.
Published: June 2021

In a lesson packed with historical, musical, and technical information, this one presents the book’s first complete piece of music written specifically for the violin. Many basic concepts are examined including rhythm, articulation, the retaking (or not) of the bow, punctuation, tessitura, impulses and rebounds, causes and effects, and the difference between “Good” and “Bad” notes (“if every note is important, no note is important”); the link between phrasing and bowing is emphasized as being direct and crucial. The melody and bass lines are shown to be inseparable so one cannot be considered without the other. The lesson shows the way to differentiate between how notes were written and how they were played in specific contexts, referring to the Tonotechnie of Engramelle. There are detailed observations and tips about almost every bar plus specially devised technical exercises on dotted notes, explaining how to travel through the bow while playing dotted rhythms and exploring the vast spectrum of articulations.
Learning to Feel
Authors: Reiter Walter S.
Published: June 2021

Music communicates emotions through the media of sound. This lesson approaches the eighteenth-century concept of ‘affect’ by examining how sounds elicit specific emotions and how, by heightening our awareness of the impact of intervals, we can better communicate these emotions to the public. The lesson quotes Geminiani’s definition of “the Intention of Music,” writings of René Descartes, Johann Mattheson, Johann Joachim Quantz, and Johann Philipp Kirnberger as well as Quintilian’s treatise on rhetoric, Institutes of Oratory. The intrinsic messages aroused by sounds are labeled “emotional information,” a central concept of the book, and this intensification of feeling achieved by specially designed exercises is applied to music by Corelli. We learn to evoke particular emotions at will, as actors do, and practice by projecting contrasting emotions onto a movement by Handel. This approach contradicts modern “instrumentalism,” a more technique-based learning method.
Chinless Shifting: Technique and Application
Authors: Reiter Walter S.
Published: June 2021

This lesson provides step-by-step guidance on how to change position when playing chinless. Harnessing the energy of the four natural springs (in the forearm, wrist, elbow, and thumb) it contains fifteen exercises, covering basic techniques of displacement, both up and down. Although most of the material is original, students are also guided toward the works of Ševčík and Kreutzer. There is a section on Shifting and Expression, and fifteen further Methodical Exercises on understanding and applying pure intonation to Geminiani’s scale studies from The Art of Playing the Violin.
Transforming Musical Decisions into Sound
Authors: Reiter Walter S.
Published: June 2021

This lesson revolves around no specific piece of music, dealing instead with essential issues common to all musicians. Music, whatever attributes it may have, is defined by a single word: sound. Sound, the materialization of the imaginative artist’s inner voice, is created through a complex cooperation of physical movements and reflexes, but those movements are meaningless unless controlled and inspired by what happens within oneself. This lesson shows the importance of listening to that inner voice and learning from it, for copying it is the key to the emergence of the independent artist. Active listening conceives, creates, and monitors the sound. The exercises are a guide to identifying and transforming musical intentions into sound. One barrier to listening is thought: students are advised to meditate, a way of freeing the mind from thought. The emerging Baroque violinist may be afraid of producing sound that seems too ‘modern,’ a fear that inhibits expression.
Nurturing Spontaneity Ornamentation, Module One
Authors: Reiter Walter S.
Published: June 2021

The lesson begins with a brief overview of the importance of improvisation and ornamentation in Baroque music, acknowledging that past writers maintained that so practical a skill cannot be learned merely by reading about it. If an ornament can be defined as anything that is not essential, then the composers themselves can be said to have written ornaments into their music: an exercise strips a melody by Handel down to its essentials, and the implication of playing such ‘written ornaments’ is discussed. The lesson asks why many musicians today find it difficult to play what is not written down or to play even simple melodies by ear, and students are encouraged to spend more practice time doing this. The difference between French and Italian ornamentation is outlined. Simple ways of ornamenting Corelli’s Sarabanda are shown, and a contemporary version by Dubourg illustrates how complex such ornamentations can be.
We the People
Authors: Schrier Karen
Published: June 2021

Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the main arguments of the book We the Gamers. It provides an overview of why ethics and civics matter, why games matter in the practice of ethics and civics, and why these types of skills need to be taught at this particular moment in our lifetimes. The chapter provides the necessary context for the book—including the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant health, economic, and social issues. To help solve these systemic, complex problems it is necessary to connect, civically engage, and ethically evaluate and deliberate. People need to not only learn these skills themselves, but teach their neighbors, community members, and leaders. This chapter reveals how games and gamers are already engaging in civics and ethics. Games are communities and public spheres where people come together to play, practice, deliberate, solve problems, and repair our world. The chapter also reviews the variety of games that may enable the practice of these skills, from in-person card games to big-budget console games, and from classroom-based collaborative games to livestreamed competitive games. Finally, this chapter introduces the concept of practicing as a citizen, which is to grapple with the complexity of humanity and governance. How do individuals “citizen” together and play with, critique, and redesign systems? How do games help people to overcome the unnecessary obstacles and unjust inequities of our world? How do people help one another to flourish as human beings?
How Do We Connect and Communicate?
Authors: Schrier Karen
Published: June 2021

Chapter 6 describes how games may support connection, community, and communication. Games are communities where civic deliberation and values-sharing take place. They also may be communities that foster harassment, exclusion, and cruelty. What are the best practices and strategies for supporting connections and communication using games? The chapter includes an overview of why communication matters in civics and ethics, and why games may support this. It also includes the limitations of using games to connect, and how to minimize those limitations. Finally, it reviews strategies that teachers can take to use games to practice skills related to communication and connection. It opens with the example of the game Way, and also shares four examples-in-action: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Lasers, Minecraft, and Argument Wars.
How Do We Make and Reflect on Decisions?
Authors: Schrier Karen
Published: June 2021

Chapter 9 describes how games may help in the practice of critical skills such as reasoning, making decisions, and reflection. How do people ask questions and posit answers, and how might games support this? What are the best practices and strategies for supporting critical thinking using games? The chapter includes an overview of why decision-making and reflection matter in civics and ethics, and why games may support this. It also includes the limitations of using games to explore peoples’ choices, and how to minimize those limitations. Finally, it reviews strategies that teachers can take to use games to practice skills related to critical thinking. It opens with the example of the game Life Is Strange, and also shares three examples-in-action: Moral Machine, Undertale, and Walden.
Epistocratic Paternalism
Authors: Estlund David
Published: June 2021

Epistocracy—roughly, political rule by the wise—is similar to paternalism. In both cases, knowing better is not enough to justify taking charge. But also in both cases, the prohibition is unlikely to be absolute. If one person’s competence is low enough, and the other person would do enough better by taking over, then (simplifying) it is plausibly justified. Arguably it is partly on such grounds that children may be governed by others in ways that adults may not be. May political subjects likewise be ruled by those who know enough better? A right to collective self-rule is not enough by itself to answer this, any more than a right to individual self-rule tells us whether and when the competence disparity is enough to justify paternalism. This rough analogy exposes important issues in the project of defending a requirement of democracy as against epistocracy.
When Should We Disagree about Politics?
Authors: Lackey Jennifer
Published: June 2021

This chapter explores when we should, from an epistemic point of view, disagree about politics by asking the question: when do we have the epistemic duty to object to assertions we take to be false or unwarranted? It begins by highlighting that the duty to object is best understood as an imperfect, rather than a perfect, duty, and hence that there are imperfect epistemic duties, in addition to moral ones. The chapter examines one specific account of imperfect moral duties: Liam Murphy’s collective view that includes what he calls the Compliance Condition that understands imperfect duties as belonging to groups or collectives, but denies that we need to “pick up the slack” from non-complying members. After showing that we should reject the Compliance Condition, the chapter outlines a view according to which the duty to object is an imperfect epistemic one that belongs to groups. It concludes by applying these considerations specifically to the political domain and highlighting the ways in which distinctive issues arise when we disagree about political matters.
Disagreement or Badmouthing? The Role of Expressive Discourse in Politics
Authors: Hannon Michael
Published: June 2021

A striking feature of political discourse is how prone we are to disagree. Political opponents will even give different answers to factual questions, which suggests that opposing parties cannot agree on facts any more than they can on values. This impression is widespread and supported by survey data. This chapter will argue, however, that the extent and depth of political disagreement is largely overstated. Many political disagreements are merely illusory. This claim has several important upshots. The implications of this idea for theories about voter misinformation, motivated reasoning, deliberative democracy, and a number of other issues are explored.
Curiosity
Authors: Volpicelli Robert
Published: June 2021

Chapter 1 argues that the US lecture tour introduced Oscar Wilde to a form of curiosity entertainment that inspired him to continually modify his person for different regional audiences. Though Wilde’s 1882 tour has received much attention for the way it catalyzed the author’s celebrity, very little has been said regarding Wilde’s actual lecturing practices. This chapter therefore examines how the circuit connected Wilde to America’s increasingly commercialized forms of public speech. It does so by focusing on Wilde’s relationship to P. T. Barnum. While Barnum is best known as a circus magnate, he was also a popular speaker who specialized in self-improvement lecturing. Placing Wilde in this particular context, the chapter shows how newspapers readily associated Wilde not only with Barnum but also with his many curiosity attractions. However, its larger aim is to illustrate how Wilde incorporated a sense of Barnum’s overall rhetoric into his own lecturing. Throughout his tour, Wilde subtly adapted Barnum’s self-improvement into a means of self-manipulation, at times going so far as to alter his own class and racial identity in order to appeal to specific audiences.
Documentarian
Authors: Volpicelli Robert
Published: June 2021

Chapter 4 considers how the US lecture tour provided the expatriate author Gertrude Stein with a chance to reacquaint herself with her native country. The media blitz that accompanied Stein’s 1934–5 tour—she made regular stops for photo ops, book signings, and radio interviews—has prompted critics to examine the way Americans saw Stein as a 1930s celebrity. This chapter is more interested, though, in the way Stein saw America, examining in particular her role as a social documentarian during one of the lowest points in the Great Depression. It specifically analyzes the way she developed a public lecturing practice invested as much in documenting her audiences as it was in speaking to them. It then goes on to compare her lecture-tour memoir, Everybody’s Autobiography, to the state and regional guidebooks being produced at that time by the New Deal’s Work Progress Administration (WPA) to reveal how these two forms of 1930s documentary come together in their renewed belief in the American collective. Finally, the many points of overlap between Stein’s memoir and WPA documentaries become an occasion to question previous readings of the author’s late 1930s politics, which have typically portrayed Stein as a stalwart social conservative.
Correspondent
Authors: Volpicelli Robert
Published: June 2021

Chapter 5 demonstrates how W. H. Auden’s public lecturing was deeply interconnected with his poetry writing during the World War II era. Important to this argument is the fact that Auden didn’t come to the US with the intention of conducting a lecture tour; instead, he arrived as a European émigré during the onset of World War II. Once in America, though, he started delivering lectures as a means of generating a secondary income. Taking these circumstances into account, this chapter examines how the outbreak of World War II informed Auden’s approach to public speaking. Through his work as a lecturer, the poet quickly assumed the role of a wartime correspondent. Yet his early lectures and addresses left him with deep ambivalence about how easily he could stir up the emotions of his audiences. This is an anxiety that compelled Auden to move to the university as a place of semi-detachment. The rest of this chapter thus goes on to trace how he used his poetry to develop a new mode of allegorical speech that still allowed him to address political issues from his new position within the postwar academic institution.
Physics, Structure, and Reality
Authors: North Jill
Published: June 2021

How do we figure out the nature of the world from a mathematically formulated physical theory? What do we infer about the world when a physical theory can be mathematically formulated in different ways? Physics, Structure, and Reality addresses these questions, questions that get to the heart of the project of interpreting physics—of figuring out what physics is telling us about the world. North argues that there is a certain notion of structure, implicit in physics and mathematics, that we should pay careful attention to, and that doing so sheds light on these questions concerning what physics is telling us about the nature of reality. Along the way, lessons are drawn for related topics such as the use of coordinate systems in physics, the differences among various formulations of classical mechanics, the nature of spacetime structure, the equivalence of physical theories, and the importance of scientific explanation. Although the book does not explicitly defend scientific realism, instead taking this to be a background assumption, the account provides an indirect case for realism toward our best theories of physics.
The Mental View
Authors: Dougherty Tom
Published: June 2021

This chapter introduces the Autonomy Argument for the Mental View of consent. The Mental View is that consent consists in a mental attitude. The key ideas of the Autonomy Argument are that since consent is an expression of our autonomy, and since our thoughts are maximally under our control, consent consists in our thoughts. This argument provides support for the Mental View over its rival, the Behavioural View, according to which consent requires outward behaviour. However, this support is limited by the fact that the Behavioural View also implies that we have a robust amount of control over our consent. If we accept the Mental View, then we face a further question of which mental attitude constitutes consent. Since consent must persist until the time at which the consent-receiver acts, the most plausible version of the Mental View identifies consent with the mental state of intention.
The Behavioural View
Authors: Dougherty Tom
Published: June 2021

This chapter argues that we should reject the Mental View in favour of the Behavioural View on the grounds that consent must be public. Like promises, consent modifies the demands that we can make of each other, and these demands structure the ways that we hold each other accountable. To the extent that duties are public, duties are better suited to structure how we hold each other accountable. Since consent changes which duties people have, this provides us with a rationale for why consent requires public behaviour. While an advocate of the Behavioural View will hold that consent requires behaviour, they should also allow that someone must have a mental attitude to consent. Accordingly, they should adopt a graded approach to sexual offence policies, according to which acting merely without someone’s affirmative consent is a less grave offence than acting against someone’s will.
Why We Should Reject the Intention Condition
Authors: Dougherty Tom
Published: June 2021

This chapter argues that we should reject the Intention Condition, according to which an action falls within the scope of consent only if the consent-giver intends to permit this action. There are two key objections to the Intention Condition. The False Belief Objection concerns the possibility that a consent-giver lacks a permissive intention because they express their consent while falsely believing that this expression does not constitute valid consent. The Mistake Objection concerns consent-givers who make mistakes when communicating consent. Because of these mistakes, the consent-givers do not intend to permit certain actions, even though their behaviour expresses permission for these actions. When the consent-giver’s intentions diverge from their public behaviour, the scope of their consent is determined by the appropriate interpretation of their behaviour. Since the Intention Condition implies otherwise, we must reject the Intention Condition. Since the Intention Condition is entailed by both the Permissive Intention Principle and the Successful Communication Principle, we must reject both these principles.
The Due Diligence Principle
Authors: Dougherty Tom
Published: June 2021

This chapter argues that the scope of someone’s consent is partly determined by evidence that the consent-receiver has a duty to acquire via investigation. The ‘enhanced reliable evidence’ is defined as the union of the available reliable evidence and any reliable evidence that the consent-receiver has a duty of due diligence to acquire. We should accept the ‘Due Diligence Principle’ for the scope of consent. According to this principle, an action falls within the scope of someone’s consent when both the available reliable evidence and the enhanced reliable evidence sufficiently support interpreting the consent-giver’s behaviour as motivated by an intention to authorize this action.
Conclusions
Authors: Dougherty Tom
Published: June 2021

This concluding chapter summarizes the Evidential Account that is comprised of the Interpersonal Justification Argument, the Expression of Will View, and the Due Diligence Principle. After elaborating how the account applies, this chapter surveys remaining doubts that we may have about this account. Doubts are inevitable because there is a tension between two attractive thoughts. On the one hand, there is a pull to thinking that a consent-giver should be able to control the scope of their consent. On the other hand, there is a pull to thinking that the consent-receiver should have epistemic access to the scope of the consent. Since the consent-giver may fail to control the epistemic access of the consent-receiver, these thoughts cannot be fully reconciled, and so any account will miss out on something attractive. After discussing how the Evidential Account responds to this tension, this book ends by revisiting the topic of sexual deception. The Evidential Account entails an expansive view of sexual misconduct in so far as the account implies that many sexual deceivers engage in non-consensual sex with their victims.
“A Play She Could Act in Dublin”
Authors: Brewer Redwine Elizabeth
Published: June 2021

Chapter 2 follows the embodiments of Cathleen ni Houlihan by Maud Gonne and the tensions over ownership of that play, written with Lady Gregory with Gonne’s contributions to the staging, and created out of Yeats’s disappointment that Gonne rejected The Countess Cathleen. Beginning with Gonne’s real-life visitation dressed as a poor old woman at her own home, rented by Yeats, during the influenza pandemic of 1918 when she was on the run from the authorities, the chapter then explores Yeats’s earliest work with Gonne, challenging the “muse” designation, and focusing instead on Maud Gonne’s skills as a theatrical and political performer. The tensions over the ownership of that play between Yeats and Gonne show the two struggling over class, performance, and definitions of Irishness.
My Pegeen Mike
Authors: Brewer Redwine Elizabeth
Published: June 2021

Molly Allgood’s contributions to Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, this chapter argues, are overdue for a reconsideration, and a close reading of their letters with the development of the play shows that there would have been no Playboy without Molly. This chapter follows the earlier discussions in highlighting the ways that current and Revival readings of theater are informed by assumptions about authorship that privilege men and how these concerns are bound up with gender roles. For example, Synge likely burned Allgood’s part of their correspondence due to his worries about her reputation; nonetheless, this chapter reads Allgood’s responses both in the handwritten notes she wrote in the margins of his surviving letters and in the context of Synge’s responses. In particular, the way that Molly brings her physical female body and the work of that body onto the stage and into the text are major contributions she made to The Playboy.
A “Brutal” Deirdre
Authors: Brewer Redwine Elizabeth
Published: June 2021

Molly Allgood helped Synge with Deirdre of the Sorrows, discussing drafts with him, performing scenes he was struggling to write, even as he neared death in his hospital room, and helping to access the draft from Synge’s family after his death. She then completed the draft with Yeats and Lady Gregory as she knew best what Synge wanted from the play, and performed in the premier. This chapter argues for the collaborative nature of this play and the importance of the dying and dead female body onstage, an embodiment that became more important to Synge as he neared death and as he grew closer to Molly. The chapter closes with a look at Molly Allgood’s death in poverty from a fire as part of the argument that who gets credit for writing plays has real-world consequences for the bodies of the women who performed. In other words, Molly Allgood suffered physically from that erasure
Collaboration and Yeats’s Deirdre
Authors: Brewer Redwine Elizabeth
Published: June 2021

This chapter begins with the actual deaths of each of the actresses who contributed to Yeats’s Deirdre, stressing what is at stake in who gets credit for theatrical performance and then arguing for the different role each actress played in the development of this play. Yeats’s dependence on Lady Gregory, Maud Gonne, Florence Farr, Sara Allgood, Florence Darragh, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell in the creation of Deirdre clashed with his obsession with class-based individuality. Deirdre, like Yeats’s earliest plays written with and for Laura Armstrong, dramatizes the death of the heroine. Yeats tried to mold the Deirdre he wanted from actresses who appealed to him because they seemed other, different from the largely middle-class Abbey company, and reflective of his own ideal of female Irishness. The arguments between Yeats as writer and director and the actresses find their way into these revisions, changes that highlight tensions between gendered versions of events. The competing Deirdres of the Abbey and Yeats’s thousand pages of revisions show attempts to claim contested ground. The history of the play reveals tensions around ownership and representation as the women who inspired and performed the part revised Yeats’s initial vision and challenged Yeats’s idea of solitary, aristocratic ownership.
Epilogue—How Cathleen Became Mrs. Monihan
Authors: Brewer Redwine Elizabeth
Published: June 2021

The Epilogue follows Sara Allgood’s history of performance and contributions to theatrical texts from her early days in Inghinidhe through her film work until her death in Hollywood in1950. What appears again and again in her American film work is an aging actress from Ireland translating stillness in the face of extremity in ways that strengthen even the smallest, sometimes nameless characters against the stereotype of the emotive Irish immigrant. From her earliest days in Inghinidhe, Allgood was part of a project to provide steadying images of Ireland against British melodrama and cartoons; her film work in America continued this work in nearly one hundred film roles. From her unpublished “Memories” and her surviving films, Sara Allgood emerges as a woman focused on creating theater and film, not simply taking direction. Her contribution to both mediums, a refusal to overact, and a gravity and stillness, educates the audience about what to expect of an Irish woman. Tracing the afterlife of her street theater and Abbey career into her later film work may restore some attention to a performer who developed the Abbey Stare for particular ends, revising established readings of both gender and nation in Ireland and America.
The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson
Authors: Tanner Laura E.
Published: June 2021

Framing Robinson’s fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson’s novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson’s novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. The signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson’s narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), and the prohibition of everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson’s novels within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson’s fiction.
Race and Imaginary Intimacy inJack
Authors: Tanner Laura E.
Published: June 2021

Through its focus on an interracial relationship in St. Louis after the Second World War, Jack interrogates the imaginative privilege of a white character whose seeming transcendence of the ordinary occurs at the expense of the black woman he romances. Jack’s aesthetic sensibility immobilizes and isolates him in an imaginative landscape; his desire to have Della, a black woman, accompany him there, however, implicates him in the literal destruction of her everyday world. This chapter uses phenomenological race theory and everyday life studies to highlight the way that the historical, material, and political pressures of the period, including the threat of eminent domain that looms over the abstracted landscape of the novel, disrupt Jack’s literary and symbolic rendering of this love story. By inviting the reader to pursue Jack’s imaginative interests, the novel constructs an uncomfortable romance troubled by the encroachments of the wider world it would exclude.
Political Epistemology and Social Critique
Authors: Haslanger Sally
Published: June 2021

Under conditions of ideology, a standard model of normative political epistemology—relying on a domain-specific reflective equilibrium—risks status-quo bias. Social critique requires a more critical standpoint. What are the aims of social critique? How is such a standpoint achieved and what grounds its claims? One way of achieving a critical standpoint is through consciousness raising. Consciousness raising offers a paradigm shift in our understanding of the social world; but not all epistemic practices that appear to “raise” consciousness are warranted. However, under certain conditions sketched in the chapter, consciousness raising produces a warranted critical standpoint and a pro tanto claim against others. This is an important epistemic achievement, yet under conditions of collective self-governance, there is no guarantee that all warranted claims can be met simultaneously. There will be winners and losers even after legitimate democratic processes have been followed.
Perfectionist Duties
Authors: Tahzib Collis
Published: June 2021

It is a central tenet of much contemporary liberal theory that the state should remain as far as possible neutral between rival conceptions of the good life. By contrast, perfectionists hold that one function of the state is to encourage citizens to lead good or flourishing ways of life. But perfectionists have not generally been clear about whether they take perfectionist interventions to be permissible or mandatory. This chapter argues in favour of the stronger duty-based version of perfectionism. After introducing the distinction between duty-based and non-duty-based forms of perfectionism (Section 1), it makes a case for duty-based perfectionism by defending the idea of a right to the fair conditions of a flourishing life (Section 2). It then shows how the invocation of perfectionist duties can help perfectionists to rebut a number of powerful objections that have recently been levelled against their view (3). Finally, it defends duty-based perfectionism against the charge that it violates the public justification principle (Section 4).
Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings
Authors: Stroumsa Guy G.
Published: June 2021

While the idea of Semitic monotheism only emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a variegated religious phenomenon, monotheism has a much more ancient history. The present chapter will first briefly set forth some of the main stages in the emergence and evolution of monotheism in ancient religious history and discuss the origins of the modern concept of monotheism. It will then follow some of the major approaches to the question of the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the long Middle Ages. As the new paradigm of the three monotheistic religions reflects a rejection of these medieval traditions, this concise review of ancient evidence is necessary in order to fully understand the later developments.
Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual
Authors: Stroumsa Guy G.
Published: June 2021

We now turn to the broader intellectual context during the final three decades of the century, when sociology and anthropology were moving to the fore of the scene, often pushing philology backstage, as the preferred approach to the study of religion. As we shall see, the stakes, which were high, showcase at once ambivalent attitudes towards Judaism and the precarious status of Jewish scholars. The standing of Jewish scholars in the comparative and anthropological tradition reflects the strategy chosen by some among them (not always in a reflexive, conscious way) to overcome this precarious status. Both the comparative and the anthropological method permitted them to circumvent the traces of Christian theology which they correctly detected in more traditional, philological approaches to the study of the monotheist systems. Our three main protagonists here are Max Müller, Julius Wellhausen, and William Robertson Smith.
To the Search of Another Model of Difference Between Constitutional Principles and Rules
Authors: Neves Marcelo
Published: June 2021

This chapter presents a model for distinguishing between constitutional principles and constitutional rules, emphasizing that it concerns a legal-doctrinal difference that emerged with modern constitutionalism. In this context, principles are defined as reflexive mechanisms in relation to rules, and the circular connection between them becomes the focus of analysis. It also discusses the performance of principles and rules in the process of constitutional concretization as well as pointing out the requirement of a constitutional principle theory adequate to the complexity of contemporary society, even in the context of transconstitutionalism. This chapter is divided into five sections: locating the problem and conceptual contours; constitutional principles as a result of the positivization of law: principles and rules as an internal difference of the legal system; the circular relationship between constitutional principles and rules; from optimization to competition: limits of ‘balancing’; and intra-principle collision, double contingency, and functional differentiation of society: towards a complex theory of principles.
Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague
Authors: Ivanič Suzanna
Published: June 2021

Prague in the seventeenth century is known as having been home to a scintillating imperial court crammed with exotic goods, scientists, and artisans, receiving ambassadors from as far away as Persia; and as a city suffering plagues, riots, and devastating military attacks. But Prague was also the setting for a complex and shifting spiritual world. At the beginning of the century it was a multiconfessional city, but by 1700 it represented one of the most archetypical Catholic cities in Europe. Through a material approach, this book pieces together how early modern men and women experienced this transformation on a daily basis. The book presents a bold alternative understanding of the history of early modern religion in Central Europe. The history of religion in the early modern period has overwhelmingly been analysed through a confessional lens, but this analysis shows how Prague burghers’ spiritual worlds were embedded in their natural environment and social relations as much as, if not more than, in confessional identity in the seventeenth century. While texts in this period trace emerging discourses around notions of religion, superstition, and magic, and what it was to be Catholic or Protestant, a material approach avoids these category mistakes being applied to everyday practice. It is through a rich seam of material evidence in Prague—spoons, glass beakers, and amulets, as much as traditional devotional objects like rosaries and garnet-encrusted crucifixes—that everyday beliefs, practices, and identities can be recovered.
Prague—An Urban Cosmos
Authors: Ivanič Suzanna
Published: June 2021

Early modern Prague is best known through snapshot glimpses as the setting for the escapades of the English alchemist John Dee, Rudolf II’s exotic Kunstkammer, or the famous defenestration of Catholic councillors that sparked the Thirty Years’ War that ravaged Europe between 1618 and 1648. No continuous treatment of its social and cultural history across the seventeenth century exists. Moreover, Prague is often viewed through refracted categories: as a court city, a city of four administratively independent towns, a city of reform and protest prior to 1620, or a city of Baroque Catholic ascendancy after 1620. While delineating the social, cultural, and religious topography of Prague over a century, this profile presents a different perspective of a city that enabled a web of encounters between people of different social strata, faiths, and occupations, and fostered its own urban cosmos.
Fracturing Universal Christianity
Authors: Ivanič Suzanna
Published: June 2021

It has widely been assumed that religious objects were quickly associated with different confessions during the Reformation period. However, the unique environment of Prague enables the conditions, speed, and clarity of this process to be tested. This chapter pushes beyond previous historiography that has focused on mono-confessional contexts to examine the confessional specificity of devotional material cultures. The multiconfessional environment of Prague in the first decades of the seventeenth century enables an examination of the role of material culture in the creation of distinct confessional identities. Prague thus provides a fascinating context in which to study the process of fracturing medieval Christianity along confessional lines. It sustained an environment of what might be called ‘multiple options’ well into the seventeenth century. Three factors that shaped this confessional context are examined: survivalism of pre-Reformation devotional modes, the impact of Utraquism, and the persistence of confessional flexibility. A detailed examination of prayer beads in the inventories and as extant objects provides a microcosm through which to understand confessional identities at ground level. Close up, qualitatively, the records reveal them to be part of a spiritual world of endless possibilities and devotional options, but quantitatively, from a distance, they reveal a striking pattern of plural confessions and religious change.
Domesticating the Baroque
Authors: Ivanič Suzanna
Published: June 2021

ít‘Domesticating’ as a process shows how a larger cultural shift—in this case, that of the Counter-Reformation—became something quotidian, everyday, accessible, and realized on the ground. It was a process by which new cultural developments became part of a broader mentalité. The focus of this chapter is to examine the concrete ways in which Catholic culture was domesticated in burgher homes over the seventeenth century. It examines how Counter-Reformation styles and themes permeated domestic objects, how Counter-Reformation images were newly integrated into domestic scenes, and how new materials contributed to the diversification of Catholic material culture at the end of the seventeenth century in a constant negotiation between ‘official’ and lay demands. From the material evidence—rose motifs, a cold-enamel painted glass beaker, and agnus dei made from a range of materials—emerges a fascinating coalescence of old and new forms of devotion that exemplifies the interplay between local and universal. It represents diversification and elaboration in the formation of a new Baroque Catholic culture in the home that was driven as much by the laity as by the Church in the second half of the seventeenth century.
Conclusion
Authors: Ivanič Suzanna
Published: June 2021

The history of religion in the early modern period has been overwhelmingly shaped by tracing confessional divisions. These divisions undoubtedly had a significant impact on religious experience in this period, as shown by the fracturing of faith in Part II, but by foregrounding a spiritual world in Part I, this book seeks to shift our perspective and understand confessions as only one layer of devotional experience on top of a complex, shared spiritual world attached to materialities, local environments, and family histories. This concluding chapter underlines the contribution of this book to the history of religion, showing how a sustained and interlinked treatment of material culture and religion can significantly reshape our understanding of early modern lived beliefs, practices, and identities. Men and women in seventeenth-century Prague conceptualized the universe as a cosmos full of harmonies and correspondences through which the divine could work. This worldview framed their approach to the objects and material surroundings they encountered in their daily lives. Examining objects allows us to reconsider the categorization of early modern items as confessional, sacred, and profane in favour of a broader connected cosmos. This material approach reveals everyday beliefs, practices, and identities from a new perspective and traces the workings of larger cultural forces at ground level.
Comrades and Campfires
Authors: Young Phoebe S.K.
Published: June 2021

During and after the Civil War, Union army soldiers and veterans attempted to make sense of their military camping experiences, which could exemplify generational camaraderie, political organization, and national belonging. This chapter follows the career of John Mead Gould, a soldier from Portland, Maine who kept an extensive diary and published a camping manual in 1877. It also discusses the role of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans’ organization that organized reunions in the form of annual encampments as part of a campaign to lobby the government for veterans’ pensions. Its form of camping put forward the veteran as a new exemplar of the ideal citizen for a modern commercial age. Veterans claimed a meaningful place in a world where the nation’s social and economic underpinnings were in flux and understandings of citizenship, manhood, work, and success were shifting under their feet.