bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Democratic politics and drug law reform
Authors: Seddon Toby
Published: August 2023

In the second of two chapters examining the politics of the ‘drug question’, this chapter explores what a ‘better’ politics of drugs would look like and how we might achieve it. It examines different approaches to normative thinking (propositions about how the world should be) and reviews the debate on ‘public social science’. It then considers ways in which drug politics could be democratised, not only through creating more spaces for democratic deliberation but also by ‘thinking democratically’ in a broader sense. It goes on to argue for the necessity of developing a cosmopolitan vision of politics which moves beyond Western-centrism. It concludes by summarising what has been learned across this pair of chapters, suggesting the need to amplify the voices of those who most directly experience the punitive edge of prohibition especially in the Global South.
Comedy of Eros
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: August 2023

One incident of the reality effect of images is that of the introduction of the comedic and corporeal into judgements in a visible form. The image enacts and theatricalizes the subjects of decision, and these pictorial displays bring with them elements of farce and satire, laughter and lampoon. The judiciary are neither immune to the allure of humour as alleviation of the boredom of trial, nor do they always resist the desire to pillory litigants who, in their view, have misbehaved. Subtending the depiction of bodies and their foibles is also on occasion an erotic drive commensurate with the older senses of histrions and players mingling with their auditors and here viewers.
Evidential Expositions
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: August 2023

Particularly in the areas of tort, crime, copyright and patents, the image relayed in judgement is the evidence of the event judged. Identificatory photographs, accident scene pictures, assault weapons, CCTV footage of criminal acts, and depictions of infringed designs and artworks are the subject matter of decision, they are what is judged. Pictures used as evidence are surprisingly often read literally and are assumed legally to directly depict what is shown. The assumption that the medium representing the denoted person or event does so immediately and without remediation, interpretation, or alteration, either aesthetic or cognitive, belies a naïve realism in viewing. The courts proceed by way of analogy to texts, as if text and picture are the same, and as if what is shown is what is there without sensory interruption or optical incision. While considerable attention is paid to the question of edits or cuts as illicit interferences in evidential representation, the questions of perspective, context, colour, and affect of appearance are often overlooked.
Mocking Modernisms
Authors: Davison Sarah
Published: August 2023

Chapter 4 investigates the culture of parody in little magazines, where parody was used to conduct ideological debates concerning the aesthetic qualities and moral probity proper to modern literature. It explores the extent to which parodies of modernism defined the popular understanding of the movement, before opening out to consider the Spectra hoax, whereby parodies of modernist writing were passed off as genuine articles to a credulous public. Contestations between Pound and Beatrice Hastings and also between Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven then provide case studies that attest to the intensity of the ideological battles fought through parody and its creative role as a spur to further literary experimentation.
‘A Moqueur to the Marrow’
Authors: Davison Sarah
Published: August 2023

While parody was enmeshed in modernist thinking from its earliest stages, it was not until high modernism that the full, multilayered, philosophical, and literary applications of parody came to the fore as a palimpsestual means towards a complex historical critique. Chapter 5 focuses on T. S. Eliot, whom Lewis described as ‘a moqueur to the marrow’. It explores Eliot’s career as a parodist, starting with his parodies of different genres and voices in early comic writings such as ‘Effie the Waif’, his ‘Brilliants’, and the King Bolo verses. It proceeds to evaluate the shaping role that Pound and Eliot’s ideas about parody, imitation, and historicity played in the composition of The Waste Land, setting Eliot’s use of parody in the light of the practices of writers such as Jules Laforgue, Tristan Tzara, James Joyce, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope. It concludes with reflections on the jeux d’esprit Eliot wrote to amuse his friends in later life and the perils of self-parody.
‘Councillors at the casino’
Authors: Pike Andy
Published: August 2023

Critical characterizations depict ‘councillors at the casino’ in England since 2010 taking risky gambles with public money and essential local services in a financialized setting. New, innovative approaches and arrangements different to tried-and-tested local government strategies and practices have been formulated and deployed by politicians and officers in attempts to make savings and generate income to balance budgets in response to the UK government’s austerity from 2010. Commercial finance actors have been drawn to reconstruct the local municipal finance market with new products and services. Situating the experience of local governments in England since 2010 in international perspective, emergent concerns are outlined about the purpose and financial strategies of local government, its use of taxpayers’ money, and implications for local public service provision and democracy. The alleged return of local governments in England to the casino is described and explained as evidence of the financialization of the local state. Addressing gaps in understanding, the book aims to develop local statecraft theory to explain how, why, where, and when local governments are—and are not—engaging the relations and process of financialization. This new theorization provides the framework to account for the experiences of local councillors, officers, commercial financiers, and external advisors navigating austerity and financialization in England since 2010.
Financialization and local statecraft
Authors: Pike Andy
Published: August 2023

Caution is needed against generalized assessments of rampant financialization of the local state and characterizations of gung-ho elected local politicians and appointed officers staking local taxpayers’ money in the casinos of finance capital and imperilling local public service provision. Differentiated landscapes demand a wider frame and more balanced account, prompting reflection on our explanatory concepts and theoretical frameworks. Existing studies of financialization, local government, and the local state are marked by a national focus, narrow empirical range, limited attention to geographical and temporal diversity and system-wide views, and underdeveloped treatment of ramifications. Addressing emanant (auto-)critique, local statecraft is defined and conceptualized. It is grounded within a theorization of the state which endows local government with distinctive local statehood attributes that underpin its powers and resources as an economic and financial actor. Hitherto missing but key distinctions are drawn between financial and local statecraft, municipal and commercial worlds of finance and risk, and commercialization and financialization. The specific actors involved in local statecraft—the local statecrafters—and their rationales are explained alongside identification of the realms examined in the book and the geographical and temporal settings of their manifestation by local governments in England since 2010. The research strategy, methodology, and design for the empirical research underpinning the book closes the chapter.
Funding and financing local government in England
Authors: Pike Andy
Published: August 2023

Situated within the UK state, local government in England lacks constitutional or legislative protection. It is a creature of the national government and Parliament, operating in a highly centralized and evolving system of central–local relations. Integral to local statecraft, this status strongly defines local government’s powers, functions, and politics. The local government system is inherently diverse across England. It has evolved incrementally, punctuated by periods of radical reorganization, from the ‘sovereign council’ through ‘new public management’ (NPM) to ‘networked governance’. Funding and financing are complex, fragmented, and highly centralized. Budgeting, expenditure, income, balance sheets, and accountability work in distinctive ways. Key processes shape local government’s evolution with implications for its funding and financing. Centralization concentrates powers and resources at the national level. Repeated modernization efforts involve experiments with new organizational models. Continued pressure forfewer, larger local government units underpins ongoing reorganization. Disaggregation increases the organizations constituting the local state working with local government. Reflecting national management of central–local relations, funding and financing experiments and innovations punctuate local government’s history as local statecrafters try to exert their autonomies.
Advising financialization?
Authors: Pike Andy
Published: August 2023

A widening array of external advisors increased their involvement in local statecraft in England since 2010. With denuded capacity due to staff reductions in austerity, local statecrafters were compelled to seek support to navigate their changing financial situations, coping with fiscal stress and formulating innovations. Such intermediaries are interpreted as potential carriers, enablers, or even drivers of the financialization of the local state. Providing long-standing sources of specialist advice for local government in England, the range and roles of accountants and consultants, financial consultants, treasury management advisors (TMAs), property consultants, and professional and sectoral advisors, associations, and consultants have increased and evolved since 2010. Their strategies, business models, and services cultivated and shaped the growing local public sector market. Local governments in England need the legal cover of commissioned expert advice to underpin their due diligence, risk management, and accountable decision-making. UK government and national professional regulation and guidance require and encourage such engagement. External advisors enabling and supporting local statecrafter involvements with commercial finance actors are differentiated by differences in local government type and size, risk appetites, attitude and openness to external advice, strategies, locations, local economic conditions, and tax bases.
The local statecraft of borrowing and debt management
Authors: Pike Andy
Published: August 2023

Spendthrift local governments with a ‘debt addiction’ on a borrowing ‘spree’ are evident in the ‘councillors at the casino’ narrative in England. Borrowing and debt management strategies evolved and grew in importance for local statecrafters addressing funding gaps since 2010. A national system governs local government borrowing. From 2003, the UK government encouraged greater local autonomy and responsibility while retaining control within the highly centralized funding system. Reflecting the use of specific loan types and new, more complex debt instruments as evidence of local state financialization, more active strategies for borrowing and managing debt portfolios are evident. Local statecrafters interpret and work with and around the centralized national codes and guidance in devising their borrowing and debt management. Importing greater risk into local government, borrowing has grown overall and in particular ways across England since 2010. Underpinning the differentiated landscape of local statecraft engagements with financialization, vanguard, intermediate, and long-tail approaches are evident. The local political and officer leadership’s strategic vision, aims, and responses to closing funding gaps determine local statecraft, reflecting external advice and involvement (or not) with financial institutions developing loan products for the local public sector market. Local governments are borrowing from and beholden to a widening range of lenders with different instruments and terms, from internal resources, each other, national government agencies, and external financial institutions and investors. Financial innovations are evident in vanguard approaches but are a relatively small proportion of overall borrowing activity.
Introduction
Authors: Shackleton David
Published: August 2023

This introduction advances an understanding of ‘Anthropocene modernism’ as a literary and cultural modernism that registers the environmental transformations such as climate change that are now considered to characterize the Anthropocene, and offers the possibility of rethinking the pressing environmental concerns of the present. Forming part of a recent eco-critical turn in modernist studies, the approach adopted here is to analyse the environmental politics of modernism through the politics of time. It draws on Martin Heidegger and Paul Ricoeur to explicate how modernist novels refigure time, and how competing narratives of the Anthropocene situate humans meaningfully within geohistory. The exceptional ability of modernist novels to refigure time and meaningful structures of action allows a way of reconceptualizing the environmental crisis, and rethinking issues of scale, agency, and responsibility in the Anthropocene. Indeed, analysing the rich timescapes of modernist novels, and reading them alongside recent narratives of environmental crisis, allows us to refigure our temporal consciousness in the Anthropocene, cultivate new structures of environmental care and concern, and open new possibilities of political action.
H. G. Wells, Geology, and Ecological Risk
Authors: Shackleton David
Published: August 2023

Chapter 1 addresses H. G. Wells’s engagements with geology and ecology. Although often confined to the peripheries of modernism, Wells drew on his scientific training to develop innovative literary and historiographic forms that start to make phenomena such as climate change and mass species extinctions visible. The chapter starts by situating The Time Machine (1895) in the context of geological literature, showing how Wells reworks the conceit of time travel, tropes of ruin, and a fragmentary aesthetic to imagine the effects of human agency over vast timescales. It then analyses the politicization of geological time in his universal histories, The Outline of History (1920) and A Short History of the World (1922). Therein, Wells reframes history on geological and planetary scales, and seeks to redirect the destructive power of humans to positive ends through the formation of a cosmopolitan World State. Turning to his ‘discovery of the future’, the chapter finishes by considering three of his utopias, in which he imagines societies that have overcome the threat of extinction to achieve efficient control over non-human species and the planet’s natural resources. In doing so, Wells mirrors the anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism of early ecological science, and anticipates some recent accounts of the Anthropocene. However, the value of his utopias lies less in their proposed environmental solutions than in the ability of their aesthetic form to produce knowledge about ecological risk.
D. H. Lawrence and Nietzsche’s Thought of Eternal Recurrence
Authors: Shackleton David
Published: August 2023

Chapter 2 examines D. H. Lawrence’s creative adaptations of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence in his coalfield fiction. It charts how Lawrence uses Nietzsche’s thought to imagine various forms of rupture in historical time, and the inauguration of a new age. Much like the epochal shift marked by the Anthropocene, Lawrence’s visions of historical transformation express an environmental politics. In Women in Love (1920), the thought is used to portray mechanical repetition and Gerald’s ruthless industrial spoliation of the Earth, whereas in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) it is reimagined as part of Connie and Mellors’s desire for a green revaluation of the Earth. Rather than involving a retreat from politics and history, Lawrence uses sex and the body to explore intertwined social and environmental crises, and to imagine a transition beyond an industrial system based on the exploitation of workers and the extraction of fossil fuels.
Forums for Raising Abuse of Process
Authors: Wells Colin
Published: August 2023

Consideration of the forums in which abuse of process arguments are raised, considered, and determined, starting with the first instance Magistrates’ court, Youth Court, and moving onto the appellant level Crown Court, Divisional Court, Court of Appeal Criminal Division, and Supreme Court. The separate jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in Strasbourg is considered in later chapters on an issues-related basis. The decision to prosecute, if taken for improper reasons, can amount to an abuse of process which can be challenged in the Magistrates’ court and by judicial review.
Non-Availability of Evidence
Authors: Wells Colin
Published: August 2023

Where evidence has been lost or destroyed and the defence has been deprived of a potential opportunity to advance its case, the court has a discretion to stay proceedings. The court, when considering an abuse application based on the non-availability of evidence, has to consider the relevance of the material, whether it should have been preserved, why it was destroyed (in terms of bad faith, serious fault, or incompetence), and alternative trial remedies. Reference is made to the Code of Practice published pursuant to sections 23 and 25 of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 (CPIA 1996) and the Attorney General’s disclosure guidelines. The ultimate objective is a fair trial to both the defence and prosecution. Trial procedural safeguards can deal with the bulk of complaints. A stay should not be granted unless the defence could show prejudice to the extent that a fair trial could not be had.
Reconceptualizing the Politics of Pockets of Effectiveness
Authors: Hickey Sam , Mohan Giles
Published: August 2023

This previous chapter argued that existing studies of PoEs have struggled to specify the forms of politics that shape how PoEs emerge and perform PoEs over time. To help address this problem, this chapter outlines the new conceptual and methodological approach developed for this project, which constitutes the first systematic investigation of PoEs across different types of political context. In conceptual terms, the authors argue that an alignment of political settlements analysis with critical theories of state power and African politics can help reveal how PoEs are shaped by underlying relations of power and politics. However, PoEs also need to be located within the particular ‘policy domain’ that they operate within, and which defines the political role they play, the policy challenges they face, and the organizational characteristics they require to perform effectively. The chapter identifies how this integrated ‘power domains’ approach can generate researchable propositions and how these were investigated through a mixture of within- and across-case analysis. It summarizes the results of the expert surveys that undertaken in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia, which were chosen to represent different types of political settlement. These surveys identified state agencies that operated within the domain of economic governance, namely ministries of finance, central banks, and revenue authorities. The chapter discusses how in-depth mixed methods investigations of these fifteen organizational case-studies were undertaken, tracking performance from the early 1990s through to the late 2010s, and locating each within shifting political settlement dynamics and the changing transnational political economy of development.
Limiting loss
Authors: Jarzabkowski Paula , Chalkias Konstantinos , Cacciatori Eugenia , Bednarek Rebecca
Published: August 2023

If Protection Gap Entities (PGEs) want to make disasters insurable over the long term, they need to make insurance a tool for resilience. Most PGEs focus on providing insurance to ensure financial resilience in the aftermath of disasters. However, climate change and growing urbanization are increasing disaster losses. Hence, physical resilience—actions to avoid or mitigate losses—is critical to maintain insurability. Privileging financial resilience, as many PGEs do, can undermine physical resilience if societies assume that money can pay for the losses and there is no need to reduce them. Ensuring physical resilience requires a wide spectrum of measures associated with land use, planning, and construction, that is beyond the traditional scope of PGEs. PGEs’ remits must thus evolve, expanding the types of stakeholders in their control system with whom they work to build individual and societal responsibility for, and integration of, financial and physical resilience to disaster.
Devils in the Details
Authors: Di Salvo Gina M.
Published: August 2023

Chapter 2 addresses saints in Elizabethan plays and pageantry. Beginning with an exploration of St. Dunstan in the anonymous A Knack to Know a Knave (c.1592) and The Devil and His Dame (c.1600) by William Haughton, this chapter shows how the first experiments with saints in the playhouse retained elements of medieval legends while also conflating, collapsing, and improvising hagiographic narratives. In the case of St. Dunstan, the saint’s iconography and legend were adapted to reflect the theatricality of conjuration found in popular magician plays, such as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. The St. Dunstan plays, like the other saint plays of the era, preserved major aspects of medieval performance and register an interest in dramatizing English saints. Nonetheless, the theatre remained somewhat skeptical of sanctity. This suspicious perspective on sainthood materializes in three of Shakespeare’s early history plays: 2 Henry VI (c.1591), Richard III (c.1592), and 1 Henry VI (c.1592). In contrast, a 1602 pageant for Queen Elizabeth that featured St. Swithin utilized the traditional legend of the saint to honor the monarch.
Acts of Translation
Authors: Di Salvo Gina M.
Published: August 2023

Chapter 3 examines Thomas Heywood’s renaissance of the saint play through the staging of Queen Elizabeth’s Reformation struggles as miraculous virgin martyrdom in If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody (c.1604). This play culminates in the production of a new theatrical vita. The chapter also explores two plays that operate according to Heywood’s new terms of theatrical sanctity. The anonymous St. Christopher (1609) and Henry VIII (1613) by Shakespeare and John Fletcher both depict overtly Catholic figures. An examination of the legal documents related to St. Christopher reveals that the pro-recusant play utilized the same oppositional theatrics of Heywood’s play to sanctify the faithful and demonize the heretics. By contrast, Henry VIII carefully navigates and somewhat distorts Heywood’s conventions of sanctity in order to frame Katherine of Aragon as saintlike but not quite sanctified.
Old Legends of England
Authors: Di Salvo Gina M.
Published: August 2023

Chapter 4 addresses five plays that extend the late medieval amalgamation of romance and hagiography to Stuart tragicomedy. It explores how Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608) by Shakespeare and Wilkins introduces itinerant sanctity in the ancient Mediterranean and how four less canonical plays similarly materialize sanctity at specific English and Welsh sites and thereby plot sainthood along a map of legendary shrines, cathedrals, and castles. A Shoemaker, A Gentleman (c.1618) and The Birth of Merlin (c.1622) both by William Rowley, The Tragical History of Guy of Warwick (c.1620), possibly by John Day and Thomas Dekker, and the Seven Cham pions of Christendom (c.1635) by John Kirke celebrate English saints of the soil and anchor the Stuart present to the sanctity of the ancient ecclesiastical past.
Introduction
Authors: Heinzelmann Nora
Published: August 2023

The introduction provides an overview over the book. It directs readers with different backgrounds to specific sections. The introduction also describes an intuitive example of weakness of will that is used throughout the book to detail how different theories describe and account for weakness of will.
Practical Takeaways
Authors: Heinzelmann Nora
Published: August 2023

This chapter explores strategies for individuals and policymakers to address weak-willed action and flawed discounting. We may adapt strategies we employ to address biased behaviour to tackle weak-willed action as well. The first is to change the incentives in common decision problems, e.g. diminishing less delayed rewards by increasing their costs. Second, we may change delay or the uncertainty associated with it. For example, nudges may affect when we make decisions about delayed rewards so that, e.g. we precommit to a healthier option early on rather than when we are under the immediate temptation of an unhealthier alternative. Third, by decreasing uncertainties and risks on the societal level, institutions can decisively change how sensitive to risks and uncertainties individuals or entire nations are. For instance, providing social safety measures increases economic security and in turn allows individuals to commit to long-term investments like education or retirement savings.
Conclusion
Authors: Heinzelmann Nora
Published: August 2023

The closing chapter of the monograph takes stock of our findings and identifies open questions that may provide avenues for future research.
Symmetry and Curvature
Authors: Belot Gordon
Published: August 2023

This chapter surveys some results concerning symmetry and spaces of constant curvature. It begins with a review of Riemannian curvature, sectional curvature, and the relation between them, before turning to highly symmetric Riemannian and Lorentz spaces of constant sectional curvature. The primary goal is to equip readers with concepts and results that will play a role in later chapters. Another goal is to place de Sitter spacetime in context: a theme of this chapter is that de Sitter spacetime has a near relative, elliptic de Sitter spacetime, that is in several senses its rival-each has a claim to be the most natural general relativistic geometry in the context of a positive cosmological constant.
Stability, Instability, and Hair
Authors: Belot Gordon
Published: August 2023

This chapter is concerned with the global non-linear stability of de Sitter spacetime and with the cosmic no-hair conjecture (according to which de Sitter spacetime is a powerful dynamical attractor when a term with a positive cosmological constant is included in the Einstein equation). By way of context, it includes some background about the notion of global non-linear stability. And by way of contrast it also considers the global non-linear instability of the Einstein static universe, the global non-linear stability of Minkowski spacetime and the global non-linear (in)stability of anti-de Sitter spacetime.
Introduction
Authors: Enderwitz Anne
Published: August 2023

The Introduction discusses the emerging commercial theatre around 1600 and its exploration of a changing socio-economic reality in an ambivalent mode, combining critique with the cultural work of accommodation. It introduces as a unifying theme of the book the ongoing revaluation of private interest and the transformation performed on the early modern stage of prudence from an ethical to a pragmatic faculty. Bacon’s notion of ‘wisdom of business’ provides a historical expression for this transformation and helps in recreating a historical context for the plays. Furthermore, the Introduction delineates the connections between early modern plays and practical mercantile and oeconomic discourses of the time, and provides a brief sketch of city comedy and tragedy to explain the book’s cross-generic approach.
Mind, Meaning, and Behavior
Authors: Sellars Wilfrid
Published: August 2023

Sellars addresses the “Mind-Body problem,” specifically whether intentional concepts can be reduced to nonintentional ones. Sellars outlines two notions of reducibility. According to logical reducibility, intentional concepts are definable in terms of nonintentional descriptions of bodily states. Casual reducibility involves only material equivalences (not identity statements) between intentional expressions and extensional descriptions of bodily states. Both naturalists and nonnaturalists, according to Sellars, hold that causal reducibility entails logical reducibility, but Sellars disagrees, arguing that intentional vocabulary is causally reducible but logically irreducible. An analogous solution can be offered concerning the reducibility of “ought” to “is,” although a different version of causal reducibility is involved with normative vocabulary as opposed to intentional vocabulary.
Thought and Action
Authors: Sellars Wilfrid
Published: August 2023

Sellars analyzes a number of concepts related to the philosophy of action. For Sellars, practical reasoning is reasoning among intentions, and culminates in an intention to act (which itself ripens into a volition). He begins by laying out some core principles of the logic of intentions. Sellars next analyzes preference and desire, and develops an account of desire making sense of its dual connection to action and to enjoyment. Sellars concludes by clarifying the relation of intention to belief; explaining the linguistic role of the “shall” operator; arguing for a relation between intention and enjoyment that further resolves the puzzle about desire; clarifying the stages of deliberation (involving intentions); examining what is involved in acting on a policy; and offering some “Hegelian” reflections regarding we-intentions and their relation to I-intentions.
On Knowing the Better and Doing the Worse
Authors: Sellars Wilfrid
Published: August 2023

Sellars frames the problem of akrasia as an inconsistent triad: (1) We know the better yet do the worse; (2) When we know A is better than B, we have a conclusive reason for doing A rather than B; and (3) When we have a conclusive reason for doing A rather than B, we will do A rather than B. Sellars distinguishes two senses of “having a reason” in (2) and (3), but the “extreme internalist” argues that conclusively good reasons are, when known, conclusively powerful. Through discussing Plato, Sellars locates the problem’s origins in the assumption that there is only one standpoint from which to judge reasons for action: the personal standpoint of self-interest. Instead, there is another standpoint from which to evaluate reasons for action: the interpersonal standpoint or moral point of view. Thus, akrasia involves acting from a self-interested motive when the moral point of view demands a contrary action.
The Hare–Sellars Correspondence, 1953–1980
Authors: Sellars Wilfrid
Published: August 2023

Most of this correspondence between Sellars and Hare takes place between 1953 and 1959, in the context of Hare’s The Language of Morals (1952) and the early (Methodos) version of Sellars’s “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’” (1956). Both Hare and Sellars are trying to articulate a form of expressivism according to which moral judgments (a) have a conceptual tie to action, and (b) are cognitive in the sense that they can be involved in valid inferences, etc. Sellars is critical of Hare’s prescriptivism, arguing (among other things) that imperatives, like expressions of promises, cannot be essentially involved in valid inferences. While offering his own critical commentary on Sellars’s brand of expressivism, Hare offers various rebuttals to Sellars’s arguments—but he also, in the course of this correspondence, revises his view in ways that mark a significant departure from The Language of Morals.
The Dimensionality of Plant Strategy Theory
Authors: Laughlin Daniel C.
Published: August 2023

The intrinsic dimensionality of any multivariate dataset is the minimum number of parameters needed to describe it, and dimensional analysis of a theory identifies the base quantities, their units of measure, and causal relations among them. The strength of plant strategy theory will be judged by its ability to predict whether a phenotype can maintain a viable population in a given environment. Life history traits are functions of demographic rates spanning at least three dimensions: a fast–slow continuum, reproductive strategies, and lifespan. Functional traits are morphological, physiological, or phenological traits that potentially impact fitness. Plant strategies have evolved in response to the complex interactions of density-independent and frequency-independent selection pressures (i.e., temperature, disturbance regimes, and resource availability), and density-dependent (i.e., vegetation density) and frequency-dependent selection pressures (i.e., the presence of other strategies). Resources can be conceptualized as a three-dimensional cube representing variation in light, water, and mineral nutrients, where different corners of the cube represent either abundance, limitation, or co-limitation of these resources. Disturbance types can be arrayed along two dimensions: a gradient of frequency and severity, and a gradient of disturbance extent. Temperature is the ultimate regulating factor because it governs non-linear reaction rates for all biological processes.
Plant Demography
Authors: Laughlin Daniel C.
Published: August 2023

It is not sufficient to merely observe a species in a habitat and assume its traits confer fitness in those environmental conditions. Strong tests of plant strategy theory must demonstrate that phenotypes can predict demographic outcomes in a given environment. Stage-based population models are often more useful for modular organisms like plants given that survival and reproduction are more strongly related to size than age. We can determine the relative importance of each demographic rate on its impact on population growth rate by computing vital rate elasticities, which quantify the impact of a vital rate on population growth rate. Seed banks can be modeled as discrete stages in population models by knowing the probability of entering, remaining in, and emerging from the soil seed bank. Models can incorporate density dependence by allowing transition probabilities and demographic rates to be functions of local neighborhood density. Integral projection models have recently been developed that treat size as a continuous variable rather than needing to bin plants into arbitrary size classes. This flexible approach allows us to estimate population growth rates by building vital rate regression models that include any number of covariates as predictors. This approach is necessary to explore how traits determine individual demographic rates across species.
Property Rights
Authors: Sussman Oren
Published: August 2023

The institution of private property is one of the pillars of the market economy. The question, how it contributes towards economic efficiency, has proven a challenge to economic theory. One suggestion is that it helps to overcome frictions in the drafting of commercial contracts. The analysis is intimately related to another question, how joint ownership of several assets by a single entity, a company, say, contributes to economic efficiency. Abstract as these questions may seem, they do have important practical implications for the analysis of mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, etc. Another important application is the analysis collateralized lending, that is securing debt repayments by the pledge of property. The chapter concludes with a brief analysis of reputation-based trade in an environment with no rule of law.
The Market for Risk
Authors: Sussman Oren
Published: August 2023

Remarkably, a theory of trade in risky securities can be derived through a simple reinterpretation of Chapter5’s theory of competitive markets, in particular the notion of a commodity. The chapter presents the three motives for trade in risky securities, when players have different exposure to non-systemic risk, different attitudes to risk, and different beliefs about asset returns. The theory provides a unified conceptual framework for some of the main results in asset-pricing theory: the Modigliani–Miller Theorem, option pricing and CAPM. The chapter presents the equity-premium puzzle: assuming complete markets, risk aversion, as measured in micro-economic data, fails to predict the long-term yield premium of equity over government bonds.
Trading with the Better Informed
Authors: Sussman Oren
Published: August 2023

The economic theory of asymmetric information deals with situations where one party to a deal has relevant information that the other party has not. Such settings are investigated using two types of models: adverse selection (hidden type) and moral hazard (hidden action). In the former case, the chapter investigates both pooling and separating equilibria. The latter case provides rigorous foundations to an economic theory of contracts. While the results clearly deviate from the perfect-competition model, some of the implications are somewhat counter-intuitive: the party to the contract who is uninformed is not being cheated, the cost of information asymmetry falls on the informed party and the effects of the asymmetry cannot be ameliorated, in the Pareto sense, through an intervention of a third party such as a judge or a legislator. Embedding the contract problem in a market setting can generate a credit-rationing equilibrium.
Nomenclature
Authors: Johnston Michael
Published: August 2023

Chapter 1 argues that the terms scholars have used to describe most Middle English manuscripts (e.g., amateur, professional, commercial, provincial, urban) are overly impressionistic and do not arise from a historical grounding in the actual practices of writing that were operative in late medieval England. This chapter offers a critique of existing terminology, after which a new set of terms is introduced as an alternative. These new terms propose categorizing manuscripts based on how much distance lay between their producers and consumers. Chapter 1 then concludes with a detailed outline of the research questions guiding an analysis of each manuscript in the corpus.
Abelian gauge field equations
Authors: Yang Yisong
Published: August 2023

This chapter studies the Abelian gauge field theory. It starts with a discussion of covariance, contravariance, and invariance, which provide the necessary foundations to develop relativistic field theory. Next, it introduces the Klein-Gordon equation and then it explores what the symmetry of the underlying theory offers. In particular, we see that gauge field and electromagnetism arise as a natural consequence of the need to preserve local internal symmetry. It then considers various notions of symmetry breaking, especially spontaneous symmetry breaking. It shows in such a context that gauge field again plays an important role through the celebrated Higgs mechanism
Ginzburg–Landau equations for superconductivity
Authors: Yang Yisong
Published: August 2023

This chapter presents the Ginzburg-Landau equations, which are the core of the phenomenological theory of superconductivity of Ginzburg and Landau. First it follows the historical path to describe the formalism of F. and H. London and derive their equations. It also gives a brief introduction to the nonlocal generalization of one of the London equations by Pippard. It then presents the Ginzburg-Landau equations, and discusses the classification of superconductivity by surface energy by virtue of a two-point boundary value problem. The chapter ends with a brief overview of some extended Ginzburg-Landau equations along several directions of research.
Charged vortices and Chern–Simons equations
Authors: Yang Yisong
Published: August 2023

This chapter investigates whether it is possible to construct electrically and magnetically charged static solutions, known as dually charged vortices, of gauge field equations. It begins by discussing the Julia-Zee theorem, which says that solutions such as these are not allowed in conventional situations, in other words, they are not permitted in the classical Abelian Higgs model. It then looks at the existence of dually charged vortices when a Chern-Simons topological term is added to the Lagrangian action density. Finally, it presents a related problem in three dimensions linking the Chern-Simons theory to the Ginzburg-Landau equations.
Cross-National Analysis
Authors: Grewal Sharan
Published: August 2023

This chapter tests the theory through a cross-national analysis of all countries from 1946 to 2010. It first shows that dictators can indeed coup-proof their regimes by pursuing empowerment or marginalization, reducing the risk of a coup four-fold. It explores how dictators’ threat perceptions, personal preferences, and most importantly, path-dependence, shapes their choice of strategy. The bulk of the chapter then examines the consequences of these strategies, showing that empowerment makes democratization far more difficult. Empowered militaries are significantly more likely to repress mass uprisings and revolutions and less likely to defect during them. During transitions to democracy, empowered militaries are about four times more likely than marginalized ones to stage coups to end the transition. At the same time, marginalized militaries carry heightened risks of incumbent takeovers and civil wars. Overall, the chapter shows that each of the hypotheses generated in the theory chapter find empirical support cross-nationally.
Egypt: Repression and Revolution
Authors: Grewal Sharan
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines the Egyptian military’s behavior during the 2011 Arab Spring revolution. While initial accounts claimed that the military resented Mubarak and thus was eager to oust him, this chapter instead shows how its calculations were far more hesitant and begrudging. Due to Mubarak’s efforts to invest the military into his regime, the military was reluctant to let him go. At the same time, the military was conscious of how its domestic and international legitimacy would be tarnished if it publicly repressed protesters, which in turn would threaten its corporate interests. Instead, the military throughout the uprising engaged in low-level repression of the protesters, and when that failed, begrudgingly decided to jettison Mubarak in order to preserve his regime. Finally, in contrast to the Tunisian military’s passive and professional approach, the Egyptian military’s politicized nature led it to seize power in order to preserve its interests during the subsequent transition to democracy.
On Being a Christian in Late Antiquity
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: August 2023

The importance for Christian ideals in late antiquity of the rise of monasticism is widely recognized. However, Basil the Great’s life and writings tend to be relocated to some kind of second-generation status, despite the fact that his writings on the monastic life are the earliest such testimony that we have. There are several factors in Basil’s understanding of monasticism to be noted: first, the importance of his sister Makrina (not acknowledged by Basil himself) in setting him on the monastic path, and herself (with her mother) pioneering a form of ‘house-monasticism’; second, Basil’s stance in relation to classical ideals of contemplative otium and the Christian ideals he derived from the NT; third, how this played out in his balancing the ideal of the desert with the demands of the city—a balance witnessed in the liturgy ascribed to him.
St Gregory the Theologian and St Maximus the Confessor
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: August 2023

Maximos the Confessor’s Ambigua, ‘Difficulties’, consists almost entirely on discussion of difficulties encountered in reading Gregory of Nazianzus: ‘Gregory the Theologian’. What is it that Maximos finds difficult about Gregory? One underlying difficulty lies in Gregory’s affinity with Origenism, for as a young man he had compiled, together with his friend Basil, a kind of digest of Origen’s works, the Philokalia. By Maximos’ time, two and a half centuries later, Origenism had come to be regarded as heretical. But not all ‘difficulties’ fit that overriding problem. Different kinds of difficulty Maximos faced are explored, drawing on George Steiner’s taxonomy set out in his essay, ‘On Difficulty’, which identifies four types: contingent, tactical, modal, and ontological. The ‘modal’ difficulty, found in the shift from rhetoric to logic between the two thinkers, is identified as widely prevalent, but examples are found of the others, including examples of the ‘ontological’ category of difficulty.
Augustine on Language
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: August 2023

Augustine’s understanding of language is derived from his understanding of signs, signa, itself based on his distinction between res and signum, ‘thing’ and sign, developed especially in De Doctrina Christiana, I. The way signs refer to things is mostly a matter of convention—wholly so in the case of words (which is what his understanding of language largely amounts to). Language communicates by using words for concepts, and the Platonist in Augustine is inclined to mistrust it, for communication by language seeks to convey the intelligible, perceived internally, across the external by the sensible, and so doubly prone to misunderstanding. The Platonist in Augustine is, however, caught out by the Christian in Augustine, for whom the pre-eminent means of communication in God’s by means of the Incarnate Word. As Augustine contemplates this, he discerns a means of communication by means of a communion in love, which frustrates his Platonic scepticism.
Eucharist and Church According to St Maximos the Confessor
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: August 2023

The most considered discussion of ecclesiology in Maximos occurs in his Mystagogia which focuses on the Divine Liturgy. From this emerges a sense of the Church as imaging God’s activity in the cosmos, and the structure of the church building, into nave and sanctuary, mirrors the various realms in which the Church’s Eucharistic activity resonates—from the cosmos to the human soul and intellect. His exposition of the action of the liturgy gives an eschatological dimension to his Eucharistic ecclesiology. Alongside this one can set Maximos’ own relation to the institutional Church of his day in which his witness to a true understanding of the Incarnate Word led him to seek support from the bishop of Rome and led him (and Pope Martin) to the way of martyrdom. The essay seeks to lay bare the way in which these dimensions of his ecclesiology coinhere.
The Place of The Heart of the World in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar
Authors: Louth Andrew
Published: August 2023

The Heart of the World was the first creatively (as opposed to historically) theological treatise of Balthasar. It was published in 1945, after several years of close friendship with Adrienne von Speyr. This essay argues that the book grows out of his relationship with Speyr and contains in nuce the themes of his great trilogy, Herrlichkeit, Theodramatik, and Theologik. It is a theology of experience, the redemptive experience of God-forsakenness, in which the Christian shares in the Son’s experience in the world, an experience that springs from the heart of the Trinity. In this experience the Son is substituted for the fallen and God-forsaken human: the human heart of the Son comes to contain the mystery of iniquity—it is the experience of the Paschal Triduum. In his working this out, there can be seen both opposition to Rahner, and inspiration from Barth.