bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Non-centralized Coordination during a Transboundary Crisis
Authors: Glynn Natalie
Published: August 2023

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 presented the world with a major issue requiring collective action to appropriately address. Contrasting non-centralization with administrative coordination and centralization as approaches to collective action in federal systems, this chapter examines the decision-making and coordination of freedom of movement policies during the first nine months of the pandemic to understand what coordination arrangements arose in four different federal systems (Australia, Canada, the European Union [EU], and the United States). The comparison highlights the continued importance of regional governments to policymaking in federal systems, the value of the European Commission as both a coordinator and negotiator for policymaking, and the potential that Australia has as a comparator for the EU. It concludes that the development of New Intergovernmentalism has not simply undermined the role of supranational institutions in the EU, but rather the intergovernmental institutions working with the supranational ones have created new dynamics that may be disempowering in one way and empowering in another way for supranational institutions.
Fascination
Authors: Bushman Richard Lyman
Published: August 2023

A new attitude toward Mormonism and the gold plates began to infuse critical literature in the years after the Civil War. In the 1830s, the prevailing tone was outrage at the imposture. After the Civil War, a few writers began to exploit the plates for their amusement value. They were treated as a fabulous tale. Latter-day Saints themselves began to embellish the plates story with accounts of a cave in a hill near the Smith farm where a trove of plates was stored. At the end of the century when scholarly interest was increasing, a novelist named Lily Dougall offered a fictional account of how Joseph Smith could have sincerely believed he had plates though they were imaginary. Dougall’s work foreshadowed the efforts of subsequent novelists and historians to explain Smith and the plates psychologically without condemning him.
Scientific Approaches
Authors: Bushman Richard Lyman
Published: August 2023

To summarize modern views about the gold plates, the chapter imagines how a museum curator might choose to display the plates were they to enter the collection. Four stories are told to explain the plates. 1. A naive boy is led by an angel to recover and translate the plates. 2. The plates are an imposture devised to hoodwink the public. 3. The plates were an elaboration of the treasure-seekers’ belief in spirits who guard treasures. 4. The plates are an instance of ancient record-keeping. Each story points to artifacts that might be displayed along with the plates to give them context. None of the stories, however, is completely satisfactory, and the chapter concludes that the only Book of Mormon itself provides a cordial context.
The Future
Authors: Cameron Charles M. , Kastellec Jonathan P.
Published: August 2023

This chapter addresses the future of Supreme Court appointment politics and the courts it will likely make. In particular, it uses computer simulations to predict how the makeup of the Court might change under a variety of future paths. First, it shows that the conservative majority on the court as of 2022 is likely to persist for several decades. Next, it shows how the events of 2016 created a historical pivot point for the court. Third, it examines how the court would be affected by a world in which nominees are not confirmed during divided government. Finally, it examines how two institutional reforms—court packing and term limits-would affect the long—run composition of the court.
Postscript
Authors: Coles Elizabeth Sarah
Published: August 2023

The book ends with a reflection on the performance-orientation of Carson’s most recent work and a brief history of her approach to the lecture form: from Short Talks to the performance scripts of Float (2016) and more recent collaborations such as “Lecture on the History of Skywriting” (2019). The performance aesthetics of these late works herald a decisive move away from literature (and its study) as the private lyric experience Carson theorizes in Eros the Bittersweet—and which so many of her works chronicle and expose—toward a public, collaborative, and intermedia scene for the products of scholarship. At the same time, Coles offers, the move toward multi-sensory, site-specific performance is anticipated in Carson from the very beginning.
After We’ve Gone
Authors: Nagel Thomas
Published: August 2023

This chapter cites Samuel Scheffler’s Death and the Afterlife, which explores the powerful but often unnoticeable ways in which facts about death affect the values that govern lives and the motives that shape them. It addresses the question of how people should feel about their own mortality if death is the end of their existence. It also argues that the collective afterlife is enormously important, though its importance escapes people’s attention because they take it so much for granted. To reveal the place of the afterlife in the structure of concerns, motives, and values, the chapter explores the classic philosophical method of counterfactual thought-experiments. It describes the doomsday scenario and the infertility scenario to explain the significance of something, imagining its absence, and seeing what else changes.
Korsgaard, Kant, and Our Fellow Creatures
Authors: Nagel Thomas
Published: August 2023

This chapter talks about Christine Korsgaard, who is distinguished within the field of philosophy for her penetrating and analytically dense writings on ethical theory and her critical interpretations of the works of Immanuel Kant. It covers Korsgaard’s Fellow Creatures: Our Obligations to the Other Animals, which blends moral passion and rigorous theoretical argument. Korsgaard deploys a Kantian account of morality to deal with the question of how we should treat animals, though she also criticizes Kant’s own answer to the question. The chapter points out how Korsgaard’s book provides the opportunity for a wider audience to see how philosophical reflection can enrich the response to a problem that everyone should be concerned about.
Fictions and Ideals
Authors: Nagel Thomas
Published: August 2023

This chapter assesses Kwame Anthony Appiah’s analyses of idealization. The theme and title of his book, As If: Idealization and Ideals (2017), pay tribute to the work of German philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Vaihinger contended that much of our most fruitful thought about the world, particularly in the sciences, relies on idealizations, or what he called fictions—descriptions or laws or theories that are literally false but that provide an easier and more useful way to think about certain subjects than the truth in all its complexity would. In general, Appiah defends the value of idealization, but he is also aware of its intellectual dangers. The chapter then considers Appiah’s discussions of decision theory, counter-normative idealization, the role of idealization in moral theory, and immigration policy.
Peter Strawson 1919–2006
Authors: Nagel Thomas
Published: August 2023

This is a eulogy for the philosopher Peter Strawson, who died in 2006.
Subjectivity
Authors: Zagzebski Linda Trinkaus
Published: August 2023

This chapter begins by distinguishing subjectivity from objectivity, arguing that subjective states are something real that must be knowable by a God who knows everything. A subjective state is consciousness as it is experienced from the first-person perspective of the subject. The objective is the world, including consciousness, from an outside viewpoint, or the third-person viewpoint. The chapter gives a brief history of the origin of the subjective/objective divide in modern philosophy, art, and literature, arguing that the distinction did not exist in the premodern period. The chapter then addresses the scope of subjectivity. It applies to human beings, many animals, and possibly artificial intelligences, as well as God himself. Subjectivity is sometimes criticized as a partial and limited perspective. This chapter argues that it is important, and is a phenomenon with enormous scope. To fail to know it is to fail in knowing everything.
Divine Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity
Authors: Zagzebski Linda Trinkaus
Published: August 2023

This chapter turns to the way in which omnisubjectivity can illuminate the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and the infusion of the Holy Spirit. Each person of the Trinity has a distinct set of subjective states. Subjectivity is the inside of a person. That is compatible with there being an individual divine being that instantiates the divine essence. This way of looking at the Trinity can also be applied to the problem of evil. Subjectivity means that there are subjective reasons for acting as well as reasons arising from the divine essence. The subjective reasons are personal and are not fully predictable given the nature of God. The chapter then turns to the Incarnation and argues that Jesus Christ was one person with one continuous stream of conscious states from all eternity through the earthly life of Christ and afterward. As one person, Christ had a single set of subjective states, not a split mind. The chapter also speculates on how that is compatible with having two distinct natures. The final section looks at how the Holy Spirit’s subjectivity can interact with human subjectivity in the operations of grace.
The Rise of Grain, 2000–2010
Authors: Azarieva Janetta , Brudny Yitzhak M. , Finkel Eugene
Published: August 2023

The Russian Federation entered the twenty-first century heavily dependent on food imports. By 2010 it had become a major exporter of grain. This chapter presents the reasons for the rapid growth of Russian food production, not just as an industry, but also as a political and security ideal during the first decade of Putin’s leadership. The authors show that the securitization of food and the emergence of nutritional self-sufficiency as a key political goal resulted from both objective economic reasons and clever ideological and bureaucratic entrepreneurship. Economic factors, such as the devaluation of the ruble and growing global demand for grain, helped the growth of Russian food production, but it was primarily the ideological vision of the conservative minister of agriculture Aleksei Gordeev that turned food into a central pillar of Putin’s regime. The chapter also documents the instruments the government used to increase food production
Sanctions and Countersanctions
Authors: Azarieva Janetta , Brudny Yitzhak M. , Finkel Eugene
Published: August 2023

On March 18, 2014, President Putin signed a law that annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula to Russia. In response to the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea and the ensuing war in the Donbas region of Ukraine, the United States, EU, and other Western governments introduced sanctions on major Russian state-owned firms and Russian politicians, media personalities, military commanders, and oligarchs close to Putin. In retaliation, Russia imposed the so-called countersanctions that banned from imports from most Western countries. This chapter explains the reasons that prompted Putin to center his response to Western sanctions on food and argues that the food import embargo was a dramatic attempt to achieve nutritional independence from the West and reduce Russia’s vulnerability to external pressure in the unfolding conflict. This chapter also documents the complete transformation of food supply into a state security domain with the appointment of the new minister of agriculture Dmitry Patrushev.
Conclusion
Authors: Ko Jiyoung
Published: August 2023

This chapter summarizes the central arguments and findings of the book: popular nationalism does not inevitably lead to interstate war, and it can facilitate the maintenance of the status quo. After briefly reviewing the arguments and findings from each chapter, this chapter discusses some remaining questions. It also draws several implications for the international relations scholarship and highlights avenues for future research. In addition, based on the findings, this chapter offers a number of critical policy implications to prevent wars that stem from popular nationalism. Finally, it also provides extended implications about Chinese popular nationalism and the likelihood of war in the Asia-Pacific region.
Shifting Grounds
Authors: Kadercan Burak
Published: August 2023

Shifting Grounds brings together the existing social constructivist research in international relations (IR) and political geography, and examines the interactive relationship between territory and war from conceptual, theoretical, and historical perspectives. The central premise is the following: territory is what states and societies make of it. Put differently, states and societies have adhered to different forms of territoriality across time and space, and territory as well as territorial control meant different things in different time periods and regions. Shifting Grounds makes two claims. First, how state elites conceive territory within and beyond their domains affects their military objectives as well as methods and strategies for waging war. Second, adherence to different forms of territoriality leads to different modes and patterns of war, and wars themselves may affect how state elites and societies conceive territories. The impacts of different territorial ideas and practices on war are illustrated through a wide variety of cases including but not limited to revolutionary France, the Ottoman Empire, British colonial expansion in South Asia, and ISIS. The transformative roles that wars can play in shaping the dominant territorial ideas and geopolitical assumptions, in turn, are examined in the context of “systemic” wars, with an emphasis on the diverging impacts of such wars on Western and non-Western geographies. Shifting Grounds sheds light on the shifting and shifty nature of the relationship between territorial ideas and armed conflict not only in the context of the distant the past, but also in present-day global politics.
Territorial Orders and War
Authors: Kadercan Burak
Published: August 2023

This chapter outlines the conceptual and analytical framework, and unfolds in four steps. The first segment elaborates on key concepts such as territory, territoriality, territorialization, reterritorialization, state, and war. The second step involves introducing the territorial orders framework. Territorial order is best seen as the collection of aspirational ideas and associated state-led efforts that aim to regulate the ways in which the state should demarcate space and organize space-society association within the state’s domain. This framework is built on two dimensions. The first is demarcation principles, which can be defined in terms of either fluid frontiers or rigid borders. The second is sociospatial organization, which can be portrayed in terms of heterogeneity or homogeneity. This framework then produces four distinct territorial orders: mosaic, monolithic, amorphous, and virulent. The third step elaborates on the ways in which these four territorial orders can affect how states and societies approach war over territory. Finally, the chapter offers a novel theory that specifies how wars, especially systemic wars, affect territorial orders. Doing so, it distinguishes between the impacts of these wars in the Global North and Global South.
(Re)Materializing Intersectionality in Transnational Context
Authors: Spitzer Denise L.
Published: August 2023

Informed by feminist geography, critical race theory, and decades of empirical research with older Somali refugee women in Canada, this chapter examines how intersectionality is (re)materialized both within and outside their diasporic community in different transnational locations. The chapter argues that greater attention needs to be paid to spatial and temporal dimensions to better conceptualize intersectionality as an analytical lens for political mobilization among refugees and immigrants. The constellation of social markers that comprise intersectionality and situate migrants and their communities within social hierarchies profoundly influence access to socioeconomic resources, constructions of identity, and how these women respond to their immigration situations. Notably, the chapter concludes that, for immigrants, intersectional status is not static; hence social identities and locations fluctuate across place and time. Subsequently, migrating across borders involves moving into new social landscapes, which invariably engenders shifts in social positioning.
What Data for Evidence-Informed Migration Policies in Africa and Europe?
Authors: Schöfberger Irene , Rango Marzia
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines policies and transnational efforts aimed at enhancing the availability and timeliness of data on migration from North and West Africa and across the Mediterranean. It argues that efforts to support evidence-based policymaking and programming are informed by changing policy priorities in migrants’ countries of origin, transit, and destination. The chapter further argues that research attention has tended to focus on the analysis of either shifts in transnational migration policies or migration-related trends based on newly available data, and less on how processes of policy negotiation and the production of evidence on migration interact. The chapter fills this gap by exploring how transnational efforts to improve data on migration in West and North Africa and across the Mediterranean have been interrelated with transnational policymaking processes, particularly in the migration policy context of Africa–EU relations.
Intersectionality and the US Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Program
Authors: Beltran Karla Rodriguez , Hamilton Erin R.
Published: August 2023

This chapter evaluates the US Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which granted eligible undocumented immigrants who arrived as children deferral from deportation and work authorization. The chapter examines the program from the perspectives of intersectionality, transnationalism, and socioecological systems. It emphasizes the limitations of the program and the immigrant rights movement in the United States. The chapter argues that DACA interacts with race, class, and gender to inform the experiences of program participants, revealing variations in the experiences of DACA recipients. Moreover, the chapter observes that the program generates a new axis of differentiation among immigrants as the policy rationale draws on discourses about “the good migrant” in defining who is deserving of protection, with consequences for recipients and nonrecipients alike. The chapter concludes that the political goals underlying DACA are better served by a vision that emphasizes the heterogeneity of participants’ experiences.
Of Ranks and Peripheries
Authors: Nshimbi Christopher Changwe
Published: August 2023

This chapter discusses policy and public discourses on intraregional or continental African migrants and refugees in Southern Africa. The chapter argues that narratives on migrants and refugees, especially in South Africa, present attitudes that construct migrants as a threatening “Other” and that hostility toward immigrants in Southern Africa is rooted in a regional system of labor migration established in the late 19th to early 20th centuries. The chapter analyzes this hostility using intersectionality to consider the ways that, and why, socioeconomic exclusionary frameworks concerning immigrants persist in Southern Africa. It particularly examines the case of immigrants from South Africa’s immediate neighbors that have traditionally supplied it with migrant labor and investigates the roots of discrimination and xenophobia experienced by immigrants from other African countries living in South Africa.
Immigrants as a Potential Development Resource to Countries of Origin
Authors: Okeke-Ihejirika Philomina
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines the contributions of sub-Saharan Africans to their countries of origin as well as to Canada’s population growth, labor supply, and cultural diversity. It argues that there are synergies between migration and development and that newcomers could constitute a “brain gain” to their home countries as a critical mass that makes important social, political, and economic contributions. The chapter presents data from Alberta, Canada, which suggest that African immigrants’ socioeconomic status and level of satisfaction fall below their pre-migration expectations. It concludes that since Canada relies on newcomers, it should improve their overall welfare and well-being if they are to successfully contribute to their host society’s economy and multicultural heritage. Enhanced well-being for African immigrants could easily translate into gains for both their countries of origin and that of settlement.
“Thou Art Welcome”
Authors: Mfoafo-M’Carthy Magnus
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines the mental well-being of racialized immigrants and refugees in Canada, The paper argues that Canada’s current immigration policy accepts immigrants and refugees from different parts of the world who end up faced with challenges associated with acculturation and the stressors involving the immigration process and resettlement. It explains the trajectory of migration; pre-migration, migration, and post-migration, and discusses their impact on the mental health and of immigrants The chapter concludes with recommendations on ways to ameliorate these challenges and suggests guidelines for support through cultural brokers, interpreters, policymakers, and consultation with community organizations.
Conclusion
Authors: Makwarimba Edward , Shizha Edward
Published: August 2023

This chapter synthesizes ideas presented in this volume, highlighting major themes and the interconnectedness of the three theoretical and conceptual frameworks (i.e., transnationality, intersectionality, and ecological approach) implicitly and explicitly applied in the volume. The chapter describes an adaptation of all three, a hybrid framework called Framework for Migration Research. The chapter concludes that both transnationality and intersectionality are shaped by the ecological settings and systems that determine the [in]effectiveness of the pre-migration, migration, and post-migration processes. The conclusion reveals that the transnational lives and experiences of immigrants are a result of their multiple new identities. The conclusion cross-references the various chapters to tease out new directions for further migration research, policymaking, theorizing, and settlement and integration programming in ways that strengthen immigrants’ agency and emphasize immigration status and racialized exclusions as key determinants of socioeconomic integration.
Fascination with Unnatural Death
Authors: Aran Gideon
Published: August 2023

Chapter 2 presents ZAKA’s myth of foundation and its history and development from the 1980s until the present, focusing on its golden age and later transformation. Then this chapter examins the organizational and operative aspects of ZAKA, and its symbolic dimension, attempting to account for its uniqueness.
Human Sacrifice and African American Muslims in the 1930s
Authors: Boaz Danielle N.
Published: August 2023

In 1932, in Detroit, Michigan, an African American Muslim named Robert Harris killed his tenant on an altar in his home, as a purported human sacrifice to Allah. In the weeks that followed, as Harris was prosecuted for murder and ultimately was sent to an insane asylum, newspapers across the country declared that Detroit was home to a “voodoo cult,” and that Black Muslims in the city offered human sacrifices to their “gods.” This was likely the first time that Black people in the United States were suspected of belonging to a religious organization centered on ritual murder. This chapter explores how the actions of this unstable man led to an entirely new interpretation of domestic “voodoo” and had profound repercussions for the Nation of Islam that continue to the present day.
Comparative Planetology and Serendipity
Authors: Munévar Gonzalo
Published: August 2023

This chapter explores comparative planetology and serendipity. NASA’s investigation of Venus’s atmosphere led to the discovery of the threat to the Earth’s ozone layer. Satellite monitoring has helped the program to save the ozone layer. Because of serendipity, exploring the solar system improves our views of the Earth. To understand the Earth’s systems, we need to understand what kind of planet it is—an understanding tested by examining other solar system bodies. Knowledge of the history of the Earth makes some mechanisms more plausible than others; for example, plate tectonics requires tens of millions of years. Mars and Neptune are part of the context for the theory of planetesimals and the Earth’s formation. Space science explains the Moon’s effects on the Earth’s climate, how to prevent giant asteroid collisions, Apollo’s evidence for the formation of the Moon, CO2 on Mars and Venus, and Venus’s ocean loss. It offers creative solutions to the CO2 problem on the Earth: solar power satellites and solar shields for energy and temperature control.
Moral Reality and Moral Progress
Authors: Nagel Thomas
Published: August 2023

This chapter elaborates on the notion of moral progress and moral reality. The advancement of moral progress implies some form of realism about moral truth and suggests that moral propositions can be true or false independent of what people believe. Meanwhile, the truth of a moral proposition cannot be distinguished from the existence of a reason for people to conduct themselves in the way it prescribes. The chapter notes how moral progress is mostly intertwined with political or institutional progress, referencing historical examples such as the abolition of slavery and the replacement of aristocracy with popular sovereignty. It explains that progress requires changes to existing institutions, the creation of new institutions, and consonant changes in norms for both institutions and individuals.
Purging the Odious Scourge of Atrocities
Authors: Cronin Bruce
Published: August 2023

Purging the Odious Scourge of Atrocities explains the growth of a small body of human rights law that is binding on all states regardless of whether they have accepted it by signing treaties or whether it is consistent with widespread state practice. This challenges the doctrine of consent, which has been the foundation of international law for the past several centuries. The book argues that qualitative changes in the form of global governance are leading to an expansion in the underpinnings of international law and its role in contemporary world politics. Specifically, in limited and well-defined areas of international law, states have begun to recognize the authority of collective international consensus over individual state consent as the source of some legal rules. This consensus is produced through extensive deliberation among political leaders within multilateral institutions. The book supports this theory by examining the degree to which the international community has developed a consensus around the legal control of “excessive internal state violence,” this is, a level of coercive force that the international community considers to be disproportionate and illegitimate for pursuing state interests within its own borders. These practices (which the Genocide Convention refers to an “odious scourge”) include widespread, systematic attacks on a civilian population; violent persecution of defined groups; torture; and the violation of civilian immunity in internal armed conflicts. In these cases, state action is subject to general international law that overrides their consent.
A Theory of Consensus-Based International Law
Authors: Cronin Bruce
Published: August 2023

This chapter advances a theory of consensus-based international law which holds that under certain well-defined conditions, some international legal obligations can be derived from a widespread agreement among the members of the international community, even in the absence of state practice and written consent. In doing so, it examines the conditions under which such legal norms can emerge, the sources of such norms, and the processes and institutions that enable states to develop them. The sources include multilateral lawmaking treaties; a corpus of soft law supported by a consistent pattern of resolutions passed by decision-making bodies within intergovernmental organizations; principles of international law that have achieved the status of jus cogens; and legal interpretations made by international courts that are broadly cited by legal analysts and political leaders. It then applies this theory to the regulation of internal state violence and the universal ban on atrocities.
International Consensus and the Future of International Law
Authors: Cronin Bruce
Published: August 2023

The concluding chapter examines the degree to which the empirical sections have successfully demonstrated that states have accepted obligations that are not based on consent and whether a new source of international law is required to explain it. It reviews how the increased globalization of world politics through the expansion of multilateral institutions is leading to a larger role for international consensus as the foundation for legal rules. In doing so, it highlights the role of deliberation and process, how tipping points are identified, and how international organizations help to further this process. In doing so, it discusses the implications for the doctrine of consent, theories of consensus-based international law, the future of international law, and the regulation and enforcement of human rights norms.
Nature’s Mind and Mind’s Nature
Authors: Schöberlein Stefan
Published: August 2023

This chapter traces the shifting understanding of the brain by the British Romantics through an examination of the metaphor of the Aeolian harp, the prime image used to describe a brain reacting to nature. Centering on readings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Shelley, this chapter discusses the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century debate on the shortcomings of philosophical theories of mind (especially the Associationism of David Hartley) and observes how literary and scientific writers move from eighteenth-century theories of the brain as vibrating cords to a chemically inflected concept of mind as an atomic property of biological matter. This shift in reading the brain, this chapter argues, leads to a double-edged appreciation of the self by these poets: It elevates the mind to a structuring force in nature, while at the same time challenging the boundaries that uphold the thinking, autonomous self.
Cranial Reconstruction
Authors: Schöberlein Stefan
Published: August 2023

This chapter interrogates the dominance of early psychometrics in the form of racial comparative craniology, in particular the measurement of brain volume. It opens with a reading of Turner’s Confessions to outline Black genius as a challenge to ubiquitous theories of racial cognitive difference, leading into an examination of Great Man theory in advocacy works like those of William Wells Brown in relation to the reformist impulse of the otherwise racially conflicted and complicit field of phrenology. These moments, the chapter argues, outline the emergence of a trend toward psychometric thinking that is exemplified by the medical testing the Union Army conducted on the brains of Black people. It is an act of cultural midwifery of sorts, creating a psychometric gaze that then infects the birth of the Realist novel, as exemplified by Miss Ravenel’s Conversion and Daniel Deronda.
We Go into Space
Authors: Powell James Lawrence
Published: August 2023

The Face of the Moon inspired chemist and Nobelist Harold Urey. He became the leading scientist in justifying crewed missions to the Moon, which he described as a fossil planet that would provide critical evidence about the origin of the Moon, the Earth, and the solar system. After Ranger had established that lunar craters derive from meteorite impact, Surveyor showed that the Moon’s surface would bear the weight of an astronaut, and Lunar Orbiter located the safest place for a lunar landing. On June 29, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down to establish Tranquility Base and collect precious Moon rocks, which they brought back to anxiously waiting scientists. At last, they would be able to decide which of the three classic theories of the origin of the Moon was correct.
Introduction
Authors: Lehrer Keith
Published: August 2023

The introduction discusses the human capacity to reconfigure how we conceive our world, ourselves in our world, and, even most remarkably perhaps, our world in us conceived by us. The book seeks a theory to explain the exercise of that capacity in terms of reflective freedom of choice in practice and theory. The goal is to explain as much as possible and to leave as little unexplained about freedom of choice. The introduction explains the idea of ultimate freedom of choice and offers a preliminary defense of its consistency with scientific explanation and determinism.
Confirmation Not Counterexample
Authors: Capes Justin A.
Published: August 2023

This concluding chapter provides a summary of the previous four chapters and explains how the fine-grained analysis defended in those chapters ultimately vindicates the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). It is argued that we have reason to be suspicious of, and ultimately to reject, our initial intuition that agents in Frankfurt cases are morally responsible for doing what they couldn’t have avoided doing and, consequently, that Frankfurt cases aren’t counterexamples to the principle. It is further argued that, given the fine-grained analysis of the Frankfurt cases defended in the preceding chapters, the Frankfurt cases actually provide further confirmation of PAP.
War powers authorities
Authors: Tama Jordan
Published: August 2023

“War powers authorities” examines the political dynamics associated with US debates during the Obama and Trump presidencies over repealing or replacing authorizations for use of military force (AUMFs) that Congress had enacted into law in 2001 and 2002. While Democrats were generally more supportive than Republicans of repealing the AUMFs, libertarian Republicans joined progressive Democrats in support of greater restrictions on presidential military power. This strange bedfellows coalition was enabled by a politically diverse advocacy coalition outside government that pushed for AUMF repeal. However, the electoral risks facing members of Congress on AUMF votes resulted in congressional inaction on the issue, leaving the president in the driver’s seat on the use of force against suspected terrorist groups. The chapter also considers more briefly the political dynamics associated with two other Trump-era war powers debates, involving the authority to intervene militarily in Yemen and against Iran.
Sanctions on Iran
Authors: Tama Jordan
Published: August 2023

“Sanctions on Iran” examines the political dynamics that have marked recent US debates over imposing or lifting sanctions on Iran. From the 1990s until 2013, Iran sanctions debates were routinely characterized by strong bipartisanship in Congress and tensions between Capitol Hill and the White House, as lawmakers in both parties repeatedly pressed for new sanctions that presidents considered ill-advised. This political constellation was fueled by concerns about Iran’s nuclear program that were widely shared by Americans across the ideological spectrum, as well as by support for sanctions by an influential advocacy group with close ties to both parties. However, policy debates on the issue became more polarized once the focus of Iran policy shifted to a major nuclear agreement negotiated by Barack Obama with Iran and other countries, which raised the partisan stakes of the issue and brought to the fore a core left-right ideological fault line over multilateralism.
Spending on foreign aid and diplomacy
Authors: Tama Jordan
Published: August 2023

“Spending on foreign aid and diplomacy” analyzes factors that influenced the political alignments of Democrats and Republicans on US foreign policy spending during the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Although the greater support of liberals than of conservatives for social welfare programs leads more Democrats than Republicans to favor foreign aid spending, a politically diverse advocacy coalition that highly values aid and diplomacy has facilitated bipartisan support in Congress for this part of the federal budget. Under Obama, who also favored a robust international affairs budget, this coalition contributed to congressional bipartisanship in support of the president. Under Trump, who sought to slash spending on aid and diplomacy dramatically, the coalition influenced bipartisan action by Congress to soundly reject Trump’s proposals.
Spirit-based Christology in Antirrheticus Adversus Apolinarium
Authors: Abecina Alexander L.
Published: August 2023

This chapter turns to Gregory’s second major christological treatise, Antirrheticus adversus Apolinarium. Apolinarius argued that the divinity and humanity of Christ were united via the ‘Spirit’. This chapter shows that Gregory offered his own alternative account of Christ’s unity via the Holy Spirit’s anointing of Christ in eternity, at conception, and in the post-resurrection transformation of Christ’s flesh. In this way, the Holy Spirit grounds both the ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ unity of the divine and human natures in Christ. Antirrheticus adversus Apolinarium therefore presents us with a significantly more coherent picture of the relationship between Gregory’s trinitarian theology and his christology than we find in Contra Eunomium III.
Christ’s Pneumatic Body in the Glory of the Trinity
Authors: Abecina Alexander L.
Published: August 2023

This chapter argues that Gregory wrote In Canticum Canticorum to guide his readers through a subjective process of reading and interpreting the Song of Songs by which the objective reality of human transformation and union with God becomes for them a subjective reality. This chapter focuses on Gregory’s teaching in Homilies 7, 13, 14, and 15 on the church as Christ’s pneumatic body united by the Spirit to the eternal ‘circular’ glory of the Trinity. It shows that Gregory’s account of the subjective process of rightly reading the Song of Songs is itself thoroughly grounded in his understanding of trinitarian unity of activity and Spirit-based christology. In this way, it completes and renders coherent his objective account of human transformation and union with God articulated in earlier doctrinal works from the perspective of human subjective experience.
Space and Time
Authors: Edwards Nancy
Published: August 2023

This chapter introduces the location of Wales on the edge of the Roman Empire in relation to the Irish Sea and Atlantic seaways, its regional geography, climate, and landscape, how communities interacted with their physical surroundings, and changing concepts of time. It discusses archaeological evidence for seafaring and contacts with Gaul, Iberia, and the Mediterranean, Ireland, and Scandinavia, but evidence for land routes is rare apart from Roman roads. The central mountainous massif and river systems of Wales fragment the more fertile coastal lowlands, leading to distinctive regional identities evident in the archaeology. The chapter then considers the potential impact of climate change, particularly the mid-sixth-century ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’ in more marginal areas of Wales followed by the Justinian plague. Pollen diagrams also enable ‘snapshots’ of the changing early medieval Welsh landscape, revealing the exploitation of different environmental zones. Finally, the chapter examines the significance of and archaeological evidence for different concepts of time: natural time—the seasons, generations, and the life cycle—and the replacement of a Roman calendar by a Christian one. It also argues that memory played a significant role in early medieval society with prehistoric monuments and Roman remains in the landscape being reinvented to address contemporary concerns.
The Legacy of Rome, Irish Settlement, and Changing Identities
Authors: Edwards Nancy
Published: August 2023

This chapter considers the Roman legacy, which included Christianity and Latin literacy, and its reinvention, the significance of changing identities as indicated on the fifth- to seventh-century inscribed memorial stones, and the impact of Irish settlement. Early medieval activity is examined on key Roman sites, such as Caerwent and Caerleon, and it is argued that they were largely reinvented in Christian terms, thereby highlighting Christian continuity with the Roman past. Roman artefacts were also recycled, with some curated as amulets. Memorial stones with inscriptions in Latin or primitive Old Irish oghams, or both, demonstrate continuing elements of a Roman identity but also the growing significance of a British identity and the process of Irish integration. They also indicate the persistence of tribal signifiers and the emergence of new ones associated with kingdom formation together with the spread of Christianity and the increasing power of the Church. Other evidence for the longer-term impact of Irish settlement is also examined, including place names and written sources such as the Historia Brittonum.
Craft, Display, and Trade
Authors: Edwards Nancy
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines craftworking in early medieval Wales before discussing the role of artefacts in elite display together with the changing pattern of trade and exchange, increasing use of silver bullion, and less clearly coin, as currency, and places where such interactions took place. Discussion of artefacts includes management of resources, such as timber, and exploitation of materials, such as iron, alongside tools and technology. Some crafts, for example textile production, were domestic and focused on women. Others, such as metalworking, were dependent on patronage with skills passed down the generations. Elite assemblages indicate how power and wealth were displayed and the impact of gift-giving. Penannular brooches likely projected group identities, whilst weapons emphasize martial display in a male-dominated society. Imported pottery and drinking horns demonstrate the significance of feasting and hospitality. Initially, long-distance trade was focused on the Atlantic seaways, but western Britain lay outside burgeoning developments in North Sea and cross-Channel trade during the long eighth century. The Viking advent brought new opportunities for international trade focused along the north coast between Dublin and Chester, and later along the south to Bristol. This is evidenced through increased finds of silver bullion, but, despite the Hywel Dda penny, there is little evidence for widespread use of coin as currency. Although, the early medieval economy followed a similar trajectory to other parts of Britain and Ireland, in Wales, a land without towns, it remained largely undeveloped despite mineral wealth and agricultural surpluses successfully exploited by the Romans.
Oxford Guides to Chaucer
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: August 2023

This book remains in its third edition the most comprehensive single-volume account of the Canterbury Tales, combining information of what is known and what has been thought about the work to offer a fresh and individual tale-by-tale analysis. It provides not only information on textual variations and sources, but a readable commentary on thematic issues, structure, style, generic affiliations, and the contribution of each tale to the work as a whole. It concludes with a survey of the many imitations of the tales down to the early seventeenth century. This new edition also takes account of the fresh emphases in recent theory and criticism that bear directly on the tales, including such matters as gender identity, consent, and racial and religious difference.
The Squire’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: August 2023

The Squire’s Tale is deeply bifurcated in almost every aspect. Threatening to be interminable but deliberately broken short, it provides just two sections of what apparently sets out to be an interlaced romance on the French model. Its first part, appropriately set in Tartary given its interest in wonder, introduces three magic objects, and has French antecedents; the second, close to Chaucer’s own Anelida, concerns the lament of a falcon betrayed by her lover. Early reactions to it ranged from absurd to fascinating; recently it has been widely dismissed as showing either the Squire’s or Chaucer’s immaturity, though its manner of telling is appropriate for the genres it adds to the Tales.
The Franklin’s Tale
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: August 2023

The Franklin’s Tale is a self-described Breton lai and so adds another to the varieties of romance in the Tales, though it is freely adapted from Boccaccio, probably the Decameron. For long admired for its presentation of a marital crisis overcome by the trust between the spouses, it has more recently been damned as showing the inadequacies of a shallow and patriarchal narrator—a view challenged in this chapter. The plot turns on astrological magic and illusion (high tides do not last for a fortnight), but the resolution is brought about by competitive acts of gentilesse by the three male protagonists.
The Tale of Sir Thopas
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: August 2023

The tale of Sir Thopas, explicitly modelled on the popular form of tail-rhyme romances, is ascribed by Chaucer, as author to himself as pilgrim. Its awfulness rules him out of the competition and gives a certain credibility to the skills of the other tellers, but its dual reception, by the Host on behalf of the pilgrims (insulting condemnation leading to interruption) and by its real audience (admiration for its tour de force as parody) points to the way the same words can be read in opposite ways, as rubbish or genius. The parody extends to its layout in the earliest manuscripts. Its admirers, for different qualities in it, included Spenser and Shakespeare.
Taking Leave Chaucer’s ‘Retractions’
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: August 2023

The relationship of the Retractions to the Parson’s Tale has been widely debated, as has its function: suggestions have ranged from Chaucer’s establishment of his canon to deathbed repentance. It is however structured as a series of prayers, to the readers, the Virgin, and Christ, culminating in a prayer for salvation.
Imitations of the Canterbury Tales 1400–1615
Authors: Cooper Helen
Published: August 2023

This survey of imitations of the Tales extends through the period when they were still a part of everyday culture. It is divided into completions of unfinished tales; new tales composed as part of the pilgrimage structure; tales modelled on Chaucer’s work but without a link to the original; and the afterlives of individual tales, in dramatizations, ballads, and so on.
Introduction
Authors: Moriarty John A.
Published: August 2023

In this chapter, the concept of quantum-based interatomic potentials (QBIPs) is introduced as a viable means of extending the predictive power of density functional theory (DFT) quantum mechanics to the much longer length and time scales historically afforded only by simple empirical potentials. In metals and alloys, this extension of DFT is possible because the valence energy bands in these materials are amenable to simplified quantum treatments, leading to reliable expansion of the total energy in terms of weak interatomic matrix elements that define the potentials. In particular, QBIPs derived from first-principles generalized pseudopotential theory can power robust atomistic simulations on both simple- and transition-metal systems involving many millions of atoms. Because of their rigorous quantum origin, the physics content and accuracy of such QBIPs can also be systematically improved, aided by machine learning with state-of-the-art supercomputers where necessary.