bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Particular Issues and Interpretations
Authors: Cline Erin M.
Published: October 2021

The Analects contains only scattered references to women and competing schools of thought, but these passages are worthy of close study. This chapter examines what the Analects says about women, and questions traditional understandings of Nanzi in 6.28, arguing that recent scholarship on women in sacred texts from other traditions, such as Mary Magdalene in the Bible, can assist us in our study of such passages. It then explores how the earliest critics of the Analects responded to Kongzi’s teachings, showing how he was as a catalyst for a variety of views in early China. It also examines some of the ways the Analects continues to be influential today as a sacred text, through practices at Confucian temples, popular writings and television programs, widely shared beliefs and practices, and changing laws and policies.
The Meaning of Life Through Israeli Eyes
Authors: Doron Eyal
Published: October 2021

Daily life experience in Israel is characterized by day-to-day tension and absence of calm. Despite this situation Israel consistently achieves high ranking on the World Happiness Index. On the other hand, Israel is also ranked high among the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its poverty rate and in income inequality. This is but one example of the many paradoxes Israeli reality reflects. How does Israeli society, typified by social and economic gaps, enable the majority of its citizens to achieve a fulfilling, meaningful, and happy life? This chapter suggests that the “Startup Nation” of Israel provides its citizens with deep sense of worth and significance through a “special compensation mechanism” that connects each Israeli to its Jewish past, its “start-up nation” present, and the unique Israeli free-spirit and self-expression. This enables the average Israeli who observes the extraordinarily successful few to have a profound and unique sense of meaning. The connection between this “compensation mechanism” and the growth of Israeli innovation and creativity is also discussed.
Yearning for Meaning
Authors: Lebel Udi , Ben-Gal Tzlil
Published: October 2021

This chapter discusses collective memory challenges in the “new wars” and post-heroic warfare era by looking at a unique community: families of civilians who were murdered in terror attacks in Israel. To obtain the resource that they value most—national meaning for their loss and trauma—families of terror victims did not ask to establish a unique or separate victimized identity for themselves, but rather to be perceived as an inseparable part of the “Families of Israeli casualties of war,” a community recognized by the Israeli public as holding a meta-frame that grants them national meaning, leading to the perception of their loved ones as having died during productive operational action. The authors wish to contribute to a further related perspective: collective memory, victimology, and death studies, and to specifically discuss the efforts of new communities to demand recognition of their sacrifice, thus enabling them to ascribe meaning to their trauma by reframing the death and loss of their loved ones from a personal framing to a national one.
Cultural Scripts, Personal Meaning, and Ethno-Class Identities Among Jews in Israel
Authors: Shoshana Avihu
Published: October 2021

This chapter examines the relationship between cultural scripts and the subjective meanings for individuals in everyday life. This relationship will be examined relative to ethnic and class identities in light of the hierarchical cultural order in Israel, which includes two master-groups: Mizrahim (Jews of Arab origin) and Ashkenazim (Jews of European-American origin). Against this backdrop, in-depth interviews were conducted on the relationship between ethnic and class identities among Mizrahim from three groups: Mizrahim from a low socioeconomic class, Mizrahim who have experienced socioeconomic mobility, and Mizrahim born to families of high socioeconomic class. Research findings show that while Mizrahim of low socioeconomic class hold strong ethnic identities (and weak class identities), Mizrahim of the other two groups prefer to dissociate themselves from ethnic identities and favor identities that are perceived as “transparent.” The discussion section exposes the relationships between specific cultural scripts and the phenomenology of individuals.
Transcending Locality
Authors: Pagis Michal
Published: October 2021

This chapter explores the rising popularity of Buddhist meditation in Israel and the self-identity that bodily based mindfulness offers its practitioners. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork among Israeli practitioners of vipassana meditation, this chapter illustrates how in periods characterized by doubt and uncertainty, Israelis find in meditation an embodied anchor for selfhood which substitutes dependency on the social world. Through meditation practice, Israelis recede into the body, temporarily liberating the self from local social embeddedness. Yet, at the same time, this same withdrawal to the body produces universal, humanistic-based identifications. The chapter detects four dimensions in the attempt to transcend local social context: an ideological rejection of particularism, the meditation center as a space without a place, the distancing of social roles and identities in vipassana practice, and a connection to humanity at large through loving-kindness. In meditation experience, considered by practitioners as the most personal, “private” withdrawal into the self, Israeli vipassana practitioners find a universal anchor that transcends social locality.
Jewish Spiritualization as “Meaning Injection”
Authors: Lebel Udi , Ben-Hador Batia , Ben-Shalom Uzi
Published: October 2021

An ethnography was conducted during a seminar for military officers organized by the “Jewish consciousness” (Toda’a Yehudith) unit recently established within the Israel Defense Forces’ Military Rabbinate Corps. The unit does not provide religious services but offers workshops, lectures, and seminars for all soldiers, religious or secular, in an attempt to infuse a sense of “Jewish spirit” intended to empower and enhance motivation to serve. The authors observe that the main aim of the seminar is to “inject meaning” into military service. This is made all the more significant as the seminar is directed at “blue-collar” officers, lacking the aura of combat and its symbolic capital. The authors argue that the seminar has succeeded in positioning their service as attractive, productive, and meaningful by infusing a Jewish-spiritualistic discourse. The use of the language of Judaism and its attribution of a spiritual meaning parallel to “New Age” discourse enables soldiers to imagine their daily service in a more meaningful way, masking the alienation, routine, and marginality of their daily work. This serves to draw participants closer to the Zionist-religious discourse, as only from this perspective is it possible to ascribe such meaning, mission, and recognition to their daily work. A post-modern motif (spiritual meaning) is coopted in favor of the reproduction of a modern hegemony (religion in the army).
Santo Niño in Recoding the History of the Spanish Conquest
Authors: Lee Christina H.
Published: October 2021

Santo Niño de Cebu is one of the most revered saints in the Philippines and draws tens of thousands of devotees during his fiestas, like few others. Santo Niño’s origins and cult formation can be traced to the very first instances of the Spanish conquest. This chapter analyzes the documentary genealogy of the colonial discourse that figures Santo Niño as the symbol for the predestined Christianization of the Philippines and tracks the rise of a native counter-narrative at the end of the sixteenth century that denies his Spanish origins. Its argues that for the Cebuano subjects, as well as other natives of the colonized Philippines, to speak of the pre-Hispanic origins of Santo Niño could have been a means to maintain their own collective memory of the material and spiritual pillage that arose with the Spanish conquest.
Our Lady of Caysasay, the Chinese Goddess of the Sea
Authors: Lee Christina H.
Published: October 2021

This chapter examines the foundation and growth of the devotion to a foot-high wooden icon of the Immaculate Conception who has also been identified as Ma-Cho, the Chinese goddess of the sea and seafarers, since the seventeenth century. It argues that Tagalogs, Spaniards, and Chinese embraced the devotion to Our Lady of Caysasay as a means to protest the indiscriminate massacre of the Chinese of 1639. Tagalog and Spanish grievances over the mass killings of the Christian Chinese in the Taal region were recorded in an investigation conducted by the Manila Church in 1640. The investigation concerned Juan Imbin, a Christian Chinese stonecutter who was believed to have been pulled out of the sea and revived by Our Lady of Caysasay after he had been executed, along with other condemned Chinese, by Spanish forces. Imbin’s miracle investigation is also the only extant source that voices the story of the massacre from the point of view of the Chinese who were targeted by the order of extermination. I argue that it is only by examining the testimonies of witnesses who participated in the investigation of the miracle that we can understand why this particular story was chosen to be remembered by the community at large.
Platonic and Stoic Powers
Authors: Bailey D. T. J.
Published: October 2021

Plato distinguishes between powers and mere possibilities; proposes a criterion for discriminating among powers in the Republic; and entertains the idea that they might lie at the foundations of his ontology in the Sophist. The Stoics likewise distinguished between the properties of individuals in virtue of which they are empowered to make a difference, and the mere fact of predicates coming to hold or fail of them. Both Plato and the Stoics go no further in their enthusiasm for powers, for, among other reasons, both are tempted by the idea that something causally inert supports the foundations of their physics.
Emanationist Powers
Authors: Pessin Sarah
Published: October 2021

This chapter addresses some fundamental approaches to upper (spiritual) and lower (natural) powers within a range of emanationist frames in the Greek, Islamic, and Jewish contexts of Plotinus (3rd century CE), the Theology of Aristotle (9th century CE), and Ibn Gabirol (11th century CE). Starting with Plotinus on upper powers, the chapter lays out some of the most central emanationist insights about emanation in general and in relation to powers in particular, and then turns to some of the shared and different details and implications of upper powers in each of the Theology of Aristotle and Ibn Gabirol’s Fons Vitae. After explaining the sense in which, within an emanationist context, natural powers are what one might call the “afterlives” of spiritual powers, the chapter goes on to explore the relation of upper to lower powers across the three text traditions. The chapter ends with a consideration of emanationist powers vis-à-vis Platonic realism, reflecting in particular on how the perspectival details of Plotinian philosophies of language ought to caution one against too quickly categorizing Plotinian powers alongside any number of other Platonist—or other metaphysical—claims about powers.
The Power of Possibility
Authors: McGinnis Jon
Published: October 2021

This study considers powers, natures, and possibility as they appear in the logical, physical, and metaphysical writings of Avicenna (980–1037), one of the foremost physicians and philosophers of the medieval Islamic world. It is argued that Avicenna maintained the “opacity of powers.” The opacity of powers refers to an epistemological position concerning the limits of empirical methods of investigation and the consequent limits on what one can know about the specific powers of the various natural kinds that populate the world. More precisely, the thesis is that while empirical methods can provide one with knowledge that certain kinds of things possess specific powers, one cannot know the what and wherefore of those powers. Despite an inability to know the causal mechanisms that explains why powers do what they do, Avicenna still believes that empirical methods provide sufficient knowledge about powers to allow for “normal science.” Avicenna’s position, it is suggested, initiated a move toward instrumentalism among post-Avicennan philosophers and scientists in the medieval Islamic world.
Reflection
Authors: Brodnicka Monika
Published: October 2021

The concept of power in Fulani and Bamana metaphysics, derived from indigenous traditions according to the Fulani traditionalist Amadou Hampaté Bâ, stems from the archetype represented by the word. This archetype originates from the Supreme Force, which is an aspect of the Supreme Being, who creates through the power of the verb. Power, in this sense, multiple in its omnipresence and one in terms of its source, is at the same time spiritual energy and its physical manifestations in the world. To access this power, the human being has to reach a state of internal equilibrium through diverse initiations. These initiations facilitate the human being’s perception and expression of the sacred forces through speech, helping to recognize their sacred polyvalence and encourage human reflection of divine speech. The appropriate management of invisible forces leads the human being to become at once the guarantor of harmony and the interlocutor of God.
Reflection
Authors: Kim Mi Gyung
Published: October 2021

Chemistry became a modern experimental science by rehabilitating material powers as the objects of inquiry, which involved a dual strategy of materializing divine power and individuating its manifestations through instrumental mastery. Early modern chemists appropriated the Aristotelian paradox of Creation—the presence of the eternal and immutable in the transient and corruptible—to claim their special access to spiritual forces. The Reformation offered an exceptional opportunity for Paracelsus to forge a chemical worldview while developing an alternative practice of medicine. Alchemical magi in his ideal could unpack the deepest mystery of God’s Creation, channel miracles, and guide men toward a path of self-realization that would evince God’s powers. Paracelsian chemical medicine had to find pragmatic advocates and institutions, however, to foster an epistemological attitude cleansed of his worldview. Chemistry’s public success by the end of the Enlightenment induced romantic longings for chemists’ lost connection with natural forces.
Matthew’s Story
Authors: Myers Alicia D.
Published: October 2021

This chapter turns to the Gospel of Matthew, beginning with a basic overview of historical contexts before digging more deeply into a specific issue, this time the various manifestations of Jewish practices in the Second Temple period. Emphasizing the Jewishness of Jesus, this chapter offers an overview of different Second Temple Jewish “schools of thought,” both those appearing in the Gospels and Acts and those we know of from extrabiblical materials. The chapter, then, gives a literary overview of Matthew before examining three main themes: Jesus’s origins and kingship, the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’s reception by Matthew’s minor characters, including the Gospels’ problematic portrayal of Jewish religious leaders. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of reading Matthew in its context as a Jewish writing that participates in intra-Jewish polemic in order to combat anti-Jewish and anachronistic interpretations.
Luke’s Story, Part 2
Authors: Myers Alicia D.
Published: October 2021

This chapter focuses on the second of Luke’s two volumes, the book of Acts. Giving special attention to its relationship to the Gospel of Luke, this chapter presents Acts as an ancient historiography and explores what that means for its historicity. Building on Roman understandings of identity, this chapter describes ancient understandings of conversion and repentance. Rather than a fundamental change, repentance and conversion were understood as redirecting oneself as a result of a dramatic or divine intervention. In Acts, this intervention comes through the Holy Spirit. Continuing with the Gospel’s emphasis on inclusion, Acts presents God as giving this Spirit to “all flesh.” The chapter then gives a literary overview before discussing three main themes: the story of Pentecost and God’s gift of the Spirit; God’s message for all people as the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise; and the conflicts faced by believers living in the Roman Empire.
The Ten Dollar Opera
Authors: Hecht Stuart J.
Published: October 2021

This chapter posits that the musical Hamilton functions as the incarnation of a new modernism and draws upon Bertolt Brecht’s theater, and The Threepenny Opera in particular, as instruments with which to examine Hamilton, both theatrically and culturally. With Hamilton, Miranda takes modernist theatrical forms originally designed to challenge the traditional status quo and uses them instead to assert a new status quo. That Miranda—racially identified as Latino and making deliberate use of diversity in his cast—should identify with the monied elite is a new chapter in American culture. Hamilton praises privilege, ultimately, as much as it does Horatio Alger’s old notion of moving from rags to riches. Hamilton’s staging and structure strongly echo Brecht, which points out how the old Left has been subverted here to promote a conservative agenda, rather than challenge both, as such devices were originally designed to do.
Musical “Founders Chic”
Authors: Lodge Mary Jo
Published: October 2021

The musicals Hamilton and 1776 take liberties with the historical record in the service of their musical stories. It can be argued that some of the decisions the creators of both shows made in their process are actually meant to communicate American heritage, rather than American history. In his 1996 book Mickey Mouse History and other Essays on American Memory, Mike Wallace has argued that heritage offers “the appropriate past for the desired future,” without the constraints of historical fact (15). Certainly, Sherman Edwards’s musical 1776 summons images of America’s patriotic heritage, right down to the iconic signing of the Declaration of Independence—which didn’t quite happen as the show depicts. This chapter explores how Hamilton, like 1776, creates Wallace’s “appropriate past for the desired future” by examining the adaptation process for the show, particularly as it relates to the musical’s treatment of race and gender.
Taking Hamilton to the Streets
Authors: Boffone Trevor
Published: October 2021

Brief live shows, later called Ham4Ham, preceded the ticket lottery held during every preview performance of Hamilton on Broadway, and then later, on two-show days. This chapter examines how creator Miranda used the Ham4Ham shows to take Hamilton to the streets as part of a long lineage of Latinx theater-making traditions. This chapter coins the term “aesthetics of accessibility” to describe a Latinx theater-making philosophy of accessibility that finds its roots in the early work of El Teatro Campesino and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. Ham4Ham officially ended in 2016, so this essay also looks to the future of aesthetics of accessibility and how Latinx theater and performance continues to be at the forefront of evolving the American theater. Ultimately, Ham4Ham blurs the lines between commerce and generosity; this essay questions what happens when the aesthetics of accessibility are produced in a commercial Broadway context.
Epicureanism
Authors: Gowans Christopher W.
Published: October 2021

The chapter argues that ancient Epicureanism (mainly Epicurus, Lucretius, and Philodemus) is plausibly interpreted as a self-cultivation philosophy. The existential starting point is a life of irrational fears and frustrated desires. The ideal state of well-being is a life of pleasure, understood primarily as the absence of physical pain and mental distress (more tranquilism than hedonism). This ideal life is free of fear of death and the gods, and it is devoted to friendship, moral virtue, and the pursuit of desires only if they are natural and necessary. The philosophical foundation is a materialist, atomistic theory of nature and human nature that entails that death is nothing to fear, the gods are unconcerned with us, and only natural and necessary desires are important. We achieve this ideal through spiritual exercises that involve learning Epicurean philosophy, modifying desires, and cultivating virtue in a community of like-minded people.
Classical Confucianism
Authors: Gowans Christopher W.
Published: October 2021

The chapter argues that classical Confucianism (Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi) is plausibly interpreted as advocating a self-cultivation philosophy. The existential starting point is a life dominated by self-oriented desires for power, honor, money, sex, etc. and, as a result, a social world in which people constantly conflict. The ideal state of being is a life of moral virtue emphasizing differential benevolence for others (ren) through forms of ritual propriety (li), a life rooted in family relationships and characterized by equilibrium and joy—as embodied in ideal figures such as the gentleman (junzi). People achieve this life through spiritual exercises such as learning about classic texts, thinking, developing moral virtues, practicing rituals, engaging in arts such as music, emulating role models, etc. Confucius did not have a developed account of human nature, and there was a disagreement between Mencius, who said it is good, and Xunzi, who said it is bad.
Linguistic Diversity and Human Migrations in Gabon
Authors: Manni Franz , Nerbonne John
Published: October 2021

Gabon is an African country located very close to the homeland of Bantu languages (Cameroon). Starting about 5,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking populations diffused into almost all sub-Saharan Africa. By processing with computational linguistic methods (Levenshtein distance) two independently collected lexical data sets recording the pronunciation of 88 and 158 words in more than 50 linguistic varieties spoken in Gabon, we obtained a numerical classification of the major linguistic groups. We compared this classification to those available based on historical linguistics methods (cognate-sharing defined by experts), and found them to overlap, which indicates that the two methods capture the same signal of linguistic difference (and relatedness). To focus on the historical relatedness between major linguistic clusters, we controlled for the linguistic similarity related to contact, proportional to geographic vicinity, and suggested that the first Bantu-speaking groups to people Gabon where those speaking KOTA-KELE (B20) languages. The other varieties concern five different immigration waves (B10, B30, B40, B50-B60-B70—Guthrie nomenclature) that penetrated Gabon later in history. To conclude, we suggest a peopling scenario that incorporates available paleoclimatic, archaeological, and population genetic evidence.
Migration of Garifuna
Authors: Crawford Michael H. , Phillips-Krawczak Christine , Beaty Kristine G. , Boaz Noel
Published: October 2021

This chapter examines the causes and consequences of migrations as well as population expansions and reductions of the Garifuna (also known as the Black Caribs), and the Carib and Arawak Native Americans from South America to the Leeward Islands of the Caribbean. In the 1600s, African slaves were brought by the British to the Lesser Antilles and admixed with Indigenous Native Americans to establish the Garifuna populations. British colonial takeover of St. Vincent (called Yurumein by the Garifuna) from the French resulted in conflict over land ownership with the Black Caribs, a war, and the forcible relocation of the Garifuna from St. Vincent to Baliceaux Island, Bay Islands, and eventually to the coast of Central America-- Honduras. From two founding communities established near Trujillo, Honduras, the Garifuna populations expanded through fission to form 54 villages distributed along the coast of Central America from Belize to Nicaragua. The evolutionary consequences of these migrations included an exceptional fertility in the founding populations, high genetic variability in some communities due to admixture between Native American and African populations, and resistance to malaria due to genes brought by the parental populations. The Garifuna provide an evolutionary success story driven by their unique history of migrations and genetic ancestry.
Migration of the Zoques to the Mountain Region of Tabasco, Mexico
Authors: Terreros-Espinosa Eladio
Published: October 2021

The mountain region of Tabasco was a significant area in the interregional exchange network in pre-Hispanic times and during the colonial period. Additionally, the exchange of various regional products followed the intricate network of trade routes within the coastal plain and Chiapas. Therefore, the role played by the settlements of the Sierra Tabasqueña within the commercial chain that existed between pre-Hispanic times and the first half of the last century was undoubtedly reflected among these territories. Trade was an important part of the economy of the Zoque settlements established in the Tabasqueña mountain range. Linguistic evidence suggests that the Proto-Mixe-Zoque speakers from several centuries BC were among the first foreign groups to migrate to Tabasco, merging with the local inhabitants. The documents written by Spaniards in the first half of the 16th century state that the Province of the Sierra de Tabasqueña was occupied by Zoque-speaking inhabitants. Based on the analysis of pre-Hispanic pottery recovered in this region, a chronology can be proposed from the Early Preclassic to the Protoclassic period, continuing into the Late-Terminal-Classic through the Late-Postclassic period.
Introduction
Authors: Ismail Raihan
Published: October 2021

The Introduction features an overview of the book. It focuses on the contribution the book intends to make. It briefly highlights previous studies in the areas and the research gap that the book seeks to fill. It provides the justification for studying the networks of Salafi ʿulama in Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as well as the need to reassess existing Salafi typology to reflect a holistic view to understanding Salafism. It also discusses the themes covered in this research in relation to the examination of the networks of the ʿulama. The Introduction also presents the conceptual approach and research methods utilized in the book, and outlines the content of the remaining chapters of the book.
Salafism
Authors: Ismail Raihan
Published: October 2021

This chapter discusses the emergence of Salafi ideals and their historical evolution. It analyzes the various trends within the movement, the place of each trend in contemporary Muslim societies, and the distinguishing features of each trend. Focusing on Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt as centers of Salafism, the chapter analyzes the role played by Salafi ʿulama in these countries and relations with their respective states. The chapter draws from exiting literature on Salafism and the various Salafi movements in the selected countries. It also considers the existing typology of Salafi political thought while outlining how the book proposes to reformulate the typology.
The Poet-Artist as Performer
Authors: Pearson Roger
Published: October 2021

This chapter considers the poet as a performer. It discusses Baudelaire’s understanding of beauty as an effect of heightened attention and spiritual intensity (or ivresse) brought on by the poet-artist’s performance, and a performance such that the creativity and positivity implicit in the act of poetic writing ‘contradict’ and resist—but do not deny or minimize—the destructiveness at the heart of human experience. In preparation for Part II, which analyses Les Fleurs du Mal as a performance of melancholy, the chapter presents two paradigmatic incarnations of the poet-artist as instigator of beauty and alternative lawgiver: first, the Spanish guitarist depicted in ‘Du vin et du hachisch’ as a combination of Orpheus and Christ and whose music gives harmonious, intoxicating expression to the rhythms of life; and second, Fancioulle, the clown protagonist of ‘Une mort héroïque’, whose performances resist the tyranny of a Prince—and melancholy itself—by creating an effect of beauty.
Melancholy and Satan
Authors: Pearson Roger
Published: October 2021

This chapter presents Baudelaire’s views on the relationship between beauty and melancholy and considers his famous definition of beauty (‘quelque chose d’ardent et de triste […] laissant carrière à la conjecture’) in the context of his radically alternative moral philosophy, embraced under the aegis of Satan. Unlike Chateaubriand and Staël, who associate melancholy historically with the advent of Christianity, Baudelaire sees melancholy as deriving from the irremediable ‘tragedy’ of human desire. Accordingly, his Satan (from the Hebrew for ‘adversary’, ‘he who resists’) is not a representative of evil and sinfulness but combines the Satan of Genesis (inviting humankind to know) with Lucifer, the rebellious angel of light who experienced both heaven and hell. Baudelaire’s Satan therefore stands for a human condition of self-conscious ill-being (‘le Mal’) in which the integrity of poetry as a form of progressive lawgiving lies in the open-eyed, no-holds-barred portrayal of the human experience of desire.
The Performance of Melancholy
Authors: Pearson Roger
Published: October 2021

This chapter examines how the double agency of Baudelaire’s poet-performer is manifested in ‘Spleen et idéal’: that is, of a poet reduced by the experience of sexual passion to a state of melancholy and a poet who resists melancholy through poetry—but resists by staging this polarity not merely as antagonism but also as harmony, as both a duel and a waltz. The chapter traces the details of this performance through the so-called ‘love cycles’ and shows how, as this very sense of cyclicity grows, so the evidence of poetic virtuosity mounts. As the themes and images of melancholic passion monotonously recur, the poet’s technique becomes increasingly innovative, so that, as poem follows upon poem, poetic craft emerges as an alternative legislation. Life repeats itself, but each poem is very precisely not the same. Poets cannot change the world, but they can change the way we perceive it.
Prose Poetry and the Press
Authors: Pearson Roger
Published: October 2021

This chapter situates the emergence of Baudelaire’s prose poems within the context of nineteenth-century French journalism. It considers briefly the nature of Baudelaire’s debt to Aloysius Bertrand’s Gaspard de la nuit and, more extensively, the implications of the collection’s possible titles. It assesses the role of Paris in these poems and proposes that as a title (and as a collection) Le Spleen de Paris expresses a poetics of resistance to the false, dogmatic wisdom peddled by the public discourse of the nation’s capital. The chapter then focuses on the publication of Baudelaire’s prose poems in the feuilleton section of La Presse in 1862. It discusses the history and nature of the feuilleton as a context for Baudelaire’s ‘counter-discourse’, and it argues that his prose poems serve to cast insistent and radical doubt on the very possibility of asserting meaning—of laying down the law.
The Voice of the Stranger
Authors: Pearson Roger
Published: October 2021

This and the following two chapters examine how Baudelaire’s resistance to public discourse is informed less by a negative spirit of critique than by a positive spirit of exploration and celebration, an invitation to otherness. This chapter presents the Étranger of the opening poem as the paradigmatic voice of Le Spleen de Paris: the occupant of a ‘double room of his own’, of an endlessly perplexing twilight zone between reality and imagination in which, as in the new genre of the prose poem, beauty and melancholy peacefully co-habit by virtue of the artistic process itself; and a cloud-gazer, a loner able to create his own peopled universe through the power of nebulous conjecture. The first eight poems in the collection are discussed in detail, along with ‘Les Vocations’, ‘Les Projets’, ‘Un hémisphère dans une chevelure’, ‘A une heure du matin’, and ‘Le Désir de peindre’.
The Beauty of the Prose Poem
Authors: Pearson Roger
Published: October 2021

This chapter examines the beauty of the prose poem under three headings: the pictorial, the musical, and the rhythmic. Beginning with ‘Les Bons Chiens’ it presents the poet as a street artist for whom the waistcoat mock-ceremonially bestowed on him by a painter of dogs constitutes the recognition of prose poetry as a powerfully inclusive pictorial medium. It then discusses ‘Le Thyrse’ in relation to the music of Liszt and contrasts his rhapsodic art with Baudelaire’s poetic combination of the contingent and the constructed. The final section explores how the poet presents the phenomenal world as filled with the ‘music of life’ (‘Déjà’), as a place where things ‘think’ ‘musically and pictorially’ (‘Le “Confiteor” de l’artiste’), and it examines some ways in which the poet derives from the chaos of human experience an array of shapes and rhythms that constitute the beauty of the accidental.
Conclusion
Authors: Pearson Roger
Published: October 2021

The Conclusion summarizes how Baudelaire’s conception of beauty as an effect evolved into an ethos of conjecture. It discusses his view of beauty as a form of justice, and with particular reference to the opening paragraphs of Les Paradis artificiels. Defining lawgiving as the attempt to fit the apparently contingent into a pattern—to have a chaotic world make sense—it concludes the account of ‘the poet as alternative lawgiver’ by characterizing Baudelaire’s poet as one who invites his readers to become lawgivers themselves and to recast their habitual moral and intellectual perceptions of the business of living. The chapter ends by discussing the beauty of Baudelaire in the light of Seamus Heaney’s account of poetry as a form of ‘redress’, and concludes that Baudelaire considers beauty to be a force for moral good because it provokes us to re-imagine the world in a spirit of progressive and playful experiment.
The Banishment of Death
Authors: Camposampiero Matteo Favaretti
Published: October 2021

Leibniz upholds immortalism in its extreme form. Nothing ever really dies, for animals (and not only their souls) are indestructible except by God’s power. Eighteenth-century philosophers described Leibniz’s doctrine as exilium mortis or “the banishment of death”, which most of them rejected as an implausible, ridiculous, or even scandalous notion. In order to understand this negative reaction, this chapter reconstructs the German debate among Leibniz’s contemporaries and immediate posterity on such issues as: Is the banishment of death a novelty or just an updated version of some traditional belief? How can the living body preserve its own identity through the dramatic transformations caused by death? On the other hand, the general hostility that surrounded the banishment-of-death doctrine suggests that the denial of natural mortality was actually perceived as a threat to Christian dogma – which challenges the naive assumption that immortalist claims are mere expression of a philosopher’s pious concerns.
Learning to Live a Human Life
Authors: Shapiro Lisa
Published: October 2021

This chapter explores how some early modern philosophers conceive of learning, how that conception intertwines with models of education, and how it ties into what can only be characterised as a movement to educate women in particular. The discussion focuses on education that aims to teach us both that we are free and how to use that freedom well. Yet as institutions of education inculcate customs and habits in students, a central question arises about how custom and habit, which are in many ways not only apparently antithetical to our freedom but also interfere with our understanding that we are free, are integral to our learning how to live freely and well.
Processing Information
Authors: Shepherd Eric , Griffiths Andy
Published: October 2021

This chapter analyzes how the development and testing of investigative CTs or hypotheses through repeat iterations of the ACCESS cycle gave rise to case material: information that assists in revealing what happened and points either towards, or away from any suspect's guilt. It highlights the significance of the effective processing of this information to understand its true value. The chapter explores this task from nine perspectives: the processing challenge posed by people's testimony, how to maximise the grasp of fine-grain detail (FGD), three methods for representing detail that facilitate analysis, how to create an overview of key material, identifying what you need to know and planning how to get it, how to assess alternative CTs and the disputability of information, visual planning for an interview, and finally cognitive debiasing to ensure the quality of your information processing. Finally, the chapter presents a common thread on information processing and professional management of information: conscious commitment to being open-minded, rational, and methodical when capturing FGD mentally and when working with FGD across the entire spectrum of processing task: representation, examination, analysis, assessment and planning.
Interviewing the Witness: Key Considerations
Authors: Shepherd Eric , Griffiths Andy
Published: October 2021

This chapter stresses the importance of witness interviewing, and argues that it is a complex discipline. It details how an interviewer applied the psychological fundamentals discussed in previous chapters across a wide diversity of witnesses and situations in order to obtain reliable information in real life criminal investigations. Preparation is paramount and the chapter covers a number of the relevant key considerations. It begins with categorising the multiple types of witness and proceeds to examine how the interviewer can prepare effectively, reducing the risks posed by interviewer bias and interviewee memory contamination, to work with any witness, including those considered vulnerable in order to obtain detailed and reliable disclosure. Ultimately, the chapter analyzes how witness interviewing changed with gradual recognition of the complexity and diversity of the demands placed on the interviewer by factors such as trauma and vulnerability, the expanded legal framework which requires video recorded interviews and the diverse categories of witnesses encountered.
‘Covered Me with Tracks’
Authors: Treharne Elaine
Published: October 2021

Chapter 3 introduces the writing of books, the physical act of inscribing the manuscript, by discussing how the scribe’s work is depicted in early medieval texts and images. It focuses on analyses of the kinds of tools, practices, and physical actions involved in the production and design of books and considers modern attitudes towards scribes and their work. It suggests that there is a great deal more to appreciate about handwriting from the medieval period, including the pleasure and joy that scribes took in their work and how the finished folio looked after the work was completed. The chapter questions the point of using ‘grade’ to describe script, and proposes that the scholarship evidenced by many scribes should be more readily recognized.
‘Covered with Protecting Boards’
Authors: Treharne Elaine
Published: October 2021

Chapter 7 investigates images of manuscripts contained within illustrations in medieval books to determine how medieval manuscript compilers and artists themselves understood the form of the codex. Notably, many miniature books are shown as being held by hands that are veiled by garments in an acknowledgement of the book’s holiness and point of connection between this world and the celestial. The Byzantine influence of this artistic motif is seen in the Encomium Emmae and analogous manuscripts. Analysis of miniature books gives rise to a taxonomy of the book through its form and position in illustrations, where books are depicted as whole and often hefty objects. This new observation calls into question the utility of seeing medieval books as comprised of parts, instead of recognizing the validity of their voluminousness and the requirement of touch for the full functioning of the codex.
Fabrics and kinematic analysis of quartzites, ice and peridotites
Authors: Bouchez Jean-Luc , Nicolas Adolphe
Published: October 2021

This chapter is particularly devoted to microscopic scale fabrics. Fabrics can be defined as the spatial and geometrical configurations of all components that are contained in a rock. These components are penetratively and repeatedly developed throughout the volume of rock. In other words, a fabric is the relative orientation of all parts of a rock mass. The processes that result in the development of shape fabrics and lattice fabrics will be examined in some detail. Examples are given demonstrating that fabrics are ubiquitous in geological formations subjected to large deformations, in the continental crust represented by quartz and in the mantle represented by olivine, as well as in the external shell of the Earth represented by ice. Fabrics are responsible for a rock anisotropy that guides seismic wave propagation in the mantle and favours localization of potential deformation. For geologists, a rock fabric holds the key to kinematic analysis and interpretations, in particular the sense of shear that always accompanies large deformations, and the understanding of mantle flow. Past and present mantle flow are analysed in terms of structure, fabric, microstructure and seismic anisotropy of olivine-rich rocks (peridotites).
Horizontal/vertical displacements and their rates
Authors: Bouchez Jean-Luc , Nicolas Adolphe
Published: October 2021

This chapter widens our scope towards translation and rotation. These displacements are critical in tectonic studies along with distortion, which has so far been the main subject of this book. Note that a translation needs a fixed reference to be defined. Consider, for example, the glide of the lithosphere over the asthenosphere with respect to the mid-Atlantic ridge. On a spherical surface, a translation is also a rotation, where the horizontal displacement of a plate is governed by a rotation axis (or pole) and an angular velocity. Vertical displacements of the Earth’s surface are one order of magnitude less (on the order of mm per year) than horizontal displacements. Lots of studies, performed in the frame of a discipline called neotectonics, attempt to determine uplift rates through different techniques, such as fission track and radioactive decay. They will be briefly presented in this chapter. The main reference for vertical displacements is the sea level, which itself is mobile through time. This mobility is obviously sensitive when processes such as erosion or post-glacial rebound are considered, but much less significant when exhumation of deep-seated rocks may reach kilometres during an orogeny.
Emotions, Virtues, and Vices in the Sienese Reflection on Violence and its Remedies
Authors: Zanetti Domingues Lidia Luisa
Published: October 2021

Chapter 2 builds on the description of models of criminal justice from the previous chapter by investigating how these different visions of society translated into the representation and promotion in the sources of different virtues, behaviours, and emotions as the appropriate reactions to offences and violence. Specific attention will be given to penitential constructions of the virtues of mercy, humility, and patience in sources such as hagiography and sermons. In this chapter, the methodology of the relatively new field of the ‘history of emotions’ is applied to the central themes of the thesis, and it is argued that this constitutes a particularly fruitful avenue of research neglected so far by scholars of communal Italy.
Communal Legislation and the Pursuit of Divine Justice
Authors: Zanetti Domingues Lidia Luisa
Published: October 2021

Chapter 5 focuses on lay views of criminal justice as expressed in Sienese ‘programmatic’ texts such as statutes. It aims to challenge the idea, expressed by some scholars of the Italian city-states, that communal justice was essentially vengeful in nature, by showing that, as in religious conceptions of justice, lay justice was also a polysemic concept that encompassed both ideas of revenge and mercy. It suggests that, even though the values of the ‘culture of revenge’ were indeed still central in the education of late medieval Sienese, as suggested by previous scholars, ‘private’ revenge between individuals or families was not legalized, even though ‘public’ revenge could be legitimized by making reference to religious concepts such as those described in Chapter 4. This highlights how religious elaborations on crime and violence were not just passively received by lay elites, but transformed to serve their own purposes.
The Development of Criminal Justice in Siena and the Influence of Religious Ideas
Authors: Zanetti Domingues Lidia Luisa
Published: October 2021

Chapter 6 checks the practical influence of the previously described theoretical elaborations in sources such as petitions, minutes of assemblies, and court records. It provides examples of how religious actors directly influenced the Sienese to create spaces for mercy in the judicial system of the city, especially for the benefit of poorer citizens: such examples show, the thesis argues, that references to religious principles by communal governments were not entirely instrumental, but the result of an effective dissemination of ideas by friars and lay penitents. The chapter also shows the high level of ‘legal consciousness’ of the Sienese, including those who did not participate in the government of the city for reasons of gender or social class: in petitions for amnesties they were indeed able to manipulate effectively the three discourses of criminal justice described in this thesis to their own benefit, instead of limiting themselves to absorbing them passively.
Psychophysics to Literary Experiments: Gertrude Stein and Neural Composition
Authors: Knoper Randall
Published: October 2021

The last chapter returns to automatisms and the concept of the reflex arc as they were investigated and rethought in Gertrude Stein’s early writings. Critics frequently analyze Stein’s work by reference to William James, one of her teachers at Harvard. Only a few think it important that Hugo Münsterberg, the German physiological psychologist, supervised most of her work in the Harvard psychology laboratory. I argue that Stein sided with Münsterberg against James’s interest in split personalities and his belief that they explained automatic writing. Stein conducted an experiment to discount such ideas, and in the process she discovered her process of allowing automatism to foster invention in composition. But, eventually recoiling from Münsterberg’s aim to exploit unconscious physiological automatisms for industrial efficiency and social order, Stein later experiments in Tender Buttons with ways to escape such determined responses in the creation of meaning.
Beef
Authors: Young Alasdair R.
Published: October 2021

This chapter revisits one of the most discussed cases of EU non-compliance with WTO rules; its ban on hormone-treated beef. It provides a fuller and more nuanced analysis of the case than is found in the existing literature. It covers the policy from its initial adoption through the end of 2019 and includes a discussion of the EU’s efforts to shelter its policy during the Uruguay Round negotiations. The beef hormones case is one of only two in which enforcement tariffs were imposed, with both the United States and Canada adopting tariffs. The chapter demonstrates that tariffs did not prompt affected exporters to lobby for lifting the ban, as assumed by demand-side explanations. Rather, EU policy makers, caught between a desire to comply (in order to uphold the then new WTO and avoid encouraging reciprocal abrogation) and a belief that hormone-treated beef was unsafe, sought to change the form, but not the substance, of the bans to make them WTO compatible.