bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Computing Methodologies Supporting the Preservation of Electroacoustic Music from Analog Magnetic Tape
Authors: Pretto Niccoló , Fantozzi Carlo , Micheloni Edoardo , Burini Valentina , Canazza Sergio
Published: June 2019

Electroacoustic music on analog magnetic tape is characterized by several carrier-related specificities that must be considered when creating a copy for digital preservation. The tape recorder needs to be set to the correct speed and equalization, and the magnetic tape could have some intentional or unintentional alterations. During both the creation and the musicological analysis of a digital preservation copy, the quality of the work may be affected by human inattention. This article presents a methodology based on neural networks to recognize and classify the alterations of a magnetic tape from the video of the tape as it passes in front of the tape recorder's playback head. Furthermore, some machine-learning techniques have been tested to recognize a tape's equalization from its background noise. The encouraging results open the way to innovative tools able to unburden audio technicians and musicologists from repetitive tasks and to improve the quality of their work.
On (Greek) Linguistics as a Science
Authors: Drachman Gaberell
Published: June 2019

This paper explores some of the pros and cons of the proposition that if Greek linguistics (included of course in linguistics generally) is to be taken seriously as a science, then it is not enough to simply ‘confirm/corroborate/verify’ a given theory from a given subset of data. Since corroboration can never ‘prove’ a given theory, we also submit the relevant data to the criteria of falsifiability (Popper 1963). For linguistics, this proceeds by appeal to two kinds of empirical evidence, viz.: a) intuitional (including native speaker assessment surveys as well as corpora analyses), and b) instrumental and other ‘external’ (e.g. acquisition, pathology) studies. All this despite the concession that falsifications can be circumvented (cf. Lakatos 1970); so indeed this paper deals with both the few successful (paradigm-replacing) and the many circumvented (paradigm-internal) falsifications. We begin (in section 2) with falsification-successes that culminated in paradigm-shifts in earlier sciences as well as in contemporary linguistics. We then (in sections 3-4) survey intuitive and experimental cases of falsification circumvention from contemporary linguistics. There we clarify that, although there is reasonable support for abstractions, modifications and unifications, experiments have so far offered only partial or suggestive results. Sections 5-6 sum up and conclude.
Aspects of Linguistic Theory and Greek Syntax
Authors: Philippaki-Warburton Irene
Published: June 2019

A detailed appraisal of selected papers from Halpert et al. 2009 (Proceedings of the 2007 Workshop in Greek Syntax and Semantics at MIT) is offered here. It must be recognized that the selections represent only a small section of the wide spectrum which is Greek Linguistics today. The five papers selected for attention here reflect the reviewer’s main interests but the volume as a whole contains a rich array of subjects, of theoretical orientations, and of language areas treated (beyond Greek). What is especially pleasing and encouraging about the entire volume is the number of non-Greek linguists who were chosen to offer commentary on papers and who were interested and familiar enough with Greek linguistic research to enter into scientific dialogue as commentators with the authors. Thus, Greek Linguistics is no longer isolated and its contribution is not restricted to Greek but it creates, extends and stimulates linguistic researchers everywhere.
Obedient Bellies: Hunger and Food Security in Ancient Mesopotamia
Authors: Richardson Seth
Published: June 2019

This essay argues that a broad survey of the evidence for hunger in ancient Mesopotamia shows that, while it was relatively rare in fact (if familiar enough in theory), the political management of hunger by early states points to its use in simulating their positions, in rhetoric and ideology, as providers of security and political membership as a rational economic choice. In fact, the social marginalization and moral pejorativization of the hungry points to these protections as “security theater” rather than security in fact.
Royal Imagery on Kushan Coins: Local Tradition and Arsacid Influences
Authors: Sinisi Fabrizio
Published: June 2019

This article deals with the development of Kushan royal imagery as known from coins in the period between the 1st and the 3rd centuries ad, i.e. from the so-called Heraios series to the coins of Vasudeva. The aim is to challenge the traditional interpretative models which ascribed a crucial role to a Roman contribution, and to highlight instead first the role of the local numismatic tradition, which stretched back to the Graeco-Bactrians, and then the influx of patterns of royal imagery of western Iranian—namely Arsacid Parthian—origin, around the time when Vima Kadphises inaugurated a new imperial coinage.
The Hidden Face of Surat: Reflections on a Cosmopolitan Indian Ocean Centre, 1540-1750
Authors: Subrahmanyam Sanjay
Published: June 2019

The great port of Surat in western India dominated accounts of Indian Ocean trade between the late sixteenth and mid eighteenth century. Consolidated first by an Ottoman notable, it became the Mughal Empire’s western window into the worlds of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. In this essay, I explore Surat’s other, less visible, aspect: namely as an intellectual centre, that brought together diverse and sometimes competing traditions. In turn, we shall see how this vibrant intellectual life was tied up both to certain structures of politics, and to commercial exchange at various scales.
Unsavoury Cosmopolitanism: Reflections on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s “The Hidden Face of Surat”
Authors: Binbaş Evrim
Published: June 2019

This article reflects on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s article on early modern cosmopolitanism entitled “The Hidden Face of Surat: Reflections on a Cosmopolitan Indian Ocean Centre, 1540-1750,” and suggests that the cosmopolitan space was a political space where competing ideas of sovereignty clashed with each other. Therefore, the article argues that the study of political ideas and competing forms of constitutional programs should accompany the focus on life-style preferences of early modern cosmopolites when we study cosmopolitanism.
Beneath the Mustache: A Well-Trimmed History of Facial Hair in the Late Ottoman Era
Authors: Wishnitzer Avner
Published: June 2019

Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of visual representations and written texts, this study argues that officers, civil officials, and urban professionals who came of age in the late Hamidian era adopted the mustache as an expression of a generational identification and a related self-consciously modern masculinity that defined itself against the bearded, Hamidian order. After 1908, when the instigators of the revolution and their supporters climbed up the social and political hierarchies, the mustache rose with them and became the facial ornament of the most powerful people in the empire. Considering the common association of the mustache with youth, its adoption as a marker of identification hints at the unsettling of longtime ageist hierarchies but also, at the durability and adaptability of gender ones.
Varro of Atax in Lucan’s Gallic Catalog
Authors: Biggs Thomas
Published: June 2019

At Bellum civile 1.403-404, Lucan makes a subtle reference to Varro of Atax. Through this metapoetic gesture, he suggests that Varro’s Argonautae and Bellum Sequanicum are topics abandoned in favor of the civil war that the Bellum civile is bold enough to depict. This article first discusses the philological evidence for recognizing the reference and the implications of seeing Varro and the Argonautae in Lucan’s poem. The second section focuses on the idea of Varro’s Bellum Sequanicum and the distinctive dynamic of departure found in the catalog of Bellum civile 1. In particular, it suggests that the movement of Roman troops from Germany and Gaul into Italy represents the movement from textual Bella Gallica and Sequanica to Bellum civile. The qualities of ferocity and gentleness are also shown to play important roles in the metapoetics of the epic.
Comic-Book Superheroes and Prosocial Agency: A Large-Scale Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of Cognitive Factors on Popular Representations
Authors: Carney James , Carron Pádraig Mac
Published: June 2019

We argue that the counterfactual representations of popular culture, like their religious cognates, are shaped by cognitive constraints that become visible when considered in aggregate. In particular, we argue that comic-book literature embodies core intuitions about sociality and its maintenance that are activated by the cognitive problem of living in large groups. This leads to four predictions: comic-book enforcers should (1) be punitively prosocial, (2) be quasi-omniscient, (3) exhibit kin-signalling proxies and (4) be minimally counterintuitive. We gauge these predictions against a large sample of 19,877 characters that were derived from 72,611 comics using data scraping techniques. Our results corroborate the view that cognitive constraints exercise a selective effect on the transmission of popular culture.
Who Wants to Live Forever?
Authors: White Claire
Published: June 2019

Around 30% of world cultures endorse reincarnation and 20% of contemporary Americans think that reincarnation is plausible. This paper addresses the question of why belief in reincarnation is so pervasive across geographically disparate contexts. While social scientists have provided compelling explanations of the particularistic aspects of reincarnation, less is known about the psychological foundations of such beliefs. In this paper, I review research in the cognitive science of religion to propose that selected panhuman cognitive tendencies contribute to the cross-cultural success of basic ideas in reincarnation. Together, this research suggests that extraordinary convictions, including those associated with postmortem survival, are underpinned by some of the same processes that govern mundane social cognition.
Owls, Climates, and Experts
Authors: Munroe Robert L. , Gauvain Mary
Published: June 2019

The cognitive research of Atran and Medin (2008) plus preliminary cross-cultural inquiry about owls permitted the formulation of a hypothesis: Inhabitants of cold-climate societies were likely to be, in relative terms, “experts” on owls. Subsequent cross-cultural study (N = 56) affirmed that in cold-climate societies, in contrast to others, the habits and characteristics of owls were more frequently noted, these birds were more often used functionally (especially for feather-ornamentation), and the human inhabitants of cold-climate areas manifested fewer negative supernaturalistic interpretations of owl behavior. For the sample as a whole, however, some form of magico-religious belief — usually negative, such as association of owls with witchcraft — exceeded all other practices and concepts, including functional uses and ethnozoological descriptions of owls. The importance of taking affective factors into account in cross-cultural cognitive research was emphasized. Exploratory analysis also revealed that owls were of extraordinarily high interest to Native North Americans, and reasons for this regularity were considered. The paper concludes with discussion of the relation between ecological setting and cultural conceptions of the natural world.
Tunes and Tones: Music, Language, and Inhibitory Control
Authors: Graham Robert E. , Lakshmanan Usha
Published: June 2019

A debate is underway regarding the perceptual and cognitive benefits of bilingualism and musical experience. This study contributes to the debate by investigating auditory inhibitory control in English-speaking monolingual musicians, non-musicians, tone language bilinguals, and non-tone language bilinguals. We predicted that musicians and tone language bilinguals would demonstrate enhanced processing relative to monolinguals and other bilinguals. Groups of monolinguals (N = 22), monolingual musicians (N = 19), non-tone language bilinguals (N = 20) and tone language bilinguals (N = 18) were compared on auditory Stroop tasks to assess domain-transferable processing benefits (e.g. auditory inhibitory control) resulting from potentially shared underlying cognitive mechanisms (Patel, 2003; Bialystok & DePape, 2009). In one task, participants heard the words “high” and “low” presented in high or low pitches, and responded regarding the pitch of the stimuli as quickly as possible. In another task, participants heard the words “rise” or “fall” presented in rising or falling pitch contours, and responded regarding the contour of the stimuli as quickly as possible. Results suggest transferable auditory inhibitory control benefits for musicians across pitch and contour processing, but any possible enhanced processing for speakers of tone languages may be task-dependent, as lexical tone activation may interfere with pitch contour processing.
Cognition, Culture, and Social Simulation
Authors: Lane Justin E. , Shults F. LeRon
Published: June 2019

The use of modeling and simulation (M&S) methodologies is growing rapidly across the psychological and social sciences. After a brief introduction to the relevance of computational methods for research on human cognition and culture, we describe the sense in which computer models and simulations can be understood, respectively, as “theories” and “predictions.” Most readers of JoCC are interested in integrating micro- and macro-level theories and in pursuing empirical research that informs scientific predictions, and we argue that M&S provides a powerful new set of tools for pursuing these interests. We also point out the way in which M&S can help scholars of cognition and culture address four key desiderata for social scientific research related to the themes of clarity, falsifiability, dynamicity, and complexity. Finally, we provide an introduction to the other papers that comprise this special issue, which includes contributions on topics such as the role of M&S in interdisciplinary debates, shamanism, early Christian ritual practices, the emergence of the Axial age, and the social scientific appropriation of algorithms from massively multiplayer online games.
Massively Multi-Agent Simulations of Religion
Authors: Bainbridge William Sims
Published: June 2019

Massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are not merely electronic communication systems based on computational databases, but also include artificial intelligence that possesses complex, dynamic structure. Each visible action taken by a component of the multi-agent system appears simple, but is supported by vastly more sophisticated invisible processes. A rough outline of the typical hierarchy has four levels: (1) interaction between two individuals, each either human or artificial, (2) conflict between teams of agents who cooperate with fellow team members, (3) enduring social-cultural groups that seek to accomplish shared goals, and (4) large-scale cultural traditions, often separated into virtual geographic regions. In many MMOs, both magic and religion are represented, in ways that harmonize with a social-scientific theory that defines them in terms of specific versus general psychological compensators. This article draws empirical examples from five diverse MMOs: Dark Age of Camelot, Dungeons and Dragons Online, World of Warcraft, A Tale in the Desert and Gods and Heroes.
The Practice of Phenomenological Empathy Training
Authors: Englander Magnus
Published: June 2019

This article provides concrete examples of a phenomenological approach to empathy training, which is a pedagogical method designed for higher education. First, the phenomenology of empathy and empathy training is briefly described. Second, excerpts from training sessions in higher education are provided as examples. The examples are meant as to concretize the purpose of the training in relation to the overall pedagogical process. In addition, some clarifications are made about how a phenomenological approach can facilitate university students’ deeper understanding of how empathy relate to interpersonal understanding in the we-relation.
The Origins of the Transitional Programme
Authors: Gaido Daniel
Published: June 2019

The origins of the Transitional Programme in Trotsky’s writings have been traced in the secondary literature. Much less attention has been paid to the earlier origins of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International between its Third and Fourth Congress, and in particular to the contribution of its largest national section outside Russia, the German Communist Party, which had been the origin of the turn to the united-front tactic in 1921. This article attempts to uncover the roots of the Transitional Programme in the debates of the Communist International. This task is important because it shows that the Transitional Programme’s slogans are not sectarian shibboleths, but the result of the collective revolutionary experience of the working class during the period under consideration, from the Bolshevik Revolution to the founding conference of the Fourth International (1917–38).
High Tech, Low Growth: Robots and the Future of Work
Authors: Moody Kim
Published: June 2019

For decades futurists, academics and business experts have argued that automation, robots and other new technology would eliminate millions of jobs. Yet the workforce in the US has continued to grow, even if more slowly, to new heights. Work has changed, but the predicted ‘end of work’ failed to materialise even as technology has advanced, albeit unevenly. This article will argue that the answer to this apparent riddle is not to be found in analysing the technology itself, but in Marxist political economy. The progress of robots and related technology will be examined, but the argument is that the limits on technical progress in the actual production of goods and services lie in the turbulence of capitalism since the 1970s with its uneven profit rates.
Return of the Strike: A Forum on the Teachers’ Rebellion in the United States
Authors: Bhattacharya Tithi , Blanc Eric , Griffiths Kate Doyle , Weiner Lois
Published: June 2019

Bringing together leading observers of the 2018 teachers’ strikes in the United States, this forum surveys the origins, character, and trajectory of the rebellion as a whole. We examine the relations between union bureaucracies and the rank and file, the wider political context of the United States, the geography of the strike, immediate and longer-term grievances in the public-education sector, spontaneity and organisation, local cultural contexts and labour histories, strategies and tactics, social reproduction and gender, race and racism, and the potentialities and obstacles facing the movement in the near future.
Deutscher, Lenin and the East-European Perspectives
Authors: Krausz Tamás
Published: June 2019

The article introduces the reception of Isaac Deutscher’s work in Eastern Europe in a historical context and shows how deeply this reception was connected to the various transformations of the system, which had been established after the victory of the Russian October Revolution. The author gives a Marxist analysis of the historical development of state socialism and the various changes in Eastern-European Marxist thought which accompanied this history. He belongs to that school of thought which defines this system as state socialism, and he gives a theoretical analysis of its main characteristics, adding that 1989 failed to fulfil the expectations and hopes of many Western and Eastern-European Marxists.
Text-building and Transmission of Pyramid Texts in the Third Millennium bce: Iteration, Objectification, and Change
Authors: Morales Antonio J.
Published: June 2019

The emergence of ancient Egyptian mortuary literature in the third millennium bce is the history of the adaptation of recitational materials to the materiality of different media. Upon a gradual development, the transformation of the oral discourse into writing began with the use of papyri for transcribing the guidelines of ritual performances as aide-mémoire, and culminated with the concealment of sacerdotal voices and deeds into the sealed-off crypt of king Wenis (ca. 2345 bce). The process of committing ritual and magical recitations into scriptio continua in the Pyramid Texts was subject to several stages of adaptation, detachability, and recentering. Investigating how the corpus emerged through the combination of recitations from different settings elucidates the transformation of oral written discourse into literary style, the traces of poetic and speech elements in the corpus, and its flexibility to disseminate and adapt to different mortuary practices, beliefs and contexts in the second millennia bce and beyond.
The Forgotten Female Figurines of Elephantine
Authors: Cornell Collin
Published: June 2019

In spite of renewed scholarly interest in the religion of Judeans living on the island of Elephantine during the Persian period, only one recent study has addressed the religious significance of the fired clay female figurines discovered there. The present article seeks to place these objects back on the research agenda. After summarizing the history of research, it also makes a new appraisal of the role of these objects in the religious life of Elephantine Judeans. Two factors prompt this reevaluation: first, newly found examples of the same figurine types; and second, Bob Becking’s recent research on Elephantine Aramaic texts attesting the phenomenon of “lending deities.”
Francis Turretin and Jonathan Edwards on Compatibilism
Authors: Helm Paul
Published: June 2019

The aim of this article is to show that the claim of Richard Muller in his recent book Divine Will and Human Choice: Freedom, Contingency, and Necessity in Early Modern Reformed Thought, that the Reformed Orthodox were not compatibilists in their view of freedom but held to the indeterminate freedom of the will, is false. The argument takes the reader through Turretin’s claim in his Institutes that freedom does not consist in indifference but in rational spontaneity. It assesses Muller’s argument that indeterminate freedom incorporates choices between two or more contraries and of none by showing that Edwards respected the same distinctions, and that Turretin and Edwards were agreed that God, the human nature of Christ, and the redeemed in heaven did not act from indifference. The article ends with remarks on Muller’s interpretation of Turretin’s position, that it involves ‘multiple potencies,’ arguing that this proposal meets serious difficulties.
Leave the Tensions
Authors: Shevel Kathryn
Published: June 2019

John Calvin’s account of human agency has been criticized for its lack of a consistent intellectualist or voluntarist explanation of free will, and recent attempts have been made allegedly to smooth out Calvin’s inconsistencies. In response, I argue that the attempt to align Calvin’s theology with either an intellectualist construct or a voluntarist construct conceals all the nuances and difficulties of Calvin’s elaborate doctrine of free choice. Although Calvin upholds the primacy of the intellect as an ideal construct, his understanding of human agency is complex due to his account of the fall. Thus, I argue that the tensions in Calvin should remain, as his different accounts of freedom mirror the type of freedom Adam had in paradise and the disorder that the fall brought to the human faculties.
A Response to John Frame’s Presuppositional Approach to Faith and Reason
Authors: Loke Andrew Ter Ern
Published: June 2019

Presuppositionalism is popular among certain groups of Reformed Christians today, and John Frame is one of its leading proponents. In contrast with the Evidential Approach concerning faith and reason, which affirms experiences and reason as starting points, Presuppositionalists assume the truth of scripture as starting point in their assessment of the truth-claims of Christianity. They appeal to Christians by emphasizing the authority of scripture, by criticizing autonomous human reason, and by highlighting the noetic effects of sin. I address these considerations, show that Frame’s approach is self-defeating and unacceptably circular, and answer his objections to the Evidential Approach.
Plurality, Dialogue and Religious Education
Authors: Astley Jeff
Published: June 2019

This paper begins with a discussion of the internal plurality of Christianity and the issue of selection in the study of religion, before moving to a consideration of the subjective dimension of religious learning. It is argued that a truly dialogical education must allow for the “risk” of conversion, particularly in moral and religious education. The paper attempts to relate this claim to questions of tolerance and respect in educational settings.
MORAL AND PERSONAL IDENTITY
Authors: Carr David
Published: June 2019

Moral conceptions of personal identity seem liable to different, more or less interesting, interpretations. This paper argues that on more interesting interpretations, moral identity is more a significant feature of personal identity than actually synonymous with it. The paper then proceeds to identify and evaluate the relative merits of very diverse conceptions of the relationship of person to moral agency in the major traditions of moral theory.
DO RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS MATTER? BELIEFS AND LIFE-STYLES OF STUDENTS IN FAITH-BASED SECONDARY SCHOOLS
Authors: Dijkstra AnneBert , Veenstra René
Published: June 2019

Despite the claim that plurality - be it religious, cultural, moral, or other - is important to the way in which schools achieve socialisation, there are few empirically validated data concerning the effects of a school system organised around plurality. This contribution explores the influence of faith-based schools on outcomes of schooling outside the traditional core curriculum, using data from the religiously segmented school system in The Netherlands. Based on an overview of earlier studies and an exploratory descriptive and multi-level analyses of data from 7600 pupils in secondary schools, the authors conclude that 1) the empirical basis for drawing valid conclusions about the effects of faith-based schools on outcomes outside the core curriculum is not very solid as yet, and 2) although some effects do seem to exist, the indicators used in this study provide little reason to expect substantial and systematic differences between schools.
“RELIGIOUS IDENTITY” BETWEEN HOME AND TRANSGRESSION
Authors: Heimbrock Hans-Günter
Published: June 2019

Jewish and Christian theologies are guided by the same convictions, basically a message about
the non-identic. This article presents a critical theological evaluation of the use of religion as
means to develop identity. After addressing the concept of “religious identity” in contemporary
discussions, it summarizes basic elements of a theological approach. Third, these insights about
identity are reformulated within a contextual and life world theological approach. Finally, the
text draws some conclusions, which focus on identity formation within pluralistic cultures.
In Search of the Debtera: An Intimate Narrative on Good and Evil in Ethiopia Today
Authors: de Ménonville Siena
Published: June 2019

This article aims to illustrate through a social narrative the role and function of the debtera and their affiliation with the sacred and the profane in the Christian Orthodox regions of Ethiopia today. The article argues that though the debtera are subject to moral opprobrium, they are able to breach both the sacred and the profane because of their close relationship to knowledge and money.
Are Liberals Winning? A Longitudinal Study of Clergy Churchmanship
Authors: Randall Kelvin
Published: June 2019

Surveys indicate a growing liberal consensus within British churches as well as in British society. Is this because each succeeding generation is more liberal than the previous one. Or is it that individuals as they grow older become more liberal? In a longitudinal study of churchmanship among Anglican clergy in England and Wales, the results indicate that individual clergy, male and female, older and younger, are becoming less Conservative and more Liberal.
Exploring Single and Multiple Religious Belonging
Authors: Berghuijs Joantine , Schilderman Hans , van der Braak André , Kalsky Manuela
Published: June 2019

This contribution studies the notion of single and multiple religious belonging in a sample of 265 Dutch respondents. We will first focus on modalities of religious belonging and subsequently compare those who claim to draw from just one religion (the monoreligious) with those who indicate that they combine elements from different religious traditions (the multireligious) in terms of their intensities and styles of belonging, loyalty and mobility, and motivations for belonging. In general, multireligious respondents are characterized by their larger flexibility in religious matters as they tend to focus on similarities and common elements in different religions, and less on boundaries between them. By being loyal to themselves in the first place, they feel free to adopt and to leave behind religious beliefs and communities. Emotional and institutional bonds for each religion appear to be less strong than for monoreligious individuals in relation to their single religion.
The Relationship of Personality and Spirituality to Empathy
Authors: Stewart Chris , Lawrence Shawn , Burg Mary Ann
Published: June 2019

This empirical study sought to explore the relationship of personality, spirituality and empathy. Specifically, the possible additional predictive ability of spirituality for empathy when also including personality was examined. Multidimensional measures of spirituality (Spiritual Involvement and Beliefs Scale) and personality (Big Five Inventory) were utilized with a sample of both undergraduate, graduate students and practitioners from two disciplines. Data was collected from several sites, including three universities. Results demonstrated that most spiritual dimensions were not significantly correlated with empathy. One spirituality dimension (Spiritual Perspective) however added significantly to a regression model that also included personality dimensions.
International Regulation of Heavy Fuel Oil Use by Vessels in Arctic Waters
Authors: Sun Zhen
Published: June 2019

The use and carriage of heavy fuel oil (HFO) as fuel by vessels in Arctic waters present unique challenges to the fragile marine environment and vulnerable Arctic communities. Discussions on the regulation of HFO use in Arctic waters have undergone several transformations, from strong resistance by several states before and during the negotiations of the Polar Code, to stalemate, to reluctant evaluation of options, before the emergence of a potential mandatory ban. An HFO ban is expected to be adopted by the International Maritime Organization in 2021 at the earliest. This article examines the formation, development and application of the ban on HFO use by vessels in Arctic waters, and discusses the potential effectiveness of the ban.
The Office of the Prosecutor: Seeking Justice or Serving Global Imperialism?
Authors: Fyfe Shannon
Published: June 2019

The international criminal courts and tribunals, especially the icc, have been strongly criticized for their susceptibility to political influence. Some have argued that the icc has a distinctly Western bias and is participating in a new kind of imperialism in Africa. Others argue that history and the complicity of the West should disqualify the international community from demanding the prosecution of individuals participating in conflicts resulting directly from colonialism. Many have focused on the nature of the creation of the judicial bodies and the inherent political nature of judicial decisions regarding whom to prosecute. In this article, I offer a normative defense of the icc, in which I acknowledge the icc’s structural protections against impermissible political influence, along with the vulnerabilities of the Chief Prosecutor to claims of distributive and substantive injustice.
Constructing International Criminal Justice across Time and Space
Authors: Palmer Emma Lauren
Published: June 2019

Scholars have suggested that ratifying international treaties and implementing them within national legal systems can lead to the acceptance and (eventually) internalisation of international norms. Likewise, failing to ratify might suggest that states reject such norms. Similarly, ratifying the Rome Statute can be promoted as the primary measure to give effect to the norms protected by international criminal law. This perspective of the diffusion of international criminal justice involves at least three characteristics. First, a temporal aspect, in that states are expected to progress from rejecting international criminal justice toward acceptance over time. Second, it reveals a spatial awareness, including by distinguishing between international and ‘local’ norms and actors. Third, this approach includes assumptions about the movement of ideas across both time and space, or directionality. This article challenges temporal, spatial, and directional assumptions about how states engage with international criminal justice with reference to experiences in Southeast Asia.
The Native Women Healers of Turkmen-Sahra in Iran
Authors: Maghsudi Manijeh
Published: June 2019

The native healers are spread all across Iran and belong to various geographical regions and cultural areas. In this study the healing techniques of a number of Turkmen women are introduced. Having a macro vision towards their patients, each of the healers uses a set of various techniques that are special and unique in their own range. Healing has left a direct effect on the personality of the women healers. The variety in techniques is much wider among women than men healers. The treatment manner of the latter is mostly based on a method, which resembles Shamanistic techniques. The healing methods in the rural society are more original and intact, than in the urban centres. According to the statements made by the healers, the healing methods (at least in the macro vision form of it) can neither be taught nor be learned. Only unique individuals endowed with special abilities in completely exceptional conditions can be selected for performing the healing.
Auf den Spuren der Panta-Birne Ein "grenzüberschreitender" Fruchtname im östlichen Pontos
Authors: Bläsing Uwe
Published: June 2019

This contribution deals with the geographical distribution and the history of a wild pear’s regional name. This kind of pear, the so-called panta-pear, is typical for the Eastern Pontic area. The issues concerning the place of the fruit and its name in the local population's daily life and folklore, as well as in the toponymy of the Turkish-Georgian boarder zone are also elucidated.
Crucifixion Hermeneutics in Judaism at the Time of Jesus
Authors: Holmén Tom
Published: June 2019

This essay strongly suggests that prior to Jesus’ death and its interpretation Judaism knew no interpretative means capable of transforming the ignominious death of crucifixion into something favorable.
Jesus on Justice and Mercy in Constitutional Perspective
Authors: Barton Stephen C.
Published: June 2019

This essay places accounts of the mission of Jesus, including his politics, within a wider frame. It does so by offering a constitutional approach. This situates Jesus’ teaching of the kingdom of God in a Mediterranean context of ancient constitutional reflection, as also of certain Palestinian constitutional ideas and forms. An account of three main aspects of Jesus’ mission is offered within this wider, constitutional frame: first, power and authority; second, law and custom; and third, ethos and praxis. Jesus’ identity as an eschatological prophet of national renewal, whose aims are at least implicitly constitutional, comes to the fore.
Reply to Waheed Hussain
Authors: Scanlon T. M.
Published: June 2019

Discusses Waheed Hussain’s conception of freedom and its relation to value pluralism.
Reasons Consequentialism
Authors: Sachs Benjamin
Published: June 2019

Douglas Portmore’s recent book, Commonsense Consequentialism: Wherein Rationality Meets Morality, is an ambitious, painstaking effort to render the moral requirements of consequentialism consistent both with our intuitions and with the requirements of rationality. Portmore argues for a version of consequentialism that requires one to act in accordance with one’s reasons for preference or reasons for desire. I raise doubts here as to whether such reasons can explain moral requirements and whether, if they do, it would be of any practical use to know that they do.
Chinese Abalone Merchants and Fishermen in Nineteenth-Century Santa Barbara, California
Authors: Bentz Linda , Braje Todd J.
Published: June 2019

Shortly after the California Gold Rush, the first commercial abalone fishery sprang to life along the central and southern Californian coast, an industry founded and developed by Chinese immigrants. By shipping dried black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) to Chinese communities in the American West, and exporting the product to a ready market in China, Chinese merchants assembled an elaborate trade network that reached from Santa Barbara, California, to China. Here, we offer the first synthesis of archaeological and historical data that describes the elements of Chinese export activities interpreted through a trading diaspora framework. Our results reveal details about an international trade network supported by the formation of self-governing business associations, relationships with trading partners, and interactions with European Americans. This study fills a critical gap in our understanding of the broader context of California’s historical fisheries and contextualizes the strategies of Chinese merchants who took advantage of new opportunities presented by a changing Pacific economy.
Two Modes of Political Engagement in Contemporary Israeli Art Photography
Authors: Morris-Reich Amos
Published: June 2019

Ranging from photojournalism to landscape photography from the late 1980s to the present, this article studies the ways in which Israeli still art photography has engaged politically with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Following historical contextualization of the emergence of critical engagement in the late 1980s and the iconography of the conflict during the first Intifada, and after introducing notions from the sociology of critique, the article uses distinctions made by art photographers in classifying themselves and their peers and identifies two contrasting poles that mark the extremities of the field. Based on the understanding of the distinctness of photography as a medium with regard to the ways the photographer draws on signs from reality, the article characterizes the two modes of engagement as “indirect” or “direct.” The indirect mode is metaphorical, evading the easily identifiable iconography of the conflict; the direct mode focuses on its already visually fixed expressions in order to place its image before the eyes of viewers. The article then illustrates both modes with photographers who consistently pursue either a direct or an indirect mode of engagement and argues for a close relationship between each of the two modes and a distinct conception of politically engaged photographic critique. The article argues that the two modes differ both in terms of their conception of photography and with regard to their conception of politics and political education. Without ignoring ambivalence, which is built into the medium of photography, or the ambiguities built into any attempt of classification, the aim of the article, ultimately, is to bring to the surface the contrasting foundations of the two modes and the methods of engagement to which they are tied.
“Jewish Tactics and Memorial Space-making: Lisa Alembik’s Murder Ballads”
Authors: Orr Joey
Published: June 2019

This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the intersection of the imaginative discourse of post-witness representation and the production of Jewish memorial space. By representing missing places and people, Alembik puts her drawings into an exchange with an Appalachian musical form to explore family trauma. These crime scenes are spaces that breathe life into an inaccessible past.
Progress and Directionality in Science, the Humanities, Society and Evolution
Authors: Attfield Robin
Published: June 2019

This essay discusses progress and directionality, both in nature, in science and in society, treating as its starting-point the reflections, parallelisms and comparisons of Ruse’s essay, ‘A Threefold Parallelism for Our Time? Progressive Development in Society, Science and the Organic World’, but reaching substantially different conclusions. The essay thus ranges over progress and directionality in the world of natural evolution, in the sciences and the humanities, and in history and society. It defends non-relative progress in science and the humanities, criticising here both the approach to these disciplines of the strongly evolutionary epistemology of Hull and the more moderate evolutionary epistemology of Ruse. It further defends the possibility of progress and directionality in history and society, and also, following Rolston, in the course of evolution within the world of nature, where the kind of directionality to be found has multiple directions rather than being unilinear. Subsequently it relates conclusions about these fields to theological reflections (characteristic of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) about the creation of nature and society by a value-loving intelligence.
In a Parallel World: An Introduction to Frank Ankersmit’s Philosophy of History
Authors: Tamm Marek , Zeleňák Eugen
Published: June 2019

This article proposes to identify the conceptual structure guiding Frank Ankersmit’s philosophy of history. We argue that philosophical analysis of history consists in Ankersmit’s approach of three different levels: 1) the level of the past itself which is the subject of ontology, 2) the level of description of the past that is studied by epistemology, and 3) the level of representation of the past which should be analysed primarily by means of aesthetics. In other words, the realm of history is constituted of three aspects: 1) historical experience, 2) historical research, and 3) historical representation. During his whole academic career, Ankersmit has been interested in the first and the third aspects and has tried deliberately to avoid any serious engagement in epistemology (historical research). Ankersmit’s philosophy of history is built on a few fundamental dichotomies that can be considered as a kind of axioms of his thinking: 1) the distinction between historical research and historical writing, and 2) the distinction between description and historical representation. The article offers a critical discussion of Ankersmit’s two different approaches to the philosophy of history: cognitivist philosophy of history (analysis of historical representation) and existentialist philosophy of history (analysis of historical experience), and concludes by a short overview of the impact and significance of his historical-philosophical work and of his idea of the uniqueness of history.
Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White on the Politics of Historical Representation
Authors: van den Akker Chiel
Published: June 2019

We do not learn from the past nor from possible analogies between the past and the present. Rather we learn from representations of the past and the insights they offer, for those insights allow us to adopt the political and moral values that we need to plan a future course of action. It follows, so Frank Ankersmit argues, that aesthetics in its sense as a general theory of representation precedes ethics. This essay is concerned with this bold and important thesis. It will do so in the context of the politics of historical representation and the fact–value and subjectivity–objectivity distinctions. The subject was also dear to the heart of Ankersmit’s late American colleague Hayden White. Ankersmit is concerned with how historical representations support a future course of action. White, by contrast, was (also) concerned with how historical representations limit a future course of action since they cannot serve as a basis for utopian politics.
The Skopos Assumption: Its Justification and Function in the Neoplatonic Commentaries on Plato
Authors: Baltzly Dirk
Published: June 2019

This paper examines the role of the theme (prothesis or skopos) in Neoplatonic interpretive practice, particularly with respect to Platonic dialogues. The belief that every dialogue has a single skopos and that every aspect of the dialogue can be seen as subserving that skopos is one of the most distinctive of the Neoplatonists’ intepretive principles.1 It is also the one that is most directly responsible for the forced and artificial character of their readings of Plato. The arguments offered in support of this principle are manifestly inadequate to justify the role that it plays. This is so even if we evaluate those arguments by the Neoplatonists’ own lights. If we want to understand how this practice seemed rational to them, we need to consider more than their texts and Plato’s. We need to consider the role that the shared act of reading a Platonic dialogue with the teacher had in transforming the souls of the students and in the self-understanding of Neoplatonic teachers. I. Hadot, among others, has argued that the continuous commentary was a kind of spiritual exercise.2 I largely agree with her conclusion, though I believe her analysis of the sense in which these were spiritual exercises needs to be deepened. I argue that the justification for the assumption that each dialogue has a single skopos is best understood by reference to the manner in which the practice of commentary functioned within the internal economy of their schools considered as textual communities.3
The Tepi Shemu Feast: A Tool for Testing Chronologies of Dynasty 21 to 25?
Authors: Gautschy Rita
Published: June 2019

Due to the lack of a reliable king list and secure reign lengths, some freedom still exists to rearrange and re-date Egyptian kings of Dynasties 21 to 25. In recent articles, Ad Thijs as well as Michael Bányai have elaborated alternative chronologies for large parts of the Egyptian Third Intermediate Period.

Various suggested chronologies will be discussed in this article, taking into account the Karnak Priestly Annals, the Nile Level Records, the Chronicle of Prince Osorkon, Assyrian and Biblical texts referring to Egypt or Nubia, and astronomical data. The main focus rests on the astronomical data and the basic idea that it seems unlikely that priestly inductions during the Tepi Shemu feast took place on miscellaneous lunar days in different years. A tentative reconstruction of the course of events of the Tepi Shemu feast is proposed.
A New Astronomically Based Chronological Model for the Egyptian Old Kingdom
Authors: Gautschy Rita , Habicht Michael E. , Galassi Francesco M. , Rutica Daniela , Rühli Frank J. , Hannig Rainer
Published: June 2019

A recently discovered inscription on an ancient Egyptian ointment jar mentions the heliacal rising of Sirius. In the time of the early Pharaohs, this specific astronomical event marked the beginning of the Egyptian New Year and originally the annual return of the Nile flood, making it of great ritual importance. Since the Egyptian civil calendar of 365 days permanently shifted one day in four years in comparison to the stars due to the lack of intercalation, the connection of a date from the Egyptian civil calendar with the heliacal rising of Sothis is vitally important for the reconstruction of chronology. The new Sothis date from the Old Kingdom (3rd–6th Dynasties) in combination with other astronomical data and radiocarbon dating re-calibrates the chronology of ancient Egypt and consequently the dating of the Pyramids. A chronological model for Dynasties 3 to 6 constructed on the basis of calculated astronomical data and contemporaneously documented year dates of Pharaohs is presented.