bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Narrative Hell and Normative Bliss of Biblical Love
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter addresses the question of how to understand a concept as amorphous and abstract as love of an infinite, omniscient, all-knowing God? The answer to that question emerges from a detailed exploration of the biblical perspective on human love, with all of its concrete manifestations and messy complications. The numerous stories of human love misplaced, withheld, or gone awry teach us something about the proper relationship with God, and, by extension, with each other. What emerges is that passionate, unrestrained love, when directed toward other human beings, is fraught with danger. The Bible seems to say that only by making God the supreme object of our desire can we ensure that love will serve as the positive, life-affirming force it was meant to be.
Dying for Others or Dying for God?
Authors: Diamond James A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the place of martyrdom in Judaism. It offers a close reading of the narrative in Leviticus 10 centering on the deaths of Aaron’s sons at the dedication of the Tabernacle in the desert. The ensuing exchanges between Moses and Aaron in response to these tragic and inexplicable deaths involve a struggle between competing theologies over the virtue of martyrdom. It is shown to be the first debate over the place of dying for God in Judaism. This chapter resolves the biblical debate in favor of Aaron and against religious martyrdom as a supreme act of devotion to God. In fact that supreme act is dying for others and not for God. The two theologies, however, remain in tension throughout the history of Jewish theology.
The Obligation to Engage
Authors: Fantl Jeremy
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores three arguments that you have at least a pro tanto obligation to engage even with those positions you find obviously false. First, as some informal logicians argue, an obligation to engage can be sourced in the nature of the practice of argumentation itself. Second, taking off from Mill’s argument for universal freedom of expression, an obligation to engage can be sourced in its good epistemic consequences. Third, an obligation to engage can be sourced in the rights or agency of the person whose position it is. This might be because, following Rawls and political liberalism generally, it is only legitimate to impose legal restrictions on those whose voices have a chance to influence the democratic process. Or perhaps people have an intrinsic right to be listened to.
Against Closed-Minded Engagement (in Some Situations)
Authors: Fantl Jeremy
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that in many situations in which you shouldn’t engage open-mindedly with salient counterarguments, you shouldn’t engage closed-mindedly, either. Closed-minded engagement can give credibility to views you know are false, demeaning, or dangerous. Furthermore, in many cases in which you are closed-minded toward a counterargument, if you engage you have to take either of two risky choices. Either you honestly represent your attitudes (as in the activist strategy known as “Nonviolent Communication”), in which case you run the risk of being ineffective. Or you risk being a “concern troll”: you fail to honestly represent yourself as closed-minded (as in the activist strategy employed by the “Listening Project”). In that case you run the risk of problematically exploiting misconceptions your interlocutors have about you in order to get them to change their attitudes. In many situations, this precludes the permissibility of closed-minded engagement.
Cognitive Versus Functional Accounts
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

Our beginning assumption is that faith is a virtue, an important element of a welllived life. If we begin from this point, we are beginning from an assumption that faith involves dispositions of some sort or other, for virtues are characteristics that fall within the broader category of dispositions. Moreover, on the standard view of faith—that it is a kind of belief—this starting point is embraced, for beliefs are one important kind of disposition toward behavior. The goal of the chapter is to contrast doxastic and cognitive accounts of faith with a more generic, dispositional account, arguing in favor of the latter.
The Logical Space of Humility
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: June 2018

The goal of this chapter is to pin down as well as we can the logical space of humility by distinguishing it from closely related concepts such as modesty, arrogance, pride, and vanity, as well as the vexed issue of how and whether intellectual humility requires abandoning one’s autonomy. Doing so will put us in a position to explain the nature of humility in the next chapter by preventing some confusions between humility and closely related notions. It will also aid in defending more fully the claim that it is a virtue and thereby has value in the attempt to find the good life.
Pieces of Mind
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Many people accept that chimpanzees, dolphins, and some other animals can think and feel. But these cases are just the tip of a growing iceberg. If biologists are right, fruit flies and plants make decisions, worms and honeybees can be trained, bacteria communicate linguistically, and neurons have preferences. Just how far does cognition go? This book is the first to critically consider this question from the perspective of the entire range of new ascriptions of psychological capacities throughout biology. It is also the first to consider the role of mathematical models and other quantitative forms of evidence in prompting and supporting the new ascriptions. It defends a default literal interpretation of psychological terms across biological domains. It also considers the implications of the literal view for efforts to explain the mind’s place in nature and for traditional ways of distinguishing the superior moral status of humans relative to other living beings.
Cases
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 2 begins to illustrate the problem with details of recent scientific research into plants and bacteria and the uses of psychological predicates to describe the new discoveries. Plants are responsive to their environments in ways that have prompted researchers to ascribe learning, individuality, the ability to make choices, and other capacities to them. Bacterial colonies possess complex signaling mechanisms for communication and group decision-making. Individual bacteria, once considered mere bags of chemicals, have internal machinery that enables them to engage in signal transduction and information-processing. The chapter further articulates the role in the debate of the assumption that human mental capacities are the standard to which all other entities’ capacities are compared and found wanting. It begins to defend Literalism’s denial of this anthropocentrism of psychology. The growing evidence reveals how the burden of proof is shifting onto those to object to a default literal interpretation of psychological terms in the new domains.
The Nonsense View
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters articulating alternatives to Literalism. Chapter 5 presents Bennett and Hacker’s Wittgenstein-inspired criticism of ascriptions of psychological capacities to brains by cognitive neuroscientists. On their view the uses violate semantic rules of proper use and so are nonsensical. The mereological fallacy, as they label this conceptual violation, is to ascribe psychological features of persons to their parts. This chapter shows that their criticism fails by their own standards, and that it is not endorsed by neuroscientists aware of their criticism. It presents Dennett and Searle’s responses to Bennett and Hacker, and contrasts their responses to the Literalist view.
The Metaphor View
Authors: Figdor Carrie
Published: June 2018

Chapter 6 presents the view that psychological terms in these unexpected contexts are used metaphorically. It argues that there is no independent, non-question-begging evidence that the terms are used with metaphorical intent. It presents two main accounts of metaphor: the classical Gricean view and the view from relevance theory or pragmatic semantics. It argues that neither theory provides support for the Metaphor view because both versions of the view rest on a non-Literal interpretation of the predicates. It discusses epistemic metaphor, or the use of analogy in science, and shows how this is compatible with Literalism. It also sets aside the conceptual metaphor view put forward by George Lakoff and colleagues.
Bodies and Being One
Authors: Schechter Elizabeth
Published: June 2018

This chapter concerns the relationship between the split-brain case and the non-split case. In the first half of the chapter, I consider arguments to the effect that if split-brain subjects have two minds apiece, then so do non-split subjects. Sometimes these arguments have taken the form of a reductio against the 2-thinkers claim for split-brain subjects. These arguments do not work: that a split-brain subject has two minds does not mean that I have two minds, although it does mean that I could. The second half of the chapter offers my own proposal for the respect in which R’s and L’s co-embodiment as one animal, S, makes a split-brain subject one of us: I argue that S must be the single object of both R’s and L’s implicit bodily self-awareness.
Emotions and Moral Value
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: June 2018

Chapter 2 explores questions about the relationship between emotion and moral value. For an emotion to be virtuous, it must be getting moral value right, but what exactly does ‘getting moral value right’ mean? The debate about the moral epistemology of emotions is waged between moral rationalism and moral sentimentalism. Rationalists believe that moral facts exist independently of our emotions, and that those facts can be tracked by human reason. Sentimentalists believe either that no moral facts exist at all or, alternatively, that moral facts are created by our emotions and exist in our minds. It is helpful to distinguish between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ forms of both moral rationalism and sentimentalism. This chapter argues that Aristotelianism is best understood as a form of ‘soft rationalism’—and that it can offer it as an antidote to currently fashionable forms of ‘hard sentimentalism’.
Awe
Authors: Kristjánsson Kristján
Published: June 2018

While interest in the emotion of awe has surged in psychology, philosophers have yet to devote a single self-standing article to awe’s conceptual contours and moral standing. Chapter 8 rectifies this imbalance and begins to make up for the unwarranted philosophical neglect. In order to do so, awe is given the standard Aristotelian treatment to uncover its conceptual contours and moral relevance—although Aristotle did not himself explicitly identify awe. The chapter critiques and proposes to improve upon existing psychological conceptual analyses of awe; probes the question why Aristotle ignored it; addresses an often-presumed link between awe and humility, bearing on its moral status; and finally explores some educational contours of awe.
Pleasure and Desire
Authors: Marshall Colin
Published: June 2018

This chapter extends the argument of earlier chapters to cases of pleasure and desires. As before, it is argued that compassion is required to be in touch with other creatures’ states. After identifying a motivational feature of most pleasures, which can be described in imperatival terms, the chapter considers the intuitive moral asymmetry between pleasure and pain: promoting pleasure does not seem to be as straightforwardly good as alleviating pain. Two explanations for this asymmetry are offered using the notion of being in touch. Desire is then considered, and it is argued that familiar types of moral goodness involve agents being in touch with the conscious manifestations of desires.
The Leeriness Objection to the Responsibility to Protect
Authors: Meyer Marco
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that even non-abusive interventions (those that are motivated purely by altruistic concern, have a just cause, are a last resort etc.) are morally problematic due to their effects on the international order. The trouble is that ‘bystander states’—those that are neither prosecuting the intervention nor targeted by it—usually do not have sufficient direct evidence that the intervention is just and properly motivated, nor can they trust the testimony of the intervening state. Thus, for all that bystander states know, any and every instance of humanitarian intervention is abusive: an act of unjust international aggression masquerading as something else. This, in turn, weakens the willingness of these bystander states to comply with the non-aggression norm themselves, since states are ‘conditional cooperators’—they abide by norms only insofar as they are reasonably assured that other states in the international arena are abiding.
Scrutinizing Intentions
Authors: Hermanson Chrisantha
Published: June 2018

Most humanitarian interventions are suspected of having secondary, non-humanitarian motives. This chapter interrogates whether, and when, the presence of some such secondary motive counts against an intervention morally. The problematic cases are those in which secondary motives lead the intervening power to take actions beyond what are necessary to achieve the stated humanitarian purpose of the intervention. While the intended beneficiaries of any humanitarian intervention can be assumed to consent to its primary aim of rescuing them, they cannot be assumed to consent to these additional actions taken in pursuit of secondary, non-altruistic ambitions. The chapter also considers abuses that might take place in the aftermath of intervention, during post-atrocity reconstruction. The central concern here is with offers of aid or loans for reconstruction that are conditional on imposed criteria.
‘Words Lying on the Table’?
Authors: Hehir Aidan
Published: June 2018

This chapter laments that the Responsibility to Protect has become nothing more than ‘a largely ineffective empty signifier’: it may have found its way into state discourse, but it has not meaningfully influenced state behaviour. This is the result of R2P having been ‘co-opted’ over time: parties hostile to the norm have publicly endorsed it, but worked to redirect and manipulate its evolution so that the norm has come to serve their interests and values. Hehir argues that the BRICS countries, and especially Russia, have succeeded in almost entirely expunging Pillar III; the part of the R2P doctrine that calls on the international community to intervene and protect human rights where sovereign states cannot or will not. Without Pillar III, however, we are left with a rendering of R2P that makes no provisions for its actual enforcement. All we have is another high-sounding rhetorical device.
Difficulties of Discovery
Authors: Byers Mark
Published: June 2018

The uncertainty of the glyph, reflecting a new commitment to the unpredictability of history and the fallibility of scientific reason, is shown in this chapter to have generated a major avant-garde interest in modern physics, particularly quantum mechanics. The chapter charts cognate developments in Olson’s work and that of Wolfgang Paalen, an Austrian-Mexican painter who had a decisive influence on abstract expressionism through his journal Dyn. Both Olson and Paalen are shown to have turned to post-classical physics—particularly Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’—as a platform for a new late modernist art that would break with both the political and the aesthetic principles of high modernism.
Feeding and Hungering
Authors: Bailkin Jordanna
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the fraught debates about feeding refugees in camps, including the frequent use of hunger strikes. Refugee camps brought new foods and ways of feeding that formed an important constellation of conflict and community. For camp authorities, the work of mass feeding sparked debates about whether camps aided or obstructed the preservation of “minority” cultures. Many refugees perceived food as a crucial reminder of what they had lost in expulsion. But food in camp could also uphold social life and kinship networks that had been disrupted by war and exile. Wherever refugees ate—in communal “mess” halls or their own huts—food operated as a highly publicized point of contact and contention between refugees and camp leaders. How refugees were fed and chose to feed themselves—as well as the refusal to eat—formed an important axis of political protest.
In Need
Authors: Bailkin Jordanna
Published: June 2018

This chapter asks how refugee camps transformed people as well as spaces, altering the identities of the individuals and communities who lived in and near them. It considers how camps forged and fractured economic, religious, and ethnic identities, constructing different kinds of unity and disunity. Camps had unpredictable effects on how refugees and Britons thought of themselves, and how they saw their relationship to upward and downward mobility. As the impoverished Briton emerged more clearly in the imagination of the welfare state, the refugee was his constant companion and critic. The state struggled to determine whether refugees required the same care as the poor, or if they warranted their own structures of aid.
Happy Families?
Authors: Bailkin Jordanna
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores the tremendous impact of refugee camps on family life. These camps served as spaces to experiment with broader definitions of “family,” while still tying certain forms of aid to traditional norms of sexual morality. Camp authorities used politics of family separation and reunification to intervene in the emotional lives of refugees, and refugees deployed British stereotypes about gender and family to their own ends. This chapter looks at how “single” refugees were disadvantaged with regard to housing, and the efforts of Ugandan Asian wives to gain entry to Britain for their “stateless” husbands. We can see both tremendous intrusions into the intimate lives of refugees, and fierce resistance to these interventions. The experience of encampment is part of the larger story of the reconstruction of family life in twentieth-century Britain.
Explaining with Mathematics?
Authors: Bueno Otávio , French Steven
Published: June 2018

In this chapter, we examine the role of idealization, specifically with regard to explanation, and the broad criteria of acceptability that any such explanatory account should meet. Our case study is the phenomenon of ‘universality’, and, in particular, the role of the renormalization group, which has been held up as another example of mathematics playing a significant explanatory role. Again, we argue that once we have a clear framework for understanding representation, and an equally clear understanding of what is required of any explanation, such claims cannot be sustained. Contrary to Bob Batterman’s proposal, our inferential account can accommodate the cases he presents without the relevant mathematics itself playing an explanatory role. By articulating our account within the partial structures approach, we can accommodate the nature and significance of the phenomena involved, and thereby offer an understanding of them within a unitary account of scientific practice.
Referential null subjects in German
Authors: Weiß Helmut , Volodina Anna
Published: June 2018

Null subjects (NSs) have been a central research topic in generative syntax ever since the 1980s. This chapter considers the situation of German NSs both from a dialectological and from a diachronic perspective and attempts to reconstruct a direct line concerning the licensing conditions of pro-drop from Old High German (OHG) through Middle High German (MHG) and Early New High German (ENHG) to current dialects of New High German (NHG). Particularly, we will argue that German changed from a consistent, yet asymmetric pro-drop language to a partial, but symmetric one. In order to demonstrate that this development took place and the steps involved, we survey the existing empirical evidence and introduce new data.
Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante
Authors: Lombardi Elena
Published: June 2018

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.
Making Deliberation Practical
Authors: Fishkin James S.
Published: June 2018

Eight criteria are discussed for microcosms or mini-publics that can offer input to policy. These include demographic and attitudinal representativeness, sample size, the opportunity to engage policy arguments for and against proposals for action, knowledge gain, opinion change, distortions from polarization and domination by the more advantaged, and whether there are identifiable reasons for the final considered judgments. These criteria are applied in depth to four case studies from different parts of the world: California (on a statewide basis), the city of Ulaanbaatar (capital of Mongolia), two projects in Uganda (in Bududa and Butaleja), and a European-wide Deliberative Poll in Brussels engaging a sample from all twenty-seven countries deliberating in twenty-two languages. These four cases illustrate the prospects and challenges of applying Deliberative Polling to specific policy choices. They illustrate different entry points for the considered judgments of the public. Both qualitative and quantitative data are considered in each project.
Developing a Researchable Question
Authors: Dewar Jacqueline M.
Published: June 2018

Chapter 2 describes how to convert a problem or question about teaching or learning into a researchable question. It uses a taxonomy of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) questions—What works? What is? What could be?—derived from the work of Carnegie scholars to guide the framing of a question. Since initially, most SoTL questions are quite broad, the chapter considers several methods for refining questions. It discusses how to conduct searches of educational literature and why they are valuable when developing a question. It shows how to use disciplinary knowledge and situational factors to refine a question. It describes how identifying underlying assumptions and considering feasibility can help to further refine or perhaps reformulate SoTL research questions. Multiple examples from and references to published SoTL studies of teaching and learning in science engineering and mathematics are provided.
Reflecting on the Benefits of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Authors: Dewar Jacqueline M.
Published: June 2018

In Chapter 9 the authors give their perspective on the benefits of scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to faculty, to their institutions, to the academy, and to students. Among these are helping faculty and their institutions respond to new developments in higher education: a more diverse student body, increasing calls for accountability, new technologies for teaching, and new understandings of how people learn. The authors describe three pathologies of teaching and discuss how SoTL can serve as an antidote to each, thereby making progress toward the ultimate goal of improving student learning. Examples are given of ways that investigating each type of question in the SoTL taxonomy might address one or more of the three pathologies.
An Epistemic Theory of Democracy
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

One attractive feature of democracy is its ability to track the truth by information aggregation. The formal support for this claim goes back to Condorcet’s famous jury theorem. However, the theorem has often been dismissed as a mathematical curiosity because the assumptions on which the theorem is based are demanding. Such quick dismissals tend to misunderstand the original theorem. They also fail to appreciate how Condorcet’s assumptions can be weakened to obtain jury theorems that are readily applicable in the real world. The first part of the book explains the original theorem and its various extensions and introduces results to deal with the challenge of voter dependence. Part II considers opportunities to make democracies perform better in epistemic terms by improving voter competence and diversity, by dividing epistemic labour, and by preceding voting with deliberation. In the third part, political practices are looked at through an epistemic lens, focusing on the influence of tradition, following opinion leaders or cues, and on settings in which the electorate falls into diverging factions. Part IV analyses the implications for the structures of government. While arguing against the case for epistocracy, the use of deliberation and expert advice in representative democracy can lead to improved truth-tracking, provided epistemic bottlenecks are avoided. The final part summarizes the results and explores how epistemic democracy might be undermined, using as case studies the Trump and Brexit campaigns.
Independence Revisited
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

The Independence Assumption is the most misunderstood premise of the Condorcet Jury Theorem. This chapter shows, first, that absence of direct voter interaction is neither necessary nor sufficient for Independence. Second, we explain that the statistical independence required is conditional: in Condorcet’s jury theorem, conditional on the state of the world; in other jury theorems, conditional on the evidence, on common causes, or on the whole decision situation. This insight leads, third, to the ‘Best Responder Corollary’, a jury theorem that is better suited to dealing with the inevitable interdependence of votes caused by common causes. In the final section, we discuss epistemic implications.
Everything and Nothing
Authors: Jago Mark
Published: June 2018

What should we say about the ‘difficult’ cases of truthmaking, involving general and negative existential truths, modal truths, counterfactual truths, analytic truths, and temporal truths? The toughest cases are the general and negative existential truths. I’ll argue that we can’t account for them without introducing new bits of ontology (§5.2 and §5.3). Armstrong’s totality states of affairs are not the best option (§5.4). Negative states of affairs are a better bet (§5.5), although their metaphysical analysis is difficult (§5.6). I’ll discuss the remaining cases – modal truths, counterfactual truths, analytic truths, and temporal truths – in §5.7.
Confronting the Shadow State
Authors: Decoeur Henri
Published: June 2018

This book examines the rules and mechanisms of international law relevant to the suppression of state organized crime, and provides a normative justification for developing international legal mechanisms specifically designed to address this phenomenon. State organized crime refers to the use by senior state officials of the resources of the state to facilitate or participate in organized crime, in pursuit of policy objectives or personal profit. This concept covers diverse forms of government misconduct, including partnerships with organized criminal groups involved in drug trafficking, the plundering of a country’s resources by kleptocratic rulers, and high-level corruption schemes. The book identifies the distinctive criminological characteristics of state organized crime, and analyses the applicability, potential, and limits of the norms and mechanisms of international law relevant to the suppression of state organized crime. In particular, it discusses whether the involvement of state organs or agents in organized crime may amount to an internationally wrongful act giving rise to the international responsibility of the state, and highlights a number of practical and normative shortcomings of the legal framework established by relevant crime-suppression conventions. The book also sketches proposals to develop an international legal framework designed to hold perpetrators of state organized crime accountable. It presents a normative justification for criminalizing and suppressing state organized crime at the international level, proposes draft provisions for an international convention for the suppression of state organized crime, and discusses the potential role of the UN Security Council and of international criminal courts and tribunals, respectively, in holding perpetrators accountable.
Introduction
Authors: Decoeur Henri
Published: June 2018

This section presents the concept of state organized crime, defined as the use, by a public official in a position to shape or influence the actions of a state and acting in concert with a structured group, of the resources of the state to commit or facilitate the commission of acts criminalized in international law, in order to obtain a financial or other material benefit. It highlights the challenges that this phenomenon poses internationally and domestically, notably for international peace and security, human rights, and the rule of law. It also discusses the terminology and methodology used in the book, and outlines the argument to be made.
A Normative Justification for Establishing State Organized Crime as an International Crime
Authors: Decoeur Henri
Published: June 2018

Chapter 5 makes a theoretical argument for establishing state organized crime as an international crime. It opens with general reflections on the social function of criminalization, discusses the dynamics of international criminalization, and identifies grounds underlying the genesis of existing international crimes, suggesting that international criminalization serves the purpose of protecting specific interests. In light of this theoretical framework, it argues that state organized crime ought to be criminalized because it threatens interests that states deem worthy of protection by way of international criminalization, constituting as it does an abuse of state authority, a threat to international peace and security, a violation of internationally guaranteed human rights, and a subversion of the rule of law and of the proper functioning of interstate cooperation. This chapter also suggests that the positing of state organized crime as an international crime would fulfil an important expressive function.
‘At last Roman, at last restored to the true light of Empire’
Authors: Omissi Adrastos
Published: June 2018

This chapter begins by considering what made the late Roman state distinctive from the early Empire, exploring the political developments of the later third century, in particular the military, administrative, and economic reforms undertaken by the tetrarchs. It then explores the presentation of the war between the tetrarchy and the British Empire of Carausius and Allectus (286‒96), taking as its core sources Pan. Lat. X, XI, and VIII. These speeches are unique in the panegyrical corpus, in that two of them (X and XI) were delivered while the usurpation they describe was still under way, the third (VIII) after it was defeated. In this chapter, we see how the British Empire was ‘othered’ as piratical and barbarian, and how conflict with it helped to create the distinctive ideology of the tetrarchy.
Dismembering the House of Valentinian
Authors: Omissi Adrastos
Published: June 2018

This chapter begins by exploring the accession of the emperor Theodosius and then events of the period 378‒9. Recognizing deficiencies and inconsistencies within the various, later, historical accounts of this episode that we possess from (mostly) Eastern sources, the chapter examines the gratiarum actio of Ausonius and the total silence that this speech maintains on the subject of Theodosius, demonstrating that Theodosius in fact seized imperial power in the year 378. The chapter then examines the usurpation of Magnus Maximus and Theodosius’ response to it, carefully constructing a narrative of Maximus’ progressive advance through Collectio Avellana 39 and 40 and Ambrose, Epistula 30[24]. Finally, the chapters considers the war between Maximus and Theodosius in 388, and explores how Pacatus’ Pan. Lat. II can shed light upon the way in which Theodosius sought to distance himself from association with Maximus after the latter’s death.
Conclusion
Authors: Omissi Adrastos
Published: June 2018

This chapter recapitulates the conclusions of this book, arguing that panegyric provides a unique source through which to explore the political climate of the later Roman world, not merely because it provides a fulsome corpus of texts, but also because the influence of panegyric and the political messages it espoused were so far-reaching among contemporaries. The conclusions of individual chapters are given in summary, showing the varied strategies that were employed by panegyrists in blackening the name of the emperor’s enemies. The importance of this exercise, as a perpetual theatrical exercise, is reiterated, and the contingent nature of imperial legitimacy is again affirmed. Panegyric illuminates the processes that made some men tyrants and others emperors.
Corporations in the Economy of Esteem
Authors: Frank Robert , Pettit Philip
Published: June 2018

Even in a regulated and competitive market economy the behavior of firms leaves much to be desired. Beyond the invisible hand of the market and the iron hand of the law, this chapter outlines arguments for an intangible hand of civil society. The central mechanisms in the model rely on social esteem and self-esteem. These depend on assessments of true intentions and dispositions for costly pro-social actions. Instrumental pro-social actions matter little in the economy of esteem. What is required is a common belief that conformity to certain costly standards benefits all; and that conformity is observable and elicits social approval (and vice versa). Challenges are considerable for the intangible hand model. Moralizing the firm’s agents, inducting the voice of affected parties in the deliberation of firms, delayed disclosure of internal deliberations, and public commitments by leaders all offer promise.
Philanthropy and Income Inequality
Authors: Anderson Elizabeth , Cheng Ing-Haw , Hong Harrison
Published: June 2018

Bill Gates recently argued that philanthropy by households at the top of the income distribution might help ameliorate income inequality, and that tax policies should take this into account. Much of the research in economics on giving has been focused on middle-income households, so we know very little about the motives for giving by the very rich. We provide some initial evidence on what drives the giving of the richest Americans. First, we extrapolate anthropological evidence on how status concerns might influence philanthropy. Second, since the richest own a significant amount of equity, we use the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Act of 2003 to see how their giving responded to unanticipated tax cuts, particularly for dividends. Third, we consider the welfare implications of philanthropy as opposed to alternative models for redistributing the wealth of the extremely rich.
‘Appearing Equal’ at Phaedo 74 B 4 – C 6: an Epistemic Interpretation
Authors: Tuozzo Thomas M.
Published: June 2018

The argument at Phaedo 74 B 4‐C 6 that the equal itself is ‘something different from’ sets of physical equals depends on Leibniz's Law: there is a property that perceptible equals have that the equal itself does not have. What I call the ‘epistemic interpretation’ holds that the property is an epistemic one: having appeared unequal. The ‘ontological interpretation’ holds that the property is not epistemic, but simply the property of being unequal (that is: physical equals suffer the compresence of opposites, while the equal itself does not). The most natural reading of the text favours the epistemic interpretation; scholarly support for the ontological interpretation is based on the widely held view that on the epistemic interpretation the argument is manifestly invalid. But this view implicitly relies on an impoverished sense of ‘appearing’ as equivalent to ‘being thought’. Drawing on an analogy with colour perception, I elaborate an experiential sense of ‘appearing’ which makes Plato's argument on the epistemic interpretation philosophically defensible.
Science without Philosophy?
Authors: Di Ventra Massimiliano
Published: June 2018

This chapter answers the question posed in its title. It makes the important point that Science is built upon the foundations of Logic/Philosophy. Misunderstanding of this point leads to sterile and oftentimes disastrous conclusions that have nothing to do with Science.
Observation and Experimentation
Authors: Di Ventra Massimiliano
Published: June 2018

This chapter expands on the previous one on the role of experiments in Science. It explains the difference between observations of phenomena and controlled laboratory experiments.
Competing Theories
Authors: Di Ventra Massimiliano
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses how to distinguish between two (or more) theories based on different hypotheses and leading to either the same predictions or different ones. It also introduces some of the social pressures experienced by scientists in their work and reinforces the notion that Science is not a democratic enterprise: Nature rules.
Verifying or Falsifying? And What?
Authors: Di Ventra Massimiliano
Published: June 2018

This chapter explains the concept of “falsifiability” of a theory as understood by practicing scientists: an observation not in agreement with a theory simply sets a new boundary for that theory. It does not invalidate all its tenets. It reinforces what the role of a theory is.
Kant on Animals
Authors: Kain Patrick
Published: June 2018

This chapter focuses on Kant’s position concerning the nature of nonhuman animals and the moral obligations that humans have toward animals. It begins by describing Kant’s account of the nature of animals and the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals. It then moves on to explaining Kant’s account of the nature of moral obligation and his oft-misunderstood contention that we do not have “duties to” nonhuman animals but only “duties with regard to” these animals. The chapter corrects the orthodox reading of Kant’s position, which has it that he considers benevolence toward animals to be justified only by the effects of brutality on the human who commits brutal acts. Instead Kant argues that animals are worthy of admiration, love, sympathy and gratitude, despite not being “ends in themselves” like humans. Finally, the chapter considers Kant’s position in relation to that of another important eighteenth-century moral theorist, Francis Hutcheson.
Political Obligation as Fair Play
Authors: Dagger Richard
Published: June 2018

One aim of this chapter is to fill out the account of the fair-play theory of obligation sketched in previous chapters. In particular, I show how respect for the rule of law is an integral feature of fair-play theory. In most of the chapter, however, the elaboration proceeds by defending the theory against six important objections critics have lodged against it. One objection, raised memorably by Robert Nozick, would have us reject the principle of fair play altogether. The others allow that the principle is valuable and unobjectionable when confined to its proper sphere, but they insist that political obligation exceeds the boundaries of that sphere. In addition to defending the fair-play account against these objections, I also argue against those who believe that fair play is a necessary but insufficient element in a theory of political obligation that must be pluralistic if it is to be successful.
Great and Noble Lines
Authors: Barrett Faith
Published: June 2018

This chapter compares David Drake to George Moses Horton. Like Dave the Potter, Horton is a once-forgotten African American author who was living and writing in the South during the slave era. Barrett historicizes Horton’s formalism as a poet to reveal the racial and social underpinnings of his aesthetic. The fact that Horton’s poems were regularly commissioned by the slave-owning gentry of his region gives us a comparable model with which to comprehend the unexpected leniency shown Dave the Potter. Beyond the similarities, Barrett traces compelling differences between Horton and Drake, advancing, while also considering the limits of, a comparative approach to Dave the Potter.
A Letter to David Drake from a Friend and a Relation
Authors: Shockley Evie
Published: June 2018

Shockley writes creatively in response to an inscription written on the side of the jar associated with the title of the collection. As a contemporary black woman and as a literary critic and a poet herself, Shockley seeks out her multifaceted relatedness to the person and legacy of Dave the Potter. In this hybrid of creative and scholarly writing, Shockley uses the format of the letter to imaginatively reply directly to “Dave.” In the process, Shockley transforms the terms of historical inquiry to better suit the diasporic terms of her relation to a “him” who is never finally in the past nor an object of impersonal history.
Accident before Love
Authors: Holland Sharon P.
Published: June 2018

Holland’s essay is part theory, part personal reflection, and thoroughly poetic in its engagement with Dave the Potter as both a historical figure, to be read and reflected upon, and as a provocation to interrogate the boundaries of our own historical moment. Holland’s brief essay touches on historical appropriation and the porosity of the human-animal bond. The essay begins by enclosing its writer within a typically anonymous space of academic prose, but then moves beyond academic conventions to perform transformations associated with Dave the Potter, whose troubling of the boundaries between life and death, human and animal Holland elucidates, examines, and contextualizes.
Nashe and Satire
Authors: Stern Tiffany
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores the story of Thomas Nashe's ‘satire’. In the 1580s and 1590s, ‘satire’ was a term conferred upon his works by admirers who sought to define — and so limit — the nature of the prose he wrote. This chapter explores what satire means to Nashe's friends and enemies, particularly in combination with ‘honey’ or ‘sweetness’. It also considers why Nashe himself avoided the word. To explore the extent to which Nashe was and was not a writer of satires, as well as where his ‘sweetness’ resides, this chapter also attempts to examine what early modern writers took satire to mean, and then to examine who was thought to be writing it.
Pornography and the Novel
Authors: Baines Paul
Published: June 2018

This chapter explains how the emerging novel has not only the problem of how to fend off the widespread accusation of lubricity, but also the corresponding problem of what to do with sex when desire drives the plot. There was no clear category of ‘pornographic’ writing during this period. Modern collections of early sex-writing contain medical treatises, smutty poems, law cases, and translations from Continental sex manuals. These clandestine classics overlap with some early types of novel, in period and often setting, in their anti-authoritarian slant, and their scepticism towards everything except the power of bodily desires. The corpus of proto-pornography, inchoate as it was, was not a sufficient matrix for the novel, still less a discursive origin for it, so much as an oblique presence at the margins of vision.
Arabian Nights and Oriental Spies
Authors: Watt James
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the enduringly formative impact of ‘Arabian Nights and Oriental Spies’ on the eighteenth-century novel. It studies Charles Gildon's The Golden Spy: or, A Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments of War and Peace, and Love and Politics (1709). The novel merges a spy narrative and a sequence of embedded tales. While paying tribute to previous texts, Gildon in turn has helped to launch the so-called ‘it-narrative’, for the ‘spy’ in question is a coin (or rather a collection of coins) whose testimony exposes, in the words of the work's subtitle, ‘The Secret Miraculous Power and Progress of Gold, in the Courts of Europe’. The various coins in the narrator's possession often invoke concepts of metamorphosis or shape-shifting in order to illustrate the transformative agency of money, and The Golden Spy uses a serial structure akin to that of the Arabian Nights to reiterate this basic point.
Defoe, Journalism, and the Early English Novel
Authors: Hunter J. Paul
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses Daniel Defoe's ambition to outline in everyday terms the economy of the world to produce a sense of the complete English gentleman, complete English tradesman, complete English planter and traveller, and complete English political theorist. His journalistic endeavours recorded and rhetorically shaped one set of aspects of that Englished world economy. His novels, with their minglings of fact and fantasy, of realism and coincidence, of ground detail and bird's-eye view, record and shape another set — of a reordered economy of genre. Defoe imports many different models into his texts, and each new model reproduces its own generic stamp in some way. An emblematic example of the novel is Robinson Crusoe (1719), in which the power of journalism, of repeated recording, to order a local or larger economy, is mirrored in Crusoe's journal.
Approach to Equilibrium, the H-Theorem and Irreversibility
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

Like most of the greatest equations in science, the Boltzmann equation is not only beautiful but also generous. Indeed, it delivers a great deal of information without imposing a detailed knowledge of its solutions. In fact, Boltzmann himself derived most if not all of his main results without ever showing that his equation did admit rigorous solutions. This Chapter illustrates one of the most profound contributions of Boltzmann, namely the famous H-theorem, providing the first quantitative bridge between the irreversible evolution of the macroscopic world and the reversible laws of the underlying microdynamics.
Transport Phenomena
Authors: Succi Sauro
Published: June 2018

The previous Chapter presented a discussion of the notion of local and global equilibria and shown that these equilibria represent the special forms taken by the distribution function once direct and inverse collisions come into balance. This Chapter provides an elementary introduction to transport phenomena and discusses their intimate relation to non-equilibrium processes at the microscopic scale. In particular it shall deal with the connection between the transport coefficients, such as mass, momentum and energy diffusivity with the molecular mean free path, namely the distance traveled by a representative molecules between two subsequent collisions. The discussion also highlights the fundamental role of inhomogeneity in fueling non-equilibrium processes.