bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Epilogue
Authors: Corduwener Pepijn
Published: August 2023

The epilogue provides a birds-eye view on where European politics have gone in the past two decades, connecting the decline of the people’s party with the growing sentiments of democratic crisis which are gripping many people in Western Europe, today. It argues that a historical perspective is vital to understand why the void created by the demise of the people’s parties in the heart of our party systems creates feelings of democratic uncertainty and crisis. People in Western Europe have only known one stable model of democracy, people’s party democracy, because, despite their many shortcomings, only the people’s parties proved able to balance some of the tensions inherent in democratic government. However, while it seems as if the people’s party’s decline cannot be stopped, this does not mean the end of democracy as such. The people’s party was the answer to democracy’s problems in the twentieth century, but history shows it is not democracy’s default option. One does not need to be nostalgic about the demise of the people’s party. Our own century calls for new organizations, institutions, and ideas.
Visualizing the Unseen in the Victorian Ghost Story
Authors: Lehmann Imfeld Zoë
Published: August 2023

The Victorians were preoccupied with vision and visuality, a fascination that has been taken up by many critics working on nineteenth-century literature. Supernatural fiction has been considered a prime location for the expression of Victorian preoccupations with the reliability of sight, as well as with the latest developments in the science of vision. While much previous criticism explores the cultural and historical significance of literary representations of vision, this chapter returns to the ‘surface’ of seeing—what is seen, what is unseen in Victorian ghost stories. The literary ghost provides opportunities for narrating the experience of seeing what is not there: Victorian ghost stories are full of haunted spaces that should be empty, but are not. This chapter explores some of these narratives, examining how ‘nothing’ becomes visible to foreground the ways in which the Victorian ghost story depicts the seen and unseen.
‘A Lowde Voys Clepyng’
Authors: Saunders Corinne
Published: August 2023

This chapter takes its direction from the collaborative project Hearing the Voice, based at Durham University and funded by the Wellcome Trust, an interdisciplinary exploration of hearing voices without external stimuli. While this phenomenon is often associated with psychosis, experience is much richer than this assumption suggests, including both benign voice-hearing and voice-hearing in a significant proportion of the healthy population. This chapter explores voice-hearing and its connection with visionary experience in the medieval period. It examines how literary texts—from penitential romances to the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe—engage with the psychological models of the period, while also exploring the powerful creative potential voice-hearing can offer. These writings enhance our understanding of the complex interrelations of sense perceptions as they were understood in the medieval period, but also offer new models for present-day understanding.
Attending to Sound in Early Modern Literature
Authors: Jackson Simon
Published: August 2023

Paying heed to the nature of sonic experience, particularly sound’s ability to penetrate boundaries and the way in which a listener is drawn into the world around them, radically reconstitutes our sense of listening subjects and their relationship to their acoustic environments. This kind of thinking is found not only in modern scholarship on the senses but also in the work of early modern writers. In their distinctive fashions, each of the writers considered in this chapter—Thomas Whythorne, Charles Butler, and Francis Bacon—are fascinated by the ways in which the mediations of sonic experience challenge any simple conception of the listening subject and its relationship to the environment they inhabit. In attempting to transcribe or to describe on the page the distinctive forms of knowing derived from sonic experience, these writers explore the more contingent, situated forms of ‘meaning’ that result from acts of attentive listening.
Festering Lilies
Authors: Dugan Holly
Published: August 2023

Lilies, especially white lilies (Lilium candidum), are complex visual and metaphoric symbols in the Renaissance. For medieval and early modern artists, white lilies signal purity. But lilies also decay rapidly, releasing a strong scent as they die. For poets like Ronsard and Shakespeare, the smell of ‘festering’ lilies provided them with a powerful metaphor about the unseen dangers of desire. The sensuous qualities of white lilies as symbols of both sexual purity and contamination helped to solidify cultural ideals of chastity, beauty, and whiteness as discernible phenomena. Reading the ecological and cultural history of lilies in the Renaissance against metaphors of beauty in Renaissance lyric poetry, especially Shakespeare’s sonnets, I argue that lilies function as eco-material signifiers of race and gender. Chaste and pure or mutable, spotted, and festering, lilies came to signify a powerful figuration of whiteness in the Renaissance, mobilized through metaphors of smell.
Tastelessness
Authors: Fumo Jamie C.
Published: August 2023

This chapter approaches the medieval English figurative vocabulary surrounding the sense of taste via its antithesis: tastelessness, or insipiditas. It delineates two overlapping expressions of tastelessness in medieval discourse: 1) blandness (ME werish) as a property of certain foods (indeed, tastelessness was recognized in some medieval taxonomies of savour as an actual subtype of taste, along with sweetness, sourness, etc.); 2) the inability to taste well, often in connection with illness and thus humoral imbalance. The creative lexicon of the unsavouri is then explored more broadly, since taste, in medieval discourse, is richly implicated in knowing and discernment, in the medicinal and spiritual as well as the gustatory. Literary examples, read against period accounts of both types of tastelessness in natural histories, culinary and medical tracts, are drawn from various medieval English genres that imaginatively appropriate the unsavouri as metaphorical construct.
A Taste of ‘Sweet Music’
Authors: Smith Simon
Published: August 2023

This chapter takes the ubiquitous phrase ‘sweet music’ as a case study in early modern sensory metaphor, ranging across diverse texts and contexts to sketch out the full scope and associations of this gustatory figure. It does so in order to ask how figurative language of the senses might draw upon, mediate, and even play a role in shaping wider cultural understandings and experiences of sensation, and to demonstrate how a more precise, historicized grasp of sensory language can facilitate new readings even of familiar literary texts like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The chapter traces the precise associations between music and sweetness in early modern texts, asking what may have drawn writers of the period to the trope. In early modern England the sugary sense of sweet had yet to become entirely dominant, encouraging multivalent sensory resonances that are not necessarily apparent to twenty-first-century readers.
The Taste of Revolution
Authors: Skoulding Zoë
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines the interplay and tension between language, sensory experience, and time, with a focus on the author’s practice as a poet. It concentrates on one particular project engaging with the linked senses of taste and smell: her 2020 sequence of poems, A Revolutionary Calendar. Devised by Fabre d’Églantine and Gilbert Romme shortly after the French Revolution, the Republican Calendar attempted to recentre time around agriculture, plants, and animals. The 360 poems written in response led to performances that engaged the senses through live outdoor readings in a botanical garden and an online reading that explored the sound of culinary and consumption processes. Drawing on Marx and Serres, the chapter considers how sensory experiences can foster a collective understanding of the ways in which bodies are connected across species, and with the material world that sustains them.
Decomposing adverbs and complementizers
Authors: Corver Norbert
Published: August 2023

This chapter examines the syntax of the Dutch wh-element hoe ‘how’ in two of its grammatical uses: its use as an interrogative manner ‘adverb’ (hoeQ(uestion)), and its use as a non-interrogative conjunctive element (referred to as hoeE(ventive)). It is proposed that the two instances of hoe can be reduced to a single linguistic expression, namely a nominal expression. HoeQ starts out as the complement of a silent adposition which heads a PP. This PP is moved to the clausal left periphery, specifically to the Spec-position of a dummy adpositional ‘conjunction’ that surfaces as of ‘if/whether’ or remains silent. HoeE is base-generated in [Spec, CP] and assigns substantive contents (‘manner/way’) to the clause. This nominal clause-marker moves to the specifier position of an adpositional conjunction within the clausal left periphery. Thus, although the base positions of the nominal expressions hoeQ and hoeE are configurationally asymmetric, their derived positions are configurationally symmetric.
Czech evidential relatives introduced byjak‘how’
Authors: Šimík Radek , Sláma Jakub
Published: August 2023

The chapter provides a thorough description of Czech relative clauses introduced by the complementizer jak ‘how’. We argue that jak-relatives convey an evidential implication, whereby the speaker expects the hearer to have evidence that the predicate-type denotation of the relative clause truthfully applies to its referential head. For instance, “the man how smoked” implies that the hearer has evidence that the man smoked. We further argue that the evidential implication is a conventional implicature in the sense of Potts (2005) - it cannot be semantically embedded, the relative clause cannot be headed by quantificational heads, and cannot contain expressions semantically dependent on matrix operators. At the same time, jak-relatives appear to be able to be arguments of so-called recognitional demonstratives. Counter to Potts’ basic assumption, jak-relatives exhibit the paradoxical behavior of commenting on the relative clause head while being able to co-determine its extension.
Germanwie-comment and reporting clauses
Authors: Pittner Karin , Frey Werner
Published: August 2023

This contribution deals with comment and reporting clauses in German introduced by wie such as wie Peter sagt (‘as Peter says’). These are contrasted with so-clauses as in so sagt Peter (‘so says Peter’). A focus is placed on the categories and the semantics of wie and so. It is argued that wie is a relative adverb introducing a free relative clause, its relations to manner-wie and equative wie are pointed out. Wie-clauses can represent different types of ‘higher’ adverbials. Furthermore, wie-clauses can be speech act-related adverbials or and may occur as discourse markers. So as a ‘similarity demonstrative’ points to the content of the host clause and equates it to the content of the speech act or mental attitude referred to in the so-parenthetical. Wie lacks so’s deictic potential but shares its identifying capacity and takes the content of the host clause as an argument. It is shown that wie-clauses, in contrast to so-clauses, are not parentheticals.
Locating the locative in English pseudo-locativewhere-relatives
Authors: Brook Marisa , Moulton Keir
Published: August 2023

In this chapter we examine a colloquial relative clause construction in English that deploys the wh-element where, as in He got this awful haircut where it’s like a bag around his head. We develop an analysis for such “pseudo-locative” relatives that seeks to explain the locative nature of the relativizer as well as the fact such relatives prefer to express characterizing properties of the head noun (Brook and Moulton 2021). Building on intuitions in Radford (2019) and Van Riemsdijk (2003), and, we propose that pseudo-locative relatives involve abstraction over a variable contained within a situation-denoting topic in the complementizer domain spelled out by where. We suggest that this complementizer where arises from a re-analysis of wh-operator where in closely related relatives that involve an abstract notion of location. We derive a number of predictions concerning the semantics and syntax of pseudo-locative relatives, including anti-reconstruction effects.
The Euro Crisis and the Judicialization of Euro-Politics
Authors: de Boer Nik
Published: August 2023

Chapter 5 discusses the role of the German Federal Constitutional Court (GFCC) in the euro crisis. In 2009, the GFCC returned to the core tenets of its Maastricht judgment with its ruling on the Lisbon Treaty, which it further developed in its case law on the euro crisis. The chapter discusses this case law and the requirement that the German parliament must retain control over essential budgetary decisions. The chapter demonstrates how, in particular, this constitutional limitation constrained legitimate political disagreement over the future of the monetary union. The GFCC’s case law is at odds with the view that budgetary powers should be transferred to the EU in order to address the monetary union’s design faults and ensure democratic control over economic policy. The GFFC’s case law instead reinforced a politics in which fiscal discipline is of overriding importance.
Introduction to Microfluidics
Authors: Tabeling Patrick
Published: August 2023

The book includes six chapters: - Chap 1 is an introduction, including the history of microfluidics, the present situation, the market and an attempt to envision the future. - Chap 2 concerns the physics of miniaturization, in natural and microfluidic systems. A description of basic physical laws, starting with intermolecular forces, including Van der Waals and electrostatic forces is given. The three main domains of fluidics at small scales (sub nanofluidic, nanofluidics, microfluidics and millifluidics) are discussed. - Chap 3 concerns the hydrodynamics of small systems, without free interface. The foundations of the governing equations are discussed. Then the notion of slippage at walls are presented for the cases of liquids and gases. Sections are devoted to the notions of hydrodynamic resistances and capaticances. Finally, inertial microfluidics, i.e. microfluidics or millifluidics at moderate Reynolds numbers, is presented. - Chap 4 concerns the hydrodynamics of microfluidics, in the presence of free interfaces. Bbubbles an droplets in microchannels. Basics of interfaces are shown, surface tension Laplace law, wetting. Surfactants are presented and various laws are discussed - Chap 5 concerns electrokinetic phenomena. Electrokinetic equations are given, leading to Debye layer, elecroosmosis, sedimentation potential, electrophoresis, along with the various methods of separation used in the field. - Chap 6 offers an introduction to microfabrication techniques. Photolithography is presented. Techniques dedicated to hard materials. Direct writing and 3D printing are shown. Soft lithography, and in particular those using PDMS (PolyDimethylSiloxane) is presented, with applications to valving, pumping, along with recent technological approaches.
Hydrodynamics of microfluidics 2: droplets
Authors: Tabeling Patrick
Published: August 2023

This concerns the hydrodynamics of microfluidics, in the presence of free interfaces. In particular bubbles an droplets in microchannels. Basics of interfaces are shown, including discussions on capillarity, surface tension Laplace law, wetting. Surfactants, which play a major role in microfluidics, are presented. Various laws are discussed: Washburn law, Landau Levich, Breteherton, Rayleigh Plateau. These notions are used to discuss the behaviour of droplets in microfluidic systems: breakup, coalescence, bubble pressure drop, droplet production.
Intuitionism, Realism, Relativism, and Rhubarb
Authors: Wright Crispin
Published: August 2023

The chapter focuses on so-called disputes of inclination, such as a dispute over whether something is delicious or attractive or funny or exciting. The ‘ordinary view’ of such disputes is that they involve the following three key elements: that the parties can have genuinely incompatible attitudes, that no one need be mistaken, and that both sides can rationally maintain their position in the face of the disagreement. It is argued that the naturalness of the ordinary view for a wide range of subject matters is what provides the root attraction of relativism. Moreover, disputes of this sort, and the ordinary view of them, arise in more philosophically interesting cases, as well: over what is right or wrong, or what is justified or not, for example. Therefore, understanding whether the ordinary view of these disputes is indeed coherent, and what sort of theory of truth it entails, stands to help us understand similar disputes in ethics or epistemology. After pointing out that the three elements of the ordinary view are in manifest tension with one another, the chapter canvasses and rejects several ways of resolving this tension. It then suggests a novel solution to the problem; one arising out of the position that truth can itself come in different forms. If this is so, then one is free to understand truth in some domains—such as the domains that give rise to disputes of inclination—as superassertibility or sustained justification without defeaters. Suitably understood and applied, superassertibility can be invoked to explain a defensible, albeit local, relativism about truth.
New Age Relativism and Epistemic Possibility
Authors: Wright Crispin
Published: August 2023

‘New Age’ relativist treatments have been proposed for discourse involving epistemic modalities for the ostensible reason that such accounts best accommodate certain alleged data of retrospective self-correction—‘retraction’—and correction by eavesdropper. The chapter argues for pessimism concerning whether a relativistic semantics is likely to make best sense of these putative data. In many cases, it is arguable that what is corrected is not strictly the epistemic possibility claim itself but the embedded proposition, understood as having been tentatively endorsed or entered into the reckoning for some practical purpose by the making of the original (apparently) epistemic modal claim. In any case, each of these kinds of corrective pattern is not actually upheld in a very significant range of cases, and in general there seem to be no fewer counterexamples to the simplest MacFarlane-style relativistic account than to its non-relativistic competitors. Additional difficulties for the relativist direction include providing the resources to handle certain kinds of embedded epistemic possibility clauses, and the fact that the retrospective correction data seem to be at odds with the admission, presumably integral to relativism, that the criticized claim may have been correct in its original (assessment) context. The discussion indirectly raises doubts whether there is any extant clear model of the patterns that linguistic data in a region of discourse should in principle assume if they are to provide compelling grounds for preferring an assessment-sensitive style of semantic theory.
Talking with Vultures
Authors: Wright Crispin
Published: August 2023

The chapter is an extended critical review of Herman Cappelen’s and John Hawthorne’s Relativism and Monadic Truth (OUP, 2009). Cappelen and Hawthorne make a case in detail that conventional contextualist semantic resources suffice for a systematic account of those areas of discourse that advocates of assessment-sensitivity have regarded as most apt for relativistic treatment. The chapter focuses on the case of basic taste and argues, to the contrary, that Cappelen and Hawthorne do not actually succeed in making out a form of contextualism adequate to discourse of basic taste; and moreover that contextualism is anyway an unmotivated direction for this particular area. Rather, a much more promising model is provided by minimalist conceptions of truth and truth-aptitude prefigured in chapter 7. In short, at least for basic taste, the chapter invites a plague on both the relativist and contextualist houses.
Alethic Pluralism, Deflationism, and Faultless Disagreement
Authors: Wright Crispin
Published: August 2023

The chapter returns to the “folk”-anti-realist idea about certain areas of my thought and discourse—basic taste, for instance, or comedy—that their lack of objectivity crystallizes in the possibility of “faultless disagreements”: situations where one party accepts P, another rejects P, and neither is guilty of any kind of mistake of substance or shortcoming of cognitive process. As noted in earlier chapters, it proves challenging on closer examination to make coherent sense of this idea, and a majority of theorists have come to reject it as incoherent. There are two significant exceptions in the contemporary literature: relativists often hold it up as something of a coup for their view that it can make straightforward sense of faultless disagreement; and I have argued (Chapters 1 and 2) that making judicious intuitionistic revisions to classical logic can provide resources that suffice to stabilize the notion. The present chapter argues that neither relativism nor intuitionism in fact provides a satisfactory account and indicates how a form of minimalism about truth and truth-aptitude, harnessed within an alethic pluralist framework enables us to do better.
The birth of prohibition
Authors: Seddon Toby
Published: August 2023

In the second of two historical chapters, this chapter examines the international meetings in the first two decades of the twentieth century at which the global drug prohibition system was assembled. After briefly presenting events in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the main part of the chapter focuses on the 1909 International Opium Commission in Shanghai, drawing on original archival research. Through a detailed account and analysis of the Shanghai Commission, it is argued that rather than being an American invention, drug prohibition is rooted in Asia and, in particular, China. The aftermath from Shanghai—a further round of meetings at The Hague between 1911 and 1914—leading up to the First World War is then described. In conclusion, it is argued that this pair of historical chapters demonstrates how the central driving forces in the dynamic that shaped the emergence of today’s prohibition system were not American moralising but rather international trade and commerce, economic regulation, European colonial power, and the modernisation of China.
Judicial Uses of Images
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: August 2023

A judge springs out of his car on the way to court in downtown Chicago and takes photographs of an inflatable rat. A while later he inserts these photographs into a decision involving another insufflated rodent used in a union protest. The increasing use of images in case law and precedent in the common law world provides a visual atlas of how lawyers see. Using a constantly augmenting corpus of over 400 images drawn from decisions in different common law influenced jurisdictions across the globe, Judicial Uses of Images catalogues, analyses, and reviews the normative significance and affective force of this new medium of legal expression and judgement. An increasingly imaginal transmission of law is critically dissected in the terms of remediation and the emergent criteria and protocols of retinal justice. The affective and aesthetic tensors of viewing are elaborated to provide a guide to the novel visual sensibilities of legality.
Conclusion
Authors: Goodrich Peter
Published: August 2023

The final chapter poses the question of remediation of law directly and addresses the inverse of retinal justice, the law’s refusal to look, the injustice of image blindness. Two examples, the case of the so called ‘naked rambler’ in the UK and a dissenting decision concerning voter restriction laws in the US are used to review and define the refusal to look closely, the monochromatic resistance to the real, to colour and difference, that the reality effect so often generates. Why did courts across the UK and into Europe routinely refuse to allow the Edenic argument of a nudist to be made in the only form authentic to his case, nakedly, in court, in camera if need be, temporarily if so desired, but seen? Habeas corpus requires its complement, that the body be seen. Similarly in the exclusion of minority voters, the dissenting African American judge posted pictures of voting rights martyrs in his judgement so as to make the court look, so as to put the faces of the dead on the record of the precedent, to open eyes.
Modernist Parody
Authors: Davison Sarah
Published: August 2023

Parody often stands accused of producing derivative art deficient in taste and skill. But in the hands of writers such as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf, the mode engendered revolutionary self-reflexive, critical, and creative practices that were crucial to the development of truly modern art. This book contends that the jauntiness, verve, and daring of high modernism is fundamentally parodic. It argues that parody is central to the whole modernist project, even to supposedly earnest movements such as Imagism, and not just to the extreme avant-garde antics of Dada. As a literary technique, parody provided the means for modernists of many stripes to learn their craft, sharpen their historical sense, define themselves as post-Victorians, and respond to sources of inspiration while composing. It offered a ready method to laugh at folly, amuse friends, criticize opponents, spike enemies, and transgress conventions. Being double-coded, parody proved a powerful weapon in the culture wars, enabling modernists to present and simultaneously challenge prevailing ideologies in all their historically determined complexity. Its fundamentally dialogic and palimpsestual form exposed the limitations of naive mimesis, insisting that literature is always language in unstable play, while simultaneously foregrounding the relational structures that underwrote the modernists’ paradoxical claims to originality and modernity. As a principle of continual genesis—and a spur to the production of yet more forcefully experimental art—parody therefore became the modernists’ primary reflex as they negotiated their position in literary culture and made it new.
‘An Atmosphere of Parody’
Authors: Davison Sarah
Published: August 2023

Chapter 3 explores how Pound’s journey of discovery with parody shaped the course of Imagism, focusing particularly on ‘Contemporania’ (1913) and Des Imagistes (1914). It examines his efforts to inaugurate an ‘atmosphere of parody’ so that the new school might flourish under the same conditions that had animated recent European avant-gardes. In doing so, it argues that Imagism was not nearly so earnest as its various pronouncements on the timeless qualities of good poetry might otherwise suggest. It concludes by investigating the parody that sustained the contradictions inherent in Blast (1914–15), the magazine of the first English avant-garde movement, Vorticism, which was itself widely parodied in little magazines and intellectual weeklies.
Parodists of History
Authors: Davison Sarah
Published: August 2023

Chapter 7 concludes by reflecting on the ways in which modernist writers felt compelled to respond to the parody that had come to define high modernist writing, having reached its apotheosis in Ulysses in general and ‘Oxen of the Sun’ in particular. It examines works by Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, and Wyndham Lewis that reckon with the achievements of Joyce and other authors by presenting versions of their contemporary literary culture as culminating moments that are defined by their parodies of the past, and it explores how Joyce surpassed the parody of Ulysses in Finnegans Wake, showing how parody is not only fundamental to the genesis of modernist literature but also its sense of its historical situatedness and paradoxical modernity.
Interpretivism and Foundationalism
Authors: Slavny Adam
Published: August 2023

This chapter distinguishes between two methodologies: interpretivism and foundationalism. It argues that interpretivism faces serious limitations with respect to justifying the law. Foundationalism can make better normative progress as it can evaluate the full range of relevant views and arguments rather than just those that best explain the law. The chapter also defends the claim that moral corrective duties are crucial to the justification of the law. When a legal duty is imposed in the absence of an enforceable moral duty, defendants can complain that their moral freedoms are being curtailed and they are suffering an undue burden. When a legal duty is not imposed where there is an enforceable moral duty, would-be claimants can complain that they have no recourse for wrongs done to them and as a result their interests are de-prioritized relative to those of others. These complaints can be overridden, but they provide a powerful general case for the relevance of moral duties to the justification of the law.
Unpacking Corrective Duties
Authors: Slavny Adam
Published: August 2023

This chapter defends a distinction between negating and counterbalancing as fundamental to understanding different types of corrective action. It also distinguishes between the well-known continuity thesis and the responsiveness thesis. It defends the responsiveness thesis, which places less emphasis on trying to make it as if the wrong did not happen and more on responding appropriately to the failures of one’s moral agency. Throughout this discussion, the chapter introduces the first two limbs of a four-fold analysis of corrective duties. The responsiveness thesis shows how wrongdoing grounds corrective duties, and the distinction between negating and counterbalancing helps to defend the concept of conditional permissibility.
Capacity and Cost Sensitivity in Negligence
Authors: Slavny Adam
Published: August 2023

This chapter further develops the first limb of the four-fold analysis by examining the wrong of negligence. It argues that the moral wrong of negligence is both capacity and cost-sensitive, meaning that the level of care one owes to others depends on one’s capacity to exercise that care, and the cost and difficulty to one of doing so. Some principled arguments in favour of the objective standard of care (which can be restated as arguments against capacity and cost insensitivity) are considered and rejected, concluding that, if the law is justified in departing from a capacity and cost-sensitive approach, this is not for any deep reasons of principle but rather because of the difficulties of enforcing alternative standards in non-ideal conditions.
Outcome Responsibility
Authors: Slavny Adam
Published: August 2023

This chapter considers and rejects a number of arguments for outcome responsibility put forward in particular by Tony Honoré and John Gardner: The Fairness Argument, The Consistency Argument, The Argument from Duties to Succeed, and The Effacement Argument. It then defends an alternative version of outcome responsibility that connects the duty of repair to our prior duties to bear special costs to avoid harming others, grounded in the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. On this view, we have some corrective responsibilities—though not necessarily the full burden of repair—even when we harm others through involuntary action.
‘Holding against the Tide’
Authors: Tyce Matthew
Published: August 2023

This chapter explores the factors that have influenced the performance of the Central Bank of Kenya, Kenya Revenue Authority, and National Treasury since the 1990s, all of which were identified as potential examples of ‘pockets of effectiveness’ in the Kenyan context. The chapter finds that Kenya’s ‘dispersed’ political settlement (which moved from a ‘narrow’ to ‘broad’ social foundation during the chapter’s period of analysis) creates an environment that is generally not conducive to concerted, longer-term investments in state capacity, as ruling elites tend to be preoccupied with shorter-term efforts to keep themselves in power and lack sufficient enforcement powers to discipline or centralize rent-seeking. Although these political pressures have been felt by the three case-study organizations, other factors have meant that the degree of autonomy that these organizations have been able to maintain has varied significantly, both between the organizations and within the same organizations over time. These factors go beyond each organization’s formal autonomy to include the nature and embeddedness of its leadership. Transnational factors have also been important, notably the extent to which these organizations have been subject to the disciplinary logics of global neoliberalism. Finally, ideational factors have helped to buttress the autonomy of these organizations, at least during particular periods, as policy coalitions composed of politicians and technocrats (drawing on, but not beholden to, donor support) have occasionally come together around shared developmental ideas to try and protect these organizations—and the economic technocracy generally—from the more corrosive pressures generated by Kenya’s political settlement.
The Politics of State Capacity in Post-genocide Rwanda
Authors: Chemouni Benjamin
Published: August 2023

The chapter analyses pockets of effectiveness (PoEs)—public organizations that function better than the rest of the state—in Rwanda and their contribution to state-building. It does so by exploring three cases of high-performing public-sector agencies, namely the Ministry of Finance, the Rwandan Revenue Authority, and the Central Bank. The chapter shows that the Rwandan case does not seem to follow the patterns of other African countries, whereby a few effective public organizations exist in an otherwise relatively dysfunctional governance context. It argues that the nature of the political settlement and elite vulnerability have led to a top-down and relatively systematic project of state-building. Anchored in the experience of the genocide, ruling elites from a minority group perceive that building an effective state geared towards delivering development in a largely impartial manner is the best response to their vulnerability. Moreover, the political dominance that the ruling coalition has achieved means that it has the capacity to enforce this project. From this perspective, PoEs are best understood as emerging through a project of state-building prioritization, with organizations supported to deliver their mandate effectively because of their political salience in the ruling coalition’s wider state-building project. Other factors identified in the PoE literature also emerge as important here, including the nature of the task being performed and the role of organizational leadership, although the choice of leaders and the support offered to them are themselves a direct outcome of the governing coalition’s political priorities.
The Politics of PoEs in Uganda
Authors: Hickey Sam , Bukenya Badru , Matsiko Haggai
Published: August 2023

Uganda’s impressive level of economic performance over much of the past three decades has often been linked to the performance of certain ‘pockets of effectiveness’ (PoEs), including the Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Uganda, and, more unevenly, the Uganda Revenue Authority. The extension of presidential protection to these (and a few other) PoEs has been central to their success, as have been high levels of international support and the appointment of ‘technopols’ to lead these organizations for prolonged periods. These technopols have proven capable of managing both the political and technical aspects of their briefs, with some playing a more prominent role in Uganda’s governance and public life than elected ministers. However, the performance of these organizations has varied considerably over time, with all coming under considerable pressure following the increased dispersal of power from the early 2000s onwards within Uganda’s erstwhile ‘broad-concentrated’ political settlement. This chapter explores how the interplay of political settlement dynamics and organizational leadership shapes public-sector performance in Uganda, and how Uganda’s PoEs have increasingly become entwined with the politics of regime survival, rather than any wider state-building project. This process has been closely shaped by international ideas and pressures, with key PoEs used by President Museveni to signal Uganda’s legitimacy within the neoliberal economic order from the early 1990s. This neoliberalized process of state-building has had a profound impact on Uganda’s development trajectory and left Uganda without the capabilities required to pursue alternative developmental agendas.
Disaster Insurance Reimagined
Authors: Jarzabkowski Paula , Chalkias Konstantinos , Cacciatori Eugenia , Bednarek Rebecca
Published: August 2023

This book is about the critical yet little-known work of “Protection Gap Entities” (PGEs), in disaster protection. Disasters, such as floods, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks, are becoming more frequent and more intense. These disasters threaten not only life, but also livelihood, causing the loss of homes and jobs that can scar the lives of those affected. Disaster insurance, by providing funds for reconstruction, plays an essential role in limiting these consequences of disaster. Yet disaster insurance is under threat in many contexts, becoming unaffordable or being withdrawn entirely. In response, many countries have established PGEs, organizations and schemes to keep disaster insurance available. PGEs rebalance the tensions (paradoxes) at the heart of insurance about who controls the insurance market, how much is known about the risk, and who should pay for protection. Using evocative examples from our research into 17 PGEs across 49 countries over five years, we explain how PGEs establish, maintain, and expand disaster insurance, and their role in the wider landscape of disaster resilience. We conclude by reimagining disaster insurance as a key tool in an ecosystem that has societal protection from disaster at its heart. Our book is accessible for those who have never heard of PGEs or thought about disaster insurance. We explain why PGEs are vital in adapting to an increasingly disaster-prone world. Our paradox lens on the tensions PGEs face will also provide an alternative, thought-provoking view for risk professionals working with the challenges of insuring disasters.
Shouldering the burden
Authors: Jarzabkowski Paula , Chalkias Konstantinos , Cacciatori Eugenia , Bednarek Rebecca
Published: August 2023

Protection Gap Entities (PGEs) do not choose how to tackle uninsurability. Their remits are the product of often-tense negotiations about who should control the insurance market—the insurance industry or the government (control paradox)—and whether individuals or society are responsible for disaster protection (responsibility paradox). These differences arise from different sociopolitical contexts and economic conditions. However, they also arise from the specific problem being addressed, such as the sudden withdrawal of insurance after terrorist attack, or the increase in premiums that make insurance unaffordable after repeated floods. There is, thus, no “one best way” to decide whether the insurance market should be primarily controlled by the government or the industry and whether individuals or society should be primarily responsible to pay for protection. We show three different ways of balancing the control and responsibility paradoxes, each of which has different pros and cons for solving the problem of uninsurability.
Problem solved?
Authors: Jarzabkowski Paula , Chalkias Konstantinos , Cacciatori Eugenia , Bednarek Rebecca
Published: August 2023

The disaster landscape is not static. Protection Gap Entities (PGEs) must evolve as new risks emerge, risk increases, or knowledge about risk changes. Yet their remits are often constrained to past disasters. PGEs thus typically struggle to evolve until a disaster exposes a lack of protection. Evolution requires PGEs to navigate a complex control system of accountability to insurance industry and government stakeholders. They must also be sensitive to wider stakeholders, who can be unaware of PGEs until after a disaster, when their expectations for protection become urgent. We show that PGEs evolve in either contested or collaborative patterns according to whether their remit is oriented towards industry or government control over the market,. We illustrate these differences through a contested case pattern in the UK and a collaborative pattern in the Caribbean. Evolution is never smooth for PGEs. But it is vital to keep pace with changes in disaster.
Reimagining disaster insurance
Authors: Jarzabkowski Paula , Chalkias Konstantinos , Cacciatori Eugenia , Bednarek Rebecca
Published: August 2023

How relevant is the global insurance industry in a world of more frequent and severe disasters? Insurance underpins complex modern economies. For example, mortgages and home ownership depend on viable disaster insurance. We need insurance to work. Yet, as disasters increase, disaster insurance is facing potential obsolescence. This chapter proposes a way to avoid sleepwalking into a future where viable disaster insurance can no longer be taken-for-granted. Our proposal involves an expanded role for Protection Gap Entities (PGEs), moving beyond ad hoc solutions to local protection gaps, to integration within the global system of disaster insurance. This expanded role includes deep links between financial and physical resilience, increased collaboration between the government and the private sector, and shared responsibility for protection between individuals and society. Our vision is an ecosystem that has societal protection from disaster at its heart, with insurance, reimagined, as an effective servant in that ecosystem.
Describing Weakness of Will
Authors: Heinzelmann Nora
Published: August 2023

Combining the philosophical and the scientific perspective, this chapter suggests a new way of describing weak-willed delay discounting. On this view, weak-willed action is, roughly, due to how the agent responds to the uncertainty about whether or when an anticipated good materializes. At least three reasons weigh in favour of this view: intuitively, the temporal delay of a future benefit, such as better health thanks to dieting, always involves a risk of not obtaining this benefit. In a similar vein, many authors have pointed out similarities of probability and delay discounting. Probability discounting is the reduction of value due to probability. Lastly, there is an empirical connection between probability and delay discounting. For example, risk-seeking individuals are more patient, and vice versa.
A Format for Every Use
Authors: Jettot Stéphane
Published: August 2023

In the field of the history of books, the first chapter is dedicated to a raw typology based on three main formats: pocket-size, octavo, and quarto-to-folio. Through this clear-cut categorization, we contend that the different formats did correspond to different social needs: some compilations could be read in passing, such as pocketbooks for aspiring gentlemen. Discarding family trees, they provided synoptic lists of titled individuals with a brief account of their public offices and dignities, ancestors, and descent. Directories in octavo were advertised as reserved to a narrower public: titled families and their descendants who would benefit from more detailed narratives of their past. They were published in particular during political crisis and adopted a rather consensual and inclusive tone. Finally, we consider the gilded luxury volumes in quarto and folio for the happy few collectors. Conceived as family monuments, they belonged to the wider material culture surrounding ancestry (carriages, libraries, portraits, furniture).
Our Hero
Authors: Belot Gordon
Published: August 2023

This chapter introduces de Sitter spacetime and surveys some facts about its geometry and symmetries. The guiding analogy is that de Sitter spacetime stands to Minkowski spacetime as the sphere stands to the Euclidean plane. Just as the sphere can be perspicuously viewed as a subset of three-dimensional space, so can a de Sitter spacetime be viewed as a subset of a Minkowski spacetime of one greater dimension. This representation underwrites an investigation of the symmetries of de Sitter spacetimes and allows one to see that they are homogeneous (i.e., they have the same geometry at each point) they are not stationary (there is no family of observers who sees de Sitter geometry as being time-independent). The chapter concludes with an discussion of the conformal completion of de Sitter spacetime.
Asymptotically de Sitter Spacetimes
Authors: Belot Gordon
Published: August 2023

This chapter initiates a study of general relativistic worlds, such as we take our own to be, that become more and more de Sitter-like as time passes. It is primarily concerned with using the technique of conformal completion to define a sense in which a spacetime can be asymptotically Minkowski or asymptotically de Sitter. This leads to a discussion of the asymptotic symmetries of such spacetimes and the relation between such symmetries and radiative behaviour. One of the themes is the difficulty of replicating in the asymptotically de Sitter context the successful analysis of gravitational radiation at conformal infinity that is has played an important role in the asymptotically Minkowski case.
Brains!
Authors: Belot Gordon
Published: August 2023

This chapter is devoted to the cosmologists' favourite skeptical worry about the reliability of evidence and the possibility of knowledge, the problem of Boltzmann brains: its origins in ideas of Boltzmann; its development and apparent resolution by Eddington; and its return to prominence in recent years, driven by physicists'' attempts to make coherent sense of physics with a positive cosmological constant. It includes a survey of some ideas from statistical physics that underlie the problem of Boltzmann brains. The chapter ends with a number of questions for readers interested in making progress on this problem.
Science and Ethics
Authors: Sellars Wilfrid
Published: August 2023

Sellars argues that a word stands for a concept when there are good arguments in which it is essentially involved. This alternative to empiricist theories of content (such as Ayer’s) can allow the conceptual character of some nonempirical language (e.g., moral, mathematical, logical). Moral judgments (as verbal expressions of attitudes) express concepts because good reasons can be brought to bear concerning such judgments. Further, these reasons allow us to vindicate moral first principles. In “rational disciplines” such as morality and mathematics, the derivation of subsidiary moral maxims from first principles is then a matter of consistency. This nonempiricist account of moral conceptual content allows Sellars to situate normative ethical discourse within a scientific realist framework: As a rational discipline, moral judgments can be contentful without troublesome ontological commitments. Further, Sellars’s account indicates how such an expressivist theory could (unlike, say, Ayer’s expressivist theory) offer an account of moral expressions as intersubjective and objective.