bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Nb12+—niobespherene: a full-metal hollow-cage cluster with superatomic stability and resistance to CO attack
Authors: Huang Benben , Zhang Hanyu , Gan Wen , Yang Mengzhou , Luo Zhixun , Yao Jiannian
Published: September 2022

Why one chemical is more stable than another is not always easy to understand. A unified answer for metal clusters has led to the establishment of the superatom concept, which rationalizes the delocalization of electrons; however, cluster stability based on superatom theory has not been confirmed unambiguously for any metal other than the s- and p-blocks of the periodic table of elements. Here, we have prepared pure niobium clusters and observed their reactions with CO under sufficient gas collision conditions. We find prominent inertness of Nb12+, which survives CO attack. Comprehensive theoretical calculation results reveal that the inertness of Nb12+ is associated with its cage structure and well-organized superatomic orbitals, giving rise to energetic superiority among the studied clusters. It is revealed that not only the 5s but also the 4d electrons of Nb delocalize in the cluster and significantly contribute to the superatomic state, resulting in reasonable cage aromaticity. This hollow-cage cluster, which we have called a ‘niobespherene’, provides a clue with regard to designing new materials of all-metal aromaticity and Nb-involved catalysts free of CO poisoning.
Introduction
Authors: Johnson Imani Kai
Published: September 2022

Opening with a thick descriptive story of a live breaking event titled “Being There” and a preface that quickly situates the author’s foregrounding of Africanist aesthetics, the introduction unpacks the book’s titular keywords: the dark matter metaphor about Africanist aesthetics, breaking (versus b-boying/b-girling and breakdancing), and cyphers. The author gives readers the scope and meaning of these terms within their cultural context. The introduction also details the book’s interdisciplinary approach—referred to as a “methodological mixtape”—which draws on ethnography, archival research, movement analysis, and the central role of the storytelling practices of practitioners. It ends with a chapter summary.
Badass B-Girls Dancing the Dissonance of a Breaking Sociality
Authors: Johnson Imani Kai
Published: September 2022

Opening with a story of a contentious cypher exchange in Germany, marked by differences in race and gender, titled “Crossing the Line,” chapter 3 pivots to the possibilities of cyphers primarily comprised of b-girls. Through a focus on two Africanist aesthetics (rituals of derision and the imperative for originality) and a reconsideration of a previously published discussion of badass femininity, it explores how b-girls embody battling imperatives through “burns” and playing in the profane, thereby contending with normative notions of femininity whether they intend to or not. At the same time, their practice cannot be reduced to an assessment of gender, and, as they bring their whole selves to identities as b-girls, they enact a mode of relationality that fosters a competing sensibility on sociality, one that makes breaking a more inclusive space for future b-girls. The chapter focuses on Emiko, Black Pearl, Rokafella, and Hanifa Queen, and puts their oral histories in conversation with recent scholarship on b-girls internationally to expand a comparative analysis.
Coda
Authors: Johnson Imani Kai
Published: September 2022

The coda pivots to consider the capacity for Africanist aesthetics to live online in what the author calls cyber cyphers. Rather than look at literal online footage of cyphers, the conclusion explores cypher-like experiences online or activated in social media, amplifying cyphers as speculative projects. While only a preliminary exploration of ideas offered by artist and educator D. Sabela grimes and filmmaker Arthur Jafa, this work asks questions that Africanist aesthetics might open up for how we watch and engage with dance. Throughout the concluding chapter are short descriptive stories that detail some of the ways the internet intersected with the ethnography. This short closing invites others to consider ideas that extend the project’s core questions in new future directions.
Toward a Feminist Theory of Mental Content
Authors: Maitra Keya
Published: September 2022

A feminist theory of content allows us to appreciate the nuanced role that historical and sociocultural forces play in shaping the content of many of our terms. This chapter first shows how the classic articulation of externalism in literature is ineffective for feminist purposes. It then identifies two important ingredients that a feminist theory of content requires, namely, accounts of how the social and physical world shape content and what is required to transform that content. The final part of the argument develops the first approximation of a feminist theory of content drawing from Ruth Garrett Millikan’s “consumer” account of meaning and mental representation. Using as an example José Jorge Mendoza’s analysis of how the history of US immigration and citizenship law has shaped the term “whiteness,” this chapter argues that feminist theorizing and activism stand to benefit from the possibility of a feminist theory of mental content that makes explicit how the contents of many terms with social and political import are determined and held stable.
Embodiments of Sex and Gender
Authors: Jackson Gabrielle Benette
Published: September 2022

Feminists of embodiment embrace the idea that sex and gender are bodily practices, constituted by the social forces of history, society, ideology, and culture. But how do social forces form bodily behavior into the regular arrangements intelligible as feminine or masculine (gender), female or male (sex)? This chapter argues that in place of answers to this question, currently, there are metaphors—“the metaphors of speaking surfaces.” These metaphors entail a false dilemma, trading individual agency for an increasingly complex tale of sex and gender. The chapter suggests moving away from the metaphors of speaking surfaces and toward precise descriptions of sex and gender that employ the notion of “bodily agency,” a personal-level phenomenon, wherein the body both responds to social forces and projects a social milieu.
Introduction
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

The introduction lays out the chief contours of Frances Willard’s life and her importance as a historical figure. Emphasizing what she called “Do Everything” reform, Willard led the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) between 1879 until her death in 1898, turning it into one of the largest women’s organizations in the world. Lionized in the years after her death as perhaps the most iconic nineteenth-century woman, many aspects of Willard’s historical legacy have been lost with the passing of time. The chapter underscores the importance of Willard’s Christian faith, noting that she was one of the most important figures in nineteenth-century American Methodism. The chapter also calls attention to Willard’s importance as a figure in American religious history, particularly in relationship to recovering the importance of women’s history for interpreting Willard’s era.
“Dawn of Woman’s Day”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter examines the continuing evolution of Frances Willard’s views on woman suffrage by the end of the 1880s. Along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, Willard played key roles in establishing the International Council of Women and the National Council of Women in 1888. Serving as inaugural president of the National Council of Women, Willard helped forge a broader movement of women’s clubs that emerged by the end of the decade. The chapter also explores tensions between Willard and leaders of the woman suffrage movement who objected to Willard’s insistence in tying together suffrage and temperance with support of the Prohibition Party. It also explores Willard’s deepening progressivism through the influence of Edward Bellamy and his popular 1888 novel, Looking Backward.
“Gospel Socialism”
Authors: Evans Christopher H.
Published: September 2022

This chapter looks at Frances Willard’s career around the time of her fiftieth birthday at the end of the 1880s. Drawn into a movement called Christian socialism, Willard became a close colleague of Episcopal priest W. D. P. Bliss and an associate editor of his Christian socialist newspaper, The Dawn. Showing the influence of the British social critic John Ruskin, Willard’s growing stress on Christian socialism put her at odds with various factions in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). The chapter highlights the culmination of her feud with J. Ellen Foster over Willard’s endorsement of the Prohibition Party. This feud led Foster in 1889 to create a new woman’s temperance organization, the Nonpartisan WCTU.
One Lord Jesus Christ
Authors: Cockayne Joshua
Published: September 2022

Chapter 3 seeks to offer a model for understanding the claim that the Church is the body of Christ. After considering Gregory of Nyssa’s reflections on the Church as the body of Christ, the chapter seeks to offer a philosophical model which can help elucidate his claims. It argues that recent work on the nature of extended cognition in the philosophy of mind can help to shed light on the relation between the one Church and the one body of Christ. As both Richard Cross and James Arcadi have shown, this philosophical literature (which seeks to show that cognition can be extended beyond the human brain into external artefacts) can help provide models for understanding both the Incarnation and the Eucharist. Here, both Cross’ and Arcadi’s incarnational metaphysics are developed to explain how the Church might be thought of as the body of Christ. However, unlike the Eucharist and the Incarnation, the doctrine of the Church does not think of Christ as extended into some artefact or tangible object, but into a social body. To give a metaphysics of the Church as the body of Christ, then, the chapter builds on work in socially extended cognition, which seeks to show the ways in which minds are extended into other minds. This can provide one model for thinking about how the Church as a group agent might participate in the body of Christ.
One Bread, One Cup
Authors: Cockayne Joshua
Published: September 2022

Whereas baptism is a once in a lifetime sign of our membership in the one Church, the Eucharist stands a perpetual sign of our membership into the body. Chapter 5 argues that the Eucharist is central to our understanding of how we participate in the one body of the Church by sharing the body of Christ in the one bread. First, drawing from recent work in social psychology, it reflects on the significance of shared experiences and ritualized movement for community cohesion, arguing that this might play a role in the outward forms of unity in the Church. While these accounts can explain the psychological mechanisms behind the Eucharist as a human ritual, and thereby provide some explanation of how the Spirit enacts unity through the sacraments of the Church, an account which is solely psychological risks locating unity in the wrong place. Secondly, then, the chapter offers an account of the Eucharist as unitive through the real presence of Christ. Here, it develops a discussion from the American Reformed theologian John Williamson Nevin as he seeks to emphasize the importance of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist for uniting the Church.
A Provisional Conception of Human Flourishing
Authors: Tahzib Collis
Published: September 2022

This chapter specifies and defends the conception of human flourishing that is to be incorporated into the perfectionist principles of justice. The author rejects several prominent conceptions of human flourishing that have been defended by previous perfectionists (namely, Christian, Confucian and Aristotelian conceptions) on the grounds that they are subject to reasonable disagreement and so are not legitimate sources of political reasons under conditions of reasonable pluralism, even if true. Instead, the author defends a more free-standing conception that holds that, at least for political purposes, human flourishing consists in the enjoyment of moral, intellectual and artistic excellence. It is stressed that this is a provisional free-standing conception of human flourishing: it is a reasonable approximation, but it is open to refinement and revision as a result of a broader process of philosophical inquiry into the nature of human flourishing. This conception is then defended against two objections: that the selection of moral, intellectual and artistic excellence is arbitrary, since no mention is made of the deeper feature that explains why all and only these excellences contribute to human flourishing; and that enjoyment and excellence are not strictly necessary conditions of human flourishing because excellence devoid of enjoyment and enjoyment devoid of excellence can both contribute to human flourishing.
Measures
Authors: Kantorovitz Shmuel , Viselter Ami
Published: September 2022

In this introductory chapter the authors outline the study of measure theory, a topic that spans Chapters 1–3 and most of Chapter 4. First the chapter introduces positive measure spaces and Lebesgue integration on them. It then proves several fundamental convergence theorems. It next covers various topics, which include Lp-spaces, the inner product, the “Little” Riesz representation theorem, and the Lebesgue–Radon–Nikodym theorem, and provides a first look at the Hilbert space. It then explains complex measures, notions of convergence, convergence on a finite measure space, distribution function, and Egoroff’s theorem. It also explores the distribution function of a measurable function, and the truncation of a function. Finally, the chapter offer exercises to challenge the reader.
Construction of measures
Authors: Kantorovitz Shmuel , Viselter Ami
Published: September 2022

In this chapter we introduce a powerful technique due to Caratheodory for constructing positive measures from primitive objects called semi-measures on semi-algebras. In contrast to σ-algebras, which are normally “big” and intangible, semi-algebras are often “small” and concrete. We use this method to construct the Lebesgue–Stieltjes measures, a special case of which is the Lebesgue measure, which is roughly the “length measure” on the real line, and it covers the structure of measurable sets. We apply Caratheodory’s extension theorem to construct the product of two positive measure spaces and prove the theorems of Fubini and Tonelli. Finally, the chapter offer exercises to challenge the reader.
Banach algebras
Authors: Kantorovitz Shmuel , Viselter Ami
Published: September 2022

This chapter introduces the study of Banach algebras, and sets the tone for the discussion that continues later in Chapters 11–13. We present and investigate the spectrum of elements in Banach algebras. We next discuss commutative Banach algebras as well as the Gelfand representation. We define C*-algebras and use the foregoing to prove the celebrated commutative Gelfand–Naimark theorem characterizing commutative C*-algebras. The continuous operational calculus of normal elements in C*-algebras is then introduced and explored. The chapter also provides a short discussion on the Arens products on the double dual of a Banach algebra. Finally, the chapter offer exercises to challenge the reader.
Von Neumann algebras
Authors: Kantorovitz Shmuel , Viselter Ami
Published: September 2022

Continuing on from Chapter 11, Chapter 12 furthers the discussion of C*-algebras. This chapter is devoted to a particular class of C*-algebras called von Neumann algebras. The chapter presents the two great foundations of von Neumann algebra theory, which are the double commutant theorem of von Neumann and the density theorem of Kaplansky with respect to the strong operator topology. In addition, it discusses the polar decomposition of operators, W*-algebras, Hilbert–Schmidt operators, and trace-class operators. It then explores the topics of commutative von Neumann algebras, as well as the enveloping von Neumann algebra of a C*-algebra. Finally, the chapter offer exercises to challenge the reader.
Postmodern Macroeconomics
Authors: Beenstock Michael
Published: September 2022

Applied macroeconomics during the last quarter of a century has undergone a postmodernist revolution. Data are not used to test models, but to infer the parameters of DSGE models using methods such as calibration, under the assumption that the model is ‘true’. This revolution was intended as a response to the Lucas critique. Lucas contended that econometricians were rejecting too many “good models.” It is ironic, therefore, that the spread of calibration has led to the acceptance of too many “bad models.” These bad models led central bankers astray, and contributed to the eventual adoption of zero interest policy. The emergence of the New Abnormal cannot be disconnected from the spread of postmodernism in applied macroeconomics. Modernist (frequentist) methods have recently been developed to test models empirically based on indirect inference. These methods strongly reject DSGE models, such as the seminal Smets-Wouters model.
The Racial Artist Confronts the Blacklist
Authors: De Santis Christopher C.
Published: September 2022

Hughes struggled throughout his career with an early decision to make a living solely as a writer, discovering that an international literary reputation was no panacea for the personal economic impact that racism, prejudice, and discrimination had on his basic, material existence. Passionate about Black theatre, he found many doors closed to him in his attempts to place dramas about Black life. Publishing companies balked at bringing out work about racial violence that might make White readers uncomfortable. Some libraries in the United States refused to stock books by Black authors. Film studios were slow to hire Black writers. And the lecture circuit, depending as it does on social interaction, was often closed to Black speakers out of deference to racist fears of social integration. Hughes chronicled these struggles in interviews and speaking engagements during the 1950s, promoting liberal legislation and support for civil rights organizations such as the NAACP in holding the United States accountable for its compromised democratic ideals.
The Era of Transparency
Authors: Koivisto Ida
Published: September 2022

The introductory chapter outlines the overall theme of the study. It builds on the question: Why should one be interested in transparency, and why now? The chapter discusses the intellectual roots of transparency, extending to the Enlightenment philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jeremy Bentham. It also analyses transparency’s current nature as a ‘magic concept’, labelled by positive spin, over-exclusive and flexible meaning, consensus implication, and fashionableness. It is argued that transparency as an ideal still attempts to resolve many of the same issues as was the case when it was first introduced in the era of Enlightenment. The chapter updates these issues to the present day. However, no clear line of succession from that era until today can be identified. The chapter also briefly introduces the main arguments of the book, describes the theme and research context of the book, and presents its parts and chapters.
Transparency as a Medium
Authors: Koivisto Ida
Published: September 2022

The chapter introduces the theoretical framework of the study. It concentrates on the question of why we use the term ‘transparency’ specifically when we refer to abstractions which lack physical appearance, such as governance. The chapter suggests that transparency as a concept is so appealing because it builds on the conceptual metaphor of ‘understanding is seeing’. However, as a governance ideal, transparency is more complex. It covertly oscillates between practices that reveal governance as it is to the governed (hostility towards representation; ‘iconoclasm’), and practices that create appearances of governance (reliance on representation; ‘iconophily’). In the book, this duality is referred to as ‘icono-ambivalence’. The chapter also introduces the concepts of ‘the hand at work’ (human influence in representation) and ‘the chagrin over mediation’ (the uncertainty of the extent and nature of such influence). It is argued that its metaphorical character makes transparency normatively attractive.
Transparency and Law
Authors: Koivisto Ida
Published: September 2022

The chapter discusses the ways in which the ideal of transparency is manifested in law. The discussion does not concentrate on any particular legal system but is general in nature. It is argued that to create structures of accountability, the transparency metaphor in law both relies on and attempts to bridge the premised distance between the governor and the governed. It is not clear, however, how law can make the state visible for that purpose. Documentation is argued to be vital. Furthermore, transparency as a legal ideal is analysed through the lens of ‘technocratic translations’, namely the ways in which the ideal is concretized in legal practice: through access to documents, the attendance of the public, and communication. These translations are contrasted with legal versions of unauthorized exposure: information leaking and whistleblowing. It is argued that in law, too, transparency needs to be controlled to create legitimacy.
The Truth-Legitimacy Trade-off
Authors: Koivisto Ida
Published: September 2022

The chapter concludes the discussion of the book and presents the main argument of the book, namely the truth-legitimacy trade-off in transparency. What is meant by that is the following: In the most general terms, transparency promises legitimacy by allowing access to truth. An entity, for example the state, is expected to be transparent to its audience, for example to its citizens, to be considered legitimate. However, contrary to the promise of transparency, the audience cannot enjoy the legitimacy of the entity and access the ‘naked truth’ about it at the same time. Depending on the intentionality of showing, these two values of transparency are subject to a tacit either-or logic: The audience can enjoy either legitimacy through intentional transparency and filtered visibilities, or access truth through unintentional transparency practices and unfiltered visibilities. The chapter revisits the transparency myth and asks whether transparency can uphold its status in modern society.
Dictator
Authors: Konrad C. F.
Published: September 2022

The imperium and auspices of the Dictator are not as such greater than those of the Consuls; his superiority is grounded in the principle that in his presence, all other magistrates are rendered incapable of exercising their powers other than at his discretion. The Dictator’s ability to forbid the Consuls to come into his presence with their lictors leaves them unable to act in an official capacity, since a magistrate without his lictors is essentially reduced, if only temporarily, to the status of a privatus. (Greek sources generally understand the matter correctly, although sometimes giving the misleading impression that other magistracies are terminated under a dictatorship.) The Dictator derives his title from dictare (“to speak with force or effect”), and is perceived to be endowed with a near-magical ability to shape events in the Romans’ favor. On the evidence of officials with the title dictator in several Latin communities, the Roman Dictator probably originated in an amalgamation of two distinct officials of the pre-republican period: a military commander (magister populi) and a civilian “Speaker” (dictator) charged with ritual pronouncements. The Dictator’s term of office was originally not limited to a particular time but defined solely in augural terms, as a function of the validity of his auspices; a time limit could only be established by including it in the wording of his ritual appointment (dictio). At all times, his term constitutionally only ended with his abdication.
Dictator Interregni Caussa
Authors: Konrad C. F.
Published: September 2022

The designation interregni caussa applied by the Capitoline Fasti to the second dictatorship of Q. Fabius Maximus Verrucosus in 217 bc in reality belongs to his (attested but undated) first dictatorship, and should be assigned to the consular year 223/2. The Consuls of that year, C. Flaminius and L. Furius Philus, having been found vitio creati (elected under flawed auspices) by the College of Augurs, were required by the Senate to abdicate, so as to allow a complete renewal of the auspices through the process of an interregnum. Flaminius refused to abdicate, issuing public statements accusing the Augurs of falsifying their findings to the benefit of his political enemies, and dismissing auspices as fraud and nonsense. The charge (also frequently levied by moderns) of using the auspices and augury as a means to sabotage Flaminius’ career runs counter to the evidence of the sources. Fabius’ appointment as Dictator was designed to force Flaminius to comply; Fabius resolved the situation in a face-saving manner for Flaminius by making him his Magister Equitum, which required his prior resignation as Consul. The subsequent interregnum caused a change in the beginning of the consular year from May 1 to March 15.
What Are Books for? Darcy’s Library, Crabbe’s The Library, and Shillito’s The Country Book-Club
Authors: Stafford Fiona
Published: September 2022

The appearance of libraries in Romantic-period literature raises questions about the very purpose of books and reading. Jane Austen’s observation of attitudes towards private libraries in her fiction opens avenues into understanding the social significance of books in the period. Taking a cue from Austen, the chapter compares key poems by George Crabbe and Charles Shillito in relation to the widening social sphere of reading, book discussion, and acquisition in the period. General awareness of literature was heightened by the expansion of provincial book clubs, private libraries, and bibliomania, which were in turn reflected in writing of the period. Books were valued not just for the intellectual, entertaining, or aesthetic quality of the contents but also as status symbols and prompts for sociability. Exploration of the social dimensions of books and reading within poems of the period has important implications for traditional definitions of the figure of the Romantic poet.
Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’
Authors: Jay Elisabeth
Published: September 2022

In ‘The Library Window’ (1896) Margaret Oliphant collapses time past and present, personal retrospection, and the re-enactment of ancient legend. The tale’s many references to a lightly disguised St Andrews, which Oliphant knew well, concentrate on the university’s King James Library. St Andrews’s role at the forefront of women’s education complicates the picture in a tale often read as a feminist protest against women’s exclusion. Rather, the story ruminates upon the contrast between the unproductive solitude of the male scholarly life and the creative imagination of a young girl stimulated by the interplay between her reading of books and the domestic rituals of daily life. Over almost half a century of reviewing, Oliphant had accumulated a large personal library, but always wrote in the midst of family life. The story’s discreet references to Oliphant’s extensive reading pays quiet testimony to the part played by personal libraries in nineteenth-century women’s writing.
On the Shelf? Women, Librarians, and Agency in Twentieth-Century Fiction
Authors: Crawford Alice
Published: September 2022

This chapter considers how the figure of the librarian has been presented in British and American middlebrow fiction of the twentieth century. Examining a title in each decade between the 1900s and the 1990s, it shows how, for novelists and short-story writers, the trope of the female librarian can provide a key to the cultural history of the period, her behaviour and reception by others often a barometer of changing times. The chapter focuses particularly on how female writers of twentieth-century fiction depict the struggles of women for agency within the increasingly professionalized field of librarianship.
The Act of Borrowing; or, Some Libraries in American Literature
Authors: Treen Kristen
Published: September 2022

Scholars of library culture have emphasized the importance of organizational systems and lending practices to the history of United States libraries, and to their emergence as practical and rhetorical sites of democratic significance in the US. This chapter examines literary representations of US library patrons and their acts of borrowing to complicate the idea of the North American library as a democratic institution. Drawing on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary engagements with the reading rooms and varied holdings of US libraries—social, domestic, reference, and free—it argues that writers of all stripes critiqued the limits of America’s changing democratic practices by reimagining the borrower’s roles and capabilities. For writers including Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and Henry James, the borrower’s imaginative uses, manipulations, and circumventions of the library’s rules and regulations drew attention to the contradictions which had come to characterize the US democratic project by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Library and Scriptorium in Eco’s The Name of the Rose
Authors: Murray Kylie
Published: September 2022

Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose shows us simultaneously a twentieth-century library and a medieval one, while presenting readers with the trope of the library as physical and ideological battle-site that has featured in earlier chapters of Libraries in Literature. Alert to ways in which Eco’s crime novel draws on Borgesian visions of the library as labyrinth, this chapter shows how in its presentation of library and scriptorium The Name of the Rose is deeply attuned to medieval culture and actual medieval libraries. At the same time, the novel presents both library and scriptorium in terms of mirroring, reflection, and refraction, implying that learning and book culture involve not only illumination but also opacity and confusion. Ultimately, presenting a spectrum of ideas about the role of reading and knowledge, Eco’s library represents at once the sum of a living civilization’s values and, ironically, the potential enemy of civilized life.
Coda
Authors: Crawford Alice , Crawford Robert , Reynolds Siân
Published: September 2022

After a brief consideration of Elias Canetti’s Die Blendung (1935; translated into English as Auto de Fé), this chapter examines three twenty-first-century novels in which the library is used to investigate aspects of national politics and identity. Ukraine-born Russophone novelist Mikhail Elizarov’s The Librarian (2007; English translation 2015) presents life in the former USSR in terms of ‘libraries’ that operate like armed gangs fighting over talismanic books. Graphic and shocking, this novel in which a young male librarian becomes ‘Curator of the Motherland’ transcends satire to present the library as a powerful, if problematic, resource at the core of civilization. French writer Sophie Divry’s book The Library of Unrequited Love (2010; English translation 2013) masquerades as a monologue by a frustrated female librarian, but this is a pretext for a knowingly humorous commentary on French identity. France’s history, politics, philosophy, and literature are subjected to the coruscating gaze of a subaltern, the self-styled ‘cultural assembly-line worker’ in the library. Published in 2018, two years after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, Salley Vickers’s The Librarian features an idealistic young librarian in 1950s England who finds herself in a milieu where ideals become tarnished and the library becomes a metaphor for an impossible dream. By turns nostalgic for and critical of class-ridden post-war English society, Vickers’s novel reflects something of the confusion of a divided Brexit-era Britain.
Quietism and Counter-Normativity
Authors: Sepielli Andrew
Published: September 2022

This chapter defends quietism against one of the most influential recent objections to the theory—the ‘schmeasons’ or ‘counter-normativity’ objection. The objection is that the quietist, being unwilling to step outside of ethics to vindicate it externally, cannot explain why we ought to privilege our ordinary normative standards over so-called ‘counter-normative’ standards in the case of a conflict. The chapter distinguishes between three possibilities: (1) both normative and counter-normative concepts are completely thin; (2) normative concepts like that of a reason are thin, but counter-normative concepts like that of a ‘schmeason’ are not; and (3) there are no completely thin concepts on either side of the normative/counter-normative divide. It is argued that, if (1), there can be no conflicts between normative and counter-normative standards; and if (2), normative standards are privileged over counter-normative ones. Finally, it is argued that (3) is highly implausible.
What Thoughts Are About
Authors: Berto Francesco
Published: September 2022

The logic of thought, understood as the logic of propositional or de dicto intentional mental states, such as knowing, believing, supposing, should be topic-sensitive. What ψs one must think (know, believe, etc.) as a consequence of thinking that φ should depend on the propositions that φ and that ψ, which make for the contents of such thoughts. This work defends the idea that propositions are individuated, not just by the sets of worlds at which they are true, but also by what they are about: their topic or subject matter. The topic-sensitive operators used to express the ascription of attitudes like knowledge, belief, etc., to be explored in the book, fail full logical closure. This means that, given one such operator X, one’s Xing that φ does not imply that one Xs all the logical consequences ψ of φ, due to the topics of the propositions that φ and that ψ: what they are about, and, thus, what one thinks about. On the other hand, such operators are not logically anarchic: they still display some logical closure properties. Failure of full closure connects to the problem of logical omniscience, and it is shown that non-omniscience has distinct, independent sources. The chapter then goes through a summary of the contents of the following chapters, introducing their main ideas and pointing at developments of such ideas currently in progress.
Topic-Sensitive Intentional Modals
Authors: Berto Francesco
Published: September 2022

This chapter introduces two-place Topic-Sensitive Intentional Modals (TSIMs): variably strict, topic-sensitive modal operators of the form ‘Xφψ’, which are to represent attitude ascriptions—generic reading: ‘One Xs (thinks, believes, imagines, etc.) that ψ, given φ’. It presents a basic possible worlds semantics for a simple propositional language including them. The key twofold clause, giving the truth conditions for the TSIMs, has it that, for Xφψ to be true, we require (1) that ψ be true throughout a set of worlds, selected via an accessibility relation or function indexed to φ; and (2) that ψ be fully on-topic with respect to φ. (1) makes of the TSIM variably strict modal operators, that is, variably strict quantifiers over possible worlds. (2) makes them topic-sensitive. The semantics validates various inferences involving conjunction; invalidates various inferences involving disjunction; and makes the TSIM operators non-monotonic (in particular, Xφψ does not entail Xφ&Xψ) and hyperintensional: capable of differentiating between necessarily or intensionally equivalent contents. Such validities and invalidities are defended for interpretations of X that range across a variety of attitudes. Finally, the chapter introduces a number of constraints on the selection functions. These will give us stronger logics for the Xφψs, as well as different plausible readings for them, to be explored in the three following chapters.
Toward an Intermediate Sex
Authors: Joyce Simon
Published: September 2022

An inverse trajectory from Symonds is evident in Edward Carpenter, who found an increasing affinity with German models emphasizing homosexuality as an intermediate or third sex. Through a close analysis of the manuscript changes to his two key homophile publications of the 1890s, Homogenic Love and An Unknown People, each reworked under censorship pressures following the Wilde trials, the chapter shows Carpenter wrestling with the problem of effeminacy and yet arriving at a very different position from Symonds. The revising of the two essays, which Carpenter did by literally writing over and re-purposing his earlier work, shows an evolution in his thought which moves away from the standard narrative of British Victorian sexology in its increasing engagement with Continental European work. In the backlash brought on by Wilde’s conviction, British homophile activists were forced into a strategic reassessment about the rhetorical uses of the pederastic model in defense of same-sex love. In Carpenter’s case, his engagement with feminist politics and ethics reimagined the context in which he could envisage an effective work of advocacy, suggesting different arguments that could be made regarding the social and civic contributions of homosexuals. A new way of thinking about gender roles, more in line with the German sexologists, emerged in the revised versions of both of Carpenter’s essays, representing an under-acknowledged break with figures associated with Oxford Hellenism such as Symonds and Wilde.
Dickens and Victorian Psychology
Authors: Stolte Tyson
Published: September 2022

Dickens and Victorian Psychology: Introspection, First-Person Narration, and the Mind positions Charles Dickens’s fiction in the midst of Victorian psychological debate, tracking Dickens’s increasing reliance over the course of his career on the introspective mode, those moments—from free indirect discourse to first-person narration—in which Dickens attempts to represent the inner view of his characters’ minds. In the middle of the nineteenth century, introspection remained the central investigative method for dualist psychologies, theories that tied the mind’s immortality to its immateriality. Because those psychologies found evidence of the mind’s ontological difference from the body in the subjective experience of consciousness, this book argues that the moments of inwardness in Dickens’s fiction, in both their form and their content, constitute efforts to resist the encroachment of psycho-physiology by making a case for the mind’s transcendence of the body. Yet Dickens and Victorian Psychology also shows the consequences of a material psychology’s appropriation of such an inward view—as well as the results of the efforts by psycho-physiologists to redefine the terminology of a mainstream dualism—by tracing the ambiguities and contradictions that find their way into Dickens’s representations of the mind. In these ways, this book reveals an overlooked context for Dickens’s experiments with narrative point of view and broadens our understanding of the strategies that a material psychology used to assuage the anxieties of those who saw psycho-physiology as a threat to immortality.
Mysteries of the Mind
Authors: Stolte Tyson
Published: September 2022

This chapter outlines Dickens’s revised thinking in Bleak House about introspection and the potential legibility of the flesh. Esther Summerson’s notoriously coy narration, this chapter argues, works to underscore the fundamental privacy of consciousness, reinforcing the notion that introspection provides the most reliable means by which to know the mind. But even as it insists on the privacy of consciousness, the novel also appears to walk back the skepticism about the legibility of the flesh that Dickens articulates in the last half of Martin Chuzzlewit, instead suggesting anew that the body might serve as a reliable index to the immaterial mind. Both Esther and the third-person narrator thus often describe the physiognomical clues by which readers might discern characters’ thoughts. But while Esther touts her ability to read the minds of those with whom she is most intimate, the third-person narrator tends to withhold what he gleans through his own physiognomical readings. This refusal to narrate the thoughts of the novel’s characters emerges as a strategy: the third-person narrator’s silences mimic the law’s own refusal to move from (bodily) sign to (mental) signified, an interpretive practice that, Bleak House suggests, is equivalent to the scientific naturalism of physicalist psychology. In this way, Bleak House finally positions psycho-physiology as a species of willed illiteracy, a hardheaded refusal to move from the body to that to which it points for conservative physiognomists, the soul.
Introduction
Authors: Rosenberg Anat
Published: September 2022

The Introduction opens by reviewing the expansion of advertising in Britain circa 1840–1914. It then turns to the book’s central arguments. Beginning with modernity-as-disenchantment, it reviews the extensive body of scholarship that has theorized enchantment by advertising, and places the book’s approach and findings in relation to this scholarship. The discussion then turns to questions of cultural boundaries, which unfolded within the tensions of dis/enchantment. It reviews the impact of legally empowered boundary work on advertising, which was simultaneously legitimized and ridiculed, stabilized and disparaged. It also discusses the dialectical impact of boundary work on the fields that interacted with advertising, among them news, art, and science. Next it explains the argument about the disavowal of enchantment as a normative enterprise and its implications. Lastly, the Introduction explains the book’s legal theory, methodology, sources, and choices of place and time.
The Market Enchanters
Authors: Rosenberg Anat
Published: September 2022

By the close of the nineteenth century, advertising professionals faced a challenge of self-definition. They wanted to extend their services in the growing market for advertising, but confronted the weight of criticisms that were attaining legalized forms. Criticisms denied professionals the comfort of integrating advertising with fields of knowledge, information, aesthetics, or common morality, and left its meaning in a conceptual vacuum. They were looking for a different ground for cultural authority, found in the concept of expertise in the human mind. Professionals relied on advertising literature—a peculiar genre that expanded from the mid-1880s—to self-brand as experts who worked magic across the distance between producers and consumers, capturing consumers’ attention and altering their desires. They thus claimed mastery over the scene of enchantment left unaddressed by law, in psychological terms. The psychological version took hold not simply because it suited advertisers’ proclivities, or because competitive market conditions mandated psychological control, but as an effect of the longer-term history examined in this book, which sent advertisers searching for a role that would not end in a backlash. The turn to psychology was controversial because it cast doubt on concepts of volition; therefore, professionals worked hard to reconcile the image of the market enchanters with the rationality of consumers as well as advertisers. Ultimately, professionals assumed the mythical role of the creators of enchantment, and presumed to be its rational tamers. There was paradox in the very definition of this goal, which remains elusive. Nonetheless, the myth of advertisers as the sorcerers of capitalism succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Conclusion
Authors: Rosenberg Anat
Published: September 2022

This brief conclusion reflects on the book’s findings, and on the centrality of law to the project of modernity-as-disenchantment. Ultimately, advertising energized an entire culture to examine and articulate the terms on which it lived, and had a world-generating power for late capitalism in terms of aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology. On these terms, the full impact of advertising becomes clear.
Fundamental Moral Ignorance
Authors: Zimmerman Michael J.
Published: September 2022

This chapter explores the question of whether and how it is possible to be blameworthy for unwitting wrongdoing when the ignorance involved is attributable to the failure to appreciate some underlying moral principle. It examines cases in which wrong is done because of a lack of conscience and cases in which wrong is done because of a misguided conscience. It also briefly addresses cases of witting wrongdoing committed in the belief that there is sufficient reason to engage in the behavior in question despite the fact that it is wrong to do so.
Nothing Is Said
Authors: Jary Mark
Published: September 2022

While there has been much debate between minimalists and contextualists about the nature of what is said, both sides assume that some such notion must be appealed to in modelling linguistic communication. This book challenges that assumption, arguing that from the perspective of basic linguistic interpretation, nothing is said. To do this, the book draws a distinction between linguistic communication proper and behavioural communication, and then draws on Situation Theory and Relevance Theory to develop a model of the former that makes no appeal to any notion of what is said. Rather, what is said is introduced later as part of a reflective competence underlying sophisticated behavioural communication, such as irony and insinuation. The notions of implicature employed in these two types of communication are shown to be distinct, and to play different explanatory roles. With the division between linguistic and behavioural communication established, the book goes on to reconsider a number of areas of linguistic investigation that have received considerable attention in recent years. These include lexical modulation, scalar implicature, lying vs. otherwise misleading, and the correct characterisation of assertion and asserted content. The final chapter of the book relates the ideas developed to the discursive-commitment framework proposed by Robert Brandom. In doing so it considers, among other things, the notion of public language in relation to linguistic theorising, and the developmental relationship between language use and theory of mind.
Introduction
Authors: Jary Mark
Published: September 2022

This chapter provides a detailed introduction to Nothing Is Said. It sets out the main issues that the book seeks to address and outlines how this is to be done. A justification for the overall structure of the book is given, and the topics covered in each chapter are detailed. Key notions and distinctions are briefly introduced, such as utterance type, linguistic vs. behavioural communication, and the difference between interpretation and reflection. Some indication is also given of the consequences of the proposed theory for topics such as lexical pragmatics, scalar implicatures, conditionals, negation, and assertion.
Conclusion
Authors: Jary Mark
Published: September 2022

This chapter serves as a conclusion to the book as a whole. It shows that the position developed is compatible with approaches to language that draw evidence from the reflective notion of what is said. Intuitions about what is said should be treated as a source of data for semantic and pragmatic theories, rather than as an explanatory target for these. What the current theory opposes, it is emphasised, is the idea that some conception of what is said need be posited as a level of representation when modelling basic utterance interpretation. Rather, from such a perspective, there is nothing that is said.