bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Convulsionaries
Authors: Gotman Kélina
Published: December 2017

Convulsions in the eighteenth century were subject not only to intense medical and religious debate but also to theatrical ridicule. Following the death of François de Pâris, a popular figure in Jansenist debates on papal intercession in France, convulsions and miracles began to take place around his tomb. This led to a spate of theatrical spoofs and street-level entertainment by the so-called Convulsionaries of Saint-Médard, unsuccessfully suppressed by the royal authorities. Convulsions, which came to represent excess emotion and exaggerated identification with national causes, were wrapped up into a psychiatric discourse on monomania, describing all extreme forms of enthusiasm—including fordance. Translated onto the vaudeville stage, monomania informed comic ballet productions as well as working-class cabaret, decried for depicting—and inspiring—surplus affect. Even the romantic tragedy Giselle may be seen to represent monomania: in this case, cast as gestural and emotional excess leading to feverish dancing and death.
‘Sicily Implies Asia and Africa’
Authors: Gotman Kélina
Published: December 2017

The passage or translatio between bodies of knowledge and geographic terrains prompted the transformation of the choreomania concept from mildly quaint to dangerously exotic, in a context of rising anti-colonial revolt. This chapter introduces part II of the book, which emphasizes the transformation of ‘choreomania’ on colonial shores. Considering the rise in comparative literature and medical geography, as well as performative reconstructions of ancient Greek attitudes, this chapter shows how travellers, translators, and anthropologists contributed to expanding the archival repertoire of choreomanias with cases and marginalia emphasizing the exotic South and East. Tarantellas, in particular, imagined as gateways to Greece and Africa via Sicily, appeared to reach back not only to medieval and ancient Europe but also across to present-day Abyssinia. The tigretier, an African ‘variant’, and further apparent variants in Nigeria, made of the ‘dancing disease’ a feminine and soon, too, a typically colonial figure of duplicity and deceit.
Ecstasy-Belonging in Madagascar and Brazil
Authors: Gotman Kélina
Published: December 2017

Choreomania became distinctly political. Missionary physicians and neuroscientists stationed in Madagascar and Brazil compared trance-like revolutionary uprisings to the literature on choreomania. Unlike earlier cases, however, these ‘movement disorders’, large-scale anti-colonial demonstrations characterized by shaking, frothing, falling, and visions—as well as, in Madagascar, ancestor worship—tipped ‘choreomania’ (and ‘epidemic chorea’) into the realm of government administration. Worried that uprisings could take place in other colonies, physicians argued that choreomania spread by pathological sympathy; it migrated. Demonstrators angered at the missionaries’ black hats, gathering at sacred sites, convulsing, and ultimately unseating a pro-European king represent, following Giorgio Agamben, a form of ecstasy-belonging: a state of exception characterized by spirit possession and repossession, through which they take back what is rightly theirs. The disorder of ‘choreomania’ represents a choreopolitics of revolt. Similarly, in Brazil, revolutionary underclasses gathered together in what was dismissed as a ‘choreomaniacal’ epidemic of delusion—a religious psychosis.
Ghost Dancing
Authors: Gotman Kélina
Published: December 2017

Native American dancers in the 1890s rebelling against the U.S. government’s failure to uphold treaties protecting land rights and rations were accused of fomenting a dancing ‘craze’. Their dancing—which hoped for a renewal of Native life—was subject to intense government scrutiny and panic. The government anthropologist James Mooney, in participant observation and fieldwork, described it as a religious ecstasy like St. Vitus’s dance. The Ghost Dance movement escalated with the proliferation of reports, telegraphs, and letters circulating via Washington, DC. Although romantically described as ‘geognosic’—nearly mineral—ancestors of the whites, Native rebels in the Plains were told to stop dancing so they could work and thus modernize; their dancing was deemed excessive, wasteful, and unproductive. The government’s belligerently declared state of exception—effectively cultural war—was countered by one that they performed ecstatically. ‘Wasted’ energy, dancers maintained, trumped dollarization—the hollow ‘use value’ of capitalist biopower.
Coda
Authors: Gotman Kélina
Published: December 2017

Modernity can be understood as the cultivation of a fantasy about the past: in the case of choreomania, this ‘past’ was imagined as a rumbling horde, a Bacchic chorus against which purposeful ‘modernity’ positioned itself. Meaningless gesture, after Agamben, epitomized in the nineteenth century in the figure of ‘chorea’, similarly became with the scientific discourse on choreomania a manner of thinking modernity’s double movement, forward and back, between efficient industrialization and the collective archaicity out of which this efficiency imagined itself to arise. Reperforming my own archival return to the still ‘living’ site of the Echternach dancing procession, I discover that the ever more institutionalized event highlights the power of choreopolitical organization displayed by the nation state. As in Meige’s day, the procession has been evacuated of nervous disorder or bodily disruption. My archival reperformance reveals an experience of historicity shorn of a historical encounter.
Coda
Authors: Hanlon Christopher
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the paintings of John Frederick Peto, whose “letter rack” depictions constitute melancholic acts of remembering transacted through the arrangement of abandoned objects. Insofar as Peto theorizes memory through the genre of trompe l’oeil, he provokes questions concerning the extent to which recollection entails fabrication, and focused upon the insistence that such fabrication invariably turns upon sensations of loss. As Peto’s letter racks move toward subject matter relating to the Civil War, his questions come increasingly to involve embroilments of memory and memorialization, and in ways that offer an entrée into Emerson’s “Fortune of the Republic,” an essay that anticipates future acts of remembering undertaken by other generations of Americans confronted with the challenge of recalling the War with integrity.
Introduction
Authors: Kemeny P. C.
Published: December 2017

The chapter explains the historical significance of the New England Watch and Ward Society, develops the book’s thesis, and situates the work within the contemporary historiography of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century moral reform movements. Scholarly studies of Protestant moral reform in this era typically either employ a Whiggish view of history that highlights how the enlightened forces of progress inexorably overcame moral repression or use some version of the status anxiety theory that overlooks human agency. This work, by contrast, provides a historical case study of a faith-based, voluntary moral reform organization during the transition in American culture from “pluralism as toleration” to “pluralism as inclusion.” It explains how and why the Protestant establishment exercised cultural hegemony over several different areas of culture, especially print culture, as well as how and why it lost control over these particular areas of American public life.
The Origins of the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice
Authors: Kemeny P. C.
Published: December 2017

This chapter first traces the gradual and growing challenges to late nineteenth-century Victorian standards in American public and private morality, specifically the increased printing and consumption of salacious literature. The chapter then examines the work of Anthony Comstock, the formation of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the 1873 passage of the Comstock Act, which limited the availability of obscene literature. In response to Comstock, an articulate and militant opposition emerged. This opposition came not from obscenity dealers but from proponents of liberal radicalism, most notably the free love activist Ezra Heywood and his free speech allies. Their commitment to personal liberty in matters of religion, sexuality, and politics contrasted sharply with prevailing Protestant views. In response to the rising tide of obscene literature and the free love movement, elite Protestants organized the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice.
The Failed Campaign Against Prostitution
Authors: Kemeny P. C.
Published: December 2017

Protestants criticized prostitution because it threatened the family and ultimately civil society, and the Watch and Ward Society devised a campaign to shut down Boston’s red-light districts. These Protestant elites espoused traditional gender roles and Victorian sexual mores and endorsed the “cult of domesticity.” In the late nineteenth century, a number of reform organizations turned their attention to the “social evil,” as it was popularly called. The Watch and Ward Society’s quest to reduce prostitution placed it squarely within the larger international anti-prostitution movement. Moral reformers resisted all forms of policy that officially sanctioned or tacitly tolerated prostitution, instead arguing for its abolition. Their attempt to suppress commercialized sex eventually collapsed because of the lack of public support.
Epilogue
Authors: Kemeny P. C.
Published: December 2017

The history of the Watch and Ward Society following the controversies of the 1920s and 1930s is briefly reviewed. The strategies and tactics employed by the Watch and Ward Society help us better understand why mainline Protestantism’s efforts to impose a common civic morality upon American culture eventually failed. The collapse of its activities in the 1930s signaled the beginning of the end of Protestant cultural hegemony in the United States. The epilogue concludes with a brief discussion of the role of religion and participatory pluralism in American culture. The demise of the Watch and Ward Society teaches today’s culture warriors—on the right and on the left—that coercive methods employed by the critics of the moral reform movement may often ultimately fail to achieve the sort of cultural consensus that can serve the common good.
Cowboys and Religion before Cowboy Church
Authors: Dallam Marie W.
Published: December 2017

Chapter 2 examines what is known about the religious lives of cowboys prior to the existence of organized forms of cowboy Christianity. Moving from the end of the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century, this chapter traces the twists and turns of cowboy life, both real and imagined, and explores various ways that religion has intersected with that history. It begins by outlining the work of cowboys in the second half of the nineteenth century and then turns to the noninstitutional means to evangelize to cowboys—in the form of wandering cowboy preachers and annual camp meetings—that were required to meet the cowboys’ lifestyle and work. The chapter then chronicles the rise and construction of the romantic image of the cowboy against the decline in the real-world cowboy profession, describing some of the uses, in entertainment and evangelism, that this image of the cowboy was put to.
Sexual Identities
Authors: Hogan Patrick Colm
Published: December 2017

Cognitive cultural theorists have rarely taken up sex, sexuality, or gender identity. When they have done so, they have often stressed the evolutionary sources of gender differences. In Sexual Identities, Patrick Hogan extends his previous work on identity to discuss the complexities of sex, the diversity of sexuality, and the limited scope of gender. Hogan begins with a rarely drawn distinction between practical identity (the patterns in what one does, thinks, and feels) and categorial identity (how one labels oneself or is categorized by society). He adds to this a nuanced reformulation of the idea of social construction, distinguishing ideology, situational determination, shallow socialization, and deep (or critical period) socialization. On the basis of this, and wide-ranging citation of empirical research, Hogan argues for a systematic skepticism about gender differences and a view of sexuality as evolved but also in many ways contingent and highly variable. In Hogan’s analysis, the variability of sexuality and the near absence of gender fixity—the imperfect alignment of practical and categorial identities in both cases—give rise to the social practices that Judith Butler refers to as “regulatory regimes.” Hogan goes on to explore the cognitive and affective operation of such regimes. Hogan concludes by turning to sex and the question of how to understand transgendering in a way that respects the dignity of transgender people, without reverting to gender essentialism. Throughout the study, Hogan draws on a diverse body of literary works, not simply to illustrate prior arguments, but to develop his analyses.
The Cognitive Organization of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender Identities
Authors: Hogan Patrick Colm
Published: December 2017

The first chapter explores the complexities and varieties of love. Though often separated from sex, sexuality, and gender, love is crucial to sexuality and significant even for gender. To explore these topics, the chapter first examines Marlowe’s Edward II. Marlowe’s play is widely recognized as an important early treatment of same-sex desire and homophobia, but less widely recognized as a work that examines homoerotic attachment bonding and that shows the limits and complexities of homophobia. In connection with homophobia, the chapter also begins to consider ethical issues. The chapter then takes up a Chinese story about a young girl who dresses as a boy in order to receive an education. This is a very popular and enduring tale, with many versions, ancient and modern. This particular version links its in some ways radical gender politics with Confucian teachings, thus connecting gender skepticism with orthodoxy, a socially important and counterintuitive association.
What Is Sex?
Authors: Hogan Patrick Colm
Published: December 2017

The concluding chapter turns finally to sex, and particularly sex change. Specifically, it considers the implications of transgendering for the gender skepticism developed in the other chapters of the book. It begins with a premodern case of sex change from the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata—the transformation of Śikhaṇḍinī from a woman to a man. This is a purely pragmatic transformation; it enables Śikhaṇḍinī to engage in behaviors forbidden to her as a woman. In this way, it is continuous with the situationism that we have found in Orlando and elsewhere. But this is not the case for our final literary work, Imogen Binnie’s novel Nevada, a treatment of transgender identity and experience. A central task of the chapter, aided by Binnie’s novel, is to reconcile the preceding arguments about sex, sexuality, and gender with the fact of transgender identity while respecting the dignity of transgender people.
Southeast Asia in India’s Defense Strategy
Authors: Grare Frédéric
Published: December 2017

India’s defence interactions with Southeast Asia were formed by the uncertain strategic configuration emerging in Asia at the end of the Cold War. India’s defence interactions with Southeast Asia were the outcome of the uncertain strategic configuration which emerged in Asia at the end of the Cold War. Additionally, asAs India’s economic interaction with the region grew, so did the need to protect its line of communication through Southeast Asia. Two sets of strategic strategy drive India’s defence interactions in Southeast Asia: the perceived imperative to be the predominant power in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea, which borders Southeast Asia and the willingness to assume a greater strategic role in Southeast Asia and the West-Pacific Ocean. Practically, however, India’s defence engagements have been defined by availability of strategical partners and the level of political trust between New Delhi and concerned countries, In practical terms however India’s defence engagements in the region have been defined by the availability of strategically meaningful partners and the level of political trust between New Delhi and each of the concerned countries, generating a hierarchy of partnership dominated by Singapore. This uneven development of India’s defence collaboration with Southeast Asia is partly mitigated by India’s participation in ASEAN’s consensus based multilateral fora, ARF and ADMM+., which consensus based approach and non-binding character make India’s favourite instrument in the region.
India’s Look East Policy and Asian Institutional Architecture
Authors: Grare Frédéric
Published: December 2017

India’s attempt to join the process of regional integration was marked by ambivalence. India did bypass its own region to seek integration in the adjacent one, ignoring SAARC to seek membership in some of the ASEAN led institutions. Operating by consensus through non-binding agreements, ASEAN-centered regionalism suited India’s needs for recognition and protected it against the negative repercussions of regional tensions while preventing the rise of potential regional hegemonys. Through its participation in a regional security architecture led by ASEAN rules, India established a normative buffer while being able to influence decisions. However, ASEAN’s centrality (i.e.; consensus based and a unanimous position reflecting common strategic vision) is gradually being eroded by US-China proxy struggle for influence, eroding the foundation of India’s relations with ASEAN, as it may draw New Delhi into the zero-sum game situation it has so far tried to avoid.
Conclusion
Authors: Grare Frédéric
Published: December 2017

India’s relationship with the United States remains crucial to its own objectives, but is also ambiguous. The asymmetry of power between the two countries is such that the relationship, if potentially useful, is not necessary for the United States while potentially risky for India. Moreover, the shift of the political centre of gravity of Asia — resulting from the growing rivalry between China and the US — is eroding the foundations of India’s policy in Asia, while prospects for greater economic interaction is limited by India’s slow pace of reforms. The future of India-US relations lies in their capacity to evolve a new quid pro quo in which the US will formulate its expectations in more realistic terms while India would assume a larger share of the burden of Asia’ security.
Mechanical power and hyperelasticity
Authors: Steigmann David J.
Published: December 2017

This chapter covers the notion of hyperelasticity—the concept that stress is derived from a strain—energy function–by invoking an analogy between elastic materials and springs. Alternatively, it can be derived by invoking a work inequality; the notion that work is required to effect a cyclic motion of the material.
Fiber symmetry
Authors: Steigmann David J.
Published: December 2017

This chapter develops the general constitutive equation for transversely isotropic, fiber-reinforced materials. Applications include composite materials and bio-elasticity.
Some boundary-value problems for uniform isotropic incompressible materials
Authors: Steigmann David J.
Published: December 2017

This chapter outlines the formulation and explicit solution of a number of simple boundary-value problems. Analysis is facilitated by the constraint of incompressibility. Examples include expansionand contraction of cylinders, torsion, azimuthal shear, and cavitation under conditions of spherical symmetry Further examples involving anti-plane shear are discussed in the Problems.
Some examples involving uniform, compressible isotropic materials
Authors: Steigmann David J.
Published: December 2017

This chapter details analytical solutions for unconstrained materials using tractable strain–energy functions. Three-dimensional and plane–strain deformations are illustrated. These include a formulation of the cavtitation problem in compressible materials and a discussion of so-called Harmonic materials.
Introduction
Authors: Brönmark Christer , Hansson Lars-Anders
Published: December 2017

The chapter introduces the reader to the book structure, including the overall topics the abiotic frame, the organisms, biotics, food web interactions and biodiversity and environmental threats. In addition to laying out the structure, this chapter brings up some overarching concepts such as the niche, generalists versus specialists and factors determining the distribution of organisms in natural ecosystems.
The Abiotic Frame and Adaptations to Cope with Abiotic Constraints
Authors: Brönmark Christer , Hansson Lars-Anders
Published: December 2017

This chapter draws up the abiotic frame for organisms set by the physical and chemical properties of a specific ecosystem. The abiotic frame is a combination of several features, including wind, turbulence, temperature and light, but also by nutrient status, pH and oxygen supply. Based on this abiotic frame, large-scale movements, as well as stratification phenomena of lakes are discussed. The importance of the surrounding land, that is, the catchment area, is stressed; specifically, how the catchment area may strongly affect the physical and chemical features of the lake or pond. In addition, this chapter explains how lakes and ponds have been, and still are, formed in the landscape and how organisms handle the abiotic frame.
The Organisms: The Actors Within the Abiotic Frame
Authors: Brönmark Christer , Hansson Lars-Anders
Published: December 2017

Here the organisms, that is the actors within the abiotic frame, are presented. The organisms range in size from the smallest viruses at the micrometre scale up to macrophytes and vertebrates at the metre scale. A brief organization of all life on Earth is given, together with examples and descriptions of the major actors and their specific features, morphologies and adaptations to cope with the environment.
Biodiversity and Environmental Threats
Authors: Brönmark Christer , Hansson Lars-Anders
Published: December 2017

The last chapter of Lakes and Ponds deals with how human activities affect the natural ecosystems and their function through eutrophication, contamination, acidification, brownification and increases in UV radiation, and how such anthropogenic disturbances may affect biodiversity and the ability of organisms to utilize a specific habitat. In addition, the chapter addresses novel environmental threats, such as global climate change and effects from our everyday chemicals, such as contraceptives, nanoparticles and antidepressant drugs. However, also possibilities and signs of improvement are discussed, providing hope for coming generations.
Landscape of scalar meanings
Authors: Sawada Osamu
Published: December 2017

Chapter 2 provides the landscape of scalar meanings and highlights the target phenomenon of this book—the phenomenon of the dual use of scalar modifiers. More specifically, four kinds of scalar meanings are introduced: at-issue scalar meaning, conversational scalar meaning, presuppositional scalar meaning, and conventional implicature (CI) scalar meaning. There follows an informal examination of the dual-use phenomenon of scalar modifiers where a scalar modifier can express an at-issue scalar meaning and a CI scalar meaning. The similarities and differences between a CI and a presupposition are also considered. It is claimed that a CI and a presupposition belong to a different class of meaning and should theoretically be treated differently.
The logic of conventional implicatures
Authors: Sawada Osamu
Published: December 2017

Chapter 3 introduces the logic of conventional implicatures (CIs), which provide a starting point for analyzing the meanings of CI scalar modifiers and considering the relation between at-issue scalar meanings and CI scalar meanings in a more theoretical way. The logic of Cis introduced in this chapter is multidimensional. That is, in addition to a regular semantic type and compositional rules, it introduces the type systems of conventional implicature and various interpretive rules based on the systems, including CI application (Potts 2005), shunting application (McCready 2010), mixed application (McCready 2010; Gutzmann 2011), and expressive application (Gutzmann 2011; McCready 2010; Sawada 2013). These rules will be explained based on various examples such as epithets, honorifics, supplements, and diminutives.
Comparison with an indeterminate pronoun
Authors: Sawada Osamu
Published: December 2017

Chapter 4 focuses on the dual-use phenomenon of comparison with an indeterminate pronoun in Japanese (and other languages) and considers the similarities and differences between at-issue comparative meaning (i.e. individual comparison) and a CI comparative meaning (i.e. noteworthy comparison). Although an individual comparison and a noteworthy comparison are compositionally and dimensionally different, there is a striking parallelism in terms of the scale structure. The chapter explains the similarities and differences between the two kinds of comparison in a systematic way. It also considers the role of scalarity and comparison in a discourse context and argues that they provide a way of signaling to what extent an at-issue utterance contributes to the goal of the conversation. The timing of signaling information on noteworthiness in a discourse and its pragmatic effect are also discussed.
Minimizer PPIs
Authors: Sawada Osamu
Published: December 2017

Chapter 5 investigates the varieties of minimizers in Japanese (and other languages) and considers the source of variations from a semantics/pragmatics interface. Although sukoshi and chotto denote a small degree, they are different in terms of granularity: sukoshi conventionally implies that a speaker is measuring degrees with a scale that is precise, whereas chotto conventionally implies that the speaker is measuring degrees imprecisely. This difference naturally explains why chotto and not sukoshi has a speech act use. The speech act minimizer measures the degree of imposition of a speech act on the hearer, and the degree of imposition is something that cannot be measured precisely. This chapter shows that the not-at-issue component of minimizers plays an important role in explaining the varieties of minimizers.
Intensifiers
Authors: Sawada Osamu
Published: December 2017

Chapter 6 investigates the expressive uses of intensifiers with special reference to the Japanese intensifier totemo and the comparative adverb motto. The expressive totemo combines with a negative gradable modal and conventionally implies that the at-issue proposition (without negation and modal) is highly unlikely or impossible and refuses to update the common ground with the at-issue proposition. The meaning of the negative motto combines with an at-issue gradable predicate locally and conventionally implies that the degree of the target in an expected situation is much greater than the target’s current degree. The chapter argues that the expressive totemo and motto belong to lower-level pragmatic scalar modifiers that recycle the scale of an at-issue gradable predicate, and they are fundamentally different from higher-level pragmatic intensifiers, such as the expressive totally, in terms of the level of modification and compositionality.
How and Why Knowledge is First
Authors: Littlejohn Clayton
Published: December 2017

This chapter’s dialectical aim has, as its focus, a sustained defence of the claim that one cannot have a reason in one’s possession unless it is something that one knows. This view is claimed to have advantages over a different way of thinking about epistemic status. On the ‘reasons-first’ approach to epistemic status, reasons and the possession of them are prior to epistemic status. In reversing this picture, the chapter reveals an important sense in which knowledge comes first—namely, in that we first come to have reasons in our possession by coming to know that certain things are true; there is nothing prior to knowledge that puts these reasons in our possession. In the course of advancing this picture, the chapter furthermore offers a defence of Williamson’s identification of evidence and knowledge (E=K).
No Need for Excuses
Authors: Schechter Joshua
Published: December 2017

This chapter discusses the viability of knowledge-first epistemology. The chapter has two parts. The first part presents several big-picture objections to knowledge-first epistemology and argues that while these considerations are pressing, they are not conclusive. The second part focuses on a specific thesis endorsed by many knowledge-first epistemologists—the knowledge norm of assertion. The chapter considers a familiar concern with this norm: It can be appropriate for someone who has a justified belief that p, but doesn’t know that p, to assert that p. Proponents of the knowledge norm typically explain away such judgments by claiming that the assertion is improper but the subject has an excuse for making it. The chapter argues against this response. The chapter concludes by briefly considering whether we should replace the knowledge norm with an alternative. It argues that that there is no norm specifically tied to assertion.
Epistemic Supervenience, Anti-individualism, and Knowledge-First Epistemology
Authors: Kallestrup Jesper , Gordon Emma C. , Pritchard Duncan
Published: December 2017

This chapter investigates connections between Knowledge-First epistemology and a meta-epistemological thesis defended elsewhere by the authors (and in opposition to robust forms of virtue epistemology) under the description of epistemic anti-individualism. Epistemic anti-individualism is a denial of the epistemic individualist’s claim that warrant—i.e. what converts true belief into knowledge—supervenes on internal physical properties of individuals, perhaps in conjunction with local environmental properties. The chapter has two central aims. First, it argues that ‘epistemic twin earth’ thought experiments which reveal robust virtue epistemology (RVE) are problematically committed to epistemic individualism also show that evidentialist mentalism is likewise committed to individualism. Second, it argues that, even though a knowledge-first approach in epistemology is in principle (unlike RVE and evidentialist mentalism) consistent with epistemic anti-individualism, this approach fails to offer a plausible account of epistemic supervenience. The chapter suggests this point is a reason to pursue epistemic anti-individualism outside the knowledge-first framework.
Introduction
Authors: Gettier Edmund L.
Published: December 2017

The contributions to this volume reflect and deepen the Gettier Problem’s impact on epistemology and on philosophical methodology. Fifty-four years ago, in his three-page paper, Edmund Gettier taught us that the generally accepted account of factual knowledge was defective because there are cases of true justified beliefs that are not knowledge. Most of the issues on our epistemological agenda since then are closely related to his lesson. To reflect on the very latest developments in the scholarship on this problem, we gathered the papers of twenty-six experts, including many of the most influential epistemologists of our time. This is the largest, most authoritative collection of essays on the Gettier Problem. The contributions to this volume reflect the state of the art on the subject.
Lessons from Gettier
Authors: Kvanvig Jonathan L.
Published: December 2017

This chapter argues that the literature surrounding the Gettier Problem arises from a kind of methodological false consciousness in the epistemology of the middle part of the twentieth century. The underlying methodology is contrasted with two paradigms within the history of epistemology: one prompted by the conversational context of scrapes with the skeptic and the other on the scientific project of trying to understand the universe and our place in it. These competing paradigms call for two quite different epistemological projects and we can separate the two projects in a way that sees them as complementary, unlike the picture that emerges from within the presuppositions of the Gettier literature. The resulting picture does not make the Gettier Problem go away, but implies a weaker claim, that it should not now be and never should have been a primary focus of epistemology.
The Lesson of Gettier
Authors: Zagzebski Linda
Published: December 2017

I revisit my ‘double-luck’ recipe for generating Gettier problems according to which a piece of good luck cancels out what would have been a piece of bad luck, giving us a case in which a belief is true and justified but is not knowledge. I then show how this formula can be used to produce Gettier cases for any definition of knowledge Â according to which knowledge is Â true belief + x, where x is closely connected with truth but does not guarantee it. I then Â show Â how closing the gap between warrant and truth solves the problem without succumbing to the problems of infallibilist definitions of knowledge, and propose a series of definitions that succeed in closing the gap. Â Finally, I argue that Â the real importance of the Gettier paper is in leading to debates about the methodology of epistemology.
The Value of Knowledge and the Gettier Game
Authors: Foley Richard
Published: December 2017

Recent literature on the nature of knowledge is filled with stories in which a subject has a true belief but intuitively seems not to have knowledge. All these stories can be understood in the same way. They are all ones in which the subject is ignorant of something important about the situation, and this ignorance can be used to explain why the subject lacks knowledge. Knowledge is a matter of having accurate and comprehensive enough information, where the test of enough is negative. One cannot lack important true beliefs. This way of thinking about knowledge has the additional advantage of dissolving puzzles about the value of knowledge and true belief, puzzles that other accounts of knowledge find it surprisingly difficult to handle.
Introduction
Authors: Sajó András , Uitz Renáta
Published: December 2017

This book examines the implications of constitutionalism for the constitutional legal order and the political community which is meant to live by it. The book demonstrates what is at stake in the debate on constitutionalism through numerous examples of political anomalies and abuse of power. It presents stories of constitutional success and failure to give a sense of the current threats, arguing that constitutions are not mere practical applications of political philosophies or opportunistic political deals. The book considers foundational issues related to constitutions and constitutionalism as reflected in influential ideas, political practices, and social dynamics behind the scenes.
Democracy, or Taming an Unruly Friend
Authors: Sajó András , Uitz Renáta
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy, with particular emphasis on the creative, disruptive, and destructive force behind constitutions and government: the people. Democracy is inherent in modern constitutionalism. The authority of the constitution derives from people’s sovereignty. If constitutionalism was designed to contain the abuse resulting from absolute sovereign power by setting up arrangements inside government, the democratic exercise of sovereignty emerged as an external constraint on government. This chapter traces the evolution of universal suffrage and considers its consequences, including the perils (and tyranny) of majority rule for a diverse society. It discusses the idea that a sovereign people has a single general will and looks at representative government as a means of balancing popular sovereignty with constitutionalism. It analyses the binding mandate and how it was replaced by the free mandate, along with the referendum as a genuine expression of the will of the people.
Federalism
Authors: Sajó András , Uitz Renáta
Published: December 2017

This chapter deals with vertical separation of powers, in which government is separated into distinct layers, primarily in federal arrangements. A federal system guarantees territorial self-rule and a form of shared rule between the central and territorial governments. In this arrangement, different levels of government limit each other’s ambitions. The chapter first explains the fundamental features of federalism before discussing the factors that determine federalism as a design choice. It also considers the actors in federal structures, namely, national (central) government and state government, as well as the role of the executive branch in a federation. Finally, it examines models of national (federal)–state relationship, federalism as a potential solution to ethnic diversity, the controversial issue of secession in a federation, and federalism as a tool of liberty.
Parliamentarism and the Legislative Branch
Authors: Sajó András , Uitz Renáta
Published: December 2017

This chapter examines the relationship between parliamentarism and the legislative branch. It explores the evolution of the legislative branch, leading to disillusionment with the rationalized law-making factory, a venture run by political parties beyond the reach of constitutional rules. The rise of democratically bred party rule is positioned between the forces favouring free debate versus effective decision-making in the legislature. The chapter analyses the institutional make-up and internal operations of the legislature, the role of the opposition in the legislative assembly, and explores the benefits of bicameralism for boosting the powers of the legislative branch. Finally, it looks at the law-making process and its outsourcing via delegating legislative powers to the executive.
Against Ultimacy
Authors: Maitzen Stephen
Published: December 2017

Although religion is characteristically concerned with the ultimate, this chapter argues that ultimacy, in any sense relevant to religion, is impossible. The arguments of this chapter challenge the possibility of anything ultimate in regard to ontology (ultimate reality), axiology (ultimate value), or teleology (ultimate purpose). If the arguments are sound, then religious concern with ultimacy in any of those senses rests on a false presupposition, as does any philosophy of religion that endorses such a concern. The chapter concludes that philosophy itself achieves three of the goals characteristically sought by religion—namely, metaphysical, axiological, and soteriological transcendence—and raises the question of what religion and philosophy of religion ought to become if its criticisms of ultimacy are correct.
Religion after Naturalism
Authors: Steinhart Eric
Published: December 2017

This chapter argues that there are nontheistic religions in the West whose claims are compatible with naturalism. Many are religions of energy. This energy is ultimate, optimizing, impersonal, and natural. Although it cannot be worshiped, it can be aroused, directed, and shaped. The energy religions thus involve tools and techniques for the therapeutic application of the ultimate energy to the self. They are technologies of the self. In this chapter, attention is focused on four new types of energy religion. These include the religions of consciousness (e.g., the New Stoicism, Westernized Buddhism); the religions of vision (involving the ethical use of entheogens); the religions of dance (e.g., religious raves); and the religions of beauty (e.g., Burning Man).
Rationality and Worldview
Authors: Oppy Graham
Published: December 2017

This chapter argues against the view that there is a particular set of worldview beliefs that is uniquely privileged when it comes to rationality and support by cogent arguments. The chapter begins with a simple model in which two competing worldviews are consistent and coherent, and neither has an advantage over the other with respect to rationality and support by cogent arguments. It is argued that the removal of simplifying assumptions—or equivalently, the addition of further constraints—does nothing to defeat the view that competing worldviews are on a par when it comes to rationality and support by cogent arguments. It is then argued that widening our focus does nothing to defeat the view that our best competing worldviews are on a par when it comes to rationality and support by cogent arguments. Finally, considerations about the assessment of competing worldviews suggests that we have pretty good reason to suppose that best competing worldviews actually are on a par when it comes to rationality and support by cogent arguments.
Protest and Enlightenment in the Book of Job
Authors: Morriston Wes
Published: December 2017

This chapter takes a close and critical look at the use made of the Book of Job by two contemporary Christian philosophers, Alvin Plantinga and Eleonore Stump. Their interpretations illustrate the way in which the theological or confessional turn in contemporary philosophy of religion can blind us to what foundational religious texts actually say. By carefully re-examining the Book of Job, the chapter seeks to show how even their own scriptures may sometimes undermine the standpoints of traditionalists. Read without theological blinders, the Book of Job presents a sharp challenge to traditional ideas about God and the world, while the theophany at the climax of the book opens up highly unorthodox but religiously interesting possibilities.
‘The King in his Countinghouse’
Authors: Masters Ben
Published: December 2017

This chapter considers how Amis sought to define a new contemporary decorum for a fundamentally indecorous age. Through close readings of Amis’s particular rhythms and rhetorical traits, it shows how Amis experiments with tone and awryness to create an active mimesis that both reflects and critiques contemporary excesses; and how Amis forges an ‘adjustment-style’ in order to individualize his reader. This chapter also shows how Amis pursues similar concerns to humanistic thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Wayne C. Booth, while replacing character and human interest with style interest, therefore evolving a provocative literary ethics that rejects the centrality of character. This all builds towards a close comparison of The Information and Yellow Dog, and their varying methods of negotiating the general and the particular.
Twenty-First-Century Excess
Authors: Masters Ben
Published: December 2017

This chapter evaluates the legacy of Burgess, Carter, and Amis by examining the work of a new generation of excessive English stylists, including Zadie Smith, Nicola Barker, and David Mitchell. It begins by showing how arguments similar to those made against stylistic prolixity in the aftermath of World War Two have resurfaced post-9/11. It goes on, through close readings of three novels (NW, Darkmans, Cloud Atlas), to show how this newer generation of writers has adapted and expanded the methods of the earlier stylists of excess by staging a return to ideas of character, interiority, and empathy in a way that still prioritizes authorial style and amplitude. With reference to Dorothy Hale’s notion of the aesthetics of alterity, it shows how these authors have made innovative use of free indirect style and polyphony to create a critical empathy that self-reflexively trains us to apprehend its own limitations.
Prayer after Augustine
Authors: Teubner Jonathan D.
Published: December 2017

Prayer after Augustine explores the place of prayer in the works of Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict, three figures critically important to the development of Latin medieval philosophical and theological thought. Part I offers a chronologically ordered reconstruction of Augustine’s understanding of prayer, tracing both theological reflections and practices from his early philosophical dialogues to his late anti-Pelagian polemical works. Part II investigates how Boethius in his Opuscula sacra and De consolatione Philosophiae and Benedict in his Regula take up Augustine’s understanding of prayer. For all three authors, the virtue of patience emerges as the means through which they struggle to confront the chasm between time and eternity, mortality and immortality, and humanity and divinity. At the heart of this book’s approach is an argument for a more complex understanding of religious and moral traditions that appreciates the subtleties with which late antique authors draw on their predecessors’ works and lives. By proposing a distinction between two levels of tradition—Augustinianism 1 and Augustinianism 2—this book argues for a distinction between the act of citing, referencing, and alluding to another author, and the use of general orientations and constellations of thought borrowed from another author. As Boethius and Benedict exemplify, the development of a religious tradition may oftentimes be less an affair of dialectical reasoning and more an expansion and refinement of devotional sensibilities.
A Historiographical Interlude
Authors: Teubner Jonathan D.
Published: December 2017

The ‘Historiographical Interlude’ presents a brief overview of the cultural, social, and political changes that occur between Augustine’s death in 430 CE and Boethius’ earliest theological writings (c.501 CE). When Augustine, Boethius, and Benedict are treated together in one unified analysis, several historiographical challenges emerge. This Interlude addresses several of these challenges and argues that trends within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship established some unfounded interpretive biases. In particular, this section will discuss the contributions of Adolf von Harnack and Henri Irénée Marrou, focusing on how they contributed, in diverse ways, to the neglect of sixth-century Italy as a significant geographical site in the development of the Augustinian tradition.
The Augustinianism 1 of the Opuscula sacra
Authors: Teubner Jonathan D.
Published: December 2017

Chapter 5 presents the first of two cases of the reception of Augustine’s understanding of prayer. This chapter treats Boethius’ Opuscula sacra (Theological Tractates). In these five little treatises, Boethius’ debt to Augustine is explicit, as seen most clearly in his references to prayer (à la Augustinianism 1) . The textual focus of this chapter will be on Boethius’ most developed theological treatises (OSI and OSV). It will be demonstrated that in these treatises Boethius’ primary references to prayer (deprecari and vota) are informed by Augustine, as both the terminologies and argumentative contexts overlap. This chapter provides the groundwork for the following chapter, in which a new interpretation of the Consolation of Philosophy is presented.
The Augustinianism 2 of The Consolation of Philosophy
Authors: Teubner Jonathan D.
Published: December 2017

Chapter 6 examines Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, focusing in particular on book 5. In Consolation 5, references to prayer are embedded within a dialogue between a prisoner and a personification of philosophy on the theme of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. By placing prayer within a broader philosophical and literary context, Boethius extends his Augustinianism to explore the boundaries and texture of Christian existence as it attempts to reach up from human ratio to divine intellegentia. Here Boethius demonstrates his Augustinianism 2, as he creatively reconstellates Augustine’s use of prayer in De trinitate to help him solve a different, though related, problem. The Augustinianism of the Consolation best comes into view when seen through Boethius’ references to prayer.