bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
American Catholic Practice of Confession in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Carey Patrick W.
Published: October 2018

The chapter outlines the growth and development of the practice of sacramental confession and the ways in which the practice was promoted by Catholic clerical leaders. In some places in the early nineteenth century the practice was rare or relatively infrequent because of the lack of priests and ignorance or unwillingness of Catholic laity to follow the tradition. Bishops and priests in the early nineteenth century were satisfied with promoting yearly confessions to meet the canonical obligation prescribed by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). After the 1830s, bishops and priests began a major campaign to increase the frequency of confessions as a spiritual exercise, a campaign that was successful and lasted well into the late 1950s. Catholic leaders promoted sacramental confessions through episcopal legislation and pastoral statements, catechisms, prayer books, preaching, and pastoral manuals for priests, and especially through parish missions.
History, Pius X, and the Practice of Confession, 1900–20
Authors: Carey Patrick W.
Published: October 2018

This chapter demonstrates how a few Catholic seminary professors in the first two decades of the twentieth century began to reconsider and critique the nineteenth-century Catholic understanding of the history of confession in light of Henry Charles Lea’s history of auricular confession and John Henry Newman’s theory of the development of doctrine. That re-examination of the early church’s history of penance met strong resistance from Pope Pius X’s anti-modernist campaign because the new approach clashed with Trent’s understanding of the divine origin of the early church’s practice of auricular confession. The pope, however, also promoted a liturgical revival in the Church that focused on active participation in the Eucharist that had consequences for American Catholic emphases on frequent confession for children as well as adults in preparation for communion. By 1920 that Pian revival in the United States reinforced the nineteenth-century promotion of frequent and devotional confessions.
The Platform Society as a Contested Concept
Authors: van José
Published: October 2018

The first chapter lays out the “platform society” as a contested concept, embroidering on Airbnb as an example. The term refers to an emerging society in which social, economic, and interpersonal traffic is largely channeled by a global online platform ecosystem that is fueled by data and organized through algorithms. Platforms are defined and approached at three levels: the micro-level of individual platforms, the meso-level of the platform ecosystem, and the macro-level of platform geopolitics. The American-based ecosystem is mostly governed by five big tech companies (Alphabet-Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft) whose platform services are central to its overall design and the distribution of data flows. Besides the dominant tech companies, there are also state and civil society actors active in governing the platform society. The question is: who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values in societies that are increasingly organized through online systems?
Discovering Desirability
Authors: Pettit Philip
Published: October 2018

In the ordinary world, we identify the desirable as something that is grounded in other properties, may diverge from what we desire, and, other things being equal, has a claim to govern what we desire. While desirability comes in many modes, moral desirability is grounded in relatively unrestricted considerations and enjoys a certain authority in resolving conflicts. Being creatures who avow and co-avow our desires, we are likely to find those desires diverging occasionally from our actual desires, and commanding our allegiance in the case of a conflict. Thus, we will begin to think of that which attracts avowal, being supported robustly by relevant desiderata, as having the governing role of the desirable. But as there are different modes of avowal, each supported by different sorts of desiderata, some neutral, some agent- or group-relative, there will be different and conflicting modes of desirability—this, by contrast with credibility. And the need to unify our own judgments of desirability into a single judgment of overall desirability, together with the need to universalize desirability so that it is standardized across individuals, will lead us to generate a notion of multi-lateral desirability that corresponds well with the ordinary notion of moral desirability.
Is There a Right to Free Movement across Borders?
Authors: Song Sarah
Published: October 2018

Chapter 6 examines three rights-based arguments for freedom of movement across borders. Three rights-based arguments have been offered in support of freedom of international movement. The first claims that freedom of movement is a fundamental human right in itself. The second adopts a “cantilever” strategy, arguing that freedom of international movement is a logical extension of existing fundamental rights, including the right of domestic free movement and the right to exit one’s country. The third argument is libertarian: international free movement is necessary to respect individual freedom of association and contract. This chapter shows why these arguments fail to justify a general right to free movement across the globe. What is morally required is not a general right of international free movement but an approach that privileges those whose basic human rights are at stake.
Refugees and Other Necessitous Migrants
Authors: Song Sarah
Published: October 2018

Chapter 7 considers the substance of immigration policy. It argues that the duty to protect refugees and other forcibly displaced migrants is a moral constraint on the state’s right to control immigration. The chapter examines the grounds of the obligation toward refugees, who should be regarded as a refugee, what the duty to assist refugees entails, how the duty should be shared among states, and what the limits on the duty to refugees might be. It concludes by considering some implications for contemporary policy toward refugees.
Resigning Without Leaving
Authors: Koh Harold Hongju
Published: October 2018

With respect to international agreements, President Donald Trump’s basic strategy has become resigning without leaving: This chapter illustrates this pattern with respect to the Paris Climate Change Agreement, trade diplomacy, and the Iran Nuclear Deal. In each area, Trump has expressed overt hostility toward the international agreement in question and threatened to abandon it, but in practice, he has generally stayed in the existing international agreements, but underperformed, forcing other transnational players to take up the slack to compensate for his unwillingness fully to execute America’s international obligations. This approach at least has the virtue that in time, a successor administration may correct that underperformance and restore the United States to full participation in the international arrangement.
What’s at Stake
Authors: Koh Harold Hongju
Published: October 2018

This closing chapter argues that what is ultimately at stake is a struggle between the post–World War II system of Kantian global governance versus an Orwellian vision of spheres of influence supported by President Donald Trump and other global authoritarians. Thus far, history shows that various techniques of resistance can be marshaled to good effect. The foreign policy tally thus far shows that Trump has not been winning and that the rope-a-dope is working. The book closes by arguing that Trump does not own transnational legal process; we all do. But our understanding of transnational legal process carries with it a normative edge. It confers on all of us a continuing obligation to keep pushing the arc of history in the right direction.
Spinoza’s “Ontological” Argument
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Proposition 11 of Part 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics states that God necessarily exists. Although his demonstration of the proposition is often said to constitute his ontological argument for the existence of God, and to report an essentially private “rational perception” of God’s existence, he provides four distinct “proofs” for the proposition. This chapter analyzes the four proofs and the relations among them. Like ontological arguments, they depend crucially on a definition of God that is intended, when grasped, to show that God necessarily exists; but like most cosmological arguments, they also depend crucially on a principle of sufficient reason. The last two proofs can be seen to address an objection, concerning the principle that substances cannot share attributes, that might otherwise be raised to the first two proofs.
Ethics IP5
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Ethics IP5 states that substances cannot share attributes, and it plays an essential role in Spinoza’s argument for substance monism. His demonstration of the proposition, however, seems subject to two serious objections—one of them originally due to Leibniz, one to Michael Hooker, and both renewed in Jonathan Bennett’s book, A Study of Spinoza’s “Ethics.” This chapter first examines a number of responses to each of these two objections, arguing that none can fully overcome the objections and that none provides a likely interpretation of Spinoza’s intentions in offering the demonstration. It then develops and defends an interpretation of the demonstration that does overcome the objections and provides a likely account of Spinoza’s intentions. Central to this interpretation is the Principle of Sufficient Reason and what Bennett calls “explanatory rationalism.”
Postscript Shared Attributes and Monism Revisited
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Chapter 3 (“Ethics 1p5: Shared Attributes and the Basis of Spinoza’s Monism”) develops replies on Spinoza’s behalf to two objections (the “Hooker-Bennett objection” and the “Leibniz-Bennett objection,” respectively) to his demonstration in Ethics 1p5d that substances cannot share an attribute. Both of these replies appeal to a positive aspect of the priority of substance over its modes: that modes are in and conceived through their substances. In his important 2002 article “Spinoza’s Substance Monism,” Michael Della Rocca develops replies to the objections that appeal instead to a negative aspect of the priority: that substances are not in or conceived through their modes. This postscript argues that neither of the negatively based replies is satisfactory on its own within the argumentative structure of the Ethics and that the positively based replies of Chapter 3 are more likely to capture Spinoza’s own thinking about the impossibility of shared attributes
Postscript Necessitarianism Revisited
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Chapter 4 (“Spinoza’s Necessitarianism”) argues, among other things, that Spinoza is committed by at least three propositions of Ethics Part 1—namely, 1p16, 1p29, and 1p33—to the doctrine that every state of affairs holds with strict metaphysical necessity. In their densely argued and widely cited article “Necessitarianism Reconsidered” (1999), Edwin Curley and Gregory Walski raise objections to this interpretation and argue that Spinoza instead believes that there could have been (from all eternity) any one of many different possible complete systems of finite modes. This postscript develops and clarifies the interpretation defended in Chapter 4. It does so, first, by responding to the worries of Curley and Walski about the coherence of the view that the chapter attributes to Spinoza, and second, by rebutting their specific objections to the chapter’s interpretation of each of the three propositions of Ethics Part 1 at issue.
Truth and Ideas of Imagination in the Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Spinoza devotes well over a third of his unfinished Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (TdIE) to discussing three kinds of ideas—fictions, false ideas, and doubts—that are derived from the imagination and which are to be distinguished from true ideas in the first part of his proposed philosophical “Method.” This chapter defends Spinoza against the charge that his treatments of these ideas of imagination are incompatible with his conceptions of truth and Method. First, the chapter examines his account of the nature of true ideas and the relation of this account to his conception of Method, with particular attention to the meaning of his claims that truth requires no sign and that truth is sufficient to remove all doubt. Second, it shows how his discussions of fiction, falsity, and doubt are compatible with these two claims and how his treatments of these ideas serve the purposes of his Method.
Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke on Extended Thinking Beings
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Can we know that nothing is in itself both thinking and spatially extended? Descartes’s two arguments for mind-body dualism in his Meditations—one drawn from the conceived separability of thought and extension, the other drawn from the indivisibility of mind and the divisibility of body—each entail an affirmative answer to this question. Yet although Spinoza and Locke both studied Descartes carefully, each gives a negative answer to the question, implying that each thought he could diagnose an error in each of Descartes’s two arguments. This chapter explains in detail the very different diagnoses that Spinoza and Locke, respectively, would have made of Descartes’s errors in each of the two arguments. It then compares and evaluates their respective strategies for resisting those arguments.
The Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Transitivity of Identity in Spinoza’s Logic of the Attributes
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Puzzlingly, Spinoza appears to reject two principles that are central to our understanding of numerical identity: the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Transitivity of Identity. For each principle, this chapter does three things. First, it explains where and how Spinoza appears to reject it. Second, it examines and argues against two proposals for resolving the puzzle that results from the apparent rejection: one proposal that appeals to Michael Della Rocca’s conception of “intensional properties” and one that denies, as Colin Marshall does, that Spinoza really means numerical identity by his phrase “one and the same” (“una, eademque”). Third, it offers and defends an original proposal for resolving the puzzle that appeals to two Spinozistic doctrines that it calls “Strong Ontological Pluralism of Attributes” and the “Adequate-Idea Conception of Truth.”
Spinoza’s Theory of Metaphysical Individuation
Authors: Garrett Don
Published: October 2018

Spinoza’s theory of metaphysical individuation explains the existence, persistence, and difference of extended individuals as functions of what he calls “fixed ratios of motion and rest.” This chapter answers several important questions about the theory as Spinoza presents it in the so-called Physical Excursus (also called the “Physical Interlude” or “Physical Digression”) following Ethics 2p13s. First, what does he mean by the terms “motion” and “rest”? Second, what does he conceive “fixed ratios” of motion and rest to be? Third, what does he intend the scope of his term “individual” (and hence the scope of the theory as a whole) to be? Finally, how is his discussion of individuals related to his crucial conatus doctrine that “each thing strives to persevere in its being?”
And I Became Male
Authors: Gold Barbara K.
Published: October 2018

This chapter discusses the metaphor of the martyr as athlete found both in the Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis and in many early Christian writers such as Tertullian. It focuses on key images and elements in Perpetua’s fourth vision in which she “becomes male,” and the theological, philosophical, theoretical, and social contexts that reveal Perpetua’s role as a woman and the portrayal of her as an athlete. It discusses the traits of endurance [patientia in Cicero and hypomonê in Greek texts] and suffering that are manifested in martyr athletes such as Perpetua and Blandina and Augustine’s discussion of the body in connection with female martyrs.
The Levant
Authors: Lentin Jérôme
Published: October 2018

This chapter reviews the history of the Arabic dialects spoken in Bilād al-Shām from long before the Arab conquests until today. They belong mainly to the Syro-Lebanese group (including the Cilician and Cypriot dialects), but also to the Shāwi, north Arabian bedouin, and Mesopotamian groups. After an overview of the various but rather scanty available sources, and methodological considerations on the use of the data provided by texts written in Middle Arabic, some basic phonological, morphological, syntactical, and lexical features are studied in an attempt to trace their appearance and history whenever possible. Special attention is given to the b(i)-imperfect, whose origin and grammatical–semantic meanings are analysed at length, and to the influence of the Aramaic substrate, of which a dozen allegedly typical examples are discussed. Pointing to the difficulty of writing a history of Levantine dialects, the conclusion also underlines the striking continuity in colloquial usage over the ages.
Solidarity
Authors: Dwan David
Published: October 2018

Orwell’s writings repeatedly extol the virtues of solidarity, or what he liked to call brotherhood. But brotherhood was often something of an ordeal for Orwell as much as it was a coveted value and practice. The issue may be partly a question of character, but it also had a conceptual element: a) the compatibility of solidarity with other values, b) its internal coherence, as it sometimes re-enlists the social divisions it seeks to transcend, c) its problematic scope given its seemingly partisan nature, and d) its practicality in a modern social setting. This chapter examines these four issues in detail, showing how they contribute to the particular heft of Orwell’s writing—its angular sympathies and superbly uneven tone.
Happiness
Authors: Dwan David
Published: October 2018

Orwell had mixed views on happiness. He cast it as the fundamental goal of socialism, but he also denied that socialism had anything to do with happiness. This chapter studies the grounds for such ambivalence. The misgivings stemmed in part from the basic psychology of happiness—in Orwell’s mind, at least, it often appeared to be too subjective, too ephemeral, and too contingent to serve as a viable public end. He believed, moreover, that its pursuit was self-undermining: the best means of eroding happiness was to make it the be-all and end-all of everything. Orwell also worried that happiness was incompatible with virtue. The chapter explores his moral and political criticisms of hedonism, but it also considers his conviction that pleasure had a key role to play in the good life. How these theories may have shaped his own colourful life is the concluding concern of the chapter.
Conclusion
Authors: Dwan David
Published: October 2018

This chapter reviews Orwell’s apparent contradictions—a disciple of brotherhood who loathed a good cross section of his brothers; a socialist egalitarian who decried ‘the personal inferiority of many individual socialists’; a revolutionary and an internationalist who also claimed that no ‘real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist’; an intellectual who despised intellectuals. Always keen to stand apart, he became a utopian when surrounded by ‘realists’ and a ‘realist’ when confronting utopians. In the face of other people’s moralism he could sound like an economic determinist, but confronted with the fatalism of others he stressed the importance of moral effort. These contradictions reveal some of Orwell’s limitations, but they raise a broader question about the role of consistency in moral life. It is this issue which the chapter sets out to address.
What young children give to our learning
Authors: Trevarthen Colwyn
Published: October 2018

Studies of the cleverness of young children reveal that education, or schooling, is a cultivation of inherent motives of human pleasure in cooperative and creative life. An experienced teacher in a kindergarten, or a supervisor of doctoral students at university, supports affectionate and curious pupils who are ready to learn new stories of knowing and doing. François Rabelais, a sixteenth-century humanist, and Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, have rejected ‘the absurd idea of pouring in knowledge’. Educators who act like a loving parent to help the child learn in playful and musical or poetic companionship are guiding the strengths of human nature. Officials appointed to administer education for the government of society need to understand that it is the human mind's convivial enthusiasm that inspires a lifetime of learning with many teachers. They need to listen to parents, to experienced teachers, and to children.
Access to enriching environments in early childhood: Paradise lost?
Authors: Miles Chris
Published: October 2018

Children need adults who respect, support, and facilitate their learning, but also know when to leave well alone. Who appreciate a rich learning environment—of which they themselves are a part—and can create or give children access to it. In a rich learning environment children have permission to explore; are given subtle invitations to do so; can solve problems for themselves; can create, reach understanding, and acquire skills and knowledge; and much more. It is an environment that fosters self-reliance, self-realization, and independence, and that encourages children to take initiative and leadership, to improvise, and to make decisions. It respects and values beauty, tranquillity, and serendipity. This chapter strives to help adults develop their understanding of children, and thus to develop awareness of what a rich learning environment looks like, so they may better meet and share the genius of the child.
The spiritual strengths of young children
Authors: Nye Rebecca
Published: October 2018

This chapter outlines childhood’s spiritual strengths and needs. Psychological theories and empirical research suggest that spiritual capacity is a natural condition of early childhood, arising in everyday experience. Contemporary scholarship identifies key strengths that underpin childhood spirituality. These include children’s heightened sensitivity to non-verbal, embodied, and emotional ways of knowing, and a less dominating verbal and intellectual approach to experience. This privileges children’s spiritual capacity for ‘relational consciousness’, and is evident in attention to mystery, delight, despair, wonder, the present moment, a sense of place, and connotative meaning-making. Without sensitive approaches to nurture in education and care, these capacities are vulnerable to erosion. Four areas of spiritual need are proposed: for child-led listening, for adult presence and humility, for space (physical, emotional, and auditory), and a need for imaginative play. Together, these can provide safe ways to explore the profound existential issues common in even the youngest children.
Gender balance in the childcare workforce: Why having more men in childcare is important
Authors: Spence Kenny , Clapton Gary
Published: October 2018

The care and education of young children comprise one of the most gender-segregated occupations in the UK. Many a child in Scotland has no positive male influence in education until secondary school. Concerning pupils with behavioural or emotional difficulties, 71% are boys, and of those children excluded from school, 91% are boys. Boys who are doing much worse than girls educationally may be more likely to be involved in crime and have mental health problems and higher rates of suicide. They need positive role models who understand their actions and feelings. A boy may go from pre-school to primary with only female teachers, and not until secondary school may they develop a relationship with a male teacher. In such a world it is difficult for a child to experience the benefits of equality or fairness in relationships, and to develop a responsive male self-confidence.
Early childhood education and care policy: Beyond quantity and quality, for human development
Authors: Naumann Ingela K.
Published: October 2018

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has become a central policy issue. After tracing the development of ECEC policy from the early nineteenth century, the chapter considers the current role of ECEC as flagship policy of the new social investment strategy of rich countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It examines how the amalgamation of neuroscientific findings with economic discourse in policy-orientations has led to an oversimplified and constricted view on children’s development and learning, whilst silencing older debates about ECEC. The focus on childhood in policy-making offers great opportunities to improve the lives of children and their families. There is, however, a risk that the child, as creative and affective social agent, is lost within old moral conflicts about the role of ECEC for children and society. I argue for a renewed moral debate on how society can support rich and encompassing human development.
The spirit of the child inspires learning in the community: How can we balance this promise with the politics and practice of education?
Authors: Trevarthen Colwyn , Dunlop Aline-Wendy , Delafield-Butt Jonathan
Published: October 2018

Our contributors offer inspiring stories—from a psychology of early childhood and teaching experience that appreciates the spiritual values that young children affirm in shared enjoyment of life. We confirm that every child has motives of an affectionate learner, seeking companions for an active and imaginative life. Each boy and girl, with their individual characters and interests, wants to take part in the ‘common sense’ world of a community with its treasured moral and artistic values, sharing joy in the discovery of a natural and meaningful world. They do not just need to be taught how to use material possessions, and how to obey social and cultural rules. We seek principles for early education and care to support responsive teachers in the years before formal school begins. Scotland’s kindergarten tradition and its contemporary policies for transition to school offer a distinguished history of curriculum reformation, following the spirit of the child.
Changing Bodies and Ambivalent Subjectivities During and After Prison
Authors: Chamberlen Anastasia
Published: October 2018

Taking the previous chapter’s argument one step further, this chapter suggests that because of this bodily awareness and of various shifts in lifestyles due to the break that imprisonment constitutes in their life course, women’s bodies change significantly as the result of imprisonment. The present chapter outlines various examples of physiological change on women’s bodies in order to explore the complexity of the effects of imprisonment on women’s bodies and identities. It argues that while physiological change is not always experienced as necessarily negative, its impact on women’s overall attitudes, body image, and subjectivities is one of ambivalence and emotional turmoil, marking their overall perceptions and identities long after release from prison.
The Birth of Wisdom Literature
Authors: Kynes Will
Published: October 2018

This chapter aims to discover the precise “scholarly world” in which the Wisdom category arose, understand what aspects of that environment inspired its creation, and evaluate the lasting effects that origin has had on its interpretation. Johann Bruch’s Weisheits-Lehre der Hebräer (1851) is the first work to draw together a developing concept of a Wisdom genre and present it systematically and comprehensively. In the nineteenth century, German Christians like Bruch were struggling to reconcile the universalistic, humanistic, and philosophical aspects of their religion with its particularistic connection with a history that was becoming increasingly problematic under the intense examination of eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century historical criticism. This was fertile soil for Wisdom Literature’s development as the “universalistic, humanistic, philosophical” collection within the Old Testament. The level of abstraction necessary to justify the diverse category leaves ample room for scholars to import their own presuppositions into the interpretation of these texts.
The Intertextual Network of Ecclesiastes and the Self-Reflective Nature of Genre
Authors: Kynes Will
Published: October 2018

The numerous, often contrasting interpretations Ecclesiastes has inspired across history provide a clear example of the self-reflective character of genres. Rather than dismissing these readings completely, Wisdom included, because of their subjectivity, it is more profitable to understand each as a partial and selective perspective responding to some potential of the text. Whether inspired by the traditional collections before Wisdom Literature, intertextual links to other canonical genres, parallels to texts from across the ancient Near East, or comparisons based on the book’s literary features, such as form, tone, or content, each genre proposal reveals something about the nature of the text while falling short of comprehending the whole. Illuminating all the contours of the text’s rugged terrain while dispelling the “misleading shadows” of self-interested exegesis will require engaging with more rather than less of the subjective perspectives on its meaning.
Marcel Mauss and the Turn to the Gift
Authors: Colesworthy Rebecca
Published: October 2018

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.
H.D. and the Promise of Queer Kinship
Authors: Colesworthy Rebecca
Published: October 2018

This chapter aligns H.D.’s understanding of art as spiritual gift with recent queer critiques of kinship theory. H.D.’s posthumously published Notes on Thought and Vision in part reads as a treatise on kinship—on the way small-scale exchanges provide a basis for large-scale social formations. In identifying homoeroticism as the ground of Western culture and lending equal significance to masculine and feminine relationships, the text offers a queer alternative to Freud’s and Lévi-Strauss’s heteronormative models of kinship. Her World War II memoir, The Gift, also posthumously published, gives mythico-historical form to this alternative, drawing connections between her Moravian matrilineage, settler–Native relations, the current war, and her domestic life with Bryher. By further linking H.D.’s notion of the gift to developments in telecommunications, this chapter takes distance from atavistic, gynocentric, and elitist readings of her work while reconsidering the apparent contradiction between her limited publications and utopian ambitions for art.
The Boundaries of the Law of Release
Authors: Smiley Will
Published: October 2018

This chapter uses a variety of case studies to examine how the Ottoman and Russian (and Iranian) states extended, and defined, the limits of the Law of Release between the 1740s and 1790s. The fundamental question was, who would benefit from the Law of Release? The answers they reached, in short, were: Russian subjects who had not converted to Islam—but that required defining all the terms involved. These definitions emerged one by one, from clashes between Russian demands and Ottoman responses. But captives presented their own claims to gain liberation—or, sometimes, to avoid release and return to Russia. Ultimately the Law of Release defined who “belonged” to each empire, delineating subjecthood and sovereignty.
Equations of motion
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter turns to the essential aspects of Newtonian dynamics. It argues that this chapter’s representation of an interaction by a vector means that it is limiting itself to phenomena that do not depend on the position or orientation of the reference frame in which they are studied. Since the algebra of the vector space to which the vectors representing the forces belong is linear, this chapter is de facto limiting itself to interactions which satisfy the superposition principle. The chapter also argues that the law of action and reaction, or Newton’s third law, states that the action of a body P2 on another body P1, described by f21, must be equal and opposite to the action f12 of P1 on P2. Finally, it introduces the principle of Galilean relativity and discusses moving frames and internal forces.
Dynamics of massive systems
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter presents the laws of motion of an ensemble of point masses forming a solid body whose shape is invariant, or a fluid whose shape can vary with time. It argues that an ensemble of point masses constitutes a solid if the distances between the points can be assumed constant. The chapter then provides examples of the motions of a solid. Finally, it demonstrates the Euler equations of fluid motion. Here, it states that a perfect fluid is characterized by its (inertial) mass density ρ(t, xⁱ), its pressure p(t, xⁱ) which phenomenologically describes its internal collisions, and a velocity field v(t, xⁱ) giving its velocity at xⁱ at time t.
The Kepler problem
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter considers Newton’s 1665 explanations of the dynamics in the laws governing the motion of a planet around the Sun, which were established by Johannes Kepler in 1618. The first law states that the motion is planar and the trajectories are ellipses. The second states that the area swept out by the radius vector per unit time is constant. Finally, the cube of the semi-major axis a is proportional to the square of the period P, a3 = (const)P2. The chapter begins with the reduced equations of motion before turning to the ellipses of Kepler. It then illustrates the Kepler problem in the Lagrangian formalism, as well as central forces.
Dynamics of a point particle
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter attributes an inertial ‘mass–energy’ to particles. It also distinguishes between the action of an external field and of long-range and short-range internal forces, which is useful for establishing the laws of dynamics of an interacting body—that is, the equations determining its world line. The chapter also presents the 4-momentum conservation law for massive particles and light particles in inertial reference frames. It then gives some examples which illustrate the role played by this law in collisions. Finally, the chapter illustrates the conservation law by the Compton experiment, that is, the collision of a light corpuscle with a particle, and the concept of the quantum of action that can be derived from it.
Waves in a medium
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter uses a phenomenological approach to obtain a ‘mean’ or macroscopic description of electromagnetic phenomena inside matter. The electromagnetic field inside a medium induces charge and current distributions called polarization. These are the response of the matter to the field. The charge and current densities can be decomposed into the sum of free densities (that is, imposed from outside the medium, and which create the field) and induced densities. The matching conditions on the electromagnetic field at the interface between two different media (for example, a pair of lenses) can be obtained from the macroscopic Maxwell equations with the use of the Gauss and Stokes theorems.
The radiation reaction force
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter observes the reaction force acting on a charge due to the radiation it emits. It also considers the related questions of renormalization and physical interpretation. Modifying the Lorentz equation introduced in Chapter 11 by including a radiation reaction force provides a heuristic method of describing the expected slowing of an accelerated charge in response to the radiation it emits. The chapter then goes on to describe the Abraham–Lorentz–Dirac reaction force, the counter-effect of the radiation of an accelerated charge on its motion. In addition, the chapter shows that a hydrogen atom, this time described by the Thomson model, is unstable in Maxwell theory.
Riemannian manifolds
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter introduces the Riemann tensor characterizing curved spacetimes, and then the metric tensor, which allows lengths and durations to be defined. As shown in the preceding chapter, ‘absolute, true, and mathematical’ spacetimes representing ‘relative, apparent, and common’ space and time in Einstein’s theory are Riemannian manifolds supplied with a metric and its associated Levi-Civita connection. Moreover, this metric simultaneously describes the coordinate system chosen to reference the events. The chapter begins with a study of connections, parallel transport, and curvature; the commutation of derivatives, torsion, and curvature; geodesic deviation and curvature; the metric tensor and the Levi-Civita connection; and locally inertial frames. Finally, it discusses Riemannian manifolds.
The physics of black holes II
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter gives a brief description of Hawking radiation, which involves a combination of general relativity and quantum field theory and leads to a thermodynamical interpretation of the laws governing the evolution of black holes. The study of the Penrose process near a Kerr black hole leads to the conclusion that its irreducible mass can only increase. A similar but more general conclusion was reached by Hawking, who showed that the sum of the areas of the horizons of black holes interacting with matter can only increase, with the condition that the cosmic censorship hypothesis is valid and that the matter obeys the so-called weak energy condition. The chapter concludes with the Israel theorem, which allows one to argue that if gravitation is described by general relativity, then not only do black holes exist, but all black holes are represented by the Kerr–Schwarzschild solution.
The two-body problem: an effective-one-body approach
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter presents the basics of the ‘effective-one-body’ approach to the two-body problem in general relativity. It also shows that the 2PN equations of motion can be mapped. This can be done by means of an appropriate canonical transformation, to a geodesic motion in a static, spherically symmetric spacetime, thus considerably simplifying the dynamics. Then, including the 2.5PN radiation reaction force in the (resummed) equations of motion, this chapter provides the waveform during the inspiral, merger, and ringdown phases of the coalescence of two non-spinning black holes into a final Kerr black hole. The chapter also comments on the current developments of this approach, which is instrumental in building the libraries of waveform templates that are needed to analyze the data collected by the current gravitational wave detectors.
The Lambda-CDM model of the hot Big Bang
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter introduces the Lambda-CDM (cold dark matter) model. In 1948, under the impetus of George Gamow, Robert Hermann, Ralph Alpher, and Hans Bethe in particular, relativistic cosmology entered the second phase of its history. In this phase, physical processes, in particular, nuclear and atomic processes, are taken into account. This provides two observational tests of the model: primordial nucleosynthesis, which explains the origin of light nuclei, and the existence of the cosmic microwave background, and it establishes the fact that the universe has a thermal history. Study of the large-scale structure of the universe then indicates the existence of dark matter and a nonzero cosmological constant. This model, known as the ΛCDM model, is the standard model of contemporary cosmology.
Riemannian manifolds
Authors: Deruelle Nathalie , Uzan Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2018

This chapter is about Riemannian manifolds. It first discusses the metric manifold and the Levi-Civita connection, determining if the metric is Riemannian or Lorentzian. Next, the chapter turns to the properties of the curvature tensor. It states without proof the intrinsic versions of the properties of the Riemann–Christoffel tensor of a covariant derivative already given in Chapter 2. This chapter then performs the same derivation as in Chapter 4 by obtaining the Einstein equations of general relativity by varying the Hilbert action. However, this will be done in the intrinsic manner, using the tools developed in the present and the preceding chapters.
Equality, Rights, and Sentientist Politics
Authors: Cochrane Alasdair
Published: October 2018

Chapter 2 defends the claim that each sentient individual possesses an ultimate and equal intrinsic moral worth. It then argues that in light of that worth, all sentient creatures possess a set of fundamental rights which impose duties on moral agents. The final claim of the chapter is that one of the duties which moral agents have is to create and maintain a political order dedicated to the protection of the worth and rights of all sentient creatures. In other words, this chapter claims that ‘sentient equality’ and ‘sentient rights’ provide the justification for political institutions, and serve to shape and constrain their design.
Diversity and Toleration in a Sentientist Political Order
Authors: Cochrane Alasdair
Published: October 2018

Chapter 6 asks how much diversity individuals and communities ought to be afforded when it comes to their relations with animals. Since individual and group attitudes in relation to animals differ widely, it needs to be asked how much difference a sentientist political order ought to tolerate, and what it should do when any individual or political community acts outside ‘the bounds of toleration’. The chapter argues that sentient rights are minimal norms of justice which set limits on pluralism. Political communities should not tolerate individuals who violate the basic rights of sentient creatures; and the global political order should not tolerate communities who violate the basic rights of sentient creatures. However, it further claims that the types of intervention that are permissible must be constrained by considerations of efficacy and proportionality.
Democratization and Institutional Design
Authors: Corbett Jack , Veenendaal Wouter
Published: October 2018

Chapter 4 interrogates the claim that colonialism and subsequent institutional design shaped the success and failure of democratization. We find that: 1)institutions designed for large states do not always work, or work as expected, in small ones; 2) that this has led to considerable reform and adaptation, especially in the Pacific; and 3) despite attempts to reform institutions, in many small states actors find it easier to circumvent them entirely. That is, the personalization of politics means institutional design and the notion of path dependence is of limited value when seeking to understand how democracy is practiced in small states. This propensity to sidestep or short circuit institutions can help explain why politics in small states is often very similar, despite variations in institutional design and colonial legacy.
Introduction
Authors: Badino Massimiliano , Navarro Jaume
Published: October 2018

This chapter addresses the historiography that justifies the contents of this book along the three major lines: (i) the usual divide between classical physics and modern physics is misleading when trying to explain the status quo of the ether in the early twentieth century; (ii) the ether remains alive in many quarters, thanks to a complex entanglement of authority, knowledge and ethos of some of the main actors involved in this story; (iii) the ether played a relevant role in the quest for unity in knowledge of nature in an attempt to transcend the divide between the material and the spiritual. Finally, this chapter makes a plea for pluralism in the history of science, escaping from linear and progressive accounts in the history of the demise of the ether.
Ether and Wireless
Authors: Navarro Jaume
Published: October 2018

This chapter explores the ways in which the ether saw its popularity renewed by its link to the modern wireless technologies. With the creation of the BBC in 1922, wireless sets ceased to be obscure devices for military and commercial communication and became household goods to entertain the British middle classes. Wireless amateurs, electrical engineers, inventors and specialised physicists engaged in a cultural exchange among themselves and with the general public in order to explain and understand the mechanisms and possibilities of the new technology. This created a new arena for discussions on the existence of the ether at a time when highly esoteric physics (mainly relativity, but also quantum physics) had triggered a debate on its very existence. This chapter argues that radio broadcasting was instrumental for the concept of the ether to remain popular among wireless amateurs, engineers and the general public in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Ether and Aesthetics in the Dialogue between Relativists and Their Critics in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Staley Richard
Published: October 2018

This chapter pairs a study of ether and aesthetics in exploring dialogues between relativists and critics in two different periods. In the 1880s, Ernst Mach argued against absolute time and space but also offered new perspectives on aesthetic phenomena and speculated on a gravitational ether. In 1905, Albert Einstein announced the superfluity of the luminiferous ether, but by 1918 had described space without the ether as ‘unthinkable’. Responding to his friend H. A. Lorentz and critics Ernst Gehrke and Philipp Lenard, Einstein both used the literary form of a dialogue between a relativist and a critic and defined a new gravitational ether that might have disarmed criticism. Neither strategy was successful, however, and the chapter concludes with an examination of social and aesthetic dimensions of the environment of political debate, commercial publishing and disciplinary discussions that marked the emergence of relativity in the public sphere in the post-war period.