bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Prodigal Son in Poetry
Authors: Jack Alison M.
Published: December 2018

While there are many examples of Prodigal Son poems, the works of Bishop and Smith are compared as they both struggle to make sense of ‘home’ from a perspective of exile. For Bishop, home is shown to have little or no meaning; for Smith, it is full of meaning and cannot be ignored. Both have to come to terms with the loss of home, while accepting its role in their formation, and this is a feature of their poems which both implicitly and explicitly references the Prodigal Son parable. The role of Robinson Crusoe as a type of Prodigal Son is explored and contrasted by both in terms of Crusoe’s experiences of homecoming and his relationship to the wider community.
Setting down the footprint: from war to war, 1919–1945
Authors: Verhoef Grietjie
Published: December 2018

The first quarter of a century of Sanlam in the long-term insurance business was characterized by strong centralized bureaucratic management, an unmistakeably Afrikaner cultural hub at Head Office, and attention to the professional training of agents. The company growth was solid and slowly gained market share through innovative products and attention to service. A close connection between Afrikaner cultural and political leadership was prevalent throughout this period. Sanlam used this nationalist allegiance to grow its business, and to develop a presence for Afrikaners outside of insurance in other sectors of the economy. By the end of World War II non-exclusive production positioned the company to benefit from strong economic growth after 1945.
Searching the soul
Authors: Verhoef Grietjie
Published: December 2018

Growing divisions along political lines, and personal differences in management on different levels of Sanlam operations, landed the life office to engage in more non-life investment restructuring than actual insurance business. Sanlam addressed complex inter-personal Afrikaner business contestation, causing negative publicity to the company. Building down its strategic investments began in 1985 and was almost completed by 1996. Unexpected management changes and seriously underperforming strategic investments curtailed the life office’s market position. The transformation of Sanlam in response to the domestic political changes, and re-entry into the international markets, led to organizational, managerial, and business adjustments. Strategic refocusing followed, but diversification into financial services remained compromised by illiquidity. Sanlam did the first Black Economic Empowerment transaction and commenced a capital building process with the aim of a fundamental functional overhaul, following the international trend to demutualize.
Introduction
Authors: Pickles Thomas
Published: December 2018

The Introduction establishes the historiographical justification for, and contribution of, a study of kingship, society, and the church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire. It suggests that historians of conversion to Christianity in Anglo-Saxon England have tended to emphasize the role and agency of kings in conversion. It demonstrates that historians of the Anglo-Saxon church have debated the merits of the ‘minster hypothesis’, partly as a result of the distinctive sources for the church in northern England. It highlights that this study will challenge that emphasis on the role and agency of kings in conversion and provide a study of church organization in one region of northern England. It justifies the decision to study Yorkshire through its status as a meaningful socio-political unit in the period with a particularly helpful range of sources.
The Kingdom of the Deirans, 450–650
Authors: Pickles Thomas
Published: December 2018

Chapter 1 considers the formation and organization of the kingdom of the Deirans during the period 450–650 as a context for conversion. It reconstructs the formation of the kingdom, and the social institutions and religious beliefs of its population, from a combination of fifth- to seventh-century mortuary archaeology and early eighth-century histories. It observes that the kingdom developed from processes of migration, social stratification, political centralization, ethnogenesis, and expansion, which were still under way at the moment of conversion. It emphasizes that social organization was based on local free kin groups whose social position was uncertain, whose social status was projected through pre-Christian religious beliefs, and through whom kings operated with limited authority and power. It suggests that the social strategies of these kin groups and this political context shaped the decision to convert and the social process of conversion.
Politics, Conversion, and Christianization, 616–867
Authors: Pickles Thomas
Published: December 2018

Chapter 3 investigates the impact of the formation of the ‘ecclesiastical aristocracy’ on kingship. It uses eighth-century histories, and eighth- and ninth-century annals, letters, poems, and coins, to consider transformations in kingship. It suggests that the formation of the ‘ecclesiastical aristocracy’ conditioned the chronology of official conversion: a generation or two after political centralization, kin groups began pursuing conversion as a social strategy; kings reacted first to the emergence of a political constituency of converts amongst the Deirans and then a generation later to the conversion of the majority of kin groups. It argues that the social process of conversion required powerful political arguments and public demonstrations of religious change. It observes that the socio-political context made episcopal sees and churches less attractive than religious communities, and produced enthusiastic investment in religious communities followed by instability in kingship and expropriation of religious communities.
World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far
Authors: Howard June
Published: December 2018

The fourth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far.” It considers the work of this doubly named author, a comparatively recent addition to the canon of literary regionalism. It offers a sketch of Eaton’s life and works, attending closely to recent research and discussing her place in North American literary history. It argues that the author’s success as “Sui Sin Far” depended on her connection to the global locality “Chinatown,” but also that she claims multiple national literatures and writes herself into a world literature beyond their horizons.
Regionalisms Now
Authors: Howard June
Published: December 2018

The fifth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “Regionalisms Now.” It mobilizes the analytic categories developed in previous chapters in an examination of place-focused cultural production in several media. Examples are drawn from television, popular romance and mystery novels, and literary fiction. These works are not treated as embodiments of an ideal genre or lineal descendants of local color; the argument is that the concept of region remains relevant for contemporary culture and that narrations of place continue to project temporality. The chapter offers extended readings of the authors Ernest Hebert and Wendell Berry, and posits the parable of the global village as an emerging genre.
In the Place of a Conclusion
Authors: Howard June
Published: December 2018

It is time to turn attention to the nonscalable, not only as objects for description but also as incitements to theory.

—ANNA LOWENHAUPT TSING, The Mushroom at the End of the World

In choosing to write this book, and in all its claims, I make a case for taking regional writing seriously. Story-telling about particular places has been a way of attending to the nearby, the distant, and the horizon, and to the entanglement of place and time. It is not always that; it can be encapsulated and quaint. But it continues to be a vital resource for contemporary creators. My enterprise has been to follow this writing into its most ambitious reaches, to read it with other efforts to understand the puzzles of place-time and generally how the world works—and to articulate what I see, as accessibly as I can....
Introducing Contagious Sympathies
Authors: Langley Eric
Published: December 2018

In this introductory chapter, the study is situated in relation to contemporary scholarship—demonstrating both points of contact with and departure from key critical interlocutors such as Nancy Selleck and Robert N. Watson, recent writing by James Kuzner and Joe Moshenska, and theoretical work by Teresa Brennan, Michel Serres, and others—while offering an overview of the study’s concerns. It considers the place of sympathy in the early-modern mindset, looking at scientific, theological, philosophical, and literary texts to give a sense of how sympathetic relations are understood as integral to social relations and the operations of the natural world. It seeks to complicate this picture by showing how sympathy is understood as a pathological force, spreading disease.
Postscript
Authors: Langley Eric
Published: December 2018

CRESSIDA I have a kind of self resides with you;

But an unkind self, that itself will leave

To be another’s fool.

Tro., III.ii.148–50

Each of us is constituted … as a site of desire and physical vulnerability … at once assertive and exposed. … If I lose you … then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. … One does not always stay intact. … To be ec-static means, literally, to be outside oneself. … Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something....
Conclusion
Authors: Langley Eric
Published: December 2018

BILLET XIII.

[A young lady] desires a Tender Letter from [her lover].

Nothing can equal the Cruelty of my Fate. We are going from ----- without returning for London, and we are going to see Places which upon your Account will seem Horrid Desarts to me. I am so strangely mortify’d at this misfortue, that you wou’d hardly know me again; and unless you write something to please me, I shall not be able to bear it. Altho I venture all in receiving your Letters, I do not matter it. I suffer already all the harm it can do me. I can no longer fear any Danger, but I expect a great deal of Joy. Let them be long, without any Equivocations, Passionate, and Worthy of a Person who only suffers for your sake. Farewel, I dread a surprise....
From Allies to Invaders
Authors: Biedermann Zoltán
Published: December 2018

The clash of legal and political cultures that unfolded as the idea of conquest began to materialize is the subject of Chapter 7. The main question addressed is whether the new policy of conquest supported by the Habsburg administration can be explained in terms of ‘Spanish influence’ on the Portuguese imperial apparatus. It is argued that the Iberian Union of crowns served as an opportunity for Portuguese reformists to change their own empire. Although orders for the conquest of Ceylon were issued in Madrid, an intricate web of communications spanning half the globe was ultimately a more powerful source of political change than any of the central authorities of the Catholic Monarchy. Emphasis is still placed on the commonalities of Iberian and Lankan political culture, on the possibilities of joint empire-building as well as the impossibilities.
Conclusion
Authors: Biedermann Zoltán
Published: December 2018

The collapse of the inter-imperial dialogue in Sri Lanka calls for further extrapolations regarding the merits and shortcomings of connected history. Do commensurability and the potential for mutual understandings logically increase as societies talk to each other, or can they also decrease? What does the case examined in this book tell us about the interdependence of the global and the local? Does Sri Lanka enrich our understanding of the making of global power dynamics elsewhere? May it be worth engaging more systematically than before in ‘(dis)connected history’—an approach that explores the global connectivity of early modern polities along with the obstacles arising to it? A methodological state of grace would allow us to examine the profound, inextricable intertwinement of deeply contradictory processes of convergence and divergence as a core characteristic of early modernity at large.
Unhistorical Fictions: Sedgwick and Neal
Authors: Insko Jeffrey
Published: December 2018

Chapter 2 attends two early works that, I argue, resist rather than participate in the formation of the historical romance tradition in antebellum U.S. literature and, in doing so, offer an implied critique of historicist assumptions and procedures. John Neal’s Seventy-Six (1823) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) each experiments with writing (and experiencing) history through the present tense. Deploying anachronism as both narrative method and trope, Hope Leslie’s narrative of colonial New England disrupts the unidirectional course of time, challenging fundamental conceptions of the form and shape of history that are as prevalent today as in Sedgwick’s time. In Seventy-Six, Neal strives to render an account of history that neither refers nor means, but that simply is. Impossibly, Neal seeks to evacuate the narrative of temporality, to circumvent the inherent tendency of narrative to shape and bestow coherence upon experience—a coherence that inevitably distorts the particular tang of now.
Israel Potter; or, Hither and Thither History
Authors: Insko Jeffrey
Published: December 2018

The present is social: this is the central claim of Chapter 5, the book’s final chapter, which reads Herman Melville’s novel Israel Potter (1855). Formally peculiar, the novel’s erratic telling of history thus mirrors Israel’s wanderings. Both are, as the narrator says at one point of Israel, “repeatedly and rapidly …planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again, hither and thither.” My reading proceeds by way of an exploration of the novel’s varying uses of narrative prolepsis, its movement away from a foreshadowing that knows that is certain, and toward one that doesn’t, but that hopes. Alongside its critique of nationalist posturing, Israel Potter imagines the conditions for a kind of hopefulness, which it glimpses in forms of sociality that reside in an unspecified, perhaps even queer, “as yet.” In doing so, it anticipates the possibility of a renovated and renewed social world.
Coda
Authors: Insko Jeffrey
Published: December 2018

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.
Introduction
Authors: Forness Philip Michael
Published: December 2018

The introduction identifies the central questions of the book and provides a basic orientation to the major figures and time period. The Christological controversies have long held an important place in the history of early Christianity, and strong evidence suggests that these quarrels affected all levels of society. This work argues that preaching served as a means of communicating Christological concepts to broad audiences in late antiquity. The homilies of Jacob of Serugh have long resisted efforts of historical contextualization and serve here as a case study for the role of sermons in spreading Christological doctrine. A brief account of Jacob’s life drawn from contemporaneous works establishes the basic characteristics of his time. A summary of the long debate over Jacob’s Christological perspective follows and leads into the structure of the monograph.
The Audience and Readership of Late Antique Homilies
Authors: Forness Philip Michael
Published: December 2018

This chapter offers a new approach to the audience of late antique homilies and reconstructs the process by which they went from spoken word to circulating text. Recent studies have exposed the potential of sermons as sources for social history by focusing on the setting in which preachers delivered their sermons. Yet most sermons from late antiquity—and especially metrical Syriac homilies—do not offer such information. This chapter reframes the question of the audience of late antique sermons to include both the individuals gathered physically before the preacher and the communities that read the homilies after delivery. A summary of the evidence for the setting of delivery reveals the challenge of working with certain homilies. But practices associated with the transmission of homilies—delivering, recording, redacting, collecting, and circulating—help reconstruct the types of individuals who formed the readership of late antique homilies.
Human Dignity and Human Rights
Authors: Gilabert Pablo
Published: December 2018

Human dignity: social movements invoke it, several national constitutions enshrine it, and it features prominently in international human rights documents. But what is it, and why is it important? This book offers a sophisticated and comprehensive defence of the view that human dignity is the moral heart of human rights. First, it develops the network of concepts associated with dignity, highlighting the notion of human dignity as an inherent, non-instrumental, egalitarian, and high-priority normative status of human persons. People have this status in virtue of their valuable human capacities rather than as a result of their national origin and other conventional features. Second, it shows how human dignity gives rise to an inspiring ideal of solidaristic empowerment, generating both negative duties not to undermine, and positive duties to facilitate, people’s pursuit of a flourishing life in which they develop and exercise their valuable capacities. The most urgent of these duties are correlative to human rights. Third, the book illustrates how the proposed dignitarian approach allows us to articulate the content, justification, and feasible implementation of specific and contested human rights, such as the rights to democratic political participation and decent labor conditions. Finally, the book’s dignitarian framework illuminates the arc of humanist justice, identifying both the difference and the continuity between basic human rights and more expansive requirements of social justice such as those defended by liberal egalitarians and democratic socialists. Human dignity is indeed the moral heart of human rights. Understanding it enables us to defend human rights as the urgent ethical and political project that puts humanity first.
Humans, gods, and demons
Authors: Mathieu Éric
Published: December 2018

Chapter 1 discusses the latest relevant concepts needed for a good understanding of gender, noun classification, and also number, in current theoretical linguistics. The structure of the volume is presented: it is divided into three parts, each addressing a particular theoretical question that arises when we study gender and noun classification in context. This chapter demonstrates how each of the chapters in the volume speaks to these theoretical questions: (1) What is the role of gender? (2) Where is gender located in the nominal spine? (3) How is gender interpreted?
Multiple facets of constructional Arabic gender and ‘functional universalism’ in the DP
Authors: Fehri Abdelkader Fassi
Published: December 2018

Rather than being confined to an intrinsic nominal property (of the low n), and expressing sex or animacy, gender is shown to be polysemous, contributing ‘unorthodox’ meanings such as quantity, perspective, evaluation, performativity, and interacting with various layers and categories in the nominal domain. It is then constructional, and distributed over the various syntactic projections, including RootP, nP, DivP, GroupP, and SAP (Speech Act Phrase). Appealing to data from Arabic varieties shows that gender plays the same role played by classifiers in South Asian classifier languages. Two alternating (and equivalent) modes of unitization are used in forming individual units or groups: (a) morphological gender builds singulatives or pluratives, and (b) pseudo-partitives contribute semi-lexical classifier structures. Close interactions between gender, classifier, and number (in addition to other interactions) make it difficult to account for linguistic variation through traditional typologies, and open the room for a more appropriate ‘functional universalism’.
Number, names, and animacy
Authors: Forbes Clarissa
Published: December 2018

Chapter 10 identifies three distinct types of noun classification active in Gitksan: mass/count, animate/inanimate, and common/determinate. It further identifies three types of number contrast each conditioned by a specific noun class; these are additive, pronominal, and associative plurals, respectively. These plurals, particularly the additive and associative plural, are shown to differ from each other in both their syntax and semantics. The author locates each of the three pairs of noun class and number contrasts in a distinct functional projection, from a nominal AspP, to φ‎P, to DP. By doing so, the chapter provides insight into the articulated projections that make up the Gitksan nominal spine, and exemplifies the variability that noun classes and number contrasts may have even within the grammar of a single language.
Aristotle
Authors: Bishop Caroline
Published: December 2018

This chapter examines Cicero’s adaptation of Aristotle in his rhetorical works. Cicero considered Aristotle a somewhat remote figure, and associated him with times of political withdrawal and intense study. Yet he also held Aristotle in high esteem as a classic, especially for his contributions to rhetoric: Cicero was taught by his instructor Philo of Larissa that Aristotle invented the debate on both sides of a general rhetorical or philosophical question that for Cicero represented the tangible union of philosophy and rhetoric necessary for the ideal orator. When Cicero faced the prospect of further political inactivity after Caesar’s assassination, he decided to fully embrace Aristotle’s didacticism by composing his Topica, a how-to manual for this sort of debate that would make his ideal orator (who, of course, resembled Cicero himself) into a classic model in Roman rhetorical instruction.
Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes
Authors: Raylor Timothy
Published: December 2018

Hobbes claimed to have founded the discipline of civil philosophy (political science). The claim did not go uncontested, and in recent years the relationship of philosophical reasoning to rhetorical persuasion in Hobbes’s work has become a significant area of discussion, as scholars attempt to align his disparaging remarks about rhetoric with his dazzling practice of it in works like Leviathan. The dominant view is that, having rejected an early commitment to humanism and with it rhetoric when he adopted the ‘scientific’ approach to philosophy in the late 1630s, Hobbes later came to re-embrace it, as an essential aid to or part of philosophy. This book proposes that Hobbes was, from first to last, dubious about the place of rhetoric in civil society, and came to see it as a pernicious presence within philosophy—a position from which he did not retreat. Through attention to his years as a country-house tutor, the book offers a fresh and expanded picture of Hobbes’s humanism. It examines his teaching, and his translation of Thucydides; traces the influence on him of Bacon, and establishes the range of his early natural historical and philosophical interests; and it demonstrates the distinctively Aristotelian character of his understanding of rhetoric. The book re-examines the new approach to philosophy Hobbes adopted at the end of the 1630s, clarifying the nature and scope of his concern about the contamination of philosophy and political life by the procedures of rhetorical argumentation. And it reconsiders the place of rhetoric in Leviathan.
Noble Tutor
Authors: Raylor Timothy
Published: December 2018

This chapter investigates Hobbes’s teaching of William Cavendish, second Earl of Devonshire, at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire in the 1610s. It sets Hobbes’s tutoring in the general context of aristocratic education in early-modern England, and, through evidence of library purchases and surviving manuscripts, explores the particular context of tutoring at Hardwick. In so doing it confirms the distinctively aristocratic and Tacitean complexion of humanism at Hardwick. The chapter examines the composition of the Discourse against Flatterie and the other essays and discourses appearing in Horae subsecivae, evaluating the influence on them of Bacon, and demonstrating their dependence on Joseph Lange’s anthology, Polyanthea nova. These works are shown to constitute something of an apology for young Cavendish’s various indiscretions.
Interpretive Social Science
Authors: Bevir Mark , Blakely Jason
Published: December 2018

This book offers a comprehensive case for an “interpretive” or hermeneutic approach to the social sciences. Interpretive approaches are a major growth area in the social sciences because they offer a full-blown alternative to the behavioralism, institutionalism, rational choice, and other quasi-scientific approaches that dominate the study of human behavior. In addition to presenting a systematic case for interpretivism and a critique of scientism, this book also proposes a unique “anti-naturalist” notion of an interpretive approach. This anti-naturalist framework encompasses the insights of philosophers ranging from Michel Foucault and Hans-Georg Gadamer to Charles Taylor and Ludwig Wittgenstein, while also resolving dilemmas that have plagued rival philosophical defenses of interpretivism. In addition, this book draws on the latest social science research to give working social scientists a detailed account of a distinctly interpretive approach to methods, empirical research, concept formation, ethics, democracy, and public policy. An anti-naturalist approach to interpretive social science offers nothing short of a sweeping paradigm shift in the study of human beings and society.
The Transnationalized Social Question
Authors: Faist Thomas
Published: December 2018

The social question is back. Yet today’s social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened in situations of cross-border migration over the past decades. As in the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting the social question as a public concern. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices of the global South and the global North. It finds its expression in movements of people seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states in transnational social spaces; because of the cross-border diffusion of norms; and because there are implications of migration for social inequalities within national states. Casting a wide net in terms of conceptual and empirical scope, this book tackles both the social structure and the politics of social inequalities. It sets a comprehensive agenda for research which also includes the public role of social scientists in dealing with the transnationalized social question.
Introduction
Authors: Faist Thomas
Published: December 2018

The introduction outlines the key questions, the core of the argument, and the outline of the book. The contemporary social question is not only between labour and capital within national states. It is located at the interstices between the global South and the global North and also revolves around cultural heterogeneities. The core question is: how is cross-border migration constituted as the social question of our times? This general question comprises several specific areas of enquiry: how has migration changed since the nineteenth century? What kinds of social inequalities are created in the migratory process and how? How does social protection across borders ameliorate and reproduce inequalities? What are the consequences for political struggles over access to (social) rights and membership? How is the transnationalized social question to be seen in light of environmental destruction? What is the public role of social scientists in understanding the transnationalized social question? The analysis seeks to uncover the social mechanisms driving the (re)production of social inequalities.
The Socio-Natural Question
Authors: Faist Thomas
Published: December 2018

Exit through cross-border migration is one of several ways in which people have adapted to both the slow-onset and fast-onset environmental destruction of human habitat in the Anthropocene. This destruction pre-empts and precedes all other aspects of the transnationalized social question. Like the threat of nuclear war, the destruction of ecological foundations underlies human life. So far, two generations of scholarship have discussed the climate change–migration debate in a rather narrow framework, without considering in full that climate change is mainly an add-on to environmental destruction. The first generation dealt with vulnerability, the second with adaptation and resilience. These perspectives have occluded the effects of environmental destruction on different categories of people with respect to social inequalities. Scholars have not fully dealt with the analogy between the exploitation of humans by humans and the exploitation of nature by capitalism.
No Alternative? The Public Role of Social Scientists in Understanding the Transnationalized Social Question
Authors: Faist Thomas
Published: December 2018

Given the high political relevance of the transnationalized social question, it is important to ask how social scientists might intervene in public debates on inequalities. Academic and public debates on social inequalities and social protection often raise the question whether and in what ways social scientific research may form a basis for rational political decisions. The main thesis in the spirit of public sociology here is that, while social science research indeed has implications for public policies, such a question is ultimately misleading. While social scientists as experts, advocates, or public intellectuals offer crucial information for describing and understanding social inequalities and social protection, the most important function of social scientists is to offer concepts and interpretations which can guide political debates in the public sphere.
Debating Pornography
Authors: Altman Andrew , Watson Lori
Published: December 2018

Debates about pornography have raged since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the explosive spread in recent years of sexually explicit images across the Internet has only fueled the disagreements. Politicians, judges, clergy, citizen activists, and academics have weighed in on the issues. In this volume, two philosophers add their voices to the debate. Their views conflict in crucial ways. Altman argues that there is an individual right to create and view pornographic images, rooted in a basic right to sexual autonomy. Watson argues that pornography is a form of sex inequality that undermines women’s equal status as citizens. Central to their disagreement is whether there is sufficient evidence that pornography harms women to justify laws aimed at suppressing the production and circulation of such material.
Conclusion: The Big Historical Picture
Authors: Altman Andrew
Published: December 2018

Social norms regarding sex and its representations have changed radically in the West, from ancient times to the present. The sexually permissive norms of ancient Greece and Rome were replaced by the highly restrictive norms of the Christian world. In Greece and Rome, sexually explicit images were routinely displayed in public and private settings. Prostitution and pederasty were permitted by prevailing norms. By contrast, Christian doctrine and culture regarded it as a sin to engage in sex outside of marriage and for reasons other than procreation. Sexually explicit images were condemned and suppressed. The sexual revolution of the 1960s, in turn, fundamentally altered the sexual norms of society, relaxing many of the previous restrictions but without returning to the norms of the ancient pagan world. This chapter places the current issue of pornography in the context of those large-scale historical changes and explains how the issue is, in a certain sense, a moral one.
Sex, Equality, and Pornography
Authors: Watson Lori
Published: December 2018

This chapter explains, develops, and defends a sex equality approach to pornography, in which pornography is understood as a practice of sex-based inequality and sex discrimination. The chapter proceeds by distinguishing formal and substantive equality in the context of law. Next, an analysis of gender and sexuality are provided, in which it is argued that gender is hierarchically organized according to dominant cultural norms of heterosexuality. Building on these arguments, a reconstruction and defense of the civil rights approach to pornography, authored by Catharine A. MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, is given. Finally, various criticisms and misinterpretations of the ordinances and their meaning are considered and dismissed.
Conclusion
Authors: Altman Andrew
Published: December 2018

The conclusion of Watson’s contribution engages with the ethical questions concerning personal pornography use. Watson notes that she cannot fully engage with the ethical dimensions of pornography use but raises a set of questions for reflection from the reader. How can one know whether the pornography one is masturbating to is of women who have been forced or coerced or otherwise compelled into pornography performances? Rarely, if ever, can one know the answers to these questions. Thus, Watson suggests that users of pornography may well be complicit in an institution of sex inequality and that such complicity is often at odds with their explicit egalitarian ideals.
Envisioning a Tibetan Luminary
Authors: Gorvine William M.
Published: December 2018

The book examines the religious biography of Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen (1859–1934), the most significant modern figure representing the Tibetan Bön religion, a vital minority tradition underrepresented in Tibetan studies. The work is based on periods of fieldwork conducted in eastern Tibet and in the Bön community in India, where traditional Tibetan scholars collaborated closely on the project. Utilizing close readings of two versions of Shardza’s life-story, along with oral history collected in Bön communities, the book presents and interprets the biographical image of this major figure, culminating in the first English translation of his remarkable life-story. The book contends that the disciple-biographer’s literary portrait not only enacts and shapes religious ideals to foster faith among its readership, but also attempts to quell tensions that had developed among segments of its original audience. For while Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen has come to be unequivocally revered among the Bön community today for an impressive textual legacy and a saintly death, during his lifetime he faced a number of prominent critics within his own lineage who went so far as to issue polemical attacks against him. The biographical texts that inform us about Shardza’s life are thus best understood when read on multiple registers, with attention given to the ways in which the religious ideals on display reflect the broader literary, cultural, and historical contexts within which they were envisioned and articulated.
Situating Bön and the Life of Shardza
Authors: Gorvine William M.
Published: December 2018

The opening chapter locates Bön within a broader Tibetan cultural landscape, with a view to how historical developments have contributed to modern Bönpo identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beginning with a general orientation to what it has meant to be an adherent of Bön, the chapter introduces key historical developments that have shaped Bön in ways significant to our understanding of Shardza’s life. These include complex and sometimes contentious relations with nascent Buddhist lineages in Tibet, internal divisions within Bön itself, and the climate of nonsectarianism that emerged in eastern Tibet in the nineteenth century. This presentation concludes with a look at some of the particular dynamics that fueled a dispute erupting late in Shardza’s career, in which his commitment to time-honored Bön tradition came to be questioned by critics from within the lineage.
Birth, Discipleship, and Precepts
Authors: Gorvine William M.
Published: December 2018

Chapter 2 shifts its focus from key issues behind the biographical works to address the narrative presentation of Shardza Tashi Gyaltsen’s early life. It draws upon the saintly themes of The Pleasure Garden of Wish-Fulfilling Trees and the detailed chronicles of The Strand of Jewels to produce a new, composite image. Taking up his birth, childhood, and entry into religious life, and his relationship with his primary teacher and his assumption of monastic vows, this chapter begins to trace the arc of Shardza’s religious career as it emerges from these two sources. A close reading of these sources, which vary significantly by length, organization, and style, reveals how they render very different accounts of Shardza’s childhood, with implications for the life to follow. In the process, this chapter interrogates the relationship between tantric and monastic sources of religious power and authority in the biographical milieu of nineteenth-century Kham.
Experimental Utility Measurement
Authors: Moscati Ivan
Published: December 2018

Chapter 13 discusses some laboratory experiments to measure the utility of money for individuals on the basis of their preferences between gambles where small amounts of money were at stake. The experiments were based on expected utility theory (EUT) and were conducted in the 1950s at Harvard and Stanford by three groups: statistician Frederick Mosteller and psychologist Philip Nogee (1951), philosophers Patrick Suppes and Donald Davidson with the collaboration of psychologist Sidney Siegel (1957), and Suppes and his student Karol Valpreda Walsh (1959). These scholars were confident about both EUT and the possibility of measuring utility through it. They designed their experiments so as to neutralize some psychological factors that could jeopardize the validity of EUT and spoil the significance of the experimental measurements of utility, and they concluded that their experimental findings supported both the experimental measurability of utility based on EUT and the descriptive validity of the theory.
From Utility Measurement to the Representational Theory of Measurement
Authors: Moscati Ivan
Published: December 2018

Chapter 15 offers a conclusion to the history of measurement theory by reconstructing the origins of the representational theory of measurement in the early work of Patrick Suppes. In particular, the chapter shows that Suppes’s superseding of the unit-based understanding of measurement that he had embraced in the early 1950s, his endorsement of a liberal definition of measurement à la Stanley Smith Stevens in the mid-1950s, his conceiving of the project of an axiomatic underpinning of this notion of measurement in the late 1950s, and the realization of this project during the 1960s all have their origins in the utility analysis research he conducted from 1953 to 1957 within the Stanford Value Theory Project. The representational theory of measurement received full-fledged expression in Foundations of Measurement (1971), a book coauthored by Suppes, Duncan Luce, David Krantz, and Amos Tversky, which quickly became the dominant theory of measurement.
Drawing Distinctions
Authors: McMillan John
Published: December 2018

Drawing distinctions is the second important class of methods in moral argument. Our choice of concepts and how they defined can often be ‘programmatic’, meaning that the concept itself implies something about it being good or bad. Clarity about the meaning of a concept can be very important to an ethical argument. A powerful form of argument is to show that the meaning that an opponent proposes cannot be correct because of what it implies, and to then suggest a better meaning for that concept. By drawing distinctions, we can also clarify the meaning of concepts that play an important role in ethical argument.
Global Taxation and Accounting Arrangements
Authors: Brock Gillian , McMaster Rachel
Published: December 2018

Chapter 12 considers why reforms to several taxation arrangements are needed, especially in the quest to reduce global injustices. The role of tax havens and transfer pricing schemes in facilitating massive tax evasion and abusive tax avoidance are discussed, along with some of the initiatives aimed at improvements. The case for carefully crafted new global taxes, including air ticket taxes and currency transaction taxes, is also considered. The chapter argues that all the reforms proposed here are normatively desirable and feasible. The chapter also engages with the work of prominent proposals concerning global taxation, considering their strengths and weaknesses.
Foreign Fads or Fashions: The Role of Comparativism in Human Rights Law
Authors: Fredman Sandra
Published: December 2018

Human rights law is particularly ripe for a comparative approach. There is a broadly similar common core of human rights, and when analogous issues arise, we would expect to see equivalent answers. Yet there are real complexities in the use of comparative human rights law. Given the important social, political, and legal differences between jurisdictions, how can the conclusions reached by judges in different jurisdictions be evaluated and weighed against each other? The book adopts a ‘deliberative’ approach, which does not regard foreign law as binding, or tending to convergence, but incorporates insights where appropriate and useful. Judicial accountability depends centrally on the quality of the reasons adduced. Comparative materials constitute an important contribution to the rigour of this process. Whether the outcomes converge or diverge, there need to be good reasons, explaining why the textual, institutional, legal, social, or cultural context demands convergence or divergence.
What Is a Human Right? Dealing with Disagreement
Authors: Fredman Sandra
Published: December 2018

While the notion of fundamental human rights attracts general respect, there is little agreement on how we identify rights or their substantive content and application. This chapter addresses several ways of addressing these foundational disagreements. One is to formulate a moral principle, from which human rights can be derived. The chapter critically assesses possible moral foundational principles, including autonomy, dignity, basic interests, and capability theory. A second approach rejects the possibility of formulating universal principles. The chapter evaluates theories of pluralism and moral relativism in relation to human rights as well as the liberal response to relativism. The chapter then canvasses various ways of resolving such disagreements. The conclusion sets out the approach in this book. Rather than aspiring to achieve absolute answers across time and place, the book draws on the insights of deliberative democracy, aiming to engage in constant reasoned attempts to develop the understanding of human rights.
Allies or Subversives? Adjudication and Democracy
Authors: Fredman Sandra
Published: December 2018

This chapter addresses the argument that human rights should be not be the responsibility of courts, but of the legislature. Instead of regarding courts and the legislature as mutually exclusive, however, it asks whether we can create a role for justiciable human rights which reinforces democracy. Section II considers democratic objections to justiciable human rights, and canvasses potential responses. Section III examines three ways to reconcile the role of courts with democracy: representation-reinforcing, dialogic, and deliberative theories. It concludes that courts should enhance the democratic accountability of decision-makers by insisting on a deliberative justification for the interpretation or limitation of rights. Section IV turns to objections based on lack of judicial competence to address complex, polycentric issues raised by human rights. Using the example of India’s public interest litigation, it examines ways in which the court structure might be adapted to address these concerns. Section V considers remedies and implementation.
Freedom of Religion
Authors: Fredman Sandra
Published: December 2018

This chapter considers freedom of religion in relation to three themes. The first concerns the separation of State and religion. Although a strict separation is seen as fundamental in some jurisdictions, others see religion as central to society and therefore a legitimate area of State involvement. The second concerns individual freedom of belief and manifestation. The third is equality. Section II shows how the different themes are expressed in constitutional texts. Section III deals with the relationship between the State and religion. Section IV examines how Courts determine which beliefs count as religious beliefs for the purpose of freedom of religion. Section V assesses the legitimacy of State limitations on freedom of religion and State responsibility to accommodate religion. Section VI examines conflicts between freedom of religion and other rights, particularly equality. Freedom of religion expects tolerance of religious adherents, but can religious adherents be expected to be tolerant of others?
Modernism in Chinua Achebe’s African Tetralogy
Authors: May Brian
Published: December 2018

Analyzing Chinua Achebe’s tetralogy of novels, this chapter shows how Achebe addresses one of the central issues of both modernism and postcolonialism: the organization and conceptualization of time. Things Fall Apart (1958) and No Longer at Ease (1960) present snapshot moments of arrested temporality that Achebe treats with the modernist techniques of imagism and epiphany. Taking a more pessimistic turn, Arrow of God (1964) grounds the handling of sequentiality not in Igbo ideas of cyclical change but in Spenglerian, Yeatsian, and Eliotic notions of apocalypse, in which endings do not mark new beginnings but a point of terminal cessation. Finally, Man of the People (1966) further modifies this version of time, replacing the cultural collapse of the previous novel with the more affirmative vision of community and village life found in Eliot’s “East Coker.” In sum, the chapter traces the tetralogy’s evolution of divergent and competing notions of time, especially as they relate to Igboland and more generally to postcolonialism.