bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Imagining the Worst, Hoping for the Best
Authors: Zhang Feng , Lebow Richard Ned
Published: July 2020

The deterioration of Sino-American relations has become a matter of growing concern for policymakers and academics in both countries. This chapter offers a critique of the American realist and liberal positions on China and examines a diverse range of Chinese views, highlighting the importance of understanding Chinese concepts and perspectives. A common flaw of realist and liberal theories is that they do not attempt to understand Chinese foreign policy goals and means with reference to Chinese culture and history. But such reference is a starting point critical to any serious analysis. Of special importance is the traditional Chinese principle of wangdao, or humane authority, which is surprisingly similar to the ancient Greek understanding of hēgemonia. The overview of this chapter drives home the inadequacy of analyzing foreign policy in terms of power and relative power and draws attention to the importance of the goals that political elites seek and the ends they consider appropriate to them.
Marx in Motion
Authors: Nail Thomas
Published: July 2020

Socialism is back, and with it comes a renewed interest in Marx’s critique of capitalism. After the 2008 financial crash, international book sales of Capital exploded for the first time in decades. In a world of rising income inequality, right-wing nationalisms, and global climate change, people are looking to the father of modern socialism for answers. This book has been written to help those returning to Marx get answers to their pressing questions about the nature of wealth, ecological crisis, gender inequality, colonialism, migration, and the possibility of socialism. This book also offers readers a new perspective on several major ideas in Marx’s work. It argues that Marx, contrary to conventional wisdom, did not think history was deterministic or that reality could be reduced to classical materialism. Marx was not an anthropocentric humanist, nor did he have a labor theory of value. The unique contribution of this book is that it begins with Marx’s earliest and most neglected book on ancient naturalism in order to show its lasting methodological effect on his “process materialism,” defined by the primacy of motion. This “kinetic Marxism” offers a new way to reread Capital that bears directly on a number of contemporary issues. This also makes Marx in Motion the first book to offer a new materialist reading of Marx. The result is a fresh new view on the important theories of primitive accumulation, metabolism, value, fetishism, dialectics, and the possibility of a kinetic communism for the twenty-first century.
The Colonialism of Value
Authors: Nail Thomas
Published: July 2020

This chapter posits that the secret of commodity fetishism is nothing other than “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation” of chapter twenty-six of Capital. It is no coincidence that the titles of chapter one, section four and chapter twenty-six are the only two in all of Capital to reference “the secret.” They are two sides of the same twofold kinetic theory of value laid out in this book. Fetishism and primitive accumulation are entangled with each other in a way rendered explicit in the history of colonialism and in the founding mythology of capitalism itself: the story of Robinson Crusoe.
Kinetic Communism
Authors: Nail Thomas
Published: July 2020

This chapter argues that since the fetish of value is something produced kinetically, its alternative, communism, must also be something understood kinetically, that is, having its own form of motion. In particular, the previous chapters have aimed to show that what is fundamentally at stake in the difference between material production and fetishism is the transparency and direction of the form of motion. Only when the social form of motion is left fully uncovered by coats, mirrors, and fogs can it be collectively organized without devalorization, appropriation, and mystical domination. Communism is the material social condition in which production is treated not as if it were coming from what is produced but as a threefold metabolic process itself. The thesis of this chapter then is that previous social forms of motion have always relied on a certain degree of fetishism of this motion.
Being Sure of Each Other
Authors: Brownlee Kimberley
Published: July 2020

To survive, let alone flourish, we need to be sure of—securely tied to—at least one other person. We also need to be sure of our general acceptance within the wider social world. This book explores the normative implications of taking our social needs seriously. Chapter 1 sketches out what our core social needs are, and Chapter 2 shows that they ground a fundamental, but largely neglected human right against social deprivation. Chapter 3 then argues that this human right includes a right to sustain the people we care about, and that often, when we are denied the resources to sustain others, we endure social contribution injustice. Chapters 4–6 explore the tension between our needs for social inclusion and our needs for interactional and associational freedom, showing that social inclusion must take priority. While Chapters 5 and 6 defend a narrow account of freedom of association, Chapter 7 shows that the moral ballgame changes once we have made morally messy associative decisions. Sometimes we have rights to remain in associations that we had no right to form. Finally, Chapter 8 exposes the distinct social injustices that we do to people whom we deem to be socially threatening. Overall, the book identifies ways to change our social and political practices, and our personal perspectives, to better honour the fact that we are fundamentally social beings.
Nietzsche and Contemporary Ethics
Authors: Robertson Simon
Published: July 2020

Nietzsche is one of the most subversive ethical thinkers of the Western canon. This book offers a critical assessment of his ethical thought and its significance for contemporary moral philosophy. It develops a charitable but critical reading of his thought, pushing some claims and arguments as far as seems fruitful while rejecting others. But it also uses Nietzsche in dialogue with, so to contribute to, a range of long-standing issues within normative ethics, metaethics, value theory, practical reason, and moral psychology. The book is divided into three principal parts. Part I examines Nietzsche’s critique of morality, arguing that it raises well-motivated challenges to morality’s normative authority and value: his error theory about morality’s categoricity is in a better position than many contemporary versions; and his critique of moral values has bite even against undemanding moral theories, with significant implications not just for rarefied excellent types but also us. Part II turns to moral psychology, attributing to Nietzsche and defending a sentimentalist explanation of action and motivation. Part III considers his non-moral perfectionism, developing models of value and practical normativity that avoid difficulties facing many contemporary accounts and that may therefore be of wider interest. The discussion concludes by considering Nietzsche’s broader significance: as well as calling into question many of moral philosophy’s deepest assumptions, he challenges our usual views of what ethics itself is—and what it, and we, should be doing.
Just Property
Authors: Pierson Christopher
Published: July 2020

This third and concluding volume of Just Property brings critical accounts of property up to the present. The book is made up of five pairs of chapters located in five major ideological traditions of modernity: liberalism, libertarianism, social democracy, conservatism, and feminism. It is not a history of these ideological approaches but of particular key thinkers who belong within, and to some extent represent, them. A long concluding chapter returns to the project’s opening questions about property and inequality and about property under the imperative of growth to limits. It judges that we need, as a political community, to re-think the ways in which we allocate property and suggests some of the ways in which we could do this.
Social Democrats I
Authors: Pierson Christopher
Published: July 2020

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of what we mean by social democracy. I explore the origins of a distinctively social democratic view in mid-nineteenth century Europe, above all through the work of Louis Blanc and Ferdinand Lassalle. I plot its further development, above all in the context of German social democracy and the work of Bernstein, Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Jaurès. I turn to the British case to consider the further development of these ideas in the interwar period, above all in changing views of nationalization, planning, taxation, and ‘functional property’. Key thinkers in this process include Tawney, Jay, and Keynes. The earliest social democrats had very clear views about the need to socialize the ownership of property. Later social democrats, under the press of a politics that was electorally feasible, sought to fudge the hard questions on property.
Feminists I
Authors: Pierson Christopher
Published: July 2020

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of what we mean by feminism. I then discuss the place of property in the earliest feminist texts—of Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft—where it is associated, above all, with the institution of marriage. In early feminist texts, the oppression of women is often likened to (or identified with) chattel slavery. This is clear, for example, in the work of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor and in the historical materialist accounts of Friedrich Engels and August Bebel. The single most remarkable treatment of property in feminist texts comes in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Built around a critique of Engels and Bebel, de Beauvoir argues that the will to acquire property (including property in women) is a characteristic of men’s behaviour which goes all the way down and all the way back—and which must change if men and women are to forge a new and more equal relationship. A key component of contemporary feminist work on property is the emphasis upon the lived experience of gendered inequality in the ownership of property. The final third of this chapter reviews the evidence of an earnings gap, a poverty gap, and an assets gap between men and women.
Fellowship and Freedom
Authors: Leng Thomas
Published: July 2020

This is the first modern study of the Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers—sixteenth-century England’s premier trading company—in its final century of existence as a privileged organization. Over this period the company’s main trade, the export of cloth to northwest Europe, was overshadowed by rising traffic with the wider world, whilst its privileges were continually criticized in an era of political revolution. But the company and its membership were not passive victims of these changes; rather, they were active participants in the commercial and political dramas of the century. Using thousands of neglected private merchant papers, the book views the company from the perspective of its members, in the process bringing to life the complex social worlds of early modern merchants. It addresses the challenge of maintaining corporate unity in the face of internal disagreements and external attacks. It restores the centrality of the Merchant Adventurers within three important historical narratives: England’s transition from the margins to the centre of the European, and later global, economy; the rise and fall of the merchant corporation as a major form of commercial government in premodern Europe; and the political history of the corporation in an era of state formation and revolution.
Conclusion
Authors: Leng Thomas
Published: July 2020

The Conclusion considers the significance of the decline of the Company of Merchant Adventurers in light of the broader structural changes that English overseas commerce underwent in the early modern period. It argues that, although the Company of Merchant Adventurers can not straightforwardly be associated with a precapitalist commercial order rendered irrelevant by the emergence of capitalism, the story of the Company’s decline does cast light on a process of commercial restructuring which involved the breakdown of certain boundaries, geographical and occupational, and the possibility of new synergies. These changes had implications for the role and career of the overseas merchant, and the place of merchant companies in structuring access to foreign trade. Survival for merchant companies depended on their ability to attract and accommodate new members and retain their loyalty, as well as to survive external attack. Changes within the Merchant Adventurers’ ranks made this increasingly difficult, and the Company’s failure to maintain its privileges was in part a consequence of the dissolution of the social system of its trade.
Introduction
Authors: Potter Simon J.
Published: July 2020

During the 1920s and 1930s radio was transnational in its reach and appeal, attracting distant listeners and encouraging hopes that broadcasting would foster international understanding and world peace. This chapter connects the themes of the book to broader currents in historical writing, exploring how international broadcasting relates to histories of internationalism, radio, sound, and listening. It introduces the concepts of ‘wireless internationalism’ and ‘distant listening’. It argues that British broadcasting was profoundly influenced by the European context, as well as by links with the US. It discusses the key sources used in the book and outlines the content of the main chapters of the book. It examines contemporary thinking about propaganda and national projection.
The Lonely Listener in the Bush
Authors: Potter Simon J.
Published: July 2020

The BBC Empire Service was established in 1932 and primarily sought to serve white expatriates scattered across British colonies in Africa and Asia. It provided a selection of programmes taken from its home services, augmented with specially produced and recorded material, and based decisions on what to broadcast largely on feedback provided by its listeners. This chapter challenges the assumption that the interwar BBC was largely uninterested in what its audience thought, and that it gave listeners what it thought they should have rather than what they wanted. It also questions the belief that the BBC was intent on the ‘uplift’ of audiences and thus focused on providing high culture. For the Empire Service concentrated on offering light music, light talks, and light entertainment. Listeners were thought to be tired after a day spent working in hot climates, and lonely and thus requiring something that reminded them of ‘home’. The BBC knew it also had to compete with other international broadcasters for the attention of overseas audiences. Special production techniques were developed in an attempt to overcome the problems associated with short-wave reception and ensure that programmes were comprehensible and enjoyable. Big Ben became the aural signature of the Empire Service. However, by the late 1930s many critics were questioning whether it was wise to devote so much of the BBC’s resources to this tiny audience, and whether BBC international broadcasts should instead be seeking to project Britain to larger and more important audiences across the world.
The Anthropological Lens
Authors: Morton Christopher
Published: July 2020

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) is widely considered the most influential British anthropologist of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his seminal works on South Sudanese ethnography Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (OUP 1937) and The Nuer (OUP 1940). In these works, now classics in the anthropological literature, Evans-Pritchard broke new ground on questions of rationality, social accountability, kinship, social and political organization, and religion, as well as influentially moving the discipline in Britain away from the natural sciences and towards history. Yet despite much discussion about his theoretical contributions to anthropology, no study has yet explored his fieldwork in detail in order to get a better understanding of its historical contexts, local circumstances or the social encounters out of which it emerged. This book then is just such an exploration, of Evans-Pritchard the fieldworker through the lens of his fieldwork photography. Through an engagement with his photographic archive, and by thinking with it alongside his written ethnographies and other unpublished evidence, the book offers a new insight into the way in which Evans-Pritchard’s theoretical contributions to the discipline were shaped by his fieldwork and the numerous local people in Africa with whom he collaborated. By writing history through field photographs we move back towards the fieldwork experiences, exploring the vivid traces, lived realities and local presences at the heart of the social encounter that formed the basis of Evans-Pritchard’s anthropology.
Explaining our Reliability
Authors: Clarke-Doane Justin
Published: July 2020

This chapter discusses the Benacerraf–Field Challenge – i.e., the reliability challenge. It argues that neither Benacerraf’s formulation of the challenge, nor any simple variations on it, satisfies key constraints which have been placed on it. It then turns to more promising analyses, in terms of sensitivity and safety. The challenge to show that our beliefs are sensitive is widely supposed to admit of an evolutionary answer in the mathematical case, but not in the moral. The chapter argues that it does not, but that, even if it did, this is an inadequate formulation of the challenge. But understanding the reliability challenge as the challenge to show that our beliefs are safe is more promising. The chapter shows that whether this challenge is equally pressing in the moral and mathematical cases depends on whether “realist pluralism” is equally viable in the two areas.
Conclusion
Authors: Clarke-Doane Justin
Published: July 2020

The Conclusion suggests a general partition of areas of philosophical interest into those which are more like mathematics and those which are more like morality. In the former category are questions of possibility, grounding, essence, logic, and mereology. In the latter are questions of epistemology, political philosophy, aesthetics, and prudential reasoning. The chapter argues that the former questions are like the question of whether the Parallel Postulate is true, qua a pure mathematical conjecture. By contrast, practical questions are immune to deflation in this way. The conclusion is that the objective questions in the neighborhood of questions of modal metaphysics, grounding, nature, and so forth are practical. Practical philosophy should, therefore, take center stage.
A structural theory of mutualistic networks
Authors: Bascompte Jordi , Ferrera Antonio
Published: July 2020

Mutualistic interactions among free-living species have shaped much of biodiversity on Earth. Ironically, however, mutualism has not been prominently featured in theoretical ecology. Recent efforts have tried to fill this gap by assessing to what degree the structure of plant-animal mutualistic networks affects species persistence. Here, we review this growing literature emphasizing how different papers relate to each other and to what extent their conclusions depend on particular assumptions. A central concept in this effort is that of structural stability. While main approaches in theoretical ecology focus on local dynamical stability, structural stability shifts the question to how large is the range of parameter values compatible with the stable coexistence of all species. This structural approach has shown that mutualism has to be understood as a balance to competition and that network architecture should be seen as affected by both stability and feasibility constraints. Constraints on the dynamical stability of these communities set up a maximum mutualistic strength. Constraints on their feasibility tend to push interaction strength near this limit and select for a nested architecture. These results, however, assume similar interspecific competition amongst species and very small mutualistic strength. Future work should thus explore the consequences of relaxing these constraints.
Toward a general theory of metacommunity ecology
Authors: Gravel Dominique , Massol François
Published: July 2020

Investigation of how spatial processes affect the maintenance of biodiversity and its geographic distribution has led to landmark contributions in community ecology. Theory has followed a logical complexification of the objects of study, with specific models at each step, from populations connected by dispersal to ecosystems connected by flows of energy and material. This large body of theory is not only diverse in the questions it addresses, and the scales and organization levels it encompasses, but also in the types of models used to represent spatial dynamics. Unfortunately, this makes it hard to establish clear, standard, quantitative predictions stemming from a coherent mathematical formalism. Here our objectives are : i) to propose a general metacommunity model that allows the investigation of spatial ecology from populations to entire food webs ; ii) use the model to review a set of principles driving coexistence in all types of metacommunities; iii) reveal how these principles constrain the spatial distribution of diversity, with a particular emphasis on species co-distribution. The model is based on the well-established representation of spatial dynamics through colonization and extinction processes. We generalize Levins’ metapopulation model to all types of ecological interactions, using a formalism akin to Lotka–Volterra equations for local community dynamics. Doing so, we revisit coexistence mechanisms proposed for competitive metacommunities, along with the assembly dynamics for spatial food webs and mutualistic interactions.
Desires of the Spirit
Authors: Zahl Simeon
Published: July 2020

This chapter examines the work of the Holy Spirit in the transformation and sanctification of Christians. It argues that accounts of sanctification that build upon the idea of an instantaneous implantation of new moral powers in the Christian upon receipt of the Spirit have significant problems. It then turns to Augustine’s theology of delight and desire to provide an alternative theology of sanctification that is experientially and affectively more persuasive. The second half of the chapter shows that this “affective Augustinian” approach has a number of further advantages. It can account for the fact that sanctifying experience of the Spirit exhibits variability and that human beings are often a mystery to themselves; it can affirm a qualified role for practice and habituation in Christian sanctification without overestimating the transformative power of Christian practice; and it directs attention to the social as well as materially and culturally embedded dimensions of sanctification. The chapter concludes by arguing that an “affective Augustinian” vision of Christian transformation can also account effectively and compassionately for the persistence of sin in Christians.
Conclusion
Authors: Zahl Simeon
Published: July 2020

This conclusion reflects on the wider implications of the book’s focus on the connections between doctrines, affects, and experiences. It summarizes the methodological approach described and deployed in earlier chapters, and indicates a number of directions for future work that could make use of this methodological toolkit. It then sites the pneumatological and affective soteriology proposed in Chapters 4 and 5 as charting a new path forward within a contemporary Protestant theological landscape hitherto dominated by the vision of Karl Barth, on the one hand, and “Protestant Thomism” on the other.
Quantities as Determinables
Authors: Wolff J. E.
Published: July 2020

On the determinable/determinate model, a quantity like mass is a determinable that requires further determination by one of its determinates, where the latter are typically thought to be its magnitudes. This chapter argues that the determinable/determinate model does not provide a good fit for quantities. Instead of focusing on the vertical relation of determination, we should pay attention to the horizontal relations between magnitudes. Such relations, in particular ordering relations, can also explain the single value principle. Similarity relations among magnitudes, by contrast, are not sufficient to establish the metric relations characteristic of quantities.
Quantitative Attributes or Measurable Concepts
Authors: Wolff J. E.
Published: July 2020

Should we ask whether an attribute is quantitative, or is it enough to show that its concept is measurable? This question is at the heart of the dispute between (restrictive) measurement realists and (typically permissive) operationalists.This chapter tries to disentangle this question from broader issues of scientific realism and argues in favour of restrictive realism. Quantitativeness is a feature of attributes, not concepts, and measurability of a concept is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee quantitativeness. Realism about quantitativeness is epistemically risky, just like realism everywhere else, since its commitments go beyond what is strictly observable.
Ontologies for Quantities
Authors: Wolff J. E.
Published: July 2020

This chapter presents and evaluates different proposals for an ontology of quantities. It contrasts, on the one hand, ontologies based on Platonic or Aristotelian universals with those based on particulars, and on the other hand ontologies based on finite domains with those based on infinite domains The latter difference is taken to be more decisive and the chapter argues in favour of infinite domains for quantities. Platonic universals, space-time substantivalism, and quality spaces each provide infinite domains for quantities. This chapter favours the quality spaces approach, according to which each quantity is a quality space and (determinate) quantity values are (determinate) locations in quality spaces.
Fundamental Structure for Quantities
Authors: Wolff J. E.
Published: July 2020

Both comparativists and sophisticated substantivalists accept that there are many equivalent numerical representations of quantities, or conversely, that no numerical representation is distinguished. But whereas comparativists seem committed to offering a reduced theory, which only trades in relational facts as fundamental facts, sophisticated substantivalism appears to offer a different kind of response. This difference in approach is best understood at the level of meta-metaphysics as a difference between those who seek out fundamental or intrinsic explanations and those who see no need to find such explanations. This chapter investigates how these strategies play out when RTM is taken to be the reduced theory for quantities and argues that RTM does not lend itself easily to fundamental or intrinsic explanations. The main difficulty is that even a retreat to purely relational facts does not avoid arbitrariness.
The Ecology of English Time
Authors: Pong Beryl
Published: July 2020

At a time when the English landscape was mobilized—both materially and in the cultural imagination—for fighting the Second World War, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot fashioned their most ‘English’ works, Between the Acts (1941) and Four Quartets (1935–42) respectively. Building on extant scholarship surrounding the writers’ temporal and environmental concerns, Chapter 6 provides an alternative account of the writers’ supposed national insularity as one inflected by pacifist and internationalist motivations. Tracing the study of ecology as it was historically intertwined with cosmopolitical inquiry in the twentieth century, the chapter reveals ways in which the writers’ late modernist works uphold Anglocentric exceptionalism but, also, provide diversified understandings of time and place to convey international belonging.
Children of the Ruins
Authors: Pong Beryl
Published: July 2020

This chapter explores anxieties surrounding war-torn childhood, both in terms of juvenile delinquency and as a metaphor for uncertain post-war reconstruction. Films were especially evocative in this respect: they captured not only the faces of war-traumatized children but the material ruins which often became their playgrounds and homes before these were cleared away. Alberto Cavalcanti’s and Humphrey Jennings’s films highlighted the tensions underpinning the use of youth as a national metaphor. But it is Ealing Studios’ first feature films, Hue and Cry (1947) and Passport to Pimlico (1949), despite being seen as nostalgic depictions of the People’s War, that best capture the ambivalent ways in which youth represented and problematized visions of the national future in ruins.
Coda
Authors: Pong Beryl
Published: July 2020

The coda briefly recapitulates the central concerns of this book by discussing Second World Wartime in relation to the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing from Ernst Bloch’s conception of time as a river, and Walter Benjamin’s theory of historical materialism, it discusses why post-war literature and culture looked back to the wartime period through the trope of unexploded bombs, which functioned as mnemonic time capsules. It ends by considering Second World Wartime’s broader relationship to the later chronophobia of the Cold War, when advancements in nuclear technology created a newly fraught relationship between anticipation and retrospection.
The Political Construction of a Coordinated Political Economy
Authors: Manow Philip
Published: July 2020

The first chapter motivates the book’s central research question: how did the German variant of capitalism emerge, and what today is its central functioning logic? The chapter argues that past and recent accounts of Germany’s economic performance and economic policy have failed to fully explain how long-term stable economic coordination could have evolved in as large a country as Germany, and that this has also translated into an often biased view of Germany’s current economic policies. The chapter sketches the basic argument of the book—namely that the German welfare state was the prime means of economic coordination for unions and employers, labor and capital—and situates it in two relevant literatures: the Varieties of Capitalism literature on the one hand and the Comparative Welfare State literature on the other. The chapter also presents an overview of the book.
Modell Deutschland as an Interdenominational Compromise
Authors: Manow Philip
Published: July 2020

Chapter 3 argues that the cooperation in the interwar period between, economically, unions and employers and, politically, between Social and Christian Democracy, estranged the liberal Protestant camp from its former pet project, social reform. An important consequence of this estrangement was the birth of ordoliberalism. Ordoliberalism, however, was much less influential in the postwar period than usually claimed. It legitimized a politics of non-intervention, which rather left a void for the corporate actors to fill, so it involuntarily furthered corporatism, not liberalism. Otherwise it provided the inability of the central state to actively manage the economy with a post hoc ideological justification. Thus, Germany’s postwar compromise was “bipolar,” combining corporatist cooperation between capital and labor, heavily reliant on the organizational and material resources of the welfare state, with a central government with limited capacity for macroeconomic steering and without the means of credibly issuing promises of full employment (as the main difference in comparison to the Scandinavian cases).
Can Scanlonian Contractualism Save Us from Aggregation?
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: July 2020

This chapter considers Scanlonian contractualism as presented in T. M. Scanlon’s What We Owe to Each Other. Scanlonian contractualism requires us to assess whether an action could reasonably have been rejected from an ex post epistemic perspective—that is to say, after the actual consequences of the act are known. For decisions made under epistemic certainty as to outcomes, the ex post perspective presents no difficulty, because it is identical to the ex ante perspective from which we necessarily act. Once epistemic uncertainty is introduced into the ex ante viewpoint, however, ex post contractualism cannot supply action-guiding norms, because by the time we know the consequence of our actions it is too late to act otherwise. Viewing choices under uncertainty from an ex ante perspective, one is led inexorably to some form of aggregation.
Can Contractualism Be Saved?
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: July 2020

Over the past fifteen years, a number of scholars sympathetic to Scanlonian contractualism have sought to rescue it from the paradox created by Scanlon’s original ex post version: that the wrongness of an act depends on its consequences. Their proposed solution, “ex ante contractualism,” retains the most distinctive feature of Scanlonian contractualism, the maximin rule embedded in Scanlon’s Greater Burden Principle, but applies it to expected rather than actual outcomes. That change in epistemic perspective eliminates the paradox at the heart of ex post contractualism. But it introduces a number of equally serious problems that limit its application to a small set of stylized cases that have colonized the philosophical laboratory but are rarely encountered outside of it.
Wilt Chamberlain Revisited
Authors: Fried Barbara H.
Published: July 2020

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick relies on his principle of Justice in Transfer to explain why the state may not tax income from labor or property. Applying Justice in Transfer to his famous Wilt Chamberlain example, he argues that Wilt owns the money he was paid to play basketball because it was voluntarily transferred to him by his fans, who owned it themselves. Nozick’s argument confuses two questions: whether someone owns the market value of his labor or property, and if so, whether he has a right to transfer that value to someone else, as a gift or exchange. Nozick’s argument goes only to the second question. But the state’s right to tax Wilt on his earnings turns on the first, and in particular on whether owners are entitled to the scarcity rents that accrue to their property or talent.
St Paul's Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture
Authors: Hentschell Roze
Published: July 2020

St Paul’s Cathedral Precinct in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Spatial Practices is a study of London’s cathedral, its immediate surroundings, and its everyday users in early modern literary and historical documents and images, with a special emphasis on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Hentschell discusses representations of several of the seemingly discrete spaces of the precinct to reveal how these spaces overlap with and inform one another spatially. She argues that specific locations—including the Paul’s nave (also known as Paul’s Walk), Paul’s Cross pulpit, the bookshops of Paul’s Churchyard, the College of the Minor Canons, Paul’s School, the performance space for the Children of Paul’s, and the fabric of the cathedral itself—should be seen as mutually constitutive and in a dynamic, ever-evolving state. To support this argument, she attends closely to the varied uses of the precinct, including the embodied spatial practices of early modern Londoners and visitors, who moved through the precinct, paused to visit its sacred and secular spaces, and/or resided there. This includes the walkers in the nave, sermon-goers, those who shopped for books, the residents of the precinct, the choristers—who were also schoolboys and actors—and those who were devoted to church repairs and renovations. By attending to the interactions between place and people and to the multiple stories these interactions tell—Hentschell attempts to animate St Paul’s and deepen our understanding of the cathedral and precinct in the early modern period.
Current Views on the Nature and Origins of Central Banks
Authors: Bindseil Ulrich
Published: July 2020

Chapter 1 first restates the present dominant view on the nature and origin of central banking, which can be summarized as follows: (1) Defining central banking is ‘by no means straightforward’; (2) the Riksens Ständers Bank and the Bank of England would have been the first sort-of central banks; (3) early central banks did not have a policy mandate and the orientation towards public objectives would go back only to the nineteenth century; (4) there has been no concept of central banking before 1800; (5) early central banking developed out of the largest commercial banks; (6) the lender of last resort (LOLR) would have developed only in the second half of the nineteenth century or even later. Second, the chapter reviews a recent literature which started again to question this view. It is explained how this book will take up the challenge to correct the myth about the origins of central banking.
Issuing Financial Money of Ultimate Quality
Authors: Bindseil Ulrich
Published: July 2020

The essence of central banking is the issuance of central bank money—being itself defined as dominant financial money used at a large scale for payments and being of the highest possible credit and liquidity quality amongst all financial assets, such that payment through it is accepted as settlement of any other financial claim. This chapter elaborates on the nature of central bank money and reviews the pre-1800 theory and practice of central bank money issuance. It is shown that the nature of central bank money and its benefits were well understood by early authors. Moreover, the 25 central banks that issued (or at least aimed at) issuing central bank money before 1800 are introduced. The types of central bank money (deposits, banknotes, certificates of deposits) are briefly reviewed.
Lending to Private Borrowers and Other Private Assets
Authors: Bindseil Ulrich
Published: July 2020

This chapter recalls the economic rationale of central bank lending to private borrowers (Section 4.1) and argues that the recent literature has often underestimated the importance of such lending by early central banks, without this implying that central banks were really competing with ‘commercial’ banks (Section 4.2). Finally, it illustrates pre-eighteenth-century awareness of the subject by reviewing the literature of the time (Section 4.3). Lending of central banks to private borrowers had a number of advantages relevant as of the first centuries of central banking: (1) providing an option for granular asset diversification and expansion, allowing thereby also to increase the monetary base; (2) generating income with limited risks; (3) improving the availability and pricing of loans for private debtors; (4) anchorizing the central bank in society. Lending to private borrowers took in particular the form of Lombard and discount operations.
Timing
Authors: Hom Andrew R.
Published: July 2020

Part One introduces the concept of timing and develops a specific theory of narrative timing, which offers a better starting point for analyzing IR’s temporal discourse and for teasing out the temporal dynamics of IR’s knowledge genres. Chapter one surveys several problems with current ways of theorizing time before adapting a novel approach from Norbert Elias’ process sociology. Building on his provocative claim that all “times” emanate from practical and social timing activities—efforts to relate and coordinate important change continua so that they unfold in particular ways—it sketches a basic account of how timing works, covering timing standards, active vs. passive timing, and how we respond to breakdowns in timing. It also shows how symbolic descriptions of timing activities communicate knowledge about these efforts but also bury their practical, processual roots under substantive and reified concepts of “time.” This chapter highlights the political power of timing as a particular and purposeful act of synthesis. Finally, it shows how to unpack from temporal symbols those dynamics intrinsic to both politics and theory. Neutral, homogeneous temporal concepts indicate successful, mostly subconscious timing; while references to the problem of Time suggest more challenging timing efforts.
Why Timing Matters
Authors: Hom Andrew R.
Published: July 2020

Chapter two makes the case for timing theory’s value. Timing offers a simple but powerful gestalt shift, from taking “times” as existential givens or temporalities as subjective and subordinate constructs to a rigorous framework for tracing how practices and symbolic language interact to produce all the times of our lives—from our innermost experiences to the rhythms of the universe. These only become “real” and “natural” if they work for us almost by second nature. Timing theory also resolves several thorny problems with our grasp of time. Within IR, timing theory offers superior explanatory power while accommodating and often clarifying the way that other time studies approach their subject matter. It further stands apart in its ability to integrate IR’s two dominant cultures of time—Western standard time and the problem of Time. Finally, it exposes basic issues in IR as matters of timing, from concerns with change and surprise, to scholarly practices and knowledge development, to central disciplinary discussions like the “neo-neo debate.”
Telling Time
Authors: Hom Andrew R.
Published: July 2020

Having defended a basic theory of timing, chapter three develops a framework more closely fitted to IR. Drawing from narratology, it formulates an account of narrative timing, which shows how we configure and re-configure narratives to place confounding experiences in a meaningful, serial whole. After emphasizing narrative elements common to all IR scholarship, this chapter shows how narrative emplotment unfolds a temporal world using four distinct timing techniques: the synoptic theme, which acts as the timing standard; creative filtration, which determines what processes matter; cleaving experience, which establishes the story’s durative presence; and concordant discordance, which reinterprets unintelligible and overwhelming experiences as key plot drivers. It then illustrates these narrative timing operations in familiar IR explanatory forms. Finally, the chapter discusses how narrative timing further elaborates the problem of Time and why some narrative temporalities become reified, passive timing meters, which aesthetically resolve that problem while blinding us to its future return. Chapter three closes by highlighting key conclusions from Part One and their implications for IR.
Methodologies
Authors: Hom Andrew R.
Published: July 2020

Chapter five addresses key recommendations for how to do IR research. After highlighting the laboratory as a social scientific timing talisman—a place cleansed of the supposedly negative effects of time—it juxtaposes this ideal against the methodological precepts of neopositivism, critical realism, and interpretivism. Despite significant diversity, these approaches grapple with time by developing narratives of less “time-bound” realms to help reason from complex and dynamic phenomena to scientifically viable explanations. IR methodologies rely on narrative timing techniques to unfold a realm more intelligible, manageable, and inhabitable than the brute world from which they draw their research puzzles. Indeed, various knowledge warrants depend on this. Treating methodologies as timing proposals upends conventional IR wisdoms, exposing neopositivism as a science fiction predicated on time travel, critical realism as a brand of theology, and interpretivism as an empirical and realistic approach to social scientific inquiry.
Quantitative Approaches
Authors: Hom Andrew R.
Published: July 2020

Chapter six confronts the hard case of quantitative research, which seems firmly based on “timeless” mathematical formulas and Western standard time. It thus appears most resistant to interpretation as a narrative timing project. This chapter excavates quantitative IR’s temporal assumptions and dependencies, with illustrations drawn from international conflict research. It argues that dominant statistical models and the statistical approach in general work to tame overly temporal phenomena by constructing narrative and poetic links to eternal logic. After tracing the narrative timing techniques embedded in IR’s quantitative workhorse, the general linear model, it shows how putatively “time-sensitive” techniques like time series analysis and event hazard models still treat time as a problem for sound knowledge development. The chapter closes by highlighting the distinctly temporal moves made in the recent Bayesian turn, which suggest that instead of relying on passive timing meters, quantitative research must remain in an active timing mode much closer to lived time than the scientific laboratory.
Proofs of the Existence of God in the Critique of Pure Reason and Morning Hours
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: July 2020

This chapter examines Kant’s continued criticism of the classical arguments for the existence of God in the Critique of Pure Reason and his critique of his own earlier new argument for God as the ground of all possibility. Kant’s conclusion is that belief in the existence of God must be defended on practical rather than theoretical grounds. In Morning Hours Mendelssohn defended the ontological and cosmological arguments and added a new argument from the incompleteness of human knowledge. Mendelssohn does not accept Kant’s argument for belief in God on moral grounds only but instead adopts a pragmatic position that we have no choice but to rely on the results of the unimpaired use of our own cognitive powers.
Kant’s Aesthetics
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: July 2020

Kant transforms Mendelssohn’s theory of mental activities in aesthetic experience into his own central idea of the free play of imagination and understanding, and builds his analysis of aesthetic experience and judgments of taste on this basis. Kant organizes his theory of fine art around the concept of genius, which incorporates some elements of Mendelssohn’s account of human artistry and Charles Batteux’s theory of artistic expression, and tacitly accepts Mendelssohn’s distinction between our response to the merits of an artistic representation and to those of what it represents.
Mendelssohn’s and Kant’s Aesthetics Compared
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: July 2020

This chapter argues that there is less difference between the two philosophers’ basic conceptions of aesthetic experience than Kant’s critique of aesthetic “perfectionism” seems to suggest. But the basic difference remains that the emotional impact of aesthetic experience is central to Mendelssohn’s account of the “main principles” of the arts, while Kant tries to keep the emotions at arm’s length even in his account of “aesthetic ideas,” which present moral ideas that anyone else would take to be accompanied with profound emotions.
Mendelssohn, Kant, and Enlightenment
Authors: Guyer Paul
Published: July 2020

This chapter contrasts the two philosophers’ 1784 essays on the question “What is Enlightenment?” True to his faith in theoretical reason, Mendelssohn interprets enlightenment as growth in knowledge, while true to his own faith in practical reason Kant interprets it more as moral maturity, willingness to take responsibility, especially in politics, rather than being passively led by external authority. Next the dispute between Mendelssohn and F.H. Jacobi over whether reason can prove the existence of God or it can be believed only by a leap of faith is examined, and Kant’s intervention in his essay “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thought?,” published in 1786 after the death of Mendelssohn, is then considered: Kant takes the side of reason in this dispute, but only of practical reason.