bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Worthy Endeavor
Authors: Dewar Jacqueline M.
Published: June 2018

Chapter 0 calls for wide participation in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) by faculty at all types of institutions, including faculty active in traditional research. The chapter provides examples of many well-known scientists, engineers, and mathematicians who eventually devoted significant time and energy to improving education in their disciplinary fields. While acknowledging the difficulty of doing both traditional research and SoTL, it cautions against ruling out the possibility of undertaking a scholarly study of learning simply because of lack of expertise in education research. Numerous benefits that may accrue to instructors who do investigate learning in their own classrooms are described.
Introduction
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

If it lacks minimal competence to track the truth, good government is impossible. Even though a lot of dispersed information is available that would help to make competent decisions, governments can fail to collect and aggregate this information. ‘Wisdom of crowds’ arguments appeal to the idea that random noise cancels so that the aggregation of many opinions leads to elimination of errors, which is epistemically valuable. This insight is formalized in Condorcet’s jury theorem. Many objections have been levelled against the theorem or its limited applicability, but we argue that the objections are often exaggerated and the usefulness of the theorem underappreciated.
Extensions
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

The classic Condorcet Jury Theorem comes with demanding assumptions. This chapter shows that similar results can be derived if the assumptions are weakened. First, if the Competence Assumption is weakened by allowing for heterogeneous voter competence, the Asymptotic Result of the jury theorem still obtains (though the Non-asymptotic Result does only under very specific assumptions). Second, the number of alternatives can be more than two for a structurally similar jury theorem, using plurality voting. Third, different decision procedures, such as the Borda count or the Condorcet pairwise criterion, still lead to the Asymptotic Result. While the Borda count and the Condorcet pairwise criterion have a slight epistemic advantage over plurality voting, for large competent groups this difference is negligible.
Limitations
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

This chapter analyses what happens when the assumptions of the Condorcet Jury Theorem are not met. The first concern is about the existence of truths to be tracked in the political realm. We argue that there are many factual claims in politics that go beyond mere value judgements. The second concern is about agendas on which the correct answer is missing or there are multiple equally correct answers, a problem that cannot be fully dismissed but is limited in scope. The third concern is about strategic voting. We argue that these worries have been exaggerated, as strategic considerations are typically outweighed by expressive motives. We counter the fourth concern, that voters are often incompetent, on grounds that a systematic tendency to be wrong is unstable. Finally, the most serious concern, that votes are typically dependent, is investigated in detail, while solutions to this problem are offered in the next chapter.
Diversity
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

This chapter investigates the epistemic advantages of diversity, especially the effect of uncorrelated and negatively correlated votes. It also considers the influence of Hong and Page’s ‘diversity trumps ability’ theorem. One way to recognize the positive epistemic effect of diversity is to consider what happens if diversity is missing. Aggregating many voters who always vote in sync is pointless because no new, independent information is added by these ‘cloned’ voters. Consequently, if voters derive all their information from a small set of media channels or opinion leaders, the epistemic output deteriorates. Avoiding correlation is good, but even better outcomes can be achieved if votes are negatively correlated. We demonstrate the effect with a small example, but suggest that negative vote correlation is rare in realistic settings and difficult to ‘engineer’.
Institutional Aids to Epistemic Success
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

This chapter considers how representative democracy can be arranged in ways that positively enhance its epistemic performance. We look, first, at mechanisms to make the decision situation more truth-conducive: finding better or removing confusing alternatives, and improving the evidence base. Second, independence can be enhanced by secret ballots, public campaign funding, public broadcasting, and promoting diverse and multiple opinion leadership. Third, individual or collective competence can be strengthened, though we caution that these mechanisms are of limited potential. A final set of mechanisms promoting better epistemic performance do so by increasing sincerity.
Epilogue
Authors: Goodin Robert E. , Spiekermann Kai
Published: June 2018

This chapter reflects on the election of Donald Trump and the vote of the British electorate in favour of ‘Brexit’ from the European Union. While we refrain from judging the outcomes of these votes, we do discuss concerns pertaining to the lack of truthfulness in both campaigns. After rehearsing the lies on which the Trump and Brexit campaigns were based, we consider different explanations as to why these campaigns were nevertheless successful, and where this leaves the argument for epistemic democracy. Particularly worrisome are tendencies towards ‘epistemic insouciance’, ‘epistemic malevolence’, and ‘epistemic agnosticism’. We also consider the problematic influence of social media in terms of echo chambers and filter bubbles. The core argument in favour of epistemic democracy is that the pooling of votes by majority rule has epistemically beneficial properties, assuming certain conditions. If these assumptions are not met, or are systematically corrupted, then epistemic democracy is under threat.
Introduction
Authors: Jago Mark
Published: June 2018

THIS IS A BOOK about what truth is. It’s about the property of being true. What features does that property have? What kinds of entity can have that property? What makes an entity have or lack that property? These and similar metaphysical questions will be to the fore throughout my investigation. I’ll be less interested in how we talk, or how we think, about truth. My focus is on the property ...
Dealing with Liars
Authors: Jago Mark
Published: June 2018

In this final chapter, I want to investigate what the theory of truth developed so far tells us about the Liar paradox (and other paradoxes involving truth). I’ll begin by reviewing the paradox (§9.1) and why it is such a difficult issue to solve (§9.2). I’ll then argue that approaches which weaken the underlying logic (§§9.3–9.5), or restrict or alter the T-scheme (§9.6), are not good options. Instead, I’ll argue that our account of propositions from chapter 8 already provides an adequate solution: there is no proposition for the Liar sentence to express (§9.8). I discuss the consequences of this view for meaning and logic in §9.9.
Emperors and Usurpers in the Later Roman Empire
Authors: Omissi Adrastos
Published: June 2018

This book is the first history of civil war in the later Roman Empire to be written in English. It advances the thesis that civil war was endemic to the later Empire (third to fifth centuries AD) and explores the way in which successive imperial dynasties—many of whose founding members had themselves usurped power—attempted to legitimate themselves and counter the threat of almost perpetual internal challenge to their rule. The work takes as its operating principle that history is written by the victors, and seeks to employ panegyric as a tool to understand the processes that, according to one contemporary commentator, ‘made tyrants by the victory of others’. Panegyric provides direct evidence of how, in the wake of civil wars, emperors attempted to publish their legitimacy and to delegitimize their enemies. The book explores the ceremony and oratory that surrounded imperial courts, examines how and why this ceremony was aggressively used to dramatize and constantly recall the events of recent civil wars, and, above all, it explores how the narratives produced by the court in this context went on to have enormous influence on the messages and narratives found within contemporary historical texts. The resulting book is a thoroughly original reworking of late Roman domestic politics, an exploration of the way that successive imperial courts sought to communicate with their subjects, and an examination of the fallibility of history.
Usurpation, Legitimacy, and the Roman Empire
Authors: Omissi Adrastos
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines Roman imperial power, from its inception under Augustus until the crisis of the third century. The chapter examines the contradictions of the imperial office—where the emperor was at once Republican magistrate subject to the laws and absolute monarch—and how these contradictions helped to destabilize the imperial succession, first in a series of isolated crises (69 and 193 AD), but then ultimately in virtually endemic usurpation and civil war. Finally, it explores the historiographical challenge with which the study of usurpation and civil war presents us. Civil wars are known to us through our texts, and our texts were always written in conformity with the propaganda of the victor, since criticism of living emperors was a virtual impossibility. Awareness of the problem this poses then informs the following chapter.
Tyranny and Betrayal
Authors: Omissi Adrastos
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores Constantine’s rise to power, mustering evidence from Pan. Lat. VII and VI to argue that Constantine should be seen as a usurper and to defend the idea that he escaped the court of Galerius in 306. The chapter then explores how an individual’s reputation could be transformed by examining the way Maximian was portrayed as a monster in Pan. Lat. VI. The chapter then considers the war of 312 between Maxentius and Constantine, and discusses how Pan. Lat. XII and IV participated in shaping an image of Maxentius as a tyrant who was destroying Rome, an image which served to legitimate Constantine’s invasion of Italy and his progressive breakaway from the tetrarchy. Finally, the chapter considers the silence of Pan. Lat. XII and IV on the topic of Licinius, and draws the conclusion that the alliance that existed between Constantine and Licinius was always a cold one.
Intergenerational Equity and Responsibility for Future Generations
Authors: Suzumura Kotaro
Published: June 2018

Why should the present generation be held responsible for the sustainable well-being of future generations, especially since past generations must bear some large share of the cause of global warming? This chapter describes the principle that all generations irrespective of when they emerged in the past or will emerge in the future should have equal opportunity to lead worthwhile lives of their choice. It assesses several alternatives including assigning voting rights to the very young and setting aside these alternatives as on balance unsatisfactory or unworkable. On the principle of responsibility and compensation, the chapter proposes that the present generation must either abate global warming or compensate future generations. It explains and defends why this one-sided, external, and irrevocable choice of the present generation is the only sensible and moral alternative for addressing intergenerational equity.
Mixing and the Formation of Homoeomers in on Generation and Corruption 2. 7
Authors: Krizan Mary
Published: June 2018

In On Generation and Corruption 1. 10 and 2. 7 Aristotle discusses mixing and mixtures. Recent scholars tend to read the two texts together, thus treating the production of homoeomers in GC 2. 7 as a process of mixing the material elements. I argue that the tendency to treat homoeomers as mixtures of material elements is incorrect: GC 1. 10 explains the mixing of bodies that have already been produced from the elements, whereas GC 2. 7 explains the processes that produce compound bodies from simpler constituents. In GC 2. 7 only the primary contraries mix in the formation of a homoeomer: material elements cannot be constituents of mixtures for theoretical and physical reasons. This makes sense of the production of homoeomers in GC 2. 7 despite worries about mixing the material elements. For Aristotle, the production of homoeomers is simultaneously a process of mixing the primary contraries and generating the homoeomers from the destruction of material elements.
A Cosmopolitan Legal Order
Authors: Stone Sweet Alec , Ryan Clare
Published: June 2018

The book provides an introduction to Kantian constitutional theory and the European system of rights protection. Part I sets out Kant’s blueprint for achieving Perpetual Peace and constitutional justice within and beyond the nation state. Part II applies these ideas to explain the gradual constitutionalization of a Cosmopolitan Legal Order: a transnational legal system in which justiciable rights are held by individuals; where public officials bear the obligation to fulfil the fundamental rights of all who come within the scope of their jurisdiction; and where domestic and transnational judges supervise how officials act. The authors then describe and assess the European Court’s progressivie approach to both the absolute and qualified rights. Today, the Court is the most active and important rights-protecting court in the world, its jurisprudence a catalyst for the construction of a cosmopolitan constitution in Europe and beyond.
Introduction
Authors: Hoover Jesse A.
Published: June 2018

The Introduction offers a brief overview of the rationale behind writing this book and clarifies significant issues which must be addressed before proceeding. In particular, it explains why the apocalyptic predictions of a long-dead ecclesial community are worth investigating, as well as reasons why this topic has not been extensively studied in the past. A brief overview of the following chapters follows, as well as a note on the chronological boundaries of the project. In addition, the Introduction clarifies significant terms which appear throughout the text, including the use of the word “apocalyptic” and attendant vocabulary and neutral terminology for the two opposing North African ecclesial factions.
“His Name Means ‘Ever-Increasing’”
Authors: Hoover Jesse A.
Published: June 2018

Chapter 6 follows Donatist apocalyptic speculation from the period immediately after the 411 Conference up to the final literary productions of the dissident communion far into the Vandal period. Representative voices from this time include Gaudentius, whose literary altercation with Augustine is contained in Contra Gaudentium, and Fulgentius, the Donatist antagonist of the pseudo-Augustinian Aduersus Fulgentium Donatistam. The witness of the various texts contained within the Donatist Compendium of 427 will also be considered, including the Prophetiae ex omnibus libris collectae, Liber generationis, and the first recension of the Liber genealogus (Sangallensis), as well as a detached revision of the latter document which dates to 438 (Florentini).
The Role of Human Faith in Science
Authors: Di Ventra Massimiliano
Published: June 2018

This chapter makes the point that Science is sustained by a type of “faith” in what other scientists discover. It clearly distinguishes this type of faith from that in supernatural causes.
Introduction
Authors: Lane Christel
Published: June 2018

Pubs have been an integral part of English history and a prominent social institution. They form as much part of English identity as roast beef, cricket, and the village green. Sociologists Alan Warde and Lydia Martens1 agree, as they describe the pub ‘as a principal symbolic site of English recreation’. Anthropologist Kate Fox...
Eating Out in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Contest between English and French Food
Authors: Lane Christel
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the food eaten at this time in taverns, inns, and public houses. It focuses on how allegiance to either English or French cuisine expresses patriotism and cosmopolitanism respectively. Patriotism and the consumption of large amounts of beef receive particular emphasis. An examination of food consumed nevertheless finds a considerable variety in the types of food enjoyed, as well as noting the quality, particularly of country house cooking. Divergent national identifications, in turn, are related to the class background of diners, as well as to gender identity. Changes in modes of dining out are viewed in their social, economic, and political contexts.
Eating Out in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Changes in Food and in Social Identities
Authors: Lane Christel
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization on food and eating out. It draws attention to the growing standardization of food and, with greater class differentiation, to the growing diversity in eating-out venues. Class, gender, and nation are again used as lenses to understand the different eating-out habits and their symbolic significance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, pubs moved more fully towards embracing dining. However, the quality of food, in general terms, began to improve significantly only towards the end of the century, and hospitality venues also moved towards selling food from diverse national origins.
Human and Animal Nature in the Philosophy of the Islamic World
Authors: Adamson Peter
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines ethical attitudes toward animals in the Islamic world, alongside the rich psychological theories developed by thinkers, including Avicenna, to explain the sophisticated behaviors of which animals are capable. On the ethical front, al-Rāzī, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and the Brethren of Purity are shown to have presented remarkable defenses of benevolence towards animals. Regarding psychology, the chapter explores the range of cognitive powers ascribed to animals, focusing on the higher faculties that overlap with the so-called “internal senses” in humans.
Reflection
Authors: Obermaier Sabine
Published: June 2018

Animals are pervasive in medieval literature. Yet, as in medieval philosophy, they are rarely considered an object of interest in their own right. Instead they are invoked as part of humankind’s natural environment or as the property or antagonists of humans. They appear as metaphors representing human affairs, as indicators of the status or inner qualities of humans. A key component in the contrast between animals and humans is the (rational) superiority of humans....
Morgan’s Canon
Authors: Steward Helen
Published: June 2018

The rule called “Morgan’s Canon,” introduced by the ethologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan at the end of the nineteenth century, states, “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.” It has since been subjected to repeated criticism and is now considered more or less discredited as a scientific rule. This chapter returns to the Canon to ask whether there is anything to be said for Morgan’s proposal, correcting certain misapprehensions about the original intent of the Canon and arguing that it may point toward a salutary “cautious agnosticism” with respect to animal minds.
Authority, Deference, and Fair Play
Authors: Dagger Richard
Published: June 2018

This chapter defends the fair-play theory of political obligation and punishment by addressing two further challenges. According to the first challenge, recent revisions to the standard conception of political and legal authority lead to the conclusion that there is no general obligation to obey the law. On this standard account, to have political or legal authority is to have a right to rule, and those subject to authority have an obligation to obey the directives of those who have the right to rule. If this account is faulty, then the connection between political authority and political obligation is neither as straightforward nor as strong as the standard account assumes. According to the second challenge, the problem is not with authority but with what citizens owe to their polities. That is, citizens do have duties with regard to the law, but the weaker duties of respect or deference rather than an obligation to obey. This chapter responds to the first challenge by demonstrating the superiority of the standard account to the so-called service conception of authority and to the second by showing how appeals to respect or deference rely on a belief in political obligation.
Darion McCloud as Dave the Potter
Authors: Johnson Dianne
Published: June 2018

Johnson investigates the recent award-winning children’s book by Hill and Collier about Dave the Potter, in particular, the illustrated representation within it of the figure of Dave the Potter. A noted children’s author herself, Johnson interviews the model for the depicted character of David Drake, Darion McCloud. The interview is used as the springboard into making observations about Bryan Collier’s collages—such as the embedded visual reference in a major spread of the book to Tom Feelings’s Soul Looks Back in Wonder, also a winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. Along with the racial significance of the brown hues used by Collier, this piece analyzes Collier’s illustration of a tree as a symbol of what McCloud refers to as the world community.
Motives to Action
Authors: Radcliffe Elizabeth S.
Published: June 2018

The discussion of Chapter 1 asks which passions count as motives, for Hume, and why. Hume discusses the indirect passions in Parts 1 and 2 of Book 2 of the Treatise, and explicitly says that the four passions he analyzes there—pride and humility, love and hatred—are not motives to action. He introduces motivational issues in Part 3, “Of the will and direct passions,” which suggests that he considers all and only direct passions as motives. This chapter shows that this reading is false. After considering Hume’s distinction between natural instincts, direct passions, and indirect passions, it confirms that some passions in each of these categories are motivating, and adds support to John Bricke’s thesis that motives, for Hume, are passions that include desires as part of their descriptions.
Bluestocking Women and Rational Female Fiction
Authors: Schellenberg Betty A. , O’Brien Karen
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines views on the emerging novel developed by a loose network of mid-eighteenth-century women who came to be known as the Bluestocking circle, and the legacy of these views for succeeding women novelists. It will look at how Frances Burney's four fictional works can be seen as furthering, while revising, this legacy within an increasingly mainstream novel tradition, but also at how ongoing resistance to this generic mainstream resulted in consistently ‘Bluestocking’ forms of rational fiction in a primarily Scottish Enlightenment context. The brief overview of Burney's rational fictions focuses on a seeming paradox in her version of the rational novel—her tendency to subject her heroines to a bout of madness.
The Novel of Sensibility in the 1780s
Authors: Franklin Caroline
Published: June 2018

This chapter studies the novels of sensibility in the 1780s. The philosophy of John Locke, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and Francis Hutcheson had influenced the first wave of epistolary novels of sensibility beginning in the 1740s. These explored the interaction between emotion and reason in producing moral actions. Response to stimuli was minutely examined, especially the relationship between the psychological and physiological manifestations of feelings. Later in the century, and, in particular during the late 1780s when the novel enjoyed a surge in popularity, the capacity for fine feeling became increasingly valued for its own sake rather than moralized. Ultimately, sensibility should be seen as a long-lasting literary movement rather than an ephemeral fashion. It put paternal authority and conventional modes of masculinity under question.
Gothic and Anti-Gothic, 1797–1820
Authors: Miles Robert
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses the Gothic from 1797 to 1820. The Gothic reached its apogee in the late 1790s, when it secured a third share of the novel market, after which it withered. From 1797 onward, the Gothic seems inseparable from an anti-Gothic shadow that materialized in myriad forms, from ad hoc animadversions found in the reviews mocking the genre's formulaic character, to full-blown parodies. While the quantity of novels advertising themselves as products of the ‘terror-system’ declined during the first two decades of the century, the Gothic migrated downmarket, sustaining itself, post-1820, by embedding itself in other ‘genres’. Putting aside the tale, which the Gothic dominated, one quickly perceives that the Gothic is a variety of the novel—one of its subgenres best labelled ‘romance’. Moreover, one can best and most accurately represent the Gothic novel during the period as the proliferation of several schools, above all, of Radcliffe, Godwin, Lewis, and Schiller.
Jane Austen’s Domestic Realism
Authors: Jones Vivien
Published: June 2018

This chapter studies the nature and quality of Jane Austen's originality. Beyond parody, but wittily in touch with contemporary fiction's excesses, beyond partisanship, but harnessing the language of polemical debates to illuminate ordinary experience, Austen set a rigorous standard for domestic realism. Key to Austen's originality is the way in which her novels transcend any attempt to reduce them to versions of the contemporary fictional subgenres in which she was nonetheless immersed. Though the fictional and political context in which she drafted her 1790s novels ( Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey) is very different from that in which she wrote and published Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), and Persuasion (1818), this strategy is evident across all her fiction.
Historical Romance
Authors: Ferris Ina
Published: June 2018

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.
All in the Family: Consanguinity, Marriage, and Property
Authors: Perry Ruth
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that the plots and characters of eighteenth-century English fiction can be illuminated by an awareness of property law and the customary disposition of property within families. That material greed as well as rivalries and competitions springing from even more primitive sources should be represented as occurring within families in the fiction of the day should surprise no one who has ever lived in a family. What is noteworthy are the excesses of innocence on the one hand and of rapaciousness on the other. One finds good characters who seek nothing for themselves and are generous to a fault, and bad characters whom nothing can touch but their ruthless desire for material wealth. Ultimately, in the fiction from 1750 to 1820, one can still read the human responses to material inequities that tore families apart and made them accomplices of an economic system that put property before family loyalty.
Authorship, Publication, Reception (1)
Authors: Salzman Paul
Published: June 2018

This chapter charts the nature of prose fiction from the beginning of printing to the start of the Restoration period. The development, diversity, and increasing popularity of prose fiction from this era are an extraordinary literary phenomenon. Prose romance circulated from the 1470s through the sixteenth century in both print and manuscript, and formed the cornerstone of prose narrative during the late fifteenth through to the mid-sixteenth centuries. While it is impossible to find a great deal of hard evidence about the early readership for these works, their proliferation and their variety suggest readers from a quite broad spectrum of society, although a truly ‘popular’ readership was only established later in the sixteenth century. Along with these long-lived survivors from earlier centuries, by the sixteenth century prose romance in England was dominated by the translations (and originals) of the Continental chivalric romance, most notably the Amadis de Gaule series.
Cross-Sections (4)
Authors: Rogers Pat
Published: June 2018

This chapter sets out some of the proximate causes of the growth in visibility of the novel's new form. It seeks out adequate explanatory factors rather than a comprehensive model which can provide a sufficient cause for everything that happened inside literary texts. After all, one can never discount chance, contingency, and sheer luck, nor can the existence of individual genius be denied. Some generalizations are possible about the earlier practitioners — their gender, age, class background, and so on — but it was not social class or education which allowed Daniel Defoe, rather than John Dunton, to become a pioneer of the English novel. It was literary talent, a commodity that crops up mysteriously in the genes of men and women at all periods of history.
Fiction and the Origins of Print
Authors: Gillespie Alexandra
Published: June 2018

This chapter is concerned with the far-reaching effects of printing, especially where these resonate with developments associated with the history of the novel. Broader reading communities and the new commerce in books are described in terms of the long and complex processes of change that made them possible. The chapter also attends to those aspects of print culture that were largely unprecedented: changes to the institution of authorship and to the accessibility of texts. Finally, the chapter has a recurring interest in the importance of the pan-European trade in medieval books of Latin. The dominant centres of that trade had always been European; the printers at Venice and Antwerp who made so many books for English readers in the early modern period did as scribes and stationers of Paris and Bologna had done before them.
Chivalric Romance and Novella Collections
Authors: Moore Helen
Published: June 2018

This chapter argues that the sixteenth-century novella collection and chivalric romance have much in common. However, their length, status as translations, and multiple authorships have rendered their comparison difficult and have limited their role in studies of pre-novelistic fiction until relatively recently. The chapter characterizes their relationship as ‘rhetorical’, because consideration of the two genres has long been dictated by their staged opposition in the traditional, dualistic narrative of the novel's origin. This narrative imagines a struggle between the past-ness and absurdities of romance and the present-ness and realism of the novel as anticipated in the early modern novella and the closely related picaresque tale. Hence, they possess an interlocking yet uncomfortable — even antagonistic — rhetorical relationship in the literary history of the novel in English.
Utopian Fiction
Authors: Carey Daniel
Published: June 2018

This chapter describes some of the literary and cultural conditions of utopian writing from 1516 to 1750, beginning with Thomas More. Utopian fiction represents one of the most durable literary forms to emerge in the early modern period. The potential of utopia remained undiminished throughout the years. Contributions continued throughout the eighteenth century as a complement to Enlightenment ideologies of progress and reform. Ranging from highly serious attempts to remodel human relations to more fanciful indulgences of the imagination, English utopian fiction gathered the energies of a culture of reform in projections of ideal commonwealths or institutions, while accommodating the potential for satire and critique through reflexive reading.
Clarissa and Tom Jones
Authors: Downie J. A.
Published: June 2018

This chapter further examines the creative and critical dialogue between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. From the publication of the two original volumes of Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded in November 1740 onwards, Fielding responded not only to the subject matter of Richardson's fiction, but also to what he regarded as shortcomings in his narrative technique. He takes particular note of Richardson's use of the epistolary form. According to Ian Watt, the private letter provides the ‘nearest record...in ordinary life’ of ‘this minute-by-minute content of consciousness which constitutes what the individual's personality really is, and dictates his relationship to others’. Yet this belief about letters tends to downplay, if not discount altogether, not merely the disadvantages of what one of Richardson's characters (Lovelace) calls ‘this lively present-tense manner’, but also the full complexity of his narrative method in Clarissa (1747–8).
The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950
Authors: Wagner Tamara
Published: June 2018

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.
The Novel in English in Africa to 1950
Authors: Kortenaar Neil Ten
Published: June 2018

This chapter focuses on English-language novels in Africa. The novel as a genre came to Africa from Europe along with European languages, alphabetic writing, and the printing press. The first English-language novels were written by white settlers, and, before 1950, the African novel in English is nearly synonymous with the South African novel. Black Africans first came in contact with the novel at mission schools where English fiction was part of the curriculum. In spite of these origins, however, African fiction should not be considered a mere offshoot of European literature, for the task of writing fiction in Africa required a reinvention of the genre. Adapting the conventions inherited from Europe to describe colonial societies and to narrate African dilemmas was a task not unlike that faced by the originators of the novel in England and France in the eighteenth century.
The Novel in English in Canada to 1950
Authors: Shearer Karis , Anderson Katrina
Published: June 2018

This chapter discusses English-language novels in Canada, focusing on a limited set of texts that exemplify key historical and socio-economic concerns informing the periods of early settler-colonialism, Confederation, and early to late modernism in Canada. The development of the novel in Canada to 1950 is at times a bleak story, albeit one with notable highlights. In telling that story, the chapter eschews a linear trajectory of ‘development’ in favour of a two-pronged approach: adopting an issue-based focus, the chapter employs the categories of empire, race, and gender; the second approach focuses on the historical conditions of the production and circulation of novels. It then looks at the post-1950 era to account for the ways in which the canon of pre-1950s Canadian novels is shaped and/or sustained by contemporary institutional forces such as the New Canadian Library and Editing Modernism in Canada Project.
The Novel in English in Oceania to 1950
Authors: Smith Vanessa
Published: June 2018

This chapter looks at English-language novels in Oceania. The Anglophone novel's location ‘in Oceania’ pre-1950 is largely imaginary. Many of the authors of both canonical and popular works set in the Pacific islands never visited the region, and none was born there. Thus, the chapter is concerned with the dialectical relationship between fantasy and contact evidenced in novels set in Oceania before 1950, a location dreamed up before it was mapped, and whose romanticized or dystopian premonitions continued to shadow its representation even after Anglophone writers began to send dispatches from its beaches. The novel speaks inevitably, with or more often without political self-consciousness, to the gap between imagined and real Oceanias—and so, to the relationship between fiction and history.
Colonial Gothic
Authors: Steer Philip
Published: June 2018

This chapter examines the colonial Gothic novel. Pervasive in the literatures of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean, the colonial Gothic is more appropriately described as a mode rather than a discrete genre, and its representational possibilities have been shaped by three broad phases of generic transformation and cross-fertilization within the Anglophone novel during the period in question. While the popularity of the Gothic novel peaked in the 1790s with the romances of Ann Radcliffe, its translation into British colonial contexts was enabled in the early decades of the nineteenth century through the hugely successful historical novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. A resurgence of Gothic tropes and themes occurred in the wake of the British romance revival of the 1880s. Finally, twentieth-century examples of the colonial Gothic increasingly occur within a literary terrain transformed by the rise of modernism and growing attempts to produce distinct national traditions of realist writing.
The Natural Numbers
Authors: Linnebo Øystein
Published: June 2018

How are the natural numbers individuated? That is, what is our most basic way of singling out a natural number for reference in language or in thought? According to Frege and many of his followers, the natural numbers are cardinal numbers, individuated by the cardinalities of the collections that they number. Another answer regards the natural numbers as ordinal numbers, individuated by their positions in the natural number sequence. Some reasons to favor the second answer are presented. This answer is therefore developed in more detail, involving a form of abstraction on numerals. Based on this answer, a justification for the axioms of Dedekind–Peano arithmetic is developed.
The Question of Platonism
Authors: Linnebo Øystein
Published: June 2018

This book defends the existence of abstract mathematical objects. Should this be regarded as a defense of Platonism? Platonism involves an analogy between mathematical and physical objects. Although mathematical objects are counterfactually independent of us, just like paradigmatic physical objects, there are other respects in which mathematical objects are strikingly different from physical objects: by giving rise to the phenomenon of indefinite extensibility and by having a shallow nature. The view here is therefore not a full-blown form of Platonism. However, the shallow nature of mathematical objects has the advantage of enabling an epistemology of mathematics where our mathematical beliefs are appropriately sensitive to the truth of these beliefs.
Introduction
Authors: Cheng Christine
Published: June 2018

This chapter introduces the concept of extralegal groups and a theoretical framework for analyzing them—how they emerge, develop, and become entrenched over time. It explores their dual nature as threats to the state and as local statebuilders. Formally, an extralegal group is defined as a set of individuals with a proven capacity for violence who work outside the law for profit and provide basic governance functions to sustain its business interests. This framing shows how political authority can develop as a by-product of the commercial environment, even where the state has little or no presence. In post-conflict societies, the predatory nature and historical abuses of citizens conducted in the name of the state means that government is not always more trusted or better able to look after the interests of local populations than an extralegal group. Ultimately, extralegal groups blur the lines between the formal and informal; the licit and illicit.
A Living Machines approach to the sciences of mind and brain
Authors: Verschure Paul F. M. J. , Prescott Tony J.
Published: June 2018

How do the sciences of mind and brain—neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence (AI)—stand in relation to each other in the 21st century? This chapter proposes that despite our knowledge expanding at ever-accelerating rates, our understanding of the relationship between mind and brain is, in some important sense, becoming less and less. An increasing explanatory gap can only be bridged by a multi-tiered and integrated theoretical framework that recognizes the value of developing explanations at different levels, combining these into cross-level integrated theories, and directly contributing to new technologies that improve the human condition. Development of technologies that instantiate principles gleaned from the study of the mind and brain, or biomimetic technologies, is a key part of the validation process for scientific theories of mind and brain. We call this strategy for the integration of science and engineering a Living Machines approach. Following this path can lead not only to better science, and useful engineering, but also a richer view of human experience and of relationships between science, engineering, and art.
Evo-devo
Authors: Prescott Tony J. , Krubitzer Leah
Published: June 2018

This chapter explores how principles underlying natural evo-devo (evolution and development) continue to inspire the design of artificial systems from models of cell growth through to simulated three-dimensional evolved creatures. Research on biological evolvability shows that phenotypic outcomes depend on multiple interactions across different organizational levels—the adult organism is the outcome of a series of genetic cascades modulated in time and space by the wider embryological, bodily, and environmental context. This chapter reviews evo-devo principles discovered in biology and explores their potential for improving the evolvability of artificial systems. Biological topics covered include adaptive, selective, and generative mechanisms, and the role of epigenetic processes in creating phenotypic diversity. Modeling approaches include L-systems, Boolean networks, reaction-diffusion processes, genetic algorithms, and artificial embryogeny. A particular focus is on the evolution and development of the mammalian brain and the possibility of designing, using synthetic evo-devo approaches, brain-like control architectures for biomimetic robots.
Growth and tropism
Authors: Mazzolai Barbara
Published: June 2018

Plants or plant parts, such as roots or leaves, have the capacity of moving by growing in response to external stimuli with high plasticity and morphological adaptation to the environment. This chapter analyses some plant features and how they have been translated in artificial devices and control. A new generation of ICT hardware and software technologies inspired from plants is described, which includes an artificial root-like prototype that moves in soil imitating the sloughing mechanism of cells at the root apex level; as well as innovative osmotic-based actuators that generate movement imitating turgor variation in the plant cells. As future directions, new technologies expected from the study of plants concern energy-efficient actuation systems, chemical and physical microsensors, sensor fusion techniques, kinematics models, and distributed, adaptive control in networked structures with local information and communication capabilities.
Biomimetic materials
Authors: Vincent Julian
Published: June 2018

Biological materials present the conventional materials scientist with alternative ways of achieving durability, recyclability, and adaptability. Technical materials are commonly designed to resist the initiation of cracks; biological materials control disaster by initiating failure where it can be more closely controlled and the strain energy can be more easily absorbed, at the same time controlling shape so that stress concentrations are avoided in sensitive areas. Most materials are hydrated and soft, achieving stiffness by dehydration and mineralization. The low energy of the predominant hydrogen bonds allows relatively easy breakdown and recycling of the units of biological materials. Since most biological materials are metabolically accessible (obvious exceptions are keratins and wood) they can be recycled and repaired in situ, adapting the organism to changing circumstances internally and externally. At the molecular level, liquid crystallinity is a driving force.
Modeling self and others
Authors: Bongard Josh
Published: June 2018

Embodied cognition is the view that intelligence arises out of the interaction between an agent’s body and its environment. Taking such a view generates novel scientific hypotheses about biological intelligence and opportunities for advancing artificial intelligence. In this chapter we review one such set of hypotheses regarding how a robot may generate models of self, and others, and then exploit those models to recover from damage or exhibit the rudiments of social cognition. This modeling of self and others draws mainly on three concepts from neuroscience and AI: forward and inverse models in the brain, the neuronal replicator hypothesis, and the brain as a hierarchical prediction machine. The chapter concludes with future directions, including the integration of deep learning methods with embodied cognition.
Building blocks
Authors: Lepora Nathan F.
Published: June 2018

This chapter introduces the “building blocks” section of the Handbook of Living Machines which explores the individual sensory and motor components that when pieced together can comprise a complete biological or artificial system. The first six chapters cover the senses of vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell (considered together as chemosensing, proprioception, and electrosensing). The remaining chapters review aspects of the biomimetics of animal movement. First, that biological muscle has many performance benefits compared with conventional electric, second, how oscillations in neural circuits can drive rhythmic movements, and finally the capacity of animal skin, in species such as geckos, to adhere to surfaces and support behaviors such as climbing.