bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Kant's Grounded Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Huber Jakob
Published: December 2022

Two kinds of cosmopolitan vision are typically associated with Kant’s practical philosophy: on the one hand, the ideal of a universal moral community of rational agents who constitute a ‘kingdom of ends’ qua shared humanity. On the other hand, the ideal of a distinctly political community of ‘world citizens’ who share membership in some kind of global polity. This book introduces a novel account of Kant’s global thinking, one that has hitherto largely been overlooked: a grounded cosmopolitanism concerned with spelling out the normative implications of the fact that a plurality of corporeal agents concurrently inhabit the earth’s spherical surface. It is neither concerned with a community of shared humanity in the abstract, nor of shared citizenship, but with a ‘disjunctive’ community of earth dwellers, that is, embodied agents in direct physical confrontation with each other. Kant’s grounded cosmopolitanism as laid out in the Doctrine of Right frames the question how individuals relate to one another globally by virtue of concurrent existence and derives from this a specific set of constraints on cross-border interactions.
Introduction
Authors: Huber Jakob
Published: December 2022

In addition to summarising the book’s main themes as described, the Introduction gives an overview of recent work on Kant’s mature political thought. In particular, it sets the stage for the book’s interpretive project by reconstructing two predominant interpretive trends: the increasing focus on the Doctrine of Right’s famous property argument and the attendant duty to enter the state, on the one hand, and efforts to investigate Kant’s rationale for commending a specific set of cosmopolitan institutions (e.g., a voluntary, noncoercive league of states) as opposed to alternative ones, on the other. The book sets out to leave both paradigms behind in order to bring into view a much less familiar strand of argument that I introduce as Kant’s grounded cosmopolitanism. The Introduction also lays out the book’s methodological commitments, arguing that in-depth interpretive work in the history of philosophy can help us to get a new perspective on our own philosophical concerns, and be it by virtue of coming to appreciate an entirely different way of approaching the pertinent questions.
The Right to be Somewhere
Authors: Huber Jakob
Published: December 2022

This chapter lays the groundwork for my account of Kant’s grounded cosmopolitanism through a close analysis of § 13 of the Doctrine of Right. Against the widespread tendency to absorb the relevant passage into the property argument, it argues that it articulates a distinct thought concerned with the relation between physical beings that act and affect one another in virtue of inhabiting the particular, limited space of the earth’s circumference. As a first step to make good on what is introduced as the argument from earth dwellership, the chapter casts doubt upon the assumption that the ‘right to be somewhere’ is analytically contained in the innate right of humanity. Simply by virtue of (unavoidably) claiming a place for ourselves as we come into the world as corporeal agents, we find ourselves in a distinct kind of spatially mediated interdependence relation with everyone else globally.
Constitutional Pluralism as a Normative Theory
Authors: Bobić Ana
Published: December 2022

In this chapter, it is demonstrated that constitutional pluralism has a strong normative core, ensuring that the essential values shared by all Member States and the European Union itself are preserved in the pluralist framework. The normative core that is shared by all participants of the system is codified in Article 2 TEU, representing the minimum requirements for Union membership. In addition, constitutional pluralism as a theory embraces constitutional conflict, which is not a bug, but an important feature of the system. The emergence of constitutional conflict in this constellation is a regular and desirable feature of the system that promotes an interactive development of law and puts in place checks and balances between different sites of constitutional authority. The chapter further distinguishes between constructive and destructive constitutional conflict in the jurisprudence of the courts under analysis. When constitutional conflict entails a breach of the basic values in Article 2 TEU and lacks any trace of sincere cooperation and mutual respect, we are speaking of destructive conflict that can only be resolved by both political and legal means. These categories serve to assess the normative operation of constitutional pluralism. The descriptive and normative prima facie assumptions of constitutional pluralism are tested in full detail in the case studies in Chapters 2 to 4.
Three Lessons and a Warning
Authors: Bobić Ana
Published: December 2022

The final chapter provides a summary of three lessons from the book and a final warning for future analyses of constitutional conflict in the European Union. The three lessons should guide our understanding and analysis of the jurisprudence of constitutional conflict: first, it is nuanced, second, the jurisprudence and the courts involved are permanently interconnected, and finally, the conflicts taking place should always be analysed taking into account their delicate nature. The book thus ends with a warning to maintain a level-headed approach that does not blow individual instances of conflict out of proportions, but rather ensures that conflict is addressed in its full nuance, taking into account its interconnectedness to the European judicial space and the delicateness of its emergence.
Trade Wars
Authors: Oermann Nils Ole , Wolff Hans-Jürgen
Published: December 2022

The book analyses the causes and instruments of armed and non-armed international trade conflicts since about 1500. It defines economic sanctions, trade war, and three types of economic warfare. It probes into their history, ethics, economic driving forces, and legality under current rules. It explains the economics of trade, and outlines trade and financial policy since the nineteenth century. It examines the effectiveness of sanctions and winnability of trade wars. It describes the increased dynamics of economic warfare since 1989, namely in cyberspace and in the world financial system, and shows how China’s rise challenges Western democracies. It pleads for improved Western economic statecraft, a determined overhaul of the Western model, and confident perseverance in the ongoing comprehensive competition of political, economic, and social systems.
Structural Transformation and Inclusive Growth
Authors: Kim Kyunghoon , Mungsunti Arriya , Sumner Andy , Yusuf Arief
Published: December 2022

We consider the ‘developer’s dilemma’ and the relationship between manufacturing value-added or employment shares and trends in income inequality. In Indonesia, structural transformation was growth-enhancing and economic growth inclusive during the decades before the 1997–1998 Asian Financial Crisis. Since then, structural transformation has become notably less growth-enhancing and inclusive growth outcomes have been mixed. Indonesia’s structural transformation pattern has shifted from ‘upgrading industrialization’ before the crisis to ‘stalled industrialization’ afterwards. Both periods saw weak Kuznetsian tension, but patterns of structural transformation and inclusive growth beforehand were more ‘benign’ than patterns after the crisis. The government has adopted diverse social assistance programmes and industrial policies to tackle these twin development challenges. We discuss changes in the political economy of development policy-making since the crisis.
Inclusive Structural Transformation in India
Authors: Ray Saon , Kar Sabyasachi
Published: December 2022

This chapter analyses the ‘developer’s dilemma’—the trade-off between the twin objectives of structural transformation and inclusive growth—as it manifested itself in post-independence India. We identify two distinct developmental episodes during this period and characterize them as ‘inclusion without growth’ and ‘growth without inclusion’, respectively. We argue that the trade-off in each of these episodes is explained by the political economy and the economic ideology during that period, which in turn, drive the economic policy regimes and economic performance. We draw a few conclusions. First, economic ideology played an important role in driving structural transformation in India. Second, structural transformation did not lead to manufacturing-based industrialization in India due to increasing political competition. Third, the lack of manufacturing growth exacerbated inequality and intensified the dilemma in the Indian context. Finally, we predict three alternative trajectories that structural transformation and inequality may take in future.
Adverse Political Settlements
Authors: Osei Robert Darko , Atta-Ankomah Richmond , Lambon-Quayefio Monica
Published: December 2022

This study examines the structural transformation–inclusive growth nexus for Ghana. The data cover the post-independence period for Ghana and are phased into three periods: the post-independence period to the start of the economic recovery programme (ERP) and structural adjustment programme (SAP) (1957–1983), the ERP/SAP period to the start of oil production (1984–2010), and the start of oil production to date (2010–2017). The chapter finds that structural transformation has been generally weak and also associated with limited inclusive growth. In part, the legacy problem relating to political settlements, and with its roots in the immediate post-independence policies, has been important in shaping these outcomes. The chapter concludes by noting that there is potential for the country to move to a path where structural transformation will be more impactful for inclusive growth. However, the risk of adverse political settlements still mitigating this potential impact remains.
Structural Transformations and the Lack of Inclusive Growth
Authors: Solimano Andrés , Zapata-Román Gabriela
Published: December 2022

This chapter describes the structural transformations that Chile has experienced over the past fifty years and how they have contributed, or not, to inclusive growth and genuine economic modernization from a historical perspective. The empirical analysis of the chapter shows a premature deindustrialization process since the 1970s, continuing to the present. We observe, in the transition from the import-substitution industrialization strategy to the outward-orientated neoliberal model of high inequality, a decline in the value-added shares of manufacturing and agriculture and a rise in services (mainly financial services, insurance, and real estate) with ups and downs in mining shares. These trends are more emphasized in employment shares, with the decline in relative employment generation in agriculture and manufacturing going directly to the services sector that now accounts for two-thirds of total employment in the economy. The trend of persistent deindustrialization and high inequality is worrisome and could negatively affect Chile’s ability to achieve structural transformations towards higher and more sophisticated levels of productive development and technological advancement.
The Borders of Sovereignty
Authors: Ramsay Peter
Published: December 2022

This chapter argues that both the privatisation of immigration control and the criminalisation of breaches of immigration law arise from a decay of national sovereignty that is primarily endogenous to the nation state itself rather than being a consequence of any external force of globalisation. It reviews the normative debate about the privatisation of immigration control to demonstrate that privatisation is a domestic policy choice that facilitates an official effort to evade the political accountability through which the state’s sovereignty is constituted. The chapter goes on to show that the legal structure of ‘crimmigration’ offences is shared with a much larger category of pre-emptive offences. These offences serve to identify enemies of the legal order and in so doing institutionalise a novel condition of decayed political authority, referred to here as the ‘exceptionalisation of normality’. Crucially, these offences are found throughout the contemporary criminal law, mostly in areas with no connection to global labour flows, indicating that they target migrants as simply one among many, predominantly domestic, threats to a weakened state. The chapter concludes by arguing that the source of this endogenous weakening of sovereignty in the UK is to be found in the decay of almost all of its national political traditions and institutions.
Towards Legitimacy at the Border
Authors: Vasanthakumar Ashwini
Published: December 2022

This chapter examines a key criticism of privatisation in border control: that private actors cannot legitimately enforce borders, particularly when doing so involves using coercion against individual migrants. This criticism often assumes that the state, by contrast, is a legitimate actor. The chapter explores what principles of legitimacy apply at the border in order to critically scrutinise this assumption of state legitimacy. Using recent accounts of global political legitimacy, it argues that enforcing borders against migrants requires that migrants have access to mechanisms of inclusion and accountability, absent which the state cannot be a legitimate enforcer of borders. Because border control is implemented by a complex combination of actors—states, private security corporations, and international organisations—there are several points at which mechanisms of voice and accountability can be made available to migrants. The chapter concludes with some reflections on these mechanisms.
The Digitalisation of Border Controls and their Corporate Actors
Authors: Bigo Didier
Published: December 2022

The dematerialisation of physical borders via the digitisation of the process of control has changed the ways we understand international frontiers. Surveillance of the borders are now exercised at a distance, before individuals arrive. Even if most border guards insist that they have the ultimate (sovereign) right to decide who enters, the development of pre-check-in databases have de facto displaced the modalities of authentification and identification of travellers. This chapter depicts these changes, and shows how control is ‘distributed’ along the journeys of the passengers, and between many different actors, who are not all, by any means, public agents. The role of corporate actors are crucial.
Law, Capitalism, and the Function(s) of Work
Authors: Adams Zoe
Published: December 2022

Chapter 2 distinguishes between different types of work depending on the function that they perform in the context of capital’s reproductive circuit, exploring how these functions are obscured, and with what implications, in the legal concept of work. It goes on to relate this discussion to law’s relationship with constitution and regulation, of time, showing how the law’s unique temporality itself impacts upon the way in which different activities—or uses of time—are conceptualized, evaluated, and experienced, and how this in turn shapes the way in which the class struggle, and thus capitalism, ultimately develops. The chapter then explores how different contractual arrangements, whether it be contracts commonly used for salaried professionals or zero-hours contracts, construct distinct temporalities, and how this relates to the imperatives of management and pressures towards work intensification and devaluation.
Creative WorkA History of Book Publishing
Authors: Adams Zoe
Published: December 2022

Chapter 7 presents a case study of creative work through the lens of a history of the UK book publishing industry. The work that is central to this industry can be described as a form of immaterial labour which, while it participates in the production of commodities, poses particular challenges for capital because its unique use value lies in its ability to make meaning, to communicate with consumers, rather than to meet some physical or biological need. The immaterial nature of the product, and the peculiar nature of the production process, generates distinct challenges for employers, because it renders the work in question relatively unamenable to external management. This has influenced how the work has come to be organized, as well as how it has come to be regulated. Most specifically, it has tended to be excluded from the scope of statutory labour law, and so the function which we today attribute to labour law has come instead to be performed via alternative means, most specifically via copyright law. The chapter thus presents an analysis of the limits and potential of copyright law when it comes to mediating the contradictions inherent in work in capitalism as they manifest in the context of certain forms of creative work.
Psychology and Value in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Authors: Hampson Margaret
Published: December 2022

Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic schools each display an interest in the psychology of ethical subjects and our psychological engagement with sources of value. They ask, amongst other things, through what psychological capacities we engage with sources of value; how our capacities to so engage might best be developed; and how these capacities can be harnessed in such a way that we lead the best human life. This chapter examines some of the ways in which ancient thinkers understood our engagement with sources of value, from intellectual engagement to appetitive desire, from pleasure and pain as responses to value as well as ways of seeing something as valuable, to temporally remote forms of engagement via our capacities for memory and anticipation. It also highlights the particular contributions made by each of the papers and responses in this volume to our understanding of the psychology of value in ancient Greek ethics.
The Blind Desires of Republic IV
Authors: Evans Matthew
Published: December 2022

It seems clear that, according to Plato, all human motivation is fundamentally guided by, fixed upon, oriented toward, or connected to the good. But what exactly is the nature of this connection, as he sees it? One initially attractive reading holds that he sees it as a restriction on the contents of our desires: just as we must always perceive things under various guises—we don’t just see the sky, we see the sky as blue; we don’t just taste the wine, we taste the wine as sweet—so we must always desire things under the guise of the good. This chapter aims to show, first, that this reading is inconsistent with any reasonable interpretation of the argument of Republic IV; and second, that there is a promising alternative reading available to us—one that is not only consistent with the argument of Republic IV, but also philosophically and exegetically appealing in its own right. On this alternative reading, the connection Plato sees between desire and the good is, at bottom, a normative one, similar in character to the one we see between belief and the true: just as it is in the nature of our beliefs to be made correct (or successful) by the truth of what we believe, so it is in the nature of our desires to be made correct (or successful) by the goodness of what we desire.
Plato on the Object of Thirst
Authors: Price A. W.
Published: December 2022

A recent revisionist tendency extends the notion of the guise of the good so that it applies even to the object of appetite. Yet how could one understand thirst’s desiring drink as a good? Thirst indeed pursues its own gratification, but not through any thought that this is worthwhile. It can, however, be redirected towards one drink rather than another. Plato takes its orientation towards drink not to be instinctive, but to arise from past experience of satiation. Anticipatory pleasure may ‘pre-live’ (as Warren puts it) the pleasure to come; but then we can view it neither as a picturing, nor as an expectation true or false.
Features of Interfaced and Confined Experimental Active Nematics
Authors: Sagués Francesc , Guillamat Pau , Hardoüin Jérôme , Martínez-Prat Berta , Ignés-Mullol Jordi
Published: December 2022

Active nematics constitute a particularly rewarding example of active systems. Here, we summarize different experimental scenarios of a particularly interesting active nematic system constituted by an aqueous suspension of filamentary proteins (microtubules) and (motor proteins) kinesins. In the first part we describe an experimental study aimed at studying quantitatively the way active turbulence is unchained in the system from an initial state of aligned microtubules. The important aspect addressed in the second part is to try to study the behavior of the system when the interface, either planar or curved, plays a decisive role in controlling fluxes and textures.
Phases of Planar Active Matter in Two Dimensions
Authors: Cugliandolo Leticia F. , Gonnella Giuseppe
Published: December 2022

This chapter focuses on the description of the phases of matter in two dimensions. Firstly, we briefly discuss the phase diagrams of bidimensional interacting passive systems. This short and schematic presentation is complemented with a rather complete bibliography that should guide the readers in their study of this very rich subject. Secondly, we summarise very recent results on the phase diagrams of active Brownian disks and active dumbbell systems in two dimensions. The idea is to identify all the phases and to relate, when this is possible, the ones found in the passive limit with the ones observed at large values of the activity, at high and low densities, and for both types of constituents. Proposals for the mechanisms leading to these phases will be discussed. The physics of bidimensional active systems open many questions, some of which will be listed by the end of the Chapter.
Nanotribology of Commensurate and Incommensurate Colloidal Monolayers on Periodic Surfaces
Authors: Brazda Thorsten , Cao Xin , Bechinger Clemens
Published: December 2022

Whenever two adjacent bodies are brought into relative motion, friction occurs. Despite its broad implications to our daily life and technical applications, many aspects of friction are only poorly understood. This particularly applies to conditions, where two atomically smooth surfaces are sliding on top of each other. Using a colloidal monolayer which is driven across a structured surface, we can confirm the dominating role of topological solitons during this process. In addition, we provide experimental evidence for the Aubry transition which predicts a frictionless sliding at incommensurate conditions and for finite substrate corrugations. Our results do not only reveal the subtle structural changes of the monolayer to avoid friction but also a sharp transition from a fully superlubric to a strongly pinned state when the contact strength between the surfaces is increased.
William Shakespeare
Authors: Braden Gordon
Published: December 2022

Shakespeare’s sonnets, published under somewhat mysterious circumstances a dozen years after the main publishing craze for sonnets had abated, have proved very difficult to integrate with the rest of what we know about his life and career. Speculation on particular questions continually changes its mind; the only secure advance in recent decades has been the lapse of efforts to disallow the manifestly homoerotic content of many of the individual poems. Putting biographical questions to one side, though, does not mean ignoring the implied narrative of the poems in the order in which they have come down to us; that narrative is more recoverable and coherent than it has been given credit for. An initially somewhat formal run of poems in praise of an attractive young man gradually reveals itself to be a flirtation, whose erotic content comes into the open in sonnet 20, which is the beginning of an initially happy bond, Platonic in the foundational sense of the term, repeatedly strained by real or imagined infidelity on both sides. The bond repeatedly restores itself, but is most painfully tested by the young man’s sexual involvement with the speaker’s own mistress. Poems to her conclude the sequence; so placed, they constitute a pained reassessment of the meaning of the whole experience. The working out of all this is a particularly anguished and ultimately bleak version of the dynamic of desire and delusion at the heart of Petrarchism.
Model Selection
Authors: Inchausti Pablo
Published: December 2022

The chapter discusses the problem and relevance of model selection in statistics based on parsimony. It thoroughly examines the conceptual basis of the various model selection criteria based on the theory of information: the Akaike, Bayesian, deviance, and Watanabe–Akaike information criteria. It discusses the use and abuse of model selection based on information criteria in the life sciences, and the main ideas behind model averaging in the frequentist and Bayesian frameworks using model weights. It introduces further tools for model validation in the Bayesian framework such as the posterior predictive distribution, posterior predictive checks, and methods based on cross validation.
Ossian and Irish literature
Authors: Barlow Richard Alan
Published: December 2022

Chapter 1 studies the impact and influence of James Macpherson’s Ossian (1760–63) on Irish literature. As opposed to a highly enthusiastic response across much of Europe, Irish scholarly and literary reactions to Macpherson’s work were often hostile. By examining key sections of Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806), W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Wanderings of Oisin’ (1889), James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938, French translation in 1947), this chapter shows how a range of Irish writers have responded to Macpherson’s work and how responses to Ossian in Irish writing have shifted over time, partly due to changing political and cultural contexts. This chapter also charts the development of Celticism from Romanticism to Modernism and discusses how Ossian is connected to questions of national identity during the Romantic period and is associated with literary recycling and schizoid voices during the Modernist era.
Gender, nationality, and Celticism in Gregory and Macleod
Authors: Barlow Richard Alan
Published: December 2022

This chapter studies the personal and literary contacts between the Irish and Scottish Revivals, with a particular focus on Augusta Gregory and William Sharp (as well as work published under the name ‘Fiona Macleod’, Sharp’s female authorial persona). The chapter studies Sharp’s visits to Ireland and his meetings with Gregory, before examining their different approaches to a traditional story; the Deirdre tale from the Ulster Cycle. An examination of the different interpretations of this story by Gregory and Sharp/Macleod sheds light on the conceptions of gender, nationality, and Celticism offered by these two writers. Chapter 2 shows that while both writers shared similar interests in the Celtic world, and while they worked with common sources, there are major political differences between the two, and neither can be classed as a ‘Pan-Celticist’. By examining the divergent ways Gregory and Sharp/Macleod treat the character of Deirdre across a range of texts, this chapter shows the ideological and political contrasts between these leading figures of the Celtic Revivals of Ireland and Scotland. Special attention is paid to Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), as well as poetry, prose, and drama by Sharp/Macleod.
Scottish Modernism and the Celtic world
Authors: Barlow Richard Alan
Published: December 2022

This chapter studies the influence of Irish politics and culture on Scottish Modernism and the relationship between the works of Hugh MacDiarmid and James Joyce, with a particular focus on MacDiarmid’s long poems To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930) and In Memoriam James Joyce (1955). MacDiarmid saw Joyce as a fellow Celt and references to Joyce are part of a larger trend in MacDiarmid’s work concerned with the revival and restoration of the Celtic world. As this chapter argues, To Circumjack Cencrastsus and In Memoriam James Joyce are examples of twentieth-century ‘late Celticism’. This chapter also studies the relatively small but highly revealing tradition of Scottish Modernist elegies for deceased modern Irishmen, including Sorley MacLean’s ‘Àrd Mhusaeum na hÈireann’, a tribute to Irish revolutionary James Connolly.
How the Irish Became Red
Authors: Burke Mary M.
Published: December 2022

Chapter 3 considers near-contemporaries Eugene O’Neill and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The latter over-identified with the one non-Irish branch of his family that exemplified ‘Saxon’ whiteness, an emphasis unquestioned by critics, who have left Fitzgerald’s eighteenth-century Irish-American roots unexamined. This struggle is the origin of his oeuvre’s anxiety regarding class and racial status, as the consideration of the term ‘half black Irish’ (a Fitzgerald self-ascription) suggests. By contrast, O’Neill’s drama critiques the Irish presence in the Americas over centuries as one long failure to create solidarity with their fellow oppressed, especially peoples of colour. As a result, unfinished Irish histories (the Ulster Plantation and the 1845 Famine) return to haunt the American action of O’Neill’s drama. In dermatologic classification (the Fitzpatrick Scale), those of white Irish ancestry have skin tones so light as to be ‘flawed’ due to being too white. Thus, a tendency to burn was a racial liability on fashionable 1920s Riviera beaches in which an even tan conversely signalled ‘whiteness’ (as depicted by Fitzgerald). It had also been a liability in the seventeenth century on Caribbean islands that witnessed indentured white labour and in which the easily sunburned Irish were racialized as ‘red’ (as evoked by O’Neill).
Science Presupposes Mood
Authors: Holm Isak Winkel
Published: December 2022

Chapter 1 gives a theoretical account of the presence of mood in a work of philosophy. The point of departure is the intriguing theory concerning the relation between thinking and feeling, between ‘science’ and ‘mood’, put forward by Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Vigilius Haufniensis in a dense footnote found in The Concept of Anxiety. In order to understand Haufniensis’s theoretical reflections, the chapter offers a rethinking of the relation between the existential (Martin Heidegger) and the aesthetic (Susanne K. Langer) concept of mood; that is, between the kind of mood we experience in life and the kind of mood we encounter in a work of art. This distinction is fleshed out in a short reading of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, focusing on the prophetic noir in the novel. In a methodological coda, the chapter discusses the analysis of mood in Kierkegaard’s work as opposed to the study of pseudonymity and visibility.
This Moment Is Life and Death
Authors: Holm Isak Winkel
Published: December 2022

Chapter 3 explores the role of prophetic noir in the philosophical argument of Fear and Trembling as a whole. This dark affective atmosphere is connected to Abraham’s anticipation of the imminent sacrifice on Mount Moriah and, as the book moves on, to a number of other disasters, too. At the level of Kierkegaard research, the chapter diagnoses a shift in focus in the interpretation of Fear and Trembling from command to collapse, from obedience to trust. Stressing collapse and trust, rather than command and obedience, it is argued, is critical to a meaningful reading of this difficult work. The book’s central concept of prophetic noir is nuanced in a discussion of the eye-opening interpretation of Fear and Trembling and the coming disaster put forward by the Kierkegaard scholar Sharon Krishek in Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (2009). The question of normative force is explored in Fear and Trembling as well as in, once again, Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
A New Infallible Interpretative Law
Authors: Holm Isak Winkel
Published: December 2022

Chapter 4 focuses on the famous journal entry in which Kierkegaard reflects on an enigmatic ‘great earthquake’ that suddenly hit the Kierkegaard family. In this entry, and in a number of related letters and notes, the young Kierkegaard addresses the prophetic noir in a theoretical framework supplied by the theodicy debate prompted by the Lisbon earthquake in 1755. The sense of catastrophe is here made up of two different but closely related moods: on the one hand, prophetic noir; on the other, a mood that might be called ‘theodical concern’. A passage from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Autobiography, concerning the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, is shown to be important to Kierkegaard’s notion of theodicy and to his journal entry on the great earthquake. Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought (2002) offers an existential perspective on the theodicy debate. To conclude, the intricate relation between prophetic noir and theodical concern is explored in a brief reading of the ‘ecocritical’ volume of poems alphabet (1981) by the Danish poet Inger Christensen.
Conclusion
Authors: Holm Isak Winkel
Published: December 2022

The Conclusion approaches the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard’s work by way of a late journal entry in which he imagines himself as a prophet of doom who predicts the shipwreck of a great ship which, sometime in the future, is steering towards an iceberg. It is the captain on this Titanic-like ship who, seeing the little white speck on the horizon, says ‘it will be a frightful night’. The chapter describes the prophetic noir in Kierkegaard’s early works as a matter of living on when facing a little white speck on the horizon, as opposed to the later works, where the impending disaster is rather a matter of being heard. Drawing on the work of Lauren Berlant and Lisa Baraitser, the chapter suggests an existential perspective on human life in the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, the chapter also reflects on the perils of turning inward towards the safe space of the individual subject at a moment when we need to turn outward to meet the objective challenges of our planetary predicament.
The Presumption of Optimism
Authors: Robson Jon
Published: December 2022

This chapter begins with a discussion of the pessimist who maintains that it is not necessary for them to support their view by appeal to argument, since it is the natural default position with respect to aesthetic testimony. It argues that this view is mistaken and that there should, on the contrary, be a presumption of optimism. The chapter surveys, and rejects, some candidate motivations for taking pessimism to be the default view. In particular, it focuses on attempts to motivate pessimism by appeal to the claim that, in contrast to other areas where testimony is uncontroversially acceptable, we typically don’t form aesthetic judgements on the basis of testimony. It is then argued that this claim is mistaken and that we frequently do form aesthetic judgements in this way. The chapter then goes on to motivate a presumption in favour of optimism by appeal both to this descriptive fact and to the difficulties which the pessimist encounters in taking the role of testimony in aesthetics to be so markedly different from the role of testimony in (most) other domains. Finally, it argues that there is not only reason to accept a presumption in favour of optimism but also good grounds for endorsing constitutive version of optimism (according to which the optimistic view of aesthetic testimony is entailed by the very nature of aesthetic judgement).
Pessimism, Assertion, and Signalling
Authors: Robson Jon
Published: December 2022

This chapter begins to consider an argument for pessimism based on the impermissibility of assertions such as ‘the painting is exquisitely beautiful, but I’ve never seen it’ or ‘the melody is graceful but I’ve never heard it’. A natural explanation here is that these assertions are illegitimate because we cannot know the aesthetic claims which they express in the absence of direct experience and so, a fortiori, cannot know them on the basis of testimony. This chapter argues that pessimistic explanations of this kind aren’t the only option and that, on the contrary, the optimist can offer an independently plausible (and non-ad hoc) account of this infelicity. The explanation offered draws on a comparison with accounts of aesthetic creation according to which one key role of aesthetic creativity is to signal to our conspecifics that we possess various advantageous qualities. It is argued that an account of this kind can be expanded to other areas of aesthetic practice including, crucially, critical discourse. The proposal is that it is, ultimately, the misleading signals that the relevant assertions produce within critical discourse, rather than their violation of a knowledge norm, which makes them problematic. Finally, this account is defended from some immediate objections.
The Debate Concerning Assertion
Authors: Robson Jon
Published: December 2022

This chapter compares the plausibility of the account of aesthetic assertion offered thus far with that of the pessimist’s preferred account. It is argued that—as with the debates concerning appeal to cases in previous chapter—the pessimist’s position gains some initial attraction by focusing on a selective range of cases, but discussion of a full range of cases ultimately favours the optimist. The chapter also briefly considers, and rejects, some alternative explanations which a pessimist might offer for the impermissibility of the relevant assertions. Finally, some concluding remarks on the state of the dialectic between the pessimist and the optimist are offered.
Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature
Authors: Friedlander Ari
Published: December 2022

The “rogue,” a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and the seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, Friedlander posits the sexualized rogue as a new category of early modern socio-sexual identity and traces a surprising social transposition, in which sociopolitical elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue’s sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, the analytical category of rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” the state’s focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, Friedlander shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets’ rendering of the supposed threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.
Rogue Curious
Authors: Friedlander Ari
Published: December 2022

This chapter provides an anatomy of early modern theories of rogue sexuality found in the flourishing genre of rogue pamphlets by Thomas Harman, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and others. It shows how these pamphlets’ rogue etiologies, or origin stories, reveal that the rogue’s excessive sexuality, often figured as beastliness, constituted the basis of a “socio-sexual identity,” a consistent and productive discursive category of personhood. Rogue identity signifies multivalently, as both symptom and cause of social unrest, as dire threat and delightful promise. The chapter concludes with an examination of the slippage of rogues and their victims illustrated in the frontispiece images of several of the rogue pamphlets, demonstrating how the catalog of behaviors that produce rogue sexuality are themselves imitable. It provides the foundation for readers to understand how a seemingly scurrilous instantiation of popular culture establishes categories that shape early modern sociopolitical thought.
A Comprehensive Review of Existing IHL and ICL as it Relates to Starvation
Authors: Jordash Wayne , Murdoch Catriona , Holmes Joe
Published: December 2022

The chapter provides a comprehensive review of international humanitarian and criminal law as it relates to starvation. It begins by drawing attention to the fact that deliberate starvation is a crime under international law. This notwithstanding, there has yet to be a prosecution of an individual suspected of committing the crime or engaging in any of the underlying conduct upon which such a charge might be based. The reasons for this neglect may be many, including a lack of clarity around the elements of the crime and particularly the element of intent that must be established. This chapter explores the challenges that might exist in investigating and prosecuting the crime of starvation and seeks to clarify its elements with a particular focus on the mens rea requirement under Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute. This chapter provides a roadmap for practitioners to ensure better international recognition of deliberate starvation as an international crime, and in order that attribution of fault and accountability become less elusive.
Truth, Memory, and Starvation
Authors: de Waal Alex
Published: December 2022

This chapter examines the neglected agenda of transitional justice mechanisms for the victims and survivors of mass starvation. It focuses on the commemoration of famine, opening with the observation that silence commonly shrouds the memory. One reason for this, the chapter argues, is the sense of shame, loss of dignity, and self-blame felt by the survivors. During times of the utmost deprivation, death, life, and dignity depend on the tiniest increments of resources and standing among the dispossessed and destitute. Victims are often forced into terrible decisions: who will eat today? With perpetrators often distant from the scene, many victims blame themselves for the hardships they suffered and the micro-deprivations they end up perpetrating against others. For these reasons, famine is particularly demoralizing and memories are suppressed. This has too often allowed the deliberate perpetration of starvation crimes to remain unrecognized or fade away in time. This chapter discusses efforts to memorialize past instances of mass starvation, with notable examples of the Great Irish Famine and Ukraine, and the role that memorialization might play in honouring victims and changing the narrative for today’s famines. It concludes with the insight that criminalizing starvation serves the vital purpose of emancipating victims, survivors, and their descendants from a sense of shame and failure, dignifying them as victims of a crime.
Rupture
Authors: Shant Rattan Lal , Bhat Javaid Iqbal
Published: December 2022

Rupture is one long love letter to a partially lost relationship. The text resonates with a frail longing for deep bonds of centuries that were severed; the bonds that had somehow survived many a test in the past. However, with the storm which hit Kashmir in the 1990s, these bonds of common affection and love between Hindus and Muslims were violently shattered, to the overall discomfort and disadvantage of both. The stories in this collection yearn to reflect and expand on those connections which permeate collective memories. The characters in the stories are alive to the possibility of rift and tension in the bonds but long to maintain the bond nevertheless. The severance of the bond also re-characterizes the stories as gentle prose elegies to a homeland. Though members of the migrant Hindu community try to recreate home away from home but the pain remains. The issues of lost identity, home, nostalgia, every day ties between the two communities are immanent in this collection. Some of the characters, especially the elderly people, are on the verge of insanity because of a confusing feeling of alienation in a foreign place. They just bide their time in daily trivia in tents, rented accommodations or even ‘homes’ away from Kashmir. They watch helplessly as the younger generation slowly strays away from the antique rites and rituals and adopt a different identity. There is separation at several levels: the young from the old, Hindu from Muslim, home from its inhabitants, rituals from their connoisseurs, and sacred landscape from its enthusiasts. The hope is that this separation is not permanent but a temporary strain in the eternal bond.
Panj Tantra
Authors: Lal Rattan
Published: December 2022

The story is that of a narrator and an imaginary listener. The narrator tells him about his wife who longs to go back to Kashmir after ten years in exile, to see the children playing under mulberry trees. Then he tells him how Thokar Chand got a helper for them in Jammu. The name of the helper was Bodhraj. Bodhraj later on, like the narrator’s wife, longs to find his cow in Kistawar, his native place, and hand it to his friends Hassan and Obul. If Bodhrajj’s desire to go back to his native home and find his white-spotted cow is futile, then how is the desire for a home in the narrator and his wife meaningful? The Listener calls the narrator’s tale a Panj Tantra because there are five characters and five associate segments: narrator, wife, Thokar Chand, Bodhraj, and Hassan and Obul taken as one.
Constitutional Provisions
Authors: Divan Shyam , Rosencranz Armin
Published: December 2022

This chapter examines how the Indian Constitution is amongst the few in the world that contains specific provisions on environmental protection. Apart from enabling the enactment of environmental laws by supplying the requisite authority to the legislature, it silently weighs in on every case. The Constitution provides the moral foundation for these laws; elevates environmental protection to a high state purpose; defines principles of environmental law through constitutional courts; and gives an impetus for enforcement through the grant of constitutional writs. The chapter begins by looking at the Fundamental Duties, explaining the public trust doctrine, eco-centrism, and sustainable development. It then considers the division of legislative authority under India’s federal system, as well as the Constitution (Forty-Second Amendment) Act of 1976. Finally, the chapter studies the relationship between environmental protection and fundamental rights.
Legislative Provisions
Authors: Divan Shyam , Rosencranz Armin
Published: December 2022

This chapter investigates how India’s vast body of environmental law is mostly statutory. Indeed, federal statutes set out the essential legislative policy, leaving it to the Central Government to work out the nuts and bolts. The primary legislative strategy is a system of licensing backed by criminal sanctions. The pollution control laws empower state agencies to shut down polluting industries or stop their supply of water and power. The chapter then explains the principles for interpreting environmental statutes, digests the primary regulatory statutes, and examines in some detail the Environment (Protection) Act of 1986. Frequently, judges must choose between two possible interpretations of an environmental statute, one that advances environmental protection, and the other favouring some other interest such as industry, jobs, or the need for energy.