bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Non-Sceptical Philosophy of Cognition
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that the main battleline in the history of epistemology is not (as Pasnau learnedly argues) the vertical line drawn between the unattainable pre-Cartesian epistemic ideal of absolute certainty and the post-Cartesian conception of knowledge as (J)TB+ sanctioned by Humean scepticism (5.1.1). It is the horizontal line, running throughout the entire history of Western philosophy, between those who affirm a natural mental state in which there is a sui generis contact between mind and reality, and those who reject such a natural mental state (5.1.2). This book argues that the battle against scepticism is won at the beginning by observing that human beings share with other animals capable of sense perception a natural, primitive, effective contact between cognizer and cognized which imperfectly and gradually apprehends those features of the environment accessible to that particular kind of perceiving being. Higher forms of cognition can then be evaluated in a framework which does not start by assuming a gap (5.2). This proposal sets the bar for knowledge high (5.3.1). To the charge that this bar is set too high, one response is to stress the social dimension of knowledge, which counts as known by the community things known by an individual or group. Another is to stress the crucial contribution of belief as a cognitive mode, irreducibly different from knowledge as a distinct, essential, complementary, and generally successful way to engage cognitively with the world. Individual adult cognition is a closely knit fabric of knowledge and of belief with different degrees of justification (5.3.2).
Ontology I
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

Revisiting another strand of the ancient–medieval tradition, an ontology of cognition is proposed consisting of objects (Chapter 8), acts, and faculties (Chapter 9). All really existing, mind-independent things, it is claimed, are fully determinate individuals. Cognition begins with these individuals via sense-perception. This first cognitive contact and most basic type of knowledge is both pre-conceptual and pre-propositional (8.1.1). A higher capacity is then needed to abstract from individual sensible objects what can be attributed to a plurality of individuals. This intellectual cognition of really existing, extra-mental things is therefore construed as a process of progressive determination of what is first apprehended in an indeterminate way by the senses. This process, however, can never fully exhaust the richness of fully determinate individuals. Therefore, although senses and intellect latch onto reality, they do not stretch to a perfectly adequate or complete knowledge of any of the concrete individuals which really exist (8.1.2). Section 8.2 then turns to ideal and imaginary objects, regarded as abstract entities without extra-mental existence. These objects are treated here as logical possibilities whose natures are either necessary or contingent. Because these natures constitute the relatum of an intentional relation, it is not necessary either to abandon the relationality of intentionality or to introduce relations without a relatum. The final section (8.3) considers the objects of cognition in two ways: either as they are in themselves—that is, according to their formal reality (extra-mental, ideal, imaginary)—or insofar as they are cognized (which is regarded as a mode of being of objects themselves).
Ontology II
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

After distinguishing the three main types of mental acts characterizing developed human cognition—apprehension, judgement, and reasoning (9.1.1–2)—this chapter develops an ontology which regards mental acts as immanent actions (that is, as actions which do not produce something distinct from, or external to, the agent) that ground the relation of the cognitive subject to what is knowable or perceptible (9.1.3). This means that cognition can be understood as having the nature of a relation between mind and world, thereby providing the basis of the immensely influential Aristotelian account of truth in terms of conformity of mind to reality or correspondence between mind and reality. Ontological truth, a non-mental element, a property of things, is distinguished from logical truth in its older sense, as a property of thought to conform to how things are (9.1.4). Faculties are then presented (9.2.1) as potentialities of a specific kind: they are abilities, capacities, or powers to actively do certainly things (rather than mere dispositions). Their ontological status (9.2.2) is that of natural properties or qualities of the mind in which the nature of the mind is manifested. Faculties therefore have an aspect both of actuality (as principles of operation actually present in a cognitive subject) and of potentiality (since they are powers which are not always exercised: 9.2.3). The cognitive model proposed by this book is also built on a philosophical anthropology in which these cognitive powers are complemented by conative powers (9.2.4), which play crucial, distinct, but fundamentally integrated roles (a point further developed in Chapter 11).
Belief and Will
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the relationship between belief and will. Is belief voluntary or involuntary? If involuntary, how can we have moral responsibility for our beliefs? The answers proposed hinge on the distinction between assent and belief. Assent, an implicit mental ‘yes’, is an on/off state distinct from states (like belief) which have degrees. Believing is the more specific mental state or act in which assent is not compelled by the presence of the object itself (as in knowledge), but is moved by reasons extrinsic to the object of cognition. Depending on the strength of these reasons, there will be lower or higher degrees of belief. On this basis, a threefold account is proposed (11.1.1–3): (1) belief is a spontaneous (involuntary) response to epistemic reasons; (2) notwithstanding the spontaneity of belief, the will has a key role to play in determining assent; (3) acknowledging this volitional role does not amount to doxastic voluntarism. A ‘doxastic family’ is then proposed, which includes belief and other mental states which entail but do not reduce to belief (11.2.1). A shift from an ethics of belief to an ethics of assent is then recommended (11.2.2). While this account of cognition narrows the domain of individual knowledge by expanding that of belief, it also reassigns a province wrongly attributed to belief to the more general category of assent. Thinking with assent is therefore a complex mental phenomenon which involves involuntary elements (knowing and believing) as well as legitimate volitional (appetitive, conative) elements without thereby implying doxastic voluntarism.
Introduction to Part I
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

Part I of this book is dedicated to challenging the crude history of philosophy underlying the Gettier paradigm which has dominated Anglo-American epistemology for over half a century. A careful survey of ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern epistemology reveals that the allegedly ‘standard’ or ‘traditional’ analysis of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB) is in fact neither standard nor traditional. On the contrary: it is difficult to find major philosophers for thousands of years who framed the problem of knowledge and belief in these terms. Moreover, what the main philosophical movements and authors did say about human cognition through the ages is typically strikingly at odds with this so-called ‘standard’ analysis. According to the genuinely traditional views reviewed in this section, knowing and believing are distinct in kind in the strong sense that they are mutually exclusive mental states: the same cognitive subject cannot, simultaneously and in the same respect, be in a state of both knowing and believing the same thing. Knowing is not ‘the best kind of believing’, nor is believing to be understood derivatively from knowing as ‘knowledge minus something’. In brief, in modern parlance, these traditional views propose a disjunctivist account of knowing and believing: either one is in a mental state of knowing or one is in a mental state of believing. Knowing does not entail believing because knowing and believing are mental states which are different in nature.
Introduction to Part II
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

After an historically well-attested account of cognition has been reclaimed in Part I, Part II reframes contemporary debates in the light of this account. The objective is not to provide detailed criticisms of present-day rival proposals but to outline an alternative by revisiting and renewing historical insights which deserve to be recovered. If (as argued in Part I) knowing is a primitive cognitive contact of a cognizer with an object of cognition, then the natural starting point for a thoroughgoing analysis of knowledge (in Chapter 6) is an account of how we arrive, in the first place, at the distinction between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Chapter 7 then focuses on intentionality itself, that is, on the nature of the contact between subject and object. It explores and commends a tradition which construes intentionality as intrinsically relational. Attention then turns to the ontology of cognition, that is, to an investigation of which kind of entities are involved in cognition. These chapters revisit a prominent strand of the ancient–medieval tradition which explains this ontology in terms of objects (Chapter 8), acts, and faculties (Chapter 9). The phenomenology and ontology outlined in Chapters 6 to 9, provide the basis for answering the questions addressed by the concluding chapter of Part II (Chapter 10), namely, what is the object of knowledge and what is the object of belief.
Introduction to Part III
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

Part III is devoted to an exploration of belief and the doxastic family of cognate mental states, with particular attention, in the last two chapters, to the specific case of religious belief. Chapter 11 tackles the relationship between belief and will. Here the vexed questions of whether belief is voluntary or involuntary, and, if it is involuntary, how we can bear moral responsibility for our beliefs are addressed by deploying the distinction between assent and belief proposed above. Chapter 12 defends the view that testimony does not, on its own, produce individual knowledge, although it can, and often does, lead to individual knowledge. A modified global reductionism is proposed to answer the question of when and how testimony provides sufficient justification for belief. Chapter 13 explores two illuminating historical accounts of significant members of the doxastic family: Kant’s taxonomy of belief subsumed under the broader category of ‘assenting’ (Fürwahrhalten) and Aquinas’s account of faith in both its secular and its religious expressions. After criticizing two influential approaches to religious epistemology—the Reformed Epistemology of Alvin Plantinga (Chapter 14) and William Alston’s epistemology of religious experience (Chapter 15)—an alternative framework for religious epistemology is developed by applying the model of cognition defended in this book.
General Conclusion
Authors: Antognazza Maria Rosa
Published: May 2024

This book offers an account of knowledge and belief, rooted in tradition, but differing greatly from most present-day views. This account distinguishes two fundamentally distinct modes of cognition. The most primitive is a family of mental states characterized by ‘seeing’ or ‘grasping’, which we can designate as ‘knowledge’. The other is a family in which the object is not directly seen or grasped, and which we can designate as ‘belief’. Since believing lacks the direct perception of the object of cognition which characterizes knowing, knowledge cannot be a species of belief. However, if assent is distinguished from belief, both knowledge and belief can be regarded as ‘thinking with assent’. After Part I documents the persistence of this framework throughout the history of Western philosophy, Part II investigates the phenomenology and ontology of cognition. It construes individual knowledge as paradigmatically first-person, in which cognitive and conative/appetitive aspects play complementary roles. The ancient–medieval tradition is reproposed to explain the ontology of cognition in terms of objects, acts, and faculties, without the need for representational content. Because this proposal sets the bar for individual knowledge very high, Part III stresses the indispensable contribution of belief to human cognition. Belief extends our cognitive grip on reality when we are unable to know, tracking truth remarkably successfully when its own standards are properly applied. This framework helps avoid key problems besetting recent epistemology. Notably, when applied to religious epistemology, it avoids both foundationalism and fideism by maintaining the distinctive epistemological status of knowledge and yet taking religious faith seriously.
Learning theory and anxiety
Authors: McNaughton Neil , Gray Jeffrey A.
Published: May 2024

‘Learning theory and anxiety’ explains the role of learning theory in underpinning cognitive concepts. It distinguishes reinforcement from reinforcers and reinforcers from goals. It emphasizes the role of contingency in altering motivational valence and explains the relationships between gain/loss and approach/avoidance depending on presentation or omission of reinforcers. It emphasizes classical and instrumental conditioning as the basis for ‘two-process’ theories of learning, the dependence of fear/frustration and hope/relief on two, respective, fundamental systems, and the resultant generation of central motivational states and so emotions. These distinctions then lead on to analysis of elicited reactions in learning experiments; and then a detailed learning-theoretic description of the key inputs to the goal inhibition system and so the generation of anxiety. The methodologies of the two-process theorists contrast with ‘ethoexperimental’ methodology, providing independent bases for categorizing and generalizing. If ethology overcategorizes and learning theory overgeneralizes, their combination achieves balance and potentially deeper perspective.
The neurology of anxiety—survival circuits
Authors: McNaughton Neil , Gray Jeffrey A.
Published: May 2024

‘The neurology of anxiety—survival circuits’ outlines the mapping of the dimensions of defensive direction (fear, anxiety) and defensive distance (immediacy of threat) to the lower, largely subcortical, levels of the nervous system—treating these dimensions as warp and weft in the weaving by the brain’s ‘Enchanted Loom’ of the magic cloak that defends us from threat. It provides detailed anatomy and functional data for: periaqueductal grey, hypothalamus, amygdala, septo-hippocampal system, and cingulate cortex. This culminates in a 2D map of the essentially subcortical systems involved. It then reviews the anatomy and function of the diffuse neuromodulatory control of the structures in the 2D map by: serotonin, noradrenaline, dopamine, histamine, acetylcholine, relaxin-3, and by outputs from the habenula, and supramammillary area. It presents the septo-hippocampal system as central, leading on to the following chapters that discuss it in detail and then add frontal ‘planning’ circuits to complete the picture.
What Is Insolvency Law?
Authors: Mangano Renato
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of the key concepts of insolvency law. It illustrates the machinery of insolvency law by employing basic notions of descriptive law and economics alongside game theory. Initially, insolvency law dealt with the punishment inflicted on insolvent merchants and ordinary overindebted people. Meanwhile, modern insolvency law refers to a debt-collection device based on the assumption of a flaw of cooperation when a distressed debtor is indebted to more than one creditor. The chapter presents several figures referring to the ‘prisoner’s dilemma game’, the ‘bargaining game’, and the ‘chicken game’. These games reproduce the dynamic of, and pitfall in, cooperation that occurs in both everyday life and insolvency cases.
Distress, Insolvency, and the Likelihood of Insolvency
Authors: Li Shuguang
Published: May 2024

This chapter focuses on distress, insolvency, and the likelihood of insolvency. It explains how enterprises may be in distress during their operations for various reasons, such as uncompetitive products or services. Once the insolvency process begins, it will have a significant impact on creditors, debtors, and debtor’s employees, so sufficient legitimate conditions must be met for the initiation of the process in numerous countries. The chapter then considers the ways for debtors to get over distress and the conditions for a distressed debtor to enter insolvency procedures. It also discusses the conditions for the debtor to enter the reorganization process.
Directors’ Duties in the Vicinity of Insolvency, Disqualification, Piercing the Veil
Authors: Mangano Renato
Published: May 2024

This chapter discusses the legal devices that jurisdictions adopt to protect creditors from the limits of limited liability when companies are in the vicinity of insolvency. It explains that limited liability sits at the core of modern business law since it enables the members of an organization to run a firm and, nevertheless, protect their assets from the claims of the firm’s creditors. However, limited liability shifts the risk of business failure from those who invested in a business to the debtor’s creditors and, as a result, becomes toxic when the firm is in the vicinity of insolvency. The chapter deals with the most relevant insolvency law legal devices aiming at protecting creditors in this situation, namely director’s liability in the vicinity of insolvency, director’s disqualification, and piercing the corporate veil. It clarifies that, within this chapter, the term ‘director’ is used regardless of the company’s governance structure.
Cross-Border Insolvency Law
Authors: Bork Reinhard
Published: May 2024

This chapter details the key concepts surrounding cross-border insolvency law. It explains the relevant codifications and the underlying principles. The chapter discusses the issues revolving around insolvency proceedings with cross-border connotations, such as jurisdiction, applicable law, recognition, and administration of proceedings. It also highlights the importance of cooperation of official bodies and coordination of the procedures when dealing with cross-border insolvencies, while simultaneously referencing the rules found in numerous regulations, such as the European Insolvency Regulation and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency.
Democratic Conversion
Authors: Forlenza Rosario , Thomassen Bjørn
Published: May 2024

This chapter deals with the Catholic experiences of World War II, which shattered the fragile balance between Catholic and Fascist identity and convinced many Catholics to take political action. For an important group of Catholics, this meant to join the Resistance. Between 1942 and 1945 the Catholic political milieu became an incubator of proposals for the political and social order of post-Fascist Italy. In a series of documents (such as the Camaldoli Code or the Reconstructive Ideas of Christian Democracy), Catholic thinkers elaborated a platform for a proper Catholic democratic political project in clear discontinuity with the tradition of the church. Under the guidance of Alcide De Gasperi the first and second generations eventually merged in a new party: Democrazia Cristiana.
The Secular Challenge
Authors: Forlenza Rosario , Thomassen Bjørn
Published: May 2024

This chapter examines how the force of secularism dramatically affected Italian society and challenged political Catholicism from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, when Italy was changing alongside urbanization, secularization, consumerism, and sexual modernization. The chapter discusses how Christian Democracy responded to the changing times. Catholic philosopher, Augusto del Noce, emerged as one of the most profound and vocal critics of the emerging secular society, but his views were difficult to reconcile with effective party politics. Aldo Moro and, in a much less effective way, Ciriaco De Mita—a representative of the “third” generation of Christian Democrats—attempted to reform the party, but their projects failed. The chapter is therefore also a story about the progressive decline of Christian Democracy as the hegemonic party that could claim to represent the broader Italian population.
Classics, Love, Revolution
Authors: Capra Andrea , Graziosi Barbara
Published: May 2024

The intervention: Capra and Graziosi address the impact of post-truth politics, the new nationalisms, and gender inequality on the practice of scholarship, taking inspiration from an unlikely find: a tale posing as the work of the imaginary ancient author Aristaeus of Megara, but actually written by the Neapolitan revolutionary and classical scholar Luigi Settembrini (1813–76). The Neoplatonists, a joyous and explicit tale of love between men, as well as between men and women, long remained censored and unpublished to protect the reputation of Settembrini, a founding father of the Italian nation. Offering the first English translation, Capra and Graziosi set this tale in dialogue with Settembrini’s incomplete Memoirs, his Dialogue on Women, his translation of Lucian (written while serving a life sentence in an infamous island prison), his political pamphlets, and several unpublished materials, written by both Settembrini and his wife, the indomitable Gigia Faucitano. Through their historical and literary analysis Capra and Graziosi demonstrate the revolutionary and reparative potential of classical scholarship, arguing that a commitment to social justice and an investment in classical antiquity can—and even should—be rooted in an egalitarian practice of love. Classics, Love, Revolution: The Legacies of Luigi Settembrini demands a reassessment of the history of Italian sexuality, revolutionary thinking, and classical scholarship—while telling an adventurous story of love and resilience along the way.
The Discovery
Authors: Capra Andrea , Graziosi Barbara
Published: May 2024

Capra and Graziosi tell the story of a discovery, or rather a concatenated series of discoveries, that lead them to consider the legacies of one man: the Neapolitan revolutionary and classical scholar Luigi Settembrini (1813–76). In 1937, Prof. Raffaele Cantarella discovered a ‘translation from the Greek’ which, he soon established, was actually the original work of Settembrini. In fascist Italy, he chose not to publish the tale: it would have been damaging, if not downright dangerous, to reveal the national hero Settembrini as the author of sodomitic fantasies. In 1977, when Cantarella did publish The Neoplatonists, Settembrini was transformed from national hero to ‘pederast’ overnight (despite Settembrini’s insistence on equality between lovers, including in age). In 2017, Capra and Graziosi decided to translate the tale into English and take it as inspiration to intervene in a broader debate about post-truth politics, classical scholarship, and social justice.
The Dialogue on Women
Authors: Capra Andrea , Graziosi Barbara
Published: May 2024

Settembrini’s ‘Platonic fictions’ are the subject of Part II; chapter 6 focuses on the early Dialogue on Women. The circumstances in which it was written (during Settembrini’s first incarceration) are documented, as is the influence of Gigia Faucitano on its contents. Like The Neoplatonists, the Dialogue leverages the classical past in order to suggest new bonds of equality, justice, and love. The two works share key concerns, most obviously the intellectual education of women and the sexual education of men. Capra and Graziosi show, for the first time, how closely the Dialogue on Women is structurally modelled on Plato’s Phaedrus (a key text also for The Neoplatonists as they go on to argue in chapter 7). The Dialogue stages a battle between the ancients and the moderns in which Plato’s arguments about the equality of women in the Republic are pitched against the positions of Rousseau, whom Settembrini (rightly) castigates for sacrificing women as collateral in establishing democratic relationships among men.
How to Live and How to Read
Authors: Capra Andrea , Graziosi Barbara
Published: May 2024

This chapter presents Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a way of living. It begins with Settembrini’s legacies. First, his scholarship: the reason why he recognized the significance of Lucian and the Greek novel, identifying in them a popular form of Platonism long before this became recognized in mainstream scholarship, reflects his egalitarian stance in matters political and sexual. His stance also aligns with contemporary insights into the many ways revolutions fail women and ethnic minorities. Settembrini’s view that, in love, ‘those who are strong … are almost always unjust’ also aligns with bell hooks’s ‘without justice there can be no love’. Shame, Sedgwick argues, stems from ‘the incomplete reduction of interest or joy’. It can happen, then, that as readers we are ashamed of our own curiosity and pleasures. Capra and Graziosi expose their own pleasures in discovering Settembrini and show how Settembrini in turn chose to reveal himself.
Knowledge Diffusion by Design
Authors: Thong Christine , Kocsis Anita , Canals Agustí , Liyanage Shantha
Published: May 2024

Chapter 6 explores knowledge diffusion in Big Science, resulting from collaboration with design practices that transform knowledge from Big Science into socially mediated artefacts. Boisot’s I-Space Framework and Social Learning Cycles grounds the exploration build on past research exploring CERN and the ATLAS experiment. Examples from Particle Physics (CERN), Astrophysics (Melbourne Museum), and Dark Matter Particle Physics (Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence) are used as illustrative examples to explain how design-inspired innovation approaches can be utilised to diffuse scientific knowledge for societal impacts. Design practices as elucidated by the chapter offer new possibilities for scientific knowledge diffusion to work across discipline fields and make complex Big Science knowledge accessible to non-scientific domains using design artefacts that may be physical, digital, spatial, object, or experience based.
Big Science, Leadership and Collaboration
Authors: McCarthy Grace , Manset David , Streit-Bianchi Marilena , Skvarciany Viktorija , Liyanage Shantha
Published: May 2024

Chapter 7 explores Big Science leadership style, behaviour, and leadership processes. Using extensive interviews conducted with lead scientists and researchers responsible for managing particle physics organisations such as ATLAS, CMS, LHCb, Alice, and LHC at CERN, Geneva and astrophysics infrastructure such as LIGO, Virgo, and ESO telescope experiments, authors examined the key features of Big Science leadership characteristics and processes. Big Science gives rise to direct and distant leadership (i.e. in various institutes disseminated around the world) and deals with multidisciplinary competences. Using key examples of how leadership is enacted at CERN and ESO, authors examine how Big Science leadership leads the world’s most expensive and science-rich facilities that support a creative, multitasking, and dedicated technically dedicated workforce. The models of leadership practices in Big Science organisations are critically examined. The chapter explains how Big Science organisations lead and manage infrastructure to generate reliable scientific knowledge for next generation groundbreaking discoveries and innovation.
The Future of Big Science and Social Impacts
Authors: Liyanage Shantha , Nordberg Markus , Streit-Bianchi Marilena
Published: May 2024

Chapter 15 brings together a synthesis of how Big Science links with social and economic progress. It discusses how collaborative forces can bring together to extend Big Science as an international asset that can resolve fundamental questions of humankind. The need for a more systematic way of analysing Big Science initiatives and connecting with society is suggested by proposing a Collaborative Innovation Framework (COIF). The key lessons and take-away messages are identified in this chapter and the key tenet of this book is identified as a new way of thinking about Big Science as a social process that must be based on the due considerations of the collaborative powers of humankind to share, nurture, converge, and trust knowledge for social construction. The overall summary of the message is that the role of Big Science, apart from its contributions to scientific triumphant in fundamental knowledge, towards human-centric approach with humanistic-based economic principles for social good through human collaboration, trust, sharing, and solving complexity-driven characteristics.
Secession and International Law
Authors: González Campañá Núria
Published: May 2024

This chapter explores the regulation of secession by international law. The International Court of Justice stated in 2010 that there is no general prohibition against unilateral declarations of independence. As for the right to secede under international law, apart from the right to self-determination of colonies or territories subject to alien domination and exploitation, there is no positive entitlement to secession. Scholars discuss if under extreme circumstances a region can be entitled to a similar right, the so called ‘remedial secession’. However, the ICJ stated that there is not enough consensus. In sum, sub-national entities within Member States cannot qualify for a right to secede under international law. If there was ever a situation of gross human rights violations in a certain EU region, we would need to revert to Article 7 TEU. Save for this far-fetched situation, there is under international law no right to secede for EU regions.
EU Approach to Secession and Secessionist Challenges: Precedents, Statements, and Reactions
Authors: González Campañá Núria
Published: May 2024

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the main question of this book with empirical data, namely to identify the policies of the EU and EU Member States with regard to secession. The initial focus will be on those situations concerning territorial changes that occurred within EU Member States: the independence of Algeria, the withdrawal of Greenland, and the reunification of Germany. Second, the case of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the EU attitude towards it since its declaration of independence will be considered. Next, the chapter examines the experiences of the countries born right after, or immediately before, the crumbling of the Soviet Union. Some lessons drawn from these experiences might tell us something relevant about EU and secession. Finally, the chapter reviews the official statements and reactions to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 and the 2017 Catalan crisis.
Introduction
Authors: Dunlop Emma
Published: May 2024

Chapter 1 sets out the importance of access to courts for asylum seekers and refugees and the practical and legal hindrances that they may face when attempting to access courts. It argues that while access to courts is of general importance, it is particularly significant for asylum seekers and refugees for three reasons. First, the ability to access the courts in a country of refuge is intrinsically linked to recognition as a person before the law, capable of possessing both obligations and rights. Second, there are inherent challenges in enforcing asylum seekers’ and refugees’ rights at the international level. Third, ensuring access to courts facilitates the development of international refugee law. The chapter also addresses practical challenges for States. It then sets out the structure of the book; the key conclusions reached in each chapter; and issues that fall outside the book’s scope. A note on methodology is also included.
The Development of Article 16 of the 1951 Convention
Authors: Dunlop Emma
Published: May 2024

Chapter 4 gives an overview of clauses guaranteeing aliens access to courts in early commercial treaties, as well as those included in earlier refugee instruments. It then sets out the historical background to the adoption of the 1951 Convention, before moving to analysis of the travaux préparatoires. It sets out debates on article 16, then investigates why the travaux préparatoires are silent on refugee status determination (RSD) and what can be gleaned from discussions on related provisions. The purpose of this examination is not to defend a conclusive interpretation of article 16, but rather to situate the provision in its historical context, to illuminate its perceived purpose and scope, and to provide insights into why the travaux préparatoires are silent on certain issues.
The Argument
Authors: Frantz Erica , Kendall-Taylor Andrea , Wright Joseph
Published: May 2024

This chapter articulates the book’s theory linking personalist parties to the undermining of democracy. It posits that personalist parties are structured in ways that reduce the party’s incentive and capacity to constrain the leader. Consistent with these theoretical assumptions, it demonstrates that personalist parties tend to feature elites with less party and governing experience, resulting in a loyal cadre of actors whose careers depend more on the leader and less on the party. Leaders of personalist parties are also more likely to control party resources and nominations, resulting in parties with weaker local organizations. As a result, cabinet appointee tenures are shorter when leaders’ support parties are personalist, suggesting that partisan cabinet elites are unlikely to challenge a personalist leader’s agenda. These patterns are consistent with the book’s expectation that personalist parties have less incentive and capacity to push back against a leader who attempts to expand executive control.
Institutional Pathways
Authors: Frantz Erica , Kendall-Taylor Andrea , Wright Joseph
Published: May 2024

This chapter documents the harmful impact of personalist parties on institutional checks on the executive. It first discusses the factors explaining the maintenance of executive constraints in democracies and how these factors diminish with ruling party personalism. It then shows that because personalist parties lack the incentive and capacity to restrain leaders’ attempts to grab power, constraints on the executive weaken when these parties win office. Specifically, it finds that ruling party personalism decreases the chance that leaders will face constraints in the state’s legislative, judicial, and bureaucratic institutions. Importantly, the whittling away of executive constraints brought on by party personalism is even worse when the leader’s party has a large legislative majority. This suggests that personalist parties do little to stand in the way of a power-seeking leader’s agenda. By weakening executive constraints, ruling party personalism opens the door for subsequent actions that culminate in the deterioration of democracy.
Global Health: On Disadvantage
Authors: Glanville Luke , Pattison James
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers the importance of assisting those who are most disadvantaged, focusing on the context of global health. It argues that states ought to prioritize health measures that will assist the most underprivileged, even if these measures will not always save the most lives. It then considers what this means for two of the main issues currently facing states. The first is whether states should prioritize communicable diseases (e.g. malaria, tuberculosis, and cholera), which are often viewed as diseases of the global poor, or non-communicable diseases (e.g. heart disease and cancer), which are often viewed as diseases of middle- and high-income countries. The second is whether states should prioritize pandemic prevention over other health initiatives and, in particular, whether this might be justified nonideally, even if seemingly suboptimal.
Global Poverty: On Culpability
Authors: Glanville Luke , Pattison James
Published: May 2024

This chapter considers to what extent, if at all, states should prioritize addressing issues beyond their borders for which they are culpable, focusing on the issue of giving bilateral aid to address poverty. Although those culpable for global harms should contribute more to the fulfilment of global responsibilities, the chapter argues that states should not look to the principle of culpability when considering how to allocate their resources. In doing so, it rejects arguments for culpability that invoke associative duties and relational ties. It also argues that although looking to culpability might sometimes encourage states to contribute more towards fulfilling global responsibilities, there are significant dangers with permitting states to prioritize their aid on this nonideal basis.
Introduction
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: May 2024

The introduction sums up the purpose and contents of the book, framing what follows. It explains the value of close attention to verse-craft in reading, and it gestures towards the book’s interests in craft, pleasure, and tangibility. The rough chronological limits of Middle English and early Scots are described, and the case for the inclusion of Scots poetry is briefly made. The discussion outlines how poems and poets were selected, and where accessible editions of relevant works can be found. Finally, it describes how readers can use key tools such as verse indexes, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Middle English Dictionary.
Wording
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: May 2024

This chapter explains how readers can study word-choice in Middle English poetry. It introduces the concepts of etymology, register, and the distinction between open- and closed-class words. It outlines four important sources of Middle English words, Old English, French, Latin, and Old Norse. Examples in the study of wording in poetry are offered from Terrance Hayes, Sir Orfeo, the early Middle English poem ‘The Grave’, and a sustained discussion of an anonymous fifteenth-century lyric. The chapter’s final section explains fifteenth-century aureation, illustrated in part from the Scots poet William Dunbar.
Phrasing
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: May 2024

Middle English and early Scots poets, like any writers in any era, fitted words together into clauses and clauses together into bigger frameworks: the business of syntax. This chapter explores these matters of order. An opening discussion takes as an example the beginning of Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes. The chapter then considers the how verse form and syntax interacted in both alternating-metre and alliterative verse, with attention to rhyme-breaking, open and closed rhyme structures, and poetic lists. Finally, the chapter examines subordination, and contrasts the different uses and purposes of hypotaxis and parataxis in John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebesand in Sir Orfeo.
Metre (II): Alliterative Verse
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: May 2024

This chapter introduces alliterative verse, which coexisted alongside alternating metres as another family of metrical approaches. Half-lines, lifts, and dips long and short are defined and illustrated, and the chapter briefly models the use of metrically informed close reading using a passage from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Then the chapter describes how alliteration itself fits into alliterative verse and pauses to consider how poets used alliteration in alternating metres too. The special alliterative lexis common in Middle English alliterative verse is identified. A section explores early Middle English alliterative verse, especially Layamon’s Brut, and the final section discusses alliterative-stanzaic poems.
Rhyme
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: May 2024

Though rhyme often defines present-day ideas of English poetry for non-specialists, Old English only used rhyme locally, and regular rhyme emerged during the Middle English period. Some techniques used to read modern rhymes work just as well with earlier poetry. Readers can, though, learn about particular rhyme-habits of the time. The chapter outlines specific rhyme types and techniques: through-rhyme; masculine and feminine rhymes; perfect and imperfect rhymes; autorhyme and punning rhyme; filler rhyme; and elective rhyme in otherwise unrhymed alliterative verse. A coda observes how blank verse was independently invented at least twice during the Middle English period, earlier than its more well-known codification in the sixteenth century.
Grander Designs
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: May 2024

Early poetry, like modern poetry, has formal features which operate at a larger scale than the stanza. This chapter explores the larger-scale features and models most common in Middle English and early Scots verse. It covers concatenation, refrains, run-on stanzas, and carols and their burdens. The ‘fixed forms’ of the roundel and the balladeare described. Changes in the forms of longer poems invite readers to consider shape poetry, variations in stanza-form, and the use of inset lyrics, exemplified by works such as the Cursor Mundi, Chaucer, Robert Henryson, Lydgate, and John Metham. Closing remarks point out the experimental energy of much poetry in these centuries and note John Metham’s accidental fifteenth-century Shakespearean sonnet.
Craft in an Unfixed Time
Authors: Sawyer Daniel
Published: May 2024

The epilogue rearranges the verse covered in the book as a whole back into a chronological narrative, from 1150 to 1500, to balance the non-chronological treatment of the topic necessary in the book as a whole. The time around 1400 is picked out as perhaps the hinge or pivot of the whole history of English poetry, the moment of the greatest potential and variety. The chapter reviews and emphasizes the uncentredness and possibility of early poetry: in its distribution, whether in writing or performance; in its lack of strong linguistic norms; and in the absence of a dominant prestige form. The task of reading early poetry is passed on to the book’s readers.
Intentional Anti-Realism I
Authors: Horowitz Amir
Published: May 2024

Chapter 5 presents the negative thesis of intentional anti-realism, according to which there can be no intentional states and content ascriptions, in themselves, lack truth conditions. The chapter begins by drawing together, from the preceding chapters, the threads of an argument for this thesis. The elements of the positive thesis are then developed. Among them is the idea that content ascriptions have practice-dependent truth conditions. Another is the claim that mental states that are standardly considered intentional exist along with most of the properties that are standardly attributed to them, but absent intentional properties and, thus, absent representational truth values. A notion of thick logico-syntactic structure is developed, and it is argued that, due to having such structures, mental states can be true (or epistemically “adequate,” in a coherentist, or coherentist-pragmatist, sense). Nonetheless, content ascriptions cannot be true (or adequate) even in this sense; they lie outside the field of knowledge.
The Problem of Evil for Atheists
Authors: Nagasawa Yujin
Published: May 2024

The problem of evil has long perplexed traditional theists: why do terrible events, such as crimes, wars, and natural disasters, occur in a world believed to be created by an omnipotent and wholly good God? The Problem of Evil for Atheists offers a fresh perspective that seeks to transform the perennial philosophical debate on this matter. This book contends that the problem of evil surpasses its conventional understanding, not only impacting traditional theists but also posing a challenge for atheists and other ‘non-theists’, including pantheists, axiarchists, and followers of Eastern religious traditions. Moreover, the book posits that traditional theists, who typically embrace some form of supernaturalism, are better equipped to address the problem than naturalist atheists/non-theists because the only potentially successful response requires supernaturalism. Conversely, the book suggests that if atheists/non-theists can develop a successful naturalist response, traditional theists can also adopt it. Thus, it concludes that traditional theists are better positioned than atheists/non-theists to grapple with the problem—an unexpected assertion, given that the problem of evil is normally viewed as an argument against traditional theism and in favour of atheism/non-theism. The Problem of Evil for Atheists presents a comprehensive defence of a fundamentally new approach to tackling the age-old philosophical conundrum. By challenging the conventional perspective, it endeavours to reshape our understanding and interpretation of evil in a profound manner.
The Problem of Evil as a Problem of Axiological Expectation Mismatch
Authors: Nagasawa Yujin
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that the problem of evil is much deeper than it is normally conceived to be because the core is relevant not only to traditional theists but also to proponents of many alternative views. To defend this view, the chapter purports to show that the problem of evil is a specific version of a broader conundrum, the ‘problem of axiological expectation mismatch’. First, the chapter presents a relatively facile way of showing that being a traditional theist is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being a target of the problem of evil. It then presents a more substantial way of showing how the problem of evil poses a challenge for atheists/non-theists as well as traditional theists. Finally, the chapter explains that existing theistic responses to the problem of evil can be understood as attempts to resolve an ‘axiological expectation mismatch’ which the problem of evil raises.
The Problem of Evil for Pantheists
Authors: Nagasawa Yujin
Published: May 2024

This chapter provides an overview of alternatives to traditional theism, including panentheism, pantheism, axiarchism, and atheism, and explains how each view interprets the relationship between God (or the absence of God) and the world. It then develops a version of the problem of evil, the ‘divinity problem of evil’, which arises for both pantheism and traditional theism. The chapter critically discusses an attempt to save pantheism and traditional theism from the problem by appealing to an experiential approach to divinity and argues that it is available to traditional theists but not to pantheists. It then focuses on ‘multiverse pantheism’, a novel form of pantheism which mitigates many shortcomings of standard pantheism. The chapter concludes, however, that even multiverse pantheism, unlike traditional theism, cannot avoid a certain version of the divinity problem of evil.
The Problem of Impermanence
Authors: Nagasawa Yujin
Published: May 2024

This chapter argues that the problem of evil arises not only for traditional theists and non-theists in the Western tradition but also for followers of non-theistic Eastern traditions. It focuses on the Japanese literature in the Kamakura period (1185–1333), especially Kamo no Chōmei’s work Hōjōki (1212), which describes pain and suffering people experienced in catastrophes in Kyoto in that period and explains how the Japanese observed and reacted to them. The chapter argues that, contrary to initial appearances, pain and suffering in the midst of disasters are not the main concerns of Chōmei or other Japanese thinkers; their main concern is rather the ephemerality or transience of our existence, which leads us to the ‘problem of impermanence’. The chapter argues that this problem of impermanence is a version of the problem of systemic evil, even though it does not address the system of natural selection or evolution.