bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Perceptual Knowledge and the Primacy of Judgement
Authors: Stroud Barry
Published: July 2018

This chapter argues that judgement, or belief, is the key to understanding the possibility of perceptual knowledge. It suggests that any adequate account of human perception should explain, at least in general, how our perceiving what we do can give us the kind of knowledge we all know we have of the world around us. Awareness of things, even repeated awareness of things of the same kind, does not on its own give you the resources for having beliefs about them that are either true or false. To understand how perception can provide us with knowledge we must understand the connection between what we perceive and the possibility of thought and belief about what we perceive. This chapter contends that being capable of judgement is a condition of knowing something about the world by perception.
Unmasking and Dispositionalism
Authors: Stroud Barry
Published: July 2018

This chapter presents a response to Mark Johnston’s ‘Subjectivism and Unmasking’, which was directed at the author’s book, The Quest for Reality. Johnston defends an ontological account of what colours are and explains how, on that view, it could be true that no colours belong to the everyday objects we perceive in the world. The author’s resistance to the subjectivity of colour perceptions and beliefs turns rather on the proper understanding of colour terms as predicates ascribing colours to objects, and not as names or terms referring to the colours. The chapter explains the main assumptions of the ‘Ramsey/Lewis’ theory of colour. It also considers how the complex relations we understand to hold among the contents of perception, thought, and belief stand as a challenge to all forms of dispositionalism.
Are the Colours of Things Secondary Qualities?
Authors: Stroud Barry
Published: July 2018

This chapter challenges the notion that the colours we believe to belong to the objects we see are ‘secondary’ qualities of those objects. Such a notion is endorsed by John McDowell, who has explained why he thinks the author is wrong to resist it. McDowell recognizes that the author’s focus on the conditions of successfully unmasking the metaphysical status of the colours of things is a way of trying to make sense of whatever notion of reality is involved in it. However, the author argues that the notion of reality he is concerned with is ‘independent reality’, not simply the general notion of reality. He also contends that an exclusively dispositional conception of an object’s being a certain colour cannot account for the perceptions we have of the colours of things.
Davidson and Wittgenstein on Meaning and Understanding
Authors: Stroud Barry
Published: July 2018

This chapter examines the views of Donald Davidson and Ludwig Wittgenstein on meaning and understanding. It argues arguing that the two philosophers are in agreement regarding this matter despite the different starting-points from which they reached it. In particular, it considers Davidson’s account of meaning and its formal parallels with Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning as use. Both Davidson and Wittgenstein assert that there can be nothing more to an expression’s meaning what it does than its being used in certain ways by speakers, and nothing more to speakers’ understanding an expression than their responding or being ready to respond to it in certain distinctive ways in interacting with others and with the shared world around them. The chapter also discusses Davidson and Wittgenstein’s claim that ostension is important not only in learning language but also for what the words one learns mean.
Time Biases
Authors: Sullivan Meghan
Published: July 2018

You are time-biased if you have systematic preferences about when events happen. There are different varieties of time bias. Near-biased agents discount events as they are scheduled further in the future. Future-biased agents discount events because they have already occurred. This book argues that it is irrational to be time-biased. In the process it develops the theory of temporal neutrality for rational planning. The first part (Chapters 1–4) describes two arguments against near bias: one based on well-being and one based on arbitrariness. It also develops a theory of egoistic concern. The second part (Chapters 5–7) argues that structurally similar arguments can be mounted against future bias. In the process it diagnoses issues we have understanding and measuring past discounting. The final part (Chapters 8–11) explains why we are time-biased and shows how the theory of temporal neutrality can help us determine when to stick to our past commitments, how to value an afterlife, and how to discover meaning in life even if we cannot make a permanent difference in the world.
Preferences about the Past
Authors: Sullivan Meghan
Published: July 2018

The received wisdom is do not bother yourself with things you cannot change, most notably the past. This chapter introduces the concept of future bias and considers some difficulties we have in conceptualizing past‐directed discounting. First, the chapter models various past discounting functions by considering cases (e.g., Parfit’s Surgery case). It argues that psychologically realistic future discount functions for pains and pleasuresmust be absolute. Next, the chapter argues against a control constraint on preferences. It also appeals to Dougherty’s Pain Insurance case to argue that we can evaluate preferences over a set of choices or preferences rather than only relative to particular choices.
Understanding Temporal Neutrality
Authors: Sullivan Meghan
Published: July 2018

This chapter provides an error theory for why our time biases are persistent even though irrational. It also explains what a temporally neutral approach to rational planning does and does not require. Drawing on work in the philosophy and psychology of emotions, the chapter defends an evolved emotional heuristic theory of temporal discounting. On this account, near-biased anxiety and relief are adaptations for tracking probabilities. Similar future‐biased emotions are adaptions explained by the benefit of focusingmore attention onwhat iswithin an organism’s control. While these emotions are useful in simple planning problems, they are not evidence that time biases are rational. The chapter argues that temporal neutrality does not entail that one must live stoically or dwell on past events. And it outlines five practical consequences of temporally neutral planning.
Introduction
Authors: Sullivan Meghan
Published: July 2018

This introduction states key concepts used in the book. First, it defines time biases as systematic preferences about when events happen. Next, it describes the kind of rationality at issue in the book: prudential approbative rationality. This kind of rationality governs what we should approve of or prefer given our self‐interest. On this approach to rationality, preferences are the sorts of attitudes that we can and should support with reasons. Finally, the introduction discusses three principles for rational planning needed for the book’s arguments: (1) Consistency: a prudentially rational agent doesn’t prefer logically inconsistent states of affairs; (2) Success: at any given time, a prudentially rational agent prefers her life going forward to go as well as possible; and (3) Non‐Arbitrariness: at any given time, a prudentially rational agent’s preferences are insensitive to arbitrary differences.
Are Body and Extension the Same Thing?
Authors: Downing Lisa
Published: July 2018

This chapter focuses on Locke’s attempts to prove in the Essay II. xiii. 11–14 that we have distinct ideas of body and of extension. The goal is both to evaluate this anti-Cartesian foray, and to use it to reflect on some intriguing and abstruse elements of Descartes’s ontology of body. The chapter shows that Locke’s engagement with Descartes goes surprisingly deep on this issue. It illustrates how many of Locke’s points on space, extension, and solidity are clarified by seeing them as responding to Descartes’s correspondence with More, in which Descartes specifically says that impenetrability results from extension.
Modes and Composite Material Things According to Descartes and Locke
Authors: Bolton Martha Brandt
Published: July 2018

This chapter deals with the ontology of bodies in Locke’s Essay. In Descartes’s ontology, a created substance, or its principal attribute, unifies the many modes that belong to that substance; by contrast, Locke’s ontology includes not only substances and their qualities, but also composite entities which contain substances but are unified by modes. Locke, it is argued, seeks to adapt the apparent unity of living things, e.g. oaks, horses, and human beings, to the (Cartesian) mechanistic doctrine that matter is a substance. His concepts of inner constitution and identity are designed to give a metaphysical account of the unity of the ordinary entities that are salient in our experience. There is nothing corresponding to this in the Cartesian texts. They purport to explain the unity among qualities of mercury, salt, etc., and the processes carried on by plants and animals on the basis of physical theory, not metaphysics.
Virtual Existence of Ideas and Real Existence
Authors: Haumesser Matthieu
Published: July 2018

The chapter considers the concept of ‘existence’ as it is variously applied in Locke to the objects of sensation (the ‘real existence’ of things) and to the objects of reflection (the ‘fleeting existence’ of ideas). It shows that Locke, in order to construct his own ontology and typology of simple ideas and modes, is both using and subverting the Cartesian ontology of substance and modes. Ideas, as ‘immediate objects of perception’, exist in the mind, but not substantially. This in turn sheds light on the differences between Locke’s and Descartes’s doctrines of ideas, especially on the question of ‘objective reality’, which played a strategic part in the Third Meditation, as well as in the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche.
Locke and Malebranche
Authors: Jolley Nicholas
Published: July 2018

This chapter addresses the issue of whether Locke’s own empiricist theory of ideas offers, as Locke often suggested, a more intelligible way of explaining human understanding than Malebranche’s doctrine of Vision in God. Drawing on Locke’s statements about the corpuscularian hypothesis, it argues that although the empiricist theory may satisfy some criteria of intelligibility, it is forced to recognize the existence of processes that are ‘incomprehensible’; to that extent, Locke’s theory of ideas runs parallel with his mature philosophy of matter. The epistemic status of the empiricist theory of ideas is thus more problematic than it is often taken to be.
Agential Thinking and its Rationale
Authors: Okasha Samir
Published: July 2018

Evolutionary biologists often use the language of intentional psychology in an extended or metaphorical sense. This is a symptom of agential thinking, the practice of invoking concepts such as interests, goals, and strategies in evolutionary analysis. Agential thinking comes in two types. In type 1, the agent with the goal is an evolved entity, typically an individual organism. In type 2, the agent is the evolutionary process itself, often personified as ‘mother nature’. Agential thinking of type 2 is misleading. That of type 1 is a valid expression of adaptationist assumptions, but it relies on a crucial presupposition. It presumes that the organism exhibits a unity-of-purpose, in that all of its evolved traits must contribute to a single overall goal. Where this unity fails to obtain, as for example if there is within-organism conflict, it becomes impossible to treat an organism as akin to a rational agent pursuing a goal.
Wright’s Adaptive Landscape, Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem
Authors: Okasha Samir
Published: July 2018

Fitness maximization, or optimization, is a controversial idea in evolutionary biology. One classical formulation of this idea is that natural selection will tend to push a population up a peak in an adaptive landscape, as Sewall Wright first proposed. However, the hill-climbing property only obtains under particular conditions, and even then the ascent is not usually by the steepest route; this shows why it is misleading to assimilate the process of natural selection to a process of goal-directed choice. A different formulation of the idea of fitness-maximization is R. A. Fisher’s ‘fundamental theorem of natural selection’. However, the theorem points only to a weak sense in which selection is an optimizing process, for it requires that ‘environmental constancy’ be understood in a highly specific way. It does not vindicate the claim that natural selection has an intrinsic tendency to produce adaptation.
Can Adaptiveness and Rationality Part Ways?
Authors: Okasha Samir
Published: July 2018

Given the abstract parallel between fitness and utility, it is natural to think that adaptive behaviour and rational behaviour will typically coincide, as many authors assume. However, a series of arguments, found in the philosophy, behavioural ecology, and economics literatures, suggest that in some cases the adaptive and the rational can part ways: evolution favours behaviours that violate the principles of rational choice. These ‘parting-of-ways’ arguments pose a challenge to agential thinking in biology—that is, to the idea that an evolved organism can be treated as akin to a rational agent pursuing a goal. However, in many cases the parting may be eliminated by suitable choice of utility function or fitness measure, or by reframing the decision problem.
Achievements and Intelligibility
Authors: Lord Errol
Published: July 2018

The type of view defended about correctly responding to normative reasons doesn’t fit nicely into the landscape of views in the philosophy of mind and action about reacting for reasons. This is because it doesn’t account for cases where we react for reasons that are not normative reasons—i.e., cases where we merely react for motivating reasons. This chapter defends a view about what it is to react for motivating reasons. According to this view, what it is for A to X for a consideration r is for A to X in virtue of the fact that A conceives of r as a normative reason to X. It is argued that this account solves the classic deviant causal chain problems for causal theories of reacting for reasons. Finally, disjunctivism about reacting-for-reasons is defended: the view that reacting for motivating reasons is different in kind from reacting for normative reasons.
Defeating the Externalist’s Demons
Authors: Lord Errol
Published: July 2018

This chapter is about the New Evil Demon problem for externalist accounts of rationality. The New Evil Demon problem plagues views that hold that what is rational is not solely determined by internal states of the agent. To solve the New Evil Demon problem one has to show that internal state duplicates—agents who share all (and only) the same internal states—always share the same rational status. This chapter argues that Reasons Responsiveness can solve the New Evil Demon problem. It is argued that even though not all internal state duplicates share the same reasons, they do always share the same rational status. The chapter also argues that Reasons Responsiveness solves several problems related to the New Evil Demon problem. These include problems about getting knowledge from falsehoods, non-veridical perceptual justification, and a problem about reacting to reasons I call the New New Evil Demon problem.
Orbits
Authors: Saha Prasenjit , Taylor Paul A.
Published: July 2018

Astronomy and recording of the motion of celestial objects are ancient practices, but what is now called astrophysics arguably began with Newtonian gravity and the concept of orbits as dynamical phenomena. This chapter provides a modern perspective on the early problems of gravitational dynamics, from Kepler’s laws up to the virial theorem for an arbitrary number of gravitating bodies. Even a simple gravitating system with only two bodies turns out to have many interesting features, such as the gravitational capture of material by protoplanets. The study of orbital motions also includes applications to observing extrasolar planets and stars near the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Celestial Mechanics
Authors: Saha Prasenjit , Taylor Paul A.
Published: July 2018

Celestial mechanics abounds in interesting and counter-intuitive phenomena, such as descriptions of mass transfer between stars or optimal placements of satellites within the Solar System. Remarkably, many such features are already present in the restricted three-body problem, whose assumptions still allow for analytical understanding, and to which the second chapter is devoted. This ‘simplified’ system is discussed first in terms of forces (both gravitational and fictitious), and then using the Hamiltonian form. As well as traditional topics like stable and unstable Lagrange points and Roche lobes, a brief introduction to chaotic orbits is given. Additionally, readers are guided towards exploring on their own with numerical orbit integration.
Schwarzschild’s Spacetime
Authors: Saha Prasenjit , Taylor Paul A.
Published: July 2018

The concept of a metric is motivated and introduced, along with the introduction of relativistic quantities of spacetime, proper time, and Einstein’s field equations. Geodesics are cast in basic form as a Hamiltonian dynamical problem, which readers are guided towards exploring numerically themselves. The specific case of the Schwarzschild metric is presented, which is applicable to space around non-rotating black holes, and orbital motion around such objects is contrasted with that of Newtonian systems. Some well-known formulas for black hole phenomena are derived, such as those for light deflection (also known as gravitational lensing) and the innermost stable orbit, and their consequences discussed.
Interlude: Quantum Ideal Gases
Authors: Saha Prasenjit , Taylor Paul A.
Published: July 2018

The previous chapters having been about purely gravitational and orbital phenomena alone, this chapter introduces microphysical processes and relevant quantities. Adaptive conversions between units have already appeared in previous chapters, and now Planckian units are introduced for convenience in writing formulas, and the conversion to and from standard SI is explained. Planckian units continue to be used throughout the rest of the book. While the topic of quantum ideal gases (a photon gas, a degenerate electron gas, and of course a classical gas) is standard material in physics classes, they are briefly presented here, in an especially concise way using Planckian units. The physics at these tiny scales will be key in determining the macroscopic behaviour of stars and stellar objects in subsequent chapters.
The Main Sequence of Stars
Authors: Saha Prasenjit , Taylor Paul A.
Published: July 2018

This chapter introduces the basics of radiative transfer, which is a primary energy-transport mechanism inside stars, and also contributes to keeping stars ‘inflated’ and balanced against gravity. The roles of opacity and cross-sections in scattering photons are described. With the help of some drastic but still insightful approximations, the luminosity of a star can be related to its mass, and its surface temperature to its interior temperature. Not all types of stars are covered with analytical approximations, and only the simplest cases are studied here: the high-mass main sequence stars where radiation-pressure dominates, and the intermediate mass range that includes the Sun, where gas pressure dominates but convection is not yet important.
Introduction
Authors: Vandrei Martha
Published: July 2018

This chapter introduces the reader to the story of Boudica, beginning in the early modern period. It also introduces what is meant by ‘historical culture’, and discusses the manner in which these two themes open up wider questions about the creative processes inherent in reconstructing the past. It discusses the distinction between approaches to the history of history, including memory and public history, as well as the existing scholarly literature about Boudica’s posthumous reputation. It goes on to argue that historical ideas are the product of complex, individualized processes, through which scholars can move beyond an understanding of the past as epiphenomenal to any single present. It establishes the argument, methodology, and audience for the book, noting in particular the way in which historical culture encourages a renewed focus on the importance of ‘truth’ in understanding the past’s relationship to successive presents.
‘They that write to all, must strive to please all’
Authors: Vandrei Martha
Published: July 2018

This chapter compares the approaches to Boudica taken in the emerging history market of the late seventeenth century, against the backdrop of the emerging national narrative. It explores the relationship between historical fact, dramatic and poetic fictionalization, and the appeal to wider audiences in the period following the Restoration. It argues that authors who wrote about Boudica were fully aware of the permeable boundaries between historical fact and fictional accounts, and that they consciously exceeded these as a means of appealing to a wider range of readers and viewers. This awareness by early modern writers of the relationship between ‘true’ history and its fictionalized aspects—and the openness with which this was shared with readers—suggests the inherent complexity of historical production. This chapter further argues that the scholarly focus on the relationship between history and the novel has somewhat overshadowed the more enduring links between history and drama.
‘That ubiquitous monarch’
Authors: Vandrei Martha
Published: July 2018

This chapter extends the chronology to the first half of the twentieth century, when Boudica emerged as a figure in modern popular culture, particularly in film. But she also acted as an embodiment of local history and identity, once again puncturing the notion that she was merely an icon of empire with no specific ‘site of memory’. Rather, this chapter shows how Boudica came to be associated most notably with the historical narrative of Wales—though not unproblematically. She was also associated with more local histories, in the east of England, where her story was celebrated through the medium of historical pageants. These forms of historical culture show the persistence of history as a form of popular narrative, particularly in the crossovers between early modern drama and twentieth-century film and pageantry. Thus this chapter argues for the localized nature of historical culture, and for Boudica’s geographic and chronological persistence.
Conclusion
Authors: Vandrei Martha
Published: July 2018

This chapter summarizes the major conceptual points the book seeks to draw out, while also providing a more sustained rumination on the implications of the book’s content and approach for the practice of history in the present day. It seeks to draw together discussions of history, popular culture, and the role of the historical profession, and touches on recent debates within the academy. It also brings out some of the key points for further research which an examination of Boudica and historical culture reveals, particularly the relationship between history and drama, as well as the under-studied area of eighteenth-century historical culture more generally.
Introduction and survey of scholarship
Authors: Lee Jongkyung
Published: July 2018

In this introductory chapter, a hypothesis is put forward that a series of programmatic additions were made to the oracles against the nations in Isa 13-23 by the same circle of writers who were responsible for putting together chs 40-55 in the late-exilic period. Various views on the formation of chs 13-23 are surveyed because many critics suspect that there was a merger between a series of oracles belonging to the Isaiah tradition and an extra-Isaianic collection of oracles against the nations sometime in the post-exilic period – a theory that a priori negates the present study’s proposal. There are, however, not a few who prefer to envisage a more gradual growth of materials found in chs 13-23 and it is such an approach that this study adopts and attempts to build on.
Zion should receive the outcasts of Moab (Isaiah 16:1–4a)
Authors: Lee Jongkyung
Published: July 2018

In this chapter, the results of a comparative study of the two parallel texts Isa 15-16 and Jer 48, together with the contrasts in style and subject matter between Isa 16:1-5 and the surrounding poem, suggest that 16:1-5 was not part of the original poem about Moab. The sudden 1st person YHWH speech in 15:9b and the clear example of reapplication of an older oracle in 16:13-14 came from one editor sometime during the Neo-Babylonian period before Moab ceased to be a meaningful political force, who understood the original poem to have been in two parts. 16:4b-5 is characterized as an expectation for a future priestly Davidic Messiah, a hope which was more common in the post-exilic period, and it is in 16:1-4a that the vision of 14:1-2 is found to have been applied to the oracle against Moab.
Introducing the theme of YHWH’s plan against the nations (Isaiah 14:26–27)
Authors: Lee Jongkyung
Published: July 2018

In this chapter, 14:26-27 is identified as an expansion on the whole of 14:4b-25a and not just 14:24-25a. In support of the hypothesis of the present study, striking similarities in language and thought between 14:26-27 and chs 40-49 are observed. YHWH would give Cyrus his chosen vessel victory over the powerful and pompous nations all but for the sake of his people Israel. This was the idea the supposed late-exilic redactor wished to express through 14:26-27 in conjunction with 14:1-4a. Although YHWH’s plan is worldwide in scale, the imminent fall of Babylon is especially in the background of 14:26-27 as indicated by the redactional setting in 14:4a.
A Conceptualist Account of Essences
Authors: Newlands Samuel
Published: July 2018

Chapter five argues for two main interpretive theses about Spinoza’s account of essences: (a) that the essence of a thing is its degree of explanatory power and (b) that the explanatory power of a thing can vary, depending on how it is conceived, both across and within attributes. Putting these two theses together, what constitutes the essence of a thing for Spinoza is sensitive to the manner in which that thing is conceived, both within and across attributes. When combined with the results of previous chapters, it follows that each thing has infinitely many essences, both within and across attributes.
Ethics, Motivation, and Egoism
Authors: Newlands Samuel
Published: July 2018

To show how this metaphysical machinery intersects with Spinoza’s ethics, chapter seven begins with a fresh account of what the author calls Spinoza’s psychological ethics, a series of descriptive claims about human desires that underwrites his metaethics. It is further argued that moral motivation for Spinoza is based on an agent’s intrinsic, appetite-based motivation for fundamental desire satisfaction. Most importantly, when this account of moral motivation is combined with his conceptualist metaphysics, Spinoza has a distinctive way of showing how moral agents can have self-interested, non-prudential moral motives to pursue the interests of others. This proposed reconciliation of Spinoza’s ethical egoism with other-regarding interests turns on his conceptualist account of how moral agents are individuated, thereby revealing just how deeply his ethics draws on his conceptualist metaphysics.
Before Discipline
Authors: Hamilton John T.
Published: July 2018

If a discipline rests on a canonical body of knowledge to be learned, understood, and mastered, if it marks out a cognitive space that has been delineated by a particular horizon, then philology—and, by extension, philosophy—may be located more at the margins of these disciplinary sites. Perhaps it would be more correct to regard both philology and philosophy as pre-disciplines, as modes of free but rational questioning that comprise the conditions of possibility for authorized, regulated, disciplinary work. To illustrate, the present article turns to Pascal Quignard’s essayistic reflections as an example of a philological approach that concerns the pre- or proto-semantic production of meaning, focusing in particular on the figure of the horizon and on the concept of the aorist that inheres in the French jadis.
Minus opus moveo
Authors: McGill Scott
Published: July 2018

This chapter examines a set of verse argumenta, or plot summaries, of Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as a pseudepigraphic verse preface to the argumenta in which the author adopts the role of Ovid. These texts are documents of reception: the preface shows how its author is responding to Ovid’s and Virgil’s poetry and how he is constructing his version of literary history, while the argumenta recast Virgil’s poem by miniaturizing it and reuse his language often in a manner akin to imitation. The texts also demonstrate how Virgil’s major poetry begets minor poetry and is remade as it and by it.
Epilogue
Authors: Connolly Joy
Published: July 2018

Throughout her life, Hannah Arendt was deeply and energetically engaged with Greek and Roman ideas, which she saw as sparking new, vital thinking about modern problems. The contemporary artist Tino Sehgal creates artworks out of dialogue that encourage participants to develop new lines of thought and conversation, in keen awareness of their evolving spatial and temporal relationship with one another. This chapter argues that Arendt and Sehgal build a new model for what we now typically call ‘classical reception’—a method of creative, purposive conservation that remembers Greek and Roman texts in their historical specificity even as it focuses on generating novel thought in and for the present time. In their view, to think is to think with—another person, another text, another culture—a treatment of thought as dialogue and, as I argue, an ethics of reading.
Mapping Out the World
Authors: Clarke Katherine
Published: July 2018

Starting from the well-known episode in which Aristagoras presents a map of the world to Cleomenes of Sparta in a bid to persuade him to collaborate against Persia, this chapter explores Herodotus’ presentation of different ‘layers’ of geographical space, ranging from the edges of the earth and the encircling Ocean, through the vast scope of continents and geographical symmetries, through patterning sequences such as the interconnected seas stretching from Asia to the Atlantic, then down through various types of ‘travelled space’. First of these is the world as experienced by armies on the march, then the world of recreational travellers in search of enlightenment or pleasure. Lastly, the geographical picture evoked by lists within the narrative is considered. Throughout, the focus is on illuminating the detailed picture drawn by Herodotus from his authorial distance, but incorporating many different viewpoints to create a complex and subtle sense of geography.
Geographical Morality
Authors: Clarke Katherine
Published: July 2018

Here, the depth imbued in Herodotus’ landscape is enhanced by the element of human intervention, which lends a moral aspect. Characters in the narrative, particularly the holders of despotic power engaging in monumental projects, are seen to manipulate the natural world in ways that can be viewed positively or negatively. This chapter explores this apparent contradiction in terms of context, contrast, and varied focalizations, which combine to encourage the reader to see similar actions in different lights. Close attention is paid to the ‘voice’ in which judgements are cast, resulting in a subtle interpretative framework. The division between water and land is explored as particularly fertile ground for exploring human interaction with the landscape in Herodotus’ narrative. The crossing of continental divisions introduces the relationship between individual projects and wider imperial aims, and the sequence of transgressive river crossings is explored as precursor to Persia’s campaigns against Greece.
The Conquest of Nature
Authors: Clarke Katherine
Published: July 2018

This chapter examines in detail the metaphorical language of desire, control, war and conquest which characterizes Herodotus’ account of Persian interaction with the natural world. After considering the appeal of beautiful lands more generally, it focuses on the particular and excessive desire for natural beauty which is most strongly manifested by Persian kings and their advisers. It argues that Herodotus associates a specific language of rage, passionate desire, punishment, enslavement, and control with the Persians in relation to their imperial bids, which marks them out as distinct from other characters. The argument is strengthened by Herodotus’ application of the metaphor of the alliance of the natural world with some of the victims of Persian imperialism. The idea that ‘the divine’ responds to the narrative through natural phenomena is also explored.
Epilogue
Authors: Clarke Katherine
Published: July 2018

This chapter recalls the way in which landscapes are constructed, both in literary terms and in physical terms by characters within Herodotus’ narrative. It explores some modern parallels, such as the Kerch bridge which will link Crimea to Russia, for the manipulation of landscape through monumental engineering works as a symbol of imperial ambitions. It suggests, therefore, that the narrative of Herodotus, with its subtle and differentiated presentation of man’s interaction with the natural world, especially in the context of imperial projects, and its underlying proposition that the map of empire is constantly evolving, remains of immediate relevance to the modern world.
Anti-theodicy
Authors: Trakakis N. N.
Published: July 2018

First, the nature of ‘anti-theodicy’ is outlined, and some indication is provided as to how this position differs from both theodicy and skeptical theism, and how the anti-theodicy view can be supported on the basis of moral and methodological considerations. Secondly, a possible metaphysical basis for anti-theodicy is sought, and this is achieved by abandoning anthropomorphic conceptions of God in favour of alternative models of divinity that might make possible new and more fruitful perspectives on the problem of evil. The alternative model advanced here for special attention is the Absolute Idealism of F. H. Bradley. The chapter concludes by showing how the problem of evil can be answered from a Bradleian perspective.
Human Nature, Natural Pedagogy, and Evolutionary Causal Essentialism
Authors: Heyes Cecilia
Published: July 2018

The theory of natural pedagogy suggests that human infants genetically inherit a package of psychological adaptations that make them receptive to teaching. This chapter evaluates the theory of natural pedagogy, and makes it a test case for two recent theories of human nature: the nomological account and causal essentialism. However, neither of these theories captures firmly the explanatory project of which natural pedagogy is part. Instead, I offer a hybrid of the nomological account and causal essentialism, ‘evolutionary causal essentialism’. This captures both the evolutionary and the causal–explanatory characteristics of contemporary evolutionary psychology, broadly construed, and allows that natural pedagogy could be part of human nature even if, as this chapter argues, receptivity to teaching is culturally inherited.
The Use and Non-Use of the Human Nature Concept by Evolutionary Biologists
Authors: Richerson Peter J.
Published: July 2018

A number of prominent modern evolutionists embraced ‘human nature’, signalling their commitment to the Modern Synthesis. Their claim is that for most of our evolutionary history, culture was of little importance, and that genes, not culture, controlled early development. More recently, cultural evolutionists have argued that culture and reason were present deep in the Homo lineage, and that the ability to learn socially develops in the first year of life. Thus, it is reasonable to think that genes and culture coevolved in the evolutionary past, and that they codevelop in infancy and childhood. Human nature theorists seek to deny this claim, while at the same time trying in various ways to make room for human culture and reason. I argue here that they are unsuccessful in their attempts.
Introduction
Authors: DeJonge Michael P.
Published: July 2018

The Introduction begins by noting the frequency and ease with which Bonhoeffer is mentioned in contemporary conversations about political resistance. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to derive from these appeals to Bonhoeffer any clear sense of the legacy of his political resistance. This raises the question: What did Bonhoeffer actually say about political resistance? Noting that Bonhoeffer spoke about political life primarily as a Christian pastor and Lutheran theologian, the Introduction sets forth the task of the book, which is a presentation of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking in the broader context of his theology. As summarized in the Introduction, this book presents Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking chronologically according to three phases of development and systematically according to a sixfold typology of resistance.
The Theological Story
Authors: DeJonge Michael P.
Published: July 2018

This chapter presents the broad outlines of Bonhoeffer’s theological vision as the story in which he embeds his political thinking. It is a story in three acts: God’s creation of the world, creation’s fall into sin, and God’s redemption of creation in Christ. Bonhoeffer writes of the first two acts most poignantly in Creation and Fall, his commentary on Genesis, and the third act receives elaboration in his Christology lectures. To the degree that this three-act story is about the creation, corruption, and redemption of human social existence, it sets the deep background for Bonhoeffer’s thinking about proper and improper forms of political life. Specifically, he outlines proper human sociality as a freedom for each other that is bounded by the absolute freedom of God’s creative word.
Political Life
Authors: DeJonge Michael P.
Published: July 2018

If we assume a Lutheran account of justification as well as the distinction between law and gospel as presented in Chapter 2, the resulting image of God’s activity in the world is a coordinated, twofold action of preservation and redemption. This means we need to add to Chapter 1’s three-act story (creation, fall, redemption) a fourth act: preservation. The theological category of preservation is, for Bonhoeffer, the theological category under which to locate political activity. As this chapter shows, the orientation of Bonhoeffer’s political thought toward preservation distinguishes it from the alternative theo-political visions that he calls “compromise” and “radicalism.” And the main concepts of Bonhoeffer’s political thinking—the two kingdoms and the orders or estates—are ones that structure political life in its preservation toward redemption.
Church and State
Authors: DeJonge Michael P.
Published: July 2018

Chapter 3’s discussion of kingdoms and orders in the context of political life leads naturally into the topic of this chapter: the church, the state, and their relationship. The present chapter locates the state (or, better, political authority in general) in relationship to Chapter 3’s categories by presenting it as one of the orders by which God’s structures the world. It is an important actor in the temporal kingdom, where God has ordained it to preserve the world through law. The church in its essence is an agent of the spiritual kingdom, bearing God’s redemptive word to the world. The themes of preservation and redemption, the kingdoms, and the orders find many of their concrete expressions in themes of the church, the state, and their relationship.
The Second Battle of the Church Struggle
Authors: DeJonge Michael P.
Published: July 2018

This chapter makes the transition to the second phase of Bonhoeffer’s resistance, which begins in earnest in 1935 as he begins leading a Confessing Church seminary. Although this middle period of his life, associated with the books Discipleship and Life Together, looks like a withdrawal from resistance, it can also be understood as a different kind of resistance. Seeing this requires attending to Bonhoeffer’s own description of what he calls the second battle of the church struggle. It is a struggle for the substance of the church, that is, the church’s form of existence that is the necessary foundation for its word of resistance. And this substance of the church is a form of life that coordinates faith and works in costly grace. It is a struggle for, in a word, discipleship.
Discipleship as Resistance
Authors: DeJonge Michael P.
Published: July 2018

This chapter elaborates on the second phase of Bonhoeffer’s resistance as well as the form of resistance that characterizes it: discipleship (type 5). Compared to the first, the second phase of resistance is less a struggle against the state and more a struggle for the church. And, again compared to the first, the second phase puts relatively less emphasis on the church’s proclamation and relatively more on its form of existence as a suffering discipleship community. The discipleship character of the church is indirectly a form of resistance insofar as it undergirds the church’s proclamatory resistance. And it is also directly a form of resistance as a more fully articulated account of what was relatively underemphasized in the first phase, the diaconal office as the church’s way of suffering for and with others.
The Free Responsible Action of the Individual
Authors: DeJonge Michael P.
Published: July 2018

If, as Chapter 12 argues, much of Bonhoeffer’s resistance thinking remains stable even as he undertakes the novel conspiratorial resistance, what is new in his resistance thinking in the third phase? What receives new theological elaboration is the resistance activity of the individual, which in the first two phases was overshadowed by the resistance role played by the church. Indeed, as this chapter shows, Bonhoeffer’s conspiratorial activity is associated with what he calls free responsible action (type 6), and this is the action of the individual, not the church, in the exercise of vocation. As such, the conspiratorial activity is most closely related to the previously developed type 1 resistance, which includes individual vocational action in response to state injustice. But the conspiratorial activity differs from type 1 resistance as individual vocational action in the extreme situation.
Introduction
Authors: Ondrey Hauna T.
Published: July 2018

This introductory chapter establishes the scope and significance of the study. In addition to his Christology, Theodore’s Old Testament commentaries were implicated at Constantinople II for their dearth of christological interpretation. Cyril, whose writings featured prominently in Theodore’s condemnation, is, by contrast, judged a pre-eminently christocentric Old Testament interpreter. A close comparison of extant commentaries on the Minor Prophets by both Theodore and Cyril illuminates the Old Testament interpretation of both consequential figures. As Antiochene and Alexandrian interpreters, the comparison bears on the shift away from an Antioch/Alexandria antithesis. Situating the study that follows, this shift is traced and evaluated, highlighting alternate reductions to which the rhetorical turn is vulnerable. Brief biographical sketches then establish the setting of each commentary and locate each interpreter within the broader commentary tradition. An overview of the book’s organization and primary arguments concludes the chapter.
A Nexus of Commentatorson the Twelve
Authors: Ondrey Hauna T.
Published: July 2018

Chapter 1, “A Nexus of Commentators on the Twelve: Theodore and Cyril’s Defense of Historia,” compares Theodore’s and Cyril’s Minor Prophets commentaries with those of Didymus (on Zechariah only) and Jerome. The direct comparison afforded by these extant commentaries reveals Theodore and Cyril’s shared interest in, and commitment to the historicity of, events depicted and predicted by the Twelve Prophets. A shared commitment to the unfolding divine economy leads Theodore and Cyril to write commentaries on the Minor Prophets in which both root the prophets firmly in Israel’s history and in turn situate Israel’s history within broader narratives of salvation history. On this basis, the chapter advocates for the ongoing validity of asserting a patristic interest in “history” against recent overcorrections.
Cyril of Alexandria
Authors: Ondrey Hauna T.
Published: July 2018

Chapter 3, “Cyril of Alexandria: The Twelve within the First Covenant,” identifies the primary role Cyril assigns the Twelve Prophets in their ministry to Old Testament Israel as summoning Israel to adherence to the Mosaic law and educating Israel regarding God’s nature. While Cyril finds the prophetic oracles replete with christological content, a careful reading of his Commentary on the Twelve reveals that he holds the typological value of these oracles only retrospectively accessible. Isolating Cyril’s view of the prophetic ministry to ante Christum Israel limits the prospective christological revelation of the prophets and reveals the positive role Cyril ascribes the Mosaic law prior to Christ’s advent. A preliminary comparison of Chapters 2 and 3 concludes this chapter.
Theodore and Cyril in Dialogue
Authors: Ondrey Hauna T.
Published: July 2018

This concluding chapter, “Theodore and Cyril in Dialogue: Analysis and Implications,” returns to charges surveyed in the Introduction, namely, that Theodore—and by extension Antiochene exegesis—failed to unify the Testaments due to his failure to find Christ in the Old Testament. Drawing on the revised descriptions of the preceding chapters, it challenges this analysis and its reading of Constantinople II. It further challenges the continued polarization of Theodore and Cyril’s Old Testament exegesis on the basis of “christocentrism” as an evaluative label for Theodore (negatively) and Cyril (positively) and advocates for a dynamic, developmental account of early Christian interpretation.
Introduction
Authors: Steane Andrew
Published: July 2018

The motivation, themes, and content of the book are introduced. The aim is to offer a better view of what science tells us about the nature of the physical world—better than the one widely assumed in our culture. Science is a rich tapestry which does not at all suggest that the world is a purposeless machine, nor does it undermine the arts and humanities. The book then engages the area of values and meaning, and shows the different type of discourse that is involved there. It offers a reply to a major argument of Hume and Dawkins, about the content of religious language. The final part of the book shows how religious response can inhabit the complete picture without awkwardness.
Logic and Knowledge: The Babel Fallacy
Authors: Steane Andrew
Published: July 2018

An error of logic is described, and dubbed the Babel Fallacy. This is the fallacy of claiming that one already knows that a given low-level language is adequate to support the expression of a given high-level or collective phenomenon, when this has not been shown to be the case. Examples from physics, linguistics, economics, mathematics, and computer science are given. The same reasoning applies to biology. In the context of science, the Babel fallacy is the fallacy of claiming to know the complete truth about the physical nature of anything.