bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Electronic Cigarette Use and Understanding Among a National Sample of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Smokers
Authors: Thomas David P , Lusis Nadia , Van der Sterren Anke E , Borland Ron
Published: July 2018

Introduction

Adult daily smoking prevalence in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is 2.8 times that of other Australians. There is little data on prevalence of electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) use among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We measured e-cigarette use and beliefs about their harmfulness in national samples of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers and of all Australian smokers.

Methods

The Talking About the Smokes project interviewed a nationally representative quota sample of 1301 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers between August 2013 and August 2014. The Australian Wave 9 survey of the long-running International Tobacco Control Project interviewed 1093 smokers between February and May 2013. Estimates for all Australian smokers were standardized to the age and sex distribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers.

Results

Fewer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander than all Australian smokers had tried an e-cigarette (21% vs. 30%). This was in part because of more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers having not heard of e-cigarettes. Fewer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers than all Australian smokers agreed that e-cigarettes are less harmful than conventional cigarettes (22% vs. 50%).

Conclusions

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers have used e-cigarettes. However, there is considerable misunderstanding about the relative harm of e-cigarettes compared with conventional cigarettes, in part because of the tight regulatory environment in Australia.

Implications

The study describes e-cigarette use and understanding in national samples of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers and of all Australian smokers. Only small studies have reported on e-cigarette use in this high smoking prevalence population. Fewer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander smokers than all Australian smokers had tried an e-cigarette and fewer agreed that e-cigarettes are less harmful than conventional cigarettes. Australian governments, health authorities, health professionals, and e-cigarette regulations should provide clearer messages that e-cigarettes are less harmful.
Enhanced Recovery After Surgery™ Awake Minimally-Invasive Transforaminal Lumbar Interbody Fusion: 2-Dimensional Operative Video
Authors: Chang Hsuan-Kan , Kolcun John Paul G , Chang Peng-Yuan , Wang Michael Y
Published: July 2018

This video demonstrates the awake endoscopic minimally-invasive transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion (MIS-TLIF) used in our institution's developing Enhanced Recovery After Surgery program. This technique relies on 6 key components, including (1) conscious sedation, (2) endoscopic visualization, (3) long-acting local anesthesia, (4) an expandable interbody device, (5) osteobiologics, and (6) percutaneous instrumentation. In joining these technologies, this procedure embodies the principles of minimally invasive surgery while achieving excellent clinical outcomes. We have previously described this procedure in detail, as well as its impact at our institution, including significant reductions in operative time, blood loss, postoperative length of stay, and hospital costs.

The procedure depicted in this video involves the off-label use of bone morphogenetic protein-2 and the Spineology Optimesh allograft containment device.

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

The patient gave direct consent for the use of the video footage and associated information from this surgery for the making and publication of this surgical video.
Banda and the Slovak Folk Revival
Authors: Lange Barbara Rose
Published: July 2018

Chapter 4 discusses the Slovak folk revival of the 1990s–2000s with a case study of the musical group Banda. In Slovakia, audiences continued to enjoy styles of staged folklore from the communist era, but revivalists opposed these older styles and were outspoken in rejecting them. The chapter describes how revival folklorism is part of a movement to rediscover and reimagine Slovakia that sprang up in the 1990s; revivalists wanted to expand styles of rural music-making that existed outside communist-era folklore performance. The chapter discusses the mediation of neighboring Hungary’s dance house movement in Slovakia, and outlines the historical conditions that made it challenging to sustain dance house activity. The chapter argues that at the turn of the twenty-first century, revivalists managed artistic tensions and strengthened their reform efforts by becoming skilled neoliberal actors; making the transition from revivalism to a world-music fusion style allowed the musicians of Banda to be independent creatively and economically.
Epilogue
Authors: Lange Barbara Rose
Published: July 2018

The Epilogue describes how economic and social shocks of the late 2000s, in particular the 2008 world economic crisis, affected local fusion musics in Central Europe. It discusses changes in artistic personhood, musical sociality, creative processes, and connections to the West European musical market; efficiency penetrated the creative process, and more aspects of the individual became monetized. The Epilogue describes how far-right nationalism and its musical expression strengthened in the late 2000s, and how others made musical interventions against these trends. It describes how musicians changed their relationships with large arts institutions, detailing how by the 2000s, intellectually oriented musicians established some connections to the Western European world-music industry and to new modes of musical production and distribution. It concludes that few artistic experiments could continue after socioeconomic shock.
Historiographical Reflections on the Eighteenth Century in Iranian History
Authors: Matthee Rudi
Published: July 2018

This chapter seeks to bring some historiographical coherence to the rather chaotic eighteenth century in Iranian history. It suggests that rather than looking at the period in dynastic terms, as a tale of ‘great men’, or as a mere tribal interlude between the seventeenth-century Safavid and the nineteenth-century Qajar dynasties, it is more productive to view it in its own right and suggest three interpretive models for future research on this transitional period: a ‘supranational’ or regional approach, situating Iran in a broader Eurasian framework; a more narrow purview which perceives the country as a singular political and cultural entity, although not necessarily through a nationalist lens; and a regional perspective, in recognition of the fact that Iran at the time was not yet a nation-state but rather a conglomerate of poorly connected and relatively autonomous regional centers.
Whatever Happened to the School of Isfahan?
Authors: Rizvi Sajjad
Published: July 2018

Since much of the literature on the history of 18th-century Iran is animated by a notion of decline, including in the cultural and intellectual fields, it is not surprising that philosophical trends are also seen in such terms: philosophy was killed off by a mixture of the chauvinism and hostility of the late Safavid milieu and the Afghan sack and occupation of Isfahan. However, this article argues that, in the midst of these challenges, philosophy grew, prospered, and became widely disseminated, taking advantage of the new patronage of the emerging regional centres of Qom, Mashhad, and the Iraqi shrine cities. After a consideration of the sources and contexts that we have in the period, the chapter takes a biographical approach analysing the contributions of five philosophers and Sufis in the course of philosophy in 18th-century Iran.
Tribal Resurgence in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Floor Willem
Published: July 2018

To gauge the usefulness of the term tribal resurgence and to better understand its alleged symptoms—“decline of the bureaucracy” and “breakdown of central government”—it is necessary to understand the context in which it is used, i.e. within the structure of Iran’s political system. Because it is only then that we also may better understand these alleged symptoms, if these actually occurred. Therefore, I briefly outline the main characteristics of that political system, after which I discuss whether the terms “tribal resurgence” and “decline of the bureaucracy” enlighten us as to the functioning of the political system of eighteenth-century Iran.
Nader Shah, the Delhi Loot, and the 18th-Century Exotics of Empire
Authors: Babaie Sussan
Published: July 2018

The famous plunder of Delhi that followed the 1739 defeat of the Mughals at the Battle of Karnal by Nader Shah (r. 1736–1747) represents, in retrospect, the last world-conquering design to have risen from the Islamicate world before the 20th century. This chapter argues that Nader Shah’s building projects, initiated after the Indian campaign, introduced a self-consciously historicized articulation of an Indo-Persian empire in the 18th century. His venture, echoing those of Timur in his post-Indian conquest, included looting of building materials and technologies that were made available by hundreds of Indian craftsmen and artists taken as booty and assigned to work with locals to make a spectacularly hybrid monument as the centerpiece of an urban retreat at a natural fortress famed as Kalat-e Naderi in northeastern Iran. Nader Shah’s patronage represents an unexpectedly un-European visualization of the exotics of empire on the eve of colonial expansions.
Mystic Plants and Aegean Nature Goddesses
Authors: Taiz Lincoln , Taiz Lee
Published: July 2018

“Mystic Plants and Aegean Nature Goddesses” examines the artistically and symbolically dense rituals of the ancient Minoans which often focused on nature goddesses and sacred trees and flowers. Ring seals and frescoes, including sacred tree frescoes, portray priestesses leading ceremonies, indicating the importance of women as spiritual leaders. The ritual importance of flowers is attested by psi-like patterns representing saffron crocus stigmas on the skirt of the priestess of Ayia Triada, and by frescoes from Knossos, Akrotiri, and Mycenae. Flower ritual frescoes, together with the Table Dancers of Phaistos and the Bowl of Phaistos, suggest that the long-sought origin of the Persephone myth may be based on saffron crocus symbolism. The Myceneans, before and after taking over Crete, adopted Minoan iconography associating women with sacred plants and healing as evidenced by numerous images, including goddess-with-up-raised-arms figurines. The Poppy Goddess exemplifies the use of psychoactive drugs in religious ritual and/or healing.
Roman Assimilation of Greek Myths and Botany
Authors: Taiz Lincoln , Taiz Lee
Published: July 2018

“Roman Assimilation of Greek Myths and Botany” traces the absorption of Greek botanical thought by the Romans. Although Roman thinkers—Cato the Elder, Varro, Virgil and Columella—wrote about agriculture, theoretical botany was largely abandoned, while the one—sex model of plants remained entrenched. Roman myths, many syncretized with Greek, reinforced the gender bias by which plants were associated with women. Chloris, Greek goddess of flowers, was assimilated to Flora, and Ceres to Demeter. Ovid recounts a story concerning Flora and Juno that symbolically connects flowers to parthenogenesis. Of Greek derived works on plants, only Pliny’s Historia Natura and Nicolaus of Damascus’ De Plantis were widely available in the Middle Ages. One interpretation of flowers by Pliny the Elder, that they were created to delight human beings, endured into of the Christian era, while St. Augustine sited the “degeneration” of plants grown from seed as “palpable evidence” for original sin.
From Herbals to Walled Gardens
Authors: Taiz Lincoln , Taiz Lee
Published: July 2018

Chapter ten focuses on botanical thought of the Middle Ages in the Roman, Eastern and Islamic Empires when herbals devolved from practical field guides to decorative status symbols, and Dioscorides developed his classifications of sex in plants according to anthropomorphic criteria, such as hardness or softness. Dioscorides’ authority endured into the sixteenth century. Sources including The Book of Idols and the Ethiopian Book of Enoch inform the discussion of pre-Islamic vegetation goddesses Allat and Al-’Uzza, and the Satanic Verses. Zakariya Muhammad Qazwini suggested the palm was human-like, with two sexes and “a sort of copulation” required for fruit production. The Quranic story of Mary and the date palm reprised “The Cherry Tree Carol,” both evidencing her assimilation of pagan goddesses. After the Council of Ephesus’s sanction of the cult of the Virgin as Theotokos, her cult bourgeoned. Her imagery often centered on gardens, fruits, and flowers symbolizing her purity.
Wars of the Roses
Authors: Taiz Lincoln , Taiz Lee
Published: July 2018

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, opposition to the sexual theory intensified among social and religiously conservative asexualists who felt threatened by the political theories of the Enlightenment. For some, the Linnaean system was a stalking horse for libertinism, radical Jacobinism, feminism and anarchy. They maintained their ideological purity citing philosophical, religious and pedagogical reasons for rejection. Among the opponents were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hans Möller and William Smellie. Lazzaro Spallanzi and Charles Alston tried, but failed, to repeat Camerarius’s experiments. Flowers were so feminized symbolically the idea that most flowers were hermaphroditic seemed perverse, but Mary Wollstonecraft attacked hyper-feminine poetic metaphors for women as inimical to the struggle for equality. Meanwhile, hybridization experiments by Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter eliminated the last rational objection to the sexual theory and demolished the preformationist theory, in both ovist and spermist versions. Christian Konrad Sprengel laid the foundation for floral ecology.
Flora’s Secret Gardens
Authors: Taiz Lincoln , Taiz Lee
Published: July 2018

Wilhelm Hofmeister established the unity of the Plant Kingdom through the discovery of Alternation of Generations. In both cryptogams and flowering plants a diploid asexual stage, or sporophyte, alternates with a haploid sexual stage. Thus the flower is not the true sexual stage, but rather the asexual spore-producing stage. The main difference between ferns and roses is that the spores of the fern are visible on the undersides of the leaves, while the spores of the rose are concealed within the anthers and ovaries. These spores develop into the actual sexual stage of the spermatophyte, the male and female gametophytes, i.e. the pollen tube and the embryo sac. Hofmeister’s discovery solved of the age-old quandary over plant sex. The sexualists and the asexualists can both claim to have been correct, but it was the sexualists who freed their minds from cultural biases and glimpsed the true sexual nature of plants.
If...Then
Authors: Bucher Taina
Published: July 2018

IF … THEN provides an account of power and politics in the algorithmic media landscape that pays attention to the multiple realities of algorithms, and how these relate and coexist. The argument is made that algorithms do not merely have power and politics; they help to produce certain forms of acting and knowing in the world. In processing, classifying, sorting, and ranking data, algorithms are political in that they help to make the world appear in certain ways rather than others. Analyzing Facebook’s news feed, social media user’s everyday encounters with algorithmic systems, and the discourses and work practices of news professionals, the book makes a case for going beyond the narrow, technical definition of algorithms as step-by-step procedures for solving a problem in a finite number of steps. Drawing on a process-relational theoretical framework and empirical data from field observations and fifty-five interviews, the author demonstrates how algorithms exist in multiple ways beyond code. The analysis is concerned with the world-making capacities of algorithms, questioning how algorithmic systems shape encounters and orientations of different kinds, and how these systems are endowed with diffused personhood and relational agency. IF … THEN argues that algorithmic power and politics is neither about algorithms determining how the social world is fabricated nor about what algorithms do per se. Rather it is about how and when different aspects of algorithms and the algorithmic become available to specific actors, under what circumstance, and who or what gets to be part of how algorithms are defined.
Conclusion
Authors: Bucher Taina
Published: July 2018

When conceptualizing the power and politics of algorithms it is important to blend an understanding of their material substrates with an understanding of the multiple ways of perceiving, feeling, acting, and knowing which congeal around algorithms as an object of social concern. The concluding chapter revisits some of the key questions of the book and looks at how algorithmic power and politics can be understood if power and politics are not necessarily about imposing force from above. The chapter serves to summarize the key contributions of the book in terms of: (1) providing an understanding of algorithms that is not committed to one ontological position, but instead sees algorithms in terms of a multiple and variable ontology, (2) helping to identify forms of algorithmic power and politics and (3) offering a theoretical framework for the kinds of work that algorithms do and the landscapes they help to generate.
Decoration and Display in Rome's Imperial Thermae
Authors: Gensheimer Maryl B.
Published: July 2018

Across the Roman Empire, ubiquitous archaeological, art historical, and literary evidence attests to the significance of bathing for Romans’ daily routines. Given the importance of bathing to the Roman style of living, imperial patrons enhanced their popular and political stature by endowing eight magnificent baths (the so-called imperial thermae) in the city of Rome between 25 B.C.E. and 315 C.E. This book presents a detailed analysis of the decoration of the best preserved of these bathing complexes, the Baths of Caracalla (inaugurated 216 C.E.). An interdisciplinary approach to the archaeological data, to the textual and visual sources, and to anthropological theories facilitates new understandings of the visual experience of the Baths of Caracalla for a diverse Roman audience and simultaneously elucidates the decoration’s critical role in advancing imperial agendas. This reassessment of one of the most sophisticated examples of architectural patronage in Classical antiquity examines the specific mechanisms through which an imperial patron could use architectural decoration to emphasize his sociopolitical position relative to the thousands of people who enjoyed his benefaction. The case studies addressed herein, ranging from architectural to freestanding sculpture and mosaic, demonstrate that sponsoring monumental baths was hardly an act of altruism. Rather, even while they provided recreation for elite and sub-altern Romans alike, such buildings were concerned primarily with dynastic legitimacy and imperial largess. The unified decorative program—and the messages of imperial power therein—adroitly articulated these themes.
A Definition
Authors: Wodziński Marcin
Published: July 2018

What did it mean for an ordinary Jew to be a Hasid? Although there are dozens of definitions of Hasidism, all of them are built on doctrinal categories. The chapter demonstrates these kinds of ideological definitions are inadequate, given that they turn Hasidism into an abstract doctrine, disconnected from its believers and their daily practices. Instead, this chapter offers a behavioral, or performative, definition of Hasidism as practiced in everyday life, a definition based on low-profile, often folk testimony, i.e. it shows what rank-and-file followers understood being a Hasid meant and how they defined their own distinctive features. It demonstrates that, contrary to a predominant assumption, the self-definition of a Hasidic group was closer to a confraternity than to a sect, which provides entirely new analytical categories and allows for a new view of the history of Hasidism, inter-group boundaries, and more.
Demography
Authors: Wodziński Marcin
Published: July 2018

This chapter revisits the oft-discussed issue of the Hasidic movement’s alleged “conquest” of Eastern Europe and its demographic parameters. How many Hasidim really were there and when did this “conquest” take place? First, by introducing rich quantitative materials and by a close reading of qualitative sources, this chapter arrives at a new scheme of development of Hasidism that challenges much of the accepted knowledge on the Hasidic “conquest” of Eastern Europe. More specifically, it demonstrates that Hasidic penetration into Jewish Eastern Europe reached its peak in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, and not around 1800, as historiography traditionally has claimed. Second, it qualifies the very concept of the Hasidic “conquest” and “dominance” by demonstrating a much more nuanced interrelation between the numbers of Hasidim and their power and influence.
Geography
Authors: Wodziński Marcin
Published: July 2018

This chapter discusses the borders of Hasidism, showing its halt on the Polish–German and Lithuanian–German border and factors responsible for this halt. This was unfavorable to Hasidism professional and social structure, language barrier, and, most importantly, the pressure of the autostereotype of anti-Hasidic, German–Jewish culture. The chapter also analyzes the basis of the popular image of Hasidism’s regional divisions, showing their essential dependence on nineteenth-century political divisions. It also traces patterns of interrelation between Hasidic groups’ types of spatial organization as well as their types of spirituality and leadership, demonstrating a correlation between the type of spatial organization of the group and the type of leadership and spirituality of a given group.
The End and the Beginning
Authors: Wodziński Marcin
Published: July 2018

This chapter asks what we know about the golden/classical period of Hasidism and when it ended. It demonstrates that long before the Holocaust, it was the First World War that brought a major crisis, from which Hasidism in the Old World never recovered. It discusses in turn the human and material losses suffered by the Hasidim, changes in the movement’s geography and their consequences, and ideological and political transformations Hasidism experienced after 1918. The chapter thus shows how the golden age of Hasidism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed from what emerged in the wake of the First World War and from what we know as Hasidism today. More generally, this chapter provides a model of the interrelation between the geopolitical, economic, or cultural context of the outside world and the ethos, doctrine, and cultural models of Hasidism.
“Tyranny,” Enlightenment, and Religion
Authors: Ahrensdorf Peter J.
Published: July 2018

By opening Oedipus the Tyrant with a plague befalling Thebes that parallels the plague befalling Athens, Sophocles points to a parallel between Oedipus’s Thebes and Sophocles’s own, Periclean Athens: namely, that between the singularly untraditional, rationalistic, and even antireligious spirit of enlightenment that characterizes Oedipus’s “tyrannical” rule over Thebes and the similar spirit that characterizes Pericles’s Athens. That spirit is tested by the deadly plague that befalls each city, and the religious responses to the plague in each expose the grave difficulties that beset the effort of both Oedipus and Pericles’s Athenians to rule by reason alone. Through the story of a terrifying plague that leads the enlightened Oedipus to embrace the ultimately destructive guidance of oracles and prophets, Sophocles warns his fellow Athenians, who also face a terrifying plague, both against a self-destructive religious backlash and against an antireligious political rationalism that might provoke such a backlash.
The Goodness of Death in Oedipus at Colonus
Authors: Trivigno Franco V.
Published: July 2018

In Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, the third choral ode presents a dark and pessimistic view of human life, whereby it is best never to have been born and second best to die young. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the pessimistic position advocated by the chorus, the core of which is an endorsement of the goodness of death. Their conclusion rests on two premises: a quantitative account of the amount of pain a typical human life contains and a narrative account of the life trajectory of a typical human life. After laying out the chorus’s position, the chapter assesses their view and situates it within recent philosophical debates in two areas: on the nature and value of death and on the relationship between well-being and time. In the end, the life of Oedipus, as presented in the tragedy, exemplifies the chorus’s dark perspective.
Scientific Explanation
Authors: Bonnay Denis
Published: July 2018

One of the major aims of science, it is commonly held, is to provide explanations. Philosophers of science have tried to understand what it is to provide a scientific explanation, what distinguishes good from bad explanations, and why explanations are valuable. This chapter goes through the main answers that have been elaborated in the last decades. It starts with a detailed discussion of the famous deductive-nomological (DN) model of explanation proposed by Hempel and Oppenheim. Then, the two main rivals to the DN model, the causal theory and the unificationist theory, are introduced and discussed. Some other contemporary approaches are sketched out in the closing section.
Metaphysics of Science as Naturalized Metaphysics
Authors: Esfeld Michael
Published: July 2018

This chapter outlines a metaphysics of science in the sense of a naturalized metaphysics. It considers in the first place the interplay of physics and metaphysics in Newtonian mechanics, then goes into the issues for the metaphysics of time that relativity physics raises, shows that what one considers as the referent of quantum theory depends on metaphysical considerations, and finally explains how the stance that one takes with respect to objective modality and laws of nature shapes the options that are available for an ontology of quantum physics. In that way, this chapter seeks to make a case for a natural philosophy that treats physics and metaphysics as inseparable in the enquiry into the constitution of the world, there being neither a neo-positivist way of deducing metaphysics from the formalisms of physical theories, nor a neo-rationalist realm of investigation for metaphysics that is independent of physics.
Reduction and Emergence
Authors: Ludwig Pascal
Published: July 2018

How are our scientific theories related to each other? Do they draw, together, a unified picture of the world, or should we infer from their disunity that reality is ontologically plural in some way? This chapter addresses the question of whether ontological pluralism is a defendable metaphysical thesis and whether philosophy of science has anything to say about it. It examines whether psychological phenomena possess an irreducible nature of their own that would be distinct from the nature of the phenomena studied by neuroscience. If, on the contrary, the explanatory gap between physics and special sciences is to be filled, the question is raised as to how it has to be done. Is conceptual analysis enough? Or should the explanatory gap be simply dismissed as being badly formulated? The chapter proposes a discussion of the current reductionist strategies.
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
Authors: Andler Daniel
Published: July 2018

Cognitive science, which appears as an articulated group of research programs whose aim is to constitute a science of the mind, raises a number of issues from the point of view of philosophy of science. This chapter will sample the field by dealing with two main topics. The first one is the hypothesis of a modular architecture of the mind, which has occupied cognitive science since more than 30 years. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the foundations and limits of cognitive science, dealing notably with the functionalist framework (in particular, the computational theory of the mind) and the so-called language of thought hypothesis. We conclude by saying a few words about the division of labor among philosophers who are interested in cognition.
Liberalism and Distributive Justice
Authors: Freeman Samuel
Published: July 2018

This volume of essays addresses a wide range of issues in contemporary political philosophy, from the different branches of liberalism and their relation to capitalism, to the basic institutions of a liberal society that underwrite political and economic justice. Samuel Freeman is a leading political philosopher and one of the foremost authorities on the works of John Rawls. This volume contains nine of his essays on liberalism, Rawls, and distributive justice. Freeman organizes his chapters into a narrative arc: from liberalism as the dominant political and economic system in the Western world, to the laws governing interpersonal transactions in a liberal society, to the broad social and political structures that determine distributive justice. Freeman analyzes the primary differences between the classical and high liberal traditions; shows why libertarianism is not a liberal view; argues for the social rather than global bases of distributive justice; demonstrates why Rawls’s difference principle supports a property-owning democracy rather than welfare-state capitalism; and shows how Rawls’s liberal principles of justice and the difference principle are to be applied in both ideal and non-ideal circumstances, effectively responding to criticisms by Amartya Sen, G. A. Cohen, and others.
Illiberal Libertarians
Authors: Freeman Samuel
Published: July 2018

This chapter situates three contemporary views—classical liberalism, the high liberal tradition, and libertarianism—on the map of political conceptions and argues that, though libertarianism is normally considered to be a liberal view, the resemblance between liberalism and libertarianism is superficial. Correctly understood, libertarianism resembles a view that liberalism historically defined itself against, the doctrine of private political power that underlies feudalism. Like feudalism, libertarianism conceives of justified political power as based in a network of private contracts. It rejects the idea, essential to liberalism, that political power is a public power that is to be impartially exercised for the common good. Moreover, the primary institutions endorsed by the liberal political tradition—basic rights and liberties, equality of opportunity, and government’s role in supporting efficient markets, public goods, and a social minimum—are incompatible with libertarianism.
The Earliest Readers of the Gospel according to Mark
Authors: Larsen Matthew D. C.
Published: July 2018

How did the earliest readers of the text we now call the Gospel according to Mark treat it? Chapter 5 analyzes the evidence of the earliest readers and argues that they regarded it not as a book published by an author but as unfinished notes (hypomnēmata). The Gospel according to Mark was regarded as textualized but not as a published book. The chapter looks at the preface to the Gospel according of Luke, as well as comments by Papias, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius. These writers use the Greek terms hypomnēmata or apomnēmoneumata to describe the textual tradition we now call the Gospel according to Mark. Moreover, they describe its production and textuality in terms similar to those explored in chapters 2 and 3.
Reading Mark as Unfinished
Authors: Larsen Matthew D. C.
Published: July 2018

What would it look like to approach the text we now call the Gospel according to Mark as unfinished notes, as opposed to a book published by an author? Chapter 7 argues that the internal structure of the Gospel according to Mark looks more like the structure of hypomnēmata than like a narrative, biography, history, or other form of finished literature. It also investigates the link between authored books and monological unity. It argues that there are multiple, competing, and unresolved voices within the text of the Gospel according to Mark on issues like the messianic secret, christology, Jesus’s power, and various other topics.
Intentionalism and Troubling Peculiar Perceptual Content
Authors: Maloney J. Christopher
Published: July 2018

Defending intentionalism, some argue that perceptual content is idiosyncratically nonconceptual: conceptually innocent; defiant of verbalization; or too richly fine-grained for subsumption under concepts carrying ratiocination. No: perception is conceptual in a manner that fits the cognitive capacities of perceivers generally. If perception is subservient to attention, a speaker's perceptual content admits of relatively simple reports implying rudimentary conceptualization. Perception's content is neither too rich nor fine-grained for expression or conceptualization. Intentionalism's temptation towards the contrary be may be urged by memory’s misguided tendency towards constructive confabulation. So, perceptual content may be neither so rich, dense, nor determinate as post-perceptual consideration and testimony may suggest. Finally, Sperling’s early important empirical work on perceptual memory cuts against intentionalism's conjecture of perception's nonconceptual content. Sperling discovered that perceptual memory can completely rehearse its recollected content. Accordingly, but contrary to intentionalism, memory might echo perception's content yet shed its phenomenal character.
Mara Chasar
Authors: Bakan Michael B.
Published: July 2018

“I love spinny chairs!” the eleven-year-old writer, poet, dancer, musician, and sometime goofball Mara Chasar shrieks gleefully as she spins round and round in a sober black office chair. “Spinny chair! Everyone loves the spinny chair!!” So begins a 2013 conversation that will change the course of the entire Speaking for Ourselves project. Mara has Asperger’s syndrome, but while she acknowledges the myriad challenges of living with this condition, she demands acceptance of it and of herself on her own terms. Autism awareness is not enough, she proclaims. Autism acceptance is what’s needed. “Who says autism is a bad thing?” Mara challenges us to consider. “Autism isn’t cholera; it isn’t some disease you can just cure. It’s just there . . . . Awareness means you know it’s there, but acceptance means you know it’s there and it’s not going to go away . . . . And there is no cure. There really isn’t. It’s just there, wound into your personality.”
Gordon Peterson
Authors: Bakan Michael B.
Published: July 2018

Gordon Peterson—early music specialist, professional musician, and former tenured music professor—was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of forty-five, by which time he had suffered through decades of misdiagnoses, misguided psychiatric treatments, and despair. “For the first time ever,” he recalls, “I felt the correctness of the diagnosis.” Gordon attributes many of the hardships he has endured to being “wired all funny” with Asperger’s, but he sees the condition as the primary source of his musical talent, intellectual prowess, and fertile imagination as well. “In my mind,” he says, “there is an impossibly complex web of musical and non-musical cultural connections across time and geographic location . . . . I see a ribbon-like time line [that] stretches back from today all the way to the beginning of recorded history, and before . . . and I can walk around in it, looking at the instruments, hearing the sounds, hearing the language.” Asperger’s is “my superpower,” Gordon attests, but as the chapter chronicles, that superpower exacts a very high toll on him in terms of the anguish and turmoil it brings.
Kingship in a Portentous Age
Authors: Geslani Marko
Published: July 2018

Chapter 4 reveals the deep Vedic-astrological roots of mainstream Hindu sources (purāṇas) on the royal office (rājadharma). Connecting to recent post-Dumontian ethnographies on kingship and Indian society, which describe the transfer of sin and the promotion of auspiciousness, it elaborates a ritual-astrological theory of kingship premised on the removal of inauspiciousness from the royal body. This theory is elaborated through an analysis of two major royal rituals in the purāṇas, namely, the monumental Great Gifts (mahādāna) and the Royal Inauguration (rājyābhiṣeka). In contrast to prevailing, theopolitical interpretations of these rituals, an astrological reading highlights the king’s responsibility to rectify his person through iterative gifting and aspersion. Purāṇic texts, therefore, fulfill the earlier designs of Atharvans and astrologers on the function of the royal priesthood and thus the tempo of state ceremonial.
The Zapatista Movement and Mexico's Democratic Transition
Authors: Inclán María
Published: July 2018

What happens to insurgent social movements that emerge during a democratic transition but fail to achieve their goals? How influential are they? Are they able to survive their initial mobilizing boom? Using the development of the Zapatista movement during Mexico’s democratic transition in the 1990s, this book seeks to answer these questions. The Zapatista movement is probably the best example of an influential and salient insurgent social movement emerging during a democratic transition that successfully mobilized sympathy and support for the indigenous agenda inside and outside of the country, yet failed to achieve its goals vis-à-vis the Mexican state. Why did such an influential movement fail to have its demands fully met? The answer is illustrated using a sliding door analogy to explain how the Zapatista movement developed within almost simultaneous openings and closings of political opportunities for its mobilization, success, and survival. Framing the relative achievements and failures of the movement within Mexico’s democratization is essential to understanding how social movements develop and survive and how responsive an electoral democracy can actually become. As such, this book offers a test of the quality of Mexico’s democracy and the resilience of the Zapatista movement, identifying the extent to which emerging political forces have incorporated dissident and previously excluded political actors into the new polity.
Democratic Transitions and Political Opportunities
Authors: Inclán María
Published: July 2018

This chapter presents the theoretical arguments of the book, which come from the literatures on political opportunities and democratic transitions, in particular protracted transitions and transitions from below. The chapter first compares Mexico’s democratic transition to other democratization processes in which insurgent social movements play a crucial role, such as the cases of El Salvador and South Africa. Then it provides an analysis of the opportunities that democratic transitions may open for the mobilization, success, and survival of an insurgent social movement. Third, hypotheses contextualized to the Mexican case illustrate how these expectations may influence the development of a specific movement’s cycle of protests, negotiating success, and chances of survival within a protracted democratic transition.
Opportunities for Mobilization
Authors: Inclán María
Published: July 2018

This chapter analyzes the development of the Zapatista cycle of protests from 1994 to 2003 in relation to the political opportunities opened to the movement during Mexico’s democratic transition. In particular, it describes to what extent Zapatista protest activity was affected by the four traditional dimensions identified in the literature of political opportunity: (1) negotiating periods, as well as changes in power as signs of openings in the political system at the local and national levels; (2) the timing and competitiveness of elections as measures of the relative vulnerability of political elites; (3) the presence of a potential political ally in power; and (4) the Mexican state’s capacity for repression. The chapter compares the explanatory power of these factors to another factor that the literature has highlighted as a crucial variable for mobilization, namely the availability of a network of preexisting organizations.
From Psychology to Morality
Authors: Deigh John
Published: July 2018

The essays in this collection belong to the tradition of naturalism in ethics. Its program is to explain moral thought and action as wholly natural phenomena, that is, to explain such thought and action without recourse to either a reality separate from that of the natural world or volitional powers that operate independently of natural forces. Naturalism’s greatest exponent in ancient thought was Aristotle. In modern thought Hume and Freud stand out as the most influential contributors to the tradition. All three thinkers made the study of human psychology fundamental to their work in ethics. All three built their theories on studies of human desires and emotions and assigned to reason the role of guiding the actions that spring from our desires and emotions toward ends that promise self-fulfillment and away from ends that are self-destructive. The collection’s essays draw inspiration from their ideas and are arranged to follow the lead of Aristotle’s and Hume’s ethics. The first three survey and examine general theories of emotion and motivation. The next two focus on emotions that are central to human sociability. Turning to distinctively cognitive powers necessary for moral thought and action, the sixth and seventh essays discuss the role of empathy in moral judgment and defend Bernard Williams’s controversial account of practical reason. The final five essays use the studies in moral psychology of the previous essays to treat questions in ethics and social philosophy. The treatment of these questions exemplifies the implementation of a naturalist program in these disciplines.
The Emotional Significance of Punishment
Authors: Deigh John
Published: July 2018

The essay explains the emotional significance of punishment in law and in common life. The explanation entails first understanding inflictions of punishment as a form of retaliation. So understanding inflictions of punishment requires abandoning the standard definition of punishment in the philosophical literature that takes legal punishment as the central case. A broader definition is offered that comprehends a broader array of cases including punishment by crime bosses of their underlings, punishment by international powers of countries that have attacked their citizens or property, and punishment inflicted by vigilantes. Given this broader definition, the emotional significance of punishment is then explained by considering punishment’s functions as a deterrent to those contemplating disrupting the social order, an assurance of support for those who maintain an allegiance to the social order, and a mechanism for reintegrating into society those who have disrupted the social order and caused a breach in their relations with its members.
Traditional Societies
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: July 2018

Traditional society is modernity’s “other”—that against which we moderns identify ourselves as modern. We believe that we live in a world of extraordinary dynamism unlike any other, while other societies honor their traditions and change very little. If modernity gets its start in the Renaissance, as Foucault held In The Order of Things, then, by his account, the Renaissance was still a traditional society and remained so. In such societies, similarities among things-as-they-seem are always significant; similitudes make their appearance in and as normatively potent signs. Just as children learn cause and become agents by launching objects, people routinely give valued things away without expectation of return; reciprocity is secondary in social relations, even if it appears to define modern life. Instead the asymmetries of giving and receiving result in social distance, which rules of hospitality and appropriate conduct codify behind the screen of innumerably many exchanges.
Epilogue
Authors: Onuf Nicholas Greenwood
Published: July 2018

The last three chapters of the book have a constructivist flavor. One might wonder if constructivism could point to new conditions of thought and rule within the modern world’s mighty frame. If so, Bruno Latour’s extensive, ever more influential body of work bears attention. He has directly, energetically attacked “the dominion of modernism” and sketched a “political ecology” for the future; he made an ancillary project of “saving constructivism” from constructivists in order stabilize conditions of thought for the world to come. Unfortunately, society is missing from Latour’s project because people have no faculties that distinguish them from other “actants.” Untroubled by issues of agency, he has proposed that actants somehow adopt a constitution for a new cosmopolis. Latour has had important allies, include Haraway. As with Haraway, he is a technological optimist. The illusion of control comes in many guises; saving modernity will not be so easy.
Quantitative Research in MENA Political Science
Authors: Pellicer Miquel , Wegner Eva
Published: July 2018

In this chapter, Miquel Pellicer and Eva Wegner make the case for employing quantitative analysis in the study of the Middle East and North Africa. The chapter recognizes the difficulties in obtaining good and reliable data, but employs examples of recent methodological innovations to discuss how such difficulties can be reduced. The authors also point out that quantitative methods in isolation cannot do justice to the political and social complexities of the region and in-depth qualitative knowledge is required to make sense of raw data.
Blurred Lines of Inclusion and Exclusion
Authors: Weipert-Fenner Irene
Published: July 2018

This chapter explores the broader ethical repercussions and dilemmas of positionality by focusing on the specific case when a researcher’s political affinity to the subject under study is so close that the line between the insider (the research subject) and the outsider (the researcher) may become blurred. It does not aim to argue against researchers being activists themselves but to encourage the use of caution when switching between the two roles. The chapter reflects on how identifying with the cause of the subject can violate the three major overarching norms of ethical research, respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. However, the specific challenges and potential solutions for fieldwork in the MENA-region are quite different from best practices originating from medical research and often prescribed by research ethics committees. Special attention is attributed to the context of authoritarian regimes, polarized societies, and periods of political transformation.
The Decision-Making Process
Authors: Moore Gordon , Quelch John A. , Boudreau Emily
Published: July 2018

Even seemingly mundane decisions involve a fair amount of individual decision-making. Chapter 4 takes a closer look at the consumer decision-making process, considering (1) the process itself; (2) the individuals and groups that make up the decision-making unit; and (3) other common factors that affect decision-making. How people make healthcare decisions, and how quickly they make them, varies greatly depending on a large range of factors, with cultural, economic, psychological, and social influences affecting the outcome at each step. This chapter reviews each of these areas in greater depth and also explores how and why the decision-making process often breaks down in healthcare markets today.