bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Charting The Aftermath: A Review Of Postcolonial Criticism
Authors: Sugirtharajah R S
Published: November 2023

Postcolonial studies emerged as a way of engaging with the textual, historical, and cultural articulations of societies disturbed and transformed by the historical reality of colonial presence. In this respect, in its earlier incarnation, postcolonialism was never conceived as a grand theory, but as creative literature and as a resistance discourse emerging in the former colonies of the Western empires. Postcolonialism as a methodological cate-gory and as a critical practice followed later. There were two aspects: ﬁrst, to analyse the diverse strategies by which the colonizers constructed images of the colonized; and second, to study how the colonized themselves made use of and went beyond many of those strategies in order to articulate their identity, self-worth, and empowerment. Postcolonialism has been taking a long historical look at both old and new forms of domination. Its insight lies in understanding how the past informs the present.
Redress, Regeneration, Redemption: A Survey Of Biblical Interpretation
Authors: Sugirtharajah R S
Published: November 2023

Before we explore how the alliance between postcolonial criticism and biblical studies might open up new possibilities, let me recall briefly the present status of biblical studies. When Western biblical scholars map out the history of interpretation, they register a range of trajectories, but they invariably begin with the Enlightenment and modernity, and their impact on biblical studies, and especially the growth and development of historical-critical methods and oﬀ shoots. I, too, start with modernity, not with its noble agenda but with its contemptible manifestation— colonialism—and how its legacy generated and influenced the development of biblical interpretation. At the risk of over simpliﬁcation, I identify diﬀerent stages of biblical interpretation as it interfaced with the varying contours of colonialism. Though these stages seem gradual and linear, what is crucial is that they demonstrate characteristic emphases, and the impact and aftermath of colonialism as it proceeded.
Convergent Trajectories? Liberation Hermeneutics And Postcolonial Biblical Criticism
Authors: Sugirtharajah R S
Published: November 2023

Up until now liberation hermeneutics has been seen as the distinctive contribution of Third World biblical interpreters. Recently another critical category, postcolonialism, has emerged as its rival, and has staked claim to represent minority voices. On the face of it, both liberation hermeneutics and postcolonial criticism share a common interpretative vocation— for instance, deideologizing dominant interpretation, a commitment to the other, and distrust of totalizing tendencies. More signiﬁcantly both are committed to social and political empowerment of the oppressed, and critical reclamation of the cultural resources of people who were historically denigrated. However, a closer look will reveal that liberation hermeneutics is still stuck with some of the vices of the modernistic project—excessive textualism, disparagement of both major and popular religions, and homogenization of the poor. Also, it seems shy about breaking with them. This chapter has three aims. First, it will draw on the recent use of the Bible by liberation hermeneutics to illustrate how liberation hermeneutics ends up reproducing a microcosmic version of the very hegemonic interpretation which it tried to dislodge.
Blotting The Master’S Copy: Locating Bible Translations
Authors: Sugirtharajah R S
Published: November 2023

I start with a disturbance, caused by the Bible translation, which occurred not in a colony in the British empire but in a city in Romanized North Africa in the ﬁ fifth century. It took place in Tripoli (Oea) where the bishop of the diocese arranged for Jerome’s new version of Jonah to be read. When some Greeks heard a word which diﬀ ered from the translation they were familiar with, they criticized the new wording and condemned it as false. Apparently the oﬀ ending translation was in Jonah 4: 6 where Jerome used ‘ivy’ instead of ‘gourd’. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, who was perturbed by the incident, wrote to Jerome that his Latin version was diﬀ erent from the one which had been read for ‘so many generations’, and which had been ‘enshrined in the memory and hearing of all’ (White 1990:92).
Hermeneutics In Transit: Diaspora And Interpretation
Authors: Sugirtharajah R S
Published: November 2023

Consider the following scene in the ﬁlm, Keeping the Faith, which half-seriously and half-humorously captures the mood of the diasporic condition. Brian Finn, a Catholic priest, played by Edward Norton, despite his vow of chastity falls in love. But the girl of his dreams is having an aﬀ air with his best friend, a Jewish rabbi, Jake Schramm. Finn, after an all-night drinking binge, confesses his passion to an Asian bartender of a New York Irish theme pub and bemoans that his heart is broken. Complicated you might think, but listen to what the Asian bartender has to say. ‘ Oh, God,’ he says. ‘ What do I know? I’ a half Punjabi Sikh, one quarter Tamil-separatist. My sister married a Jewish doctor from New Jersey and our grandmother was an Irish nun, who left me this bar—which is a very long story.’ Finn was disconcerted. ‘You’re a Sikh Catholic Muslim with Jewish in-laws?’ he asks. ‘Yes, yes, it gets very complicated. I am reading Dianetics.’
God
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: November 2023

I assume in this book that, on the basis of evidence such as the general character of the natural world or a person ‘s own religious experience, there is a moderate probability that there is a God of the kind worshipped by Christians, Jews, and Muslims. (I emphasize the ‘moderate ‘. I am not even assuming that the existence of God is more probable than not, as I have argued elsewhere that it is.) In this chapter I shall spell out the nature of the claim that there is God.
God Shared Our Human Nature
Authors: Swinburne Richard
Published: November 2023

It is an obvious general fact about the world that humans not merely suffer but do much wrong. How will a loving God respond to the suffering and wrongdoing of these feeble but partly rational creatures whom he has made? I will argue in this chapter that a priori we would expect God to respond to our suffering and wrongdoing by himself living a human life. God would live a human life by one divine person becoming human (that is, ‘becoming incarnate ‘).
Introduction
Authors: Murphy Nancey
Published: November 2023

Major change is afoot in current understandings of both the natural and human worlds. A central image, throughout the modern era, has been that of the hierarchy of the sciences—the picture of physics supporting chemistry, chemistry supporting the various levels of biology, and perhaps biology supporting psychology and then the social sciences. This image represents a conception of the physical world as itself a hierarchy of levels of complexity, with the true simples described by basic physics at the bottom, and everything else understood as larger and more complex organizations of such entities.
True to Life?: Biological Models of Origin and Evolution
Authors: Hewlett Martinez J
Published: November 2023

Erwin Schrödinger, after his participation in the founding of quantum mechanics, turned his attention towards the life sciences. In What is Life?, his self-described ‘little book,’ he wondered about what the physical character of the gene must be. It struck him that the nature of heredity is such that whatever the chemical material of the gene might be, it resists the thermodynamic imperative of the second law towards dissolution. In his book, he focuses on well known examples of strong inheritance, such as the famous Hapsburg lip. His speculation leads him to suggest that there may, indeed, be new physical principles or even laws waiting to be discovered.
Toward a Constructive Christian Theology of Emergence
Authors: Clayton Philip
Published: November 2023

Can one construct a viable Christian theology that uses the theory of emergence as its systematic principle? The question is vital: if emergence is in fact a fundamental feature of the natural world, as authors in this volume are arguing, then one wants to know how Christian theology might be reformulated to be responsive to these new insights.
Adamgirk ‘ 1
Authors: Stone Michael E
Published: November 2023

The suitable words and appropriate tales concerning the first ones, Adam and Eve, compared by various analogies [drawn] from Adam to Christ and from Eve to the Mother of God and from the serpent to Judas. And concerning the rib by various analogies [drawn] from Paradise to the Cross, from that first creation to this second renewal and other divers, needful, and necessary matters spoken poetically by Lord Aṙakfiel of Siwnik‘ at the order of the great, universe-illuminating vardapet and rhetor Grigor, [being] 1,200 stanzas divided into 26 chapters.
The Builders
Authors: Hansell Mike
Published: November 2023

Standing with its back to the Atlantic atop a 90m (nearly 300ft) vertical cliff, at the base of which the ocean seethes and foams, is the great semi-circular, prehistoric fort of Dun Aengus. The location is the very westernmost fringe of Europe, the Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland. On the landward side, the fort’s protection from attack is man-made. The half-moon inner sanctuary of the fort (45m or 148ft across) is embraced by a drystone rampart reaching over 5m high and nearly 4m thick. Beyond this are a further three irregular semi circles of defensive walls and, should even the outer one be overrun, the attackers must then negotiate a field of massive limestone shards, jagged and stood on end.
You Don’t Need Brains to be a Builder
Authors: Hansell Mike
Published: November 2023

It is a sphere composed of a few hundred stones cemented together, with a large circular hole at the bottom. The top of its dome bears seven or eight sturdy spikes, each a cairn of stones, larger ones at the base, the smallest at the tip creating a sharp point. The most distinctive architectural detail, the one that gives the name to the species that builds it, is the collar to the circular aperture. It is a pleated coronet constructed from particles too small to be distinguishable from the cement that binds them. The diameter of this whole dwelling, for that is what it is, is about 150 thousandths of a millimetre (i.e. micrometres, written ïm). Smaller than the full stop at the end of this sentence, it is the portable home of Difflugia coronata, a species of amoeba (Figure 3.1).
From One Nest to Another
Authors: Hansell Mike
Published: November 2023

When I was a child, dinosaurs were grey and lumbering; rather more than half a century on, they have become agile, dappled, striped, even sporting splashes of vivid colour. The speed and agility now depicted is based largely on a reappraisal of the fossil skeletons, but the colours are entirely fanciful, more the consequence of cheaper colour printing than of improved scientific understanding. So, how much fiction is there in our depiction of other aspects of dinosaurs’ lives? I have a copy of a recently published biology textbook which shows a duck-billed dinosaur stooping as an attentive parent over a nest-full of ‘chicks’ among a small colony of other ground-nesting duck-bills.
What is life? Why water?
Authors: Gale Joseph
Published: November 2023

The answer to this first question could almost make a chapter in itself. If we really knew the answer perhaps only a sentence or two would suffice, and the definition would be relegated to the preamble to Chapter 6, which discusses the origin of life. As it is, there is no simple definition; however, we require at least a working hypothesis before we can discuss any of the topics of astrobiology. The first definition (or more correctly description) of life is informed, coloured, and limited by ‘life as we know it’ on Earth. It may come as a surprise to many, but there is only one life system here on Earth. This is further discussed in Chapter 6. It is by no means necessary that this is the system of life to be found in different (or even similar) extraterrestrial environments. It is possible to imagine other life biochemistries and forms that evolved under conditions very different from those existing on Earth; indeed, science fiction is full of such creatures! As long as they do not depart from the known laws of physics and chemistry (also an uncertain restriction) such life systems are not completely outrageous. They are certainly often entertaining.
The universe from the perspective of biology
Authors: Gale Joseph
Published: November 2023

Life exists in the universe; humans and other life forms on Earth are all the evidence required. The central theme of astrobiology is to learn whether we are alone, or are only one of many other life forms out there, some perhaps intelligent. In the last three or four decades opinion has been divided between optimists (‘we are not alone’) and pessimists, who believe that the chances of finding extraterrestrial life are extremely small. These are emotion-laden terms. The optimists yearn for the possibility of exchanging knowledge with other sentient beings. Others think we should be lucky to find that we are indeed alone, and not molested by superior, exotic aliens, who may not be benevolent, or vegetarian! The ‘optimists’ have usually come from among astronomers, who have an appreciation of the vastness of the universe. For them, the sheer number of stars and galaxies makes it unlikely that Earth is the only place where life has evolved. The ‘pessimists’ have usually been biologists. They are more aware of the enormous difficulties and the countless requirements that must be satisfied before life can appear, persist, and evolve to the level of Homo sapiens sapiens. This latter concern is a central motif of the astrobiology of Earth. Biologists point out that only once in the 4.55 Gy of Earth’s existence has a life form appeared on Earth capable of seeking out other extraterrestrial life:
The Solar System and life on Earth: I
Authors: Gale Joseph
Published: November 2023

In the previous chapter the entire universe was considered from the point of view of biology. However, the only place in the universe where, as of early 2009, we know that life exists is within our own Solar System. Within this system we are only sure of the existence of life on Earth, and on Earth only in the biosphere, a thin layer just a few kilometres thick. Ask any estate agent and you will be told that the three most important considerations for evaluating property are location, location, and location. The same goes for life in the universe. As discussed in Chapter 2, a favourable location is the central theme of the concept of the GHZ and the CHZ (Gonzalez et al. 2001a,b). The Sun is within the GHZ of the Milky Way galaxy and the Earth is within the CHZ of the Solar System. Parameters which define the CHZ are given below. The main components of the Solar System are its central star, the Sun, planets and their satellites (or moons), comets, and asteroids. To this must be added the all-important radiations: short-wave EM radiation and the particulate solar wind and cosmic radiation (the latter from outside the Solar System).
Origin of life and photosynthesis
Authors: Gale Joseph
Published: November 2023

The first chapters of this book described how conditions favourable to life were established on the surface of Earth, in a thin unstable layer we call the biosphere. But, and it is a very big ‘but’, having the conditions for life does not mean that life will surely appear. Before the 19th century many believed that even advanced life forms, such as flies and mice, would form spontaneously given a suitable substrate (such as a piece of rotten meat) and just a little time (days). This idea was finally put to rest by the classic demonstrations of Louis Pasteur. ‘Finally’ as his was a follow-up to the work of Francesco Redi and Lazaro Spallanzani, in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively. The problem remained as to how life first appeared on Earth. Even the most elementary forms of life are enormously complex. A few, non-independent entities,1 such as viruses, have just a thin protein covering. Simple bacteria and all more advanced life forms have sophisticated membranes for separating their internal milieu from the external world, mechanisms for handling energy, complex chemicals that serve as substrates and regulators of the cellular chemical processes (metabolism), tissue construction, and proteins for catalysing biochemical reactions and sometimes for special tissue formation. They also reproduce and have the means for storing data on their construction and operation and for transferring this information from one generation to the next.
Liturgy since Vatican II
Authors: Rowland Tracey
Published: November 2023

On the same day as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas (22 November 1963) the Council fathers adopted the Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium. It was formally promulgated on 4 December 1963. This document was not attempting to break new ground theologically. This had already been done in the encyclical of Pius XII, Mediator Dei, of 1947, which was occasioned by the early twentieth-century movement for liturgical renewal. This movement was particularly strong among the Benedictines in western Europe and is associated with the names of Prosper Guéranger of Solesmes (I805–I875), Odo Casel (I886–1948) of the Maria Laach monastery in Germany, the Munich-based theologian Romano Guardini (I885–1968), and the Austrian Augustinian Pius Parsch (I884–1954). The young Ratzinger was strongly in Xuenced by this movement. One of the first books he read after starting his theological studies in 1946 was Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy, published Easter 19I8. In 2000 Ratzinger published his own work under the same title in which he reiterated Guardini’s central liturgical principles, but in the light of the liturgical problems of the present era. One of the chief concerns of the movement was to overcome the tendency of laity to regard Mass attendance as a form of duty parade. There was a concern that laity were not properly participating in the liturgical action which was taking place but had accepted the standing of spectators.
Conclusion
Authors: Rowland Tracey
Published: November 2023

The university of Chicago theologian David Tracy has made the interesting sociological observation that those who spent their early years trying to rethink Aquinas’ thought in modern terms—Chenu, Congar, Rahner, Lonergan, Schillebeeckx—remained, after Vatican II, open to further fundamental changes in Catholic thought and institutional and religious life. However, many of this generation who had spent their early years striving either to retrieve patristic thought, or among the medieval classics, Bonaventure rather than Aquinas, began after Vatican II to pull back from continuing intellectual and institutional change or, Tracy would argue, intellectual and institutional ‘reform’.
Principles of Evolutionary Theory, Evolutionary Psychology, and Genetics
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

Traditionally, the causes of psychiatric disorders and psychopathological signs and symptoms are conceptualized in terms of developmental disruptions during foetal development, adverse events during infancy, early childhood, or adolescence, and, at the neurobiological level, in terms of malfunctioning of neural circuits,dysbalanced neurotransmission or genetic vulnerability. For example, depression can be seen as the result of adverse events during infancy such as separation from an attachment figure, as a serotonin deficiency syndrome, or be associated with allelic variation of the transporter gene. There is no doubt that research into the behavioural and neurobiological roots of psychological dysfunction has greatly improved our understanding of psychopathology,but from a broader biological perspective, this is only half of the story. A common misconception of psychiatry is to assume that an understanding of an individual❜s early developmental conditions and the neurochemistry or molecular level of brain function is sufficient to understand the pathology of cognitive-emotional-behavioural systems. This is as incorrect as assuming that ontogeny and physiology alone are sufficient to understand the nature of animal behaviour. Nikolaas Tinbergen, one of the great ethologists of the last century, referred to these levels as the proximate or immediate causation of behaviour. The proximate causes of behaviour comprise ontogenetic development and physiological mechanisms.
The human brain: Anatomy, Evolution, and function
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

The human brain is probably the most complex organ that has ever evolved. It is the ‘seat’ of higher cognitive functions and complex emotions, which convey a hitherto unseen behavioural flexibility. The manifold functions the human brain entertains are the result of a complex evolutionary history. The first primitive regulatory systems—receptors and biochemical mechanisms that could propel simple organisms such as bacteria—served to buffer the organism against environmental variation, e.g. in terms of avoiding toxins or approaching nutrients, and this was the principal way of regulating behaviour for a couple of billion years. But these systems were not nervous systems. Neurons (the basis of all nervous systems) are characterized by the presence of receptors, conductors, and effectors. Neurons can be electrically stimulated. The first genuine nervous systems emerged in coelenterata (e.g. jellyfish) more than 500 million years ago (mya) and consisted of small conglomerates of neurons. These early nervous systems subsequently expanded, evolving into complex hierarchically organized organs called brains.
Dementia
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

Dementia is characterized by an insidious and progressive loss of memory, disorientation, cognitive decline in other domains, and affective flattening. It is often accompanied by neuropsychological deficits such as aphasia, apraxia, agnosia, or disturbances in executive functioning including planning, organizing, and sequencing of events in a logical fashion. Behavioural symptoms such as withdrawal, depression, delusions, motor restlessness, wander-ing, or aggression may complicate dementia, particularly in advanced stages of the disorder. These behavioural symptoms may occur, in part, secondary to loss of orientation and memory, with loss of autobiographic memory perhaps being most devastating. A patient, for example, who is impaired in retrieving past social interactions from autobiographical memory or recalling other relevant personal information may be more likely to respond with increasing irritability or anxiety in situations that are actually or perceived unfamiliar. Such a patient may perhaps choose a ‘safety first’ strategy or remain captured in indecisiveness, which could manifest in ruminating thinking and stereotyped behaviour, or displacement activities expressing motivational conflict and ambivalence. In any event, the combination of memory loss with other cognitive disturbances certainly leads to a profound deterioration of social competence. It is also noteworthy that, in addition to the problems the patients have themselves, which they generally deny except in the earliest stages of the disorder (anosognosia), dementia creates a substantial burden on patients’ spouses, children and other carers.
Affective Disorders
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

Affective disorders comprise a group of heterogeneous disorders that are characterized by abnormalities of mood, drive, and cognition. Although this definition would clearly embrace anxiety disorders, they are traditionally separated from the ‘classical’ mood disorders, namely depression and bipolar affective disorder (manic-depressive illness).
Eating Disorders
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

Anorexia nervosa (AN) is characterized by a preoccupation with body weight and shape. Patients restrict their calorie intake to achieve a much lower than average body weight. Body image is usually distorted in a way that, even though the actual body weight may be dangerously low, patients perceive themselves as overweight or have fears of becoming fat.
Psychotherapy
Authors: Brüne Martin
Published: November 2023

Psychotherapy can be defined as the attempt to change cognitions, emotions, and behaviours in humans who suffer from maladaptive consequences of their behaviour or have caused suffering in others, by means of scientifically evaluated psychological techniques and interventions. Central to all kinds of psychotherapy is the assumption that alternative strategies to cope with interpersonal stress or other adverse stimuli can be accomplished throughout the human lifespan through learning and experience, albeit with different likelihood of success depending on age at onset, duration, and severity of the underlying disorder. It is widely acknowledged among psychotherapists that logic in therapeutic discourse alone does not suffice to enable a patient to give up maladaptive strategies; rather, it is essential that the patient feels a difference; perhaps first imaginatively, and later on, as therapy progresses, as part of his or her ‘real life’ experience. Even though it becomes increasingly clear that psychotherapy has the potential to induce long-lasting changes in brain activation, particularly in the most recently evolved cortical midline structures involved in the representation of self and others, and in phylogenetically older brain centres involved in emotion regulation, the fact that any kind of psychotherapy is deeply rooted in the evolved psychology of our species is more implicitly, rather than explicitly, approved by therapists. Mental representation of self and others is, however, at the core of interpersonal and intrapersonal conflict, as well as of conflict resolution. The ability to infer mental states and anticipate future actions of other individuals may not only have been a major driving force in human brain evolution, but also a major source of cognitive distortion causing psychological distress (for further details, see Chapters 2 and 5).
‘What a Fountain of Joys’: Reproduction and Sexual Pleasure
Authors: Toulalan Sarah
Published: November 2023

It seems to be stating the obvious to say that pornography in the twenty-first century is about sex but not about reproduction. In the modern pornographic text (whether visual or literary) sex is represented as being for pleasure in itself, and is divorced completely from its primary purpose, the reproduction of the human race. To modern eyes, pornography and the discussion and representation of reproduction (including issues to do with the care of the woman during pregnancy, childbirth, post-parturition, and lactation) are mutually exclusive, despite having a common subject matter: sex. This was not the case, however, in early modern England, where representations of sex and the sexual body were not yet divorced from their purpose of ‘generation’.1 It is not only that the outcome of the act of intercourse was expected to be pregnancy in a period in which known methods of contraception could not be relied upon always to be successful, but that complete sexual pleasure was understood to require conception to occur.2
‘An Extraordinary Satisfaction’: Imagining Homosexuality
Authors: Toulalan Sarah
Published: November 2023

One of the major narratives of women’s history, and the history of female sexuality, is that the sexual love of one woman for another is something that has been ‘hidden from history’.1 To date, the lesbian in early modern history has been recovered, and reconstructed, through medical and legal discourses or through homoerotic interpretations of the poetry and prose of female writers.2 Seventeenth-century pornographic writing is, however, a surviving textual source in which descriptions and discussion of homosexual sexual intercourse are neither hidden nor disguised. Pornography’s representation of homosexual acts, and especially of lesbian sexual encounters, has generally not been analysed to any great extent to reveal early modern understanding of the meaning of such acts.
‘Unexpected Bed Fellows’: The Comic and the Erotic
Authors: Toulalan Sarah
Published: November 2023

I have argued in earlier chapters that ‘getting the joke’ in past narratives will help the modern historian to ‘get’ an understanding of early modern sexual cultures.1 This chapter will focus specifically on the use of sexual humour in seventeenth-century pornographic texts, and argues that, to understand fully these seventeenth-century narratives, and their representations of the sexual body and sexuality, we must literally get to grips with the joke. Sexual humour is not confined to what we may term the subgenre of pornography of sexual jokes: it permeates the entire corpus of texts, whichever end of the market they were produced for, from Venus in the Cloister and The School of Venus to news-sheets, chapbooks, pamphlets, and ballads.
Electra — Waiting on God
Authors: Meaney Marie Cabaud
Published: November 2023

Dieu traverse l’univers et vient jusqu’à nous. Par-dessus l’infinité de l’espace et du temps, l’amour infiniment plus infini de Dieu vient nous saisir. Il vient à son heure. Nous avons le pouvoir de consentir à l’accueillir ou de refuser. Si nous restons sourds il revient et revient encore comme un mendiant, mais aussi, comme un mendiant, un jour ne revient plus. Si nous consentons, Dieu met en nous une petite graine et s’en va.
Conclusion: Simone Weil— An Apologist of the Supernatural
Authors: Meaney Marie Cabaud
Published: November 2023

We have seen that Weil is not only a strong reader, but that she is also in some sense an apologetic writer. Her concerns were apologetic, especially in the last years of her life. She was aware of the urgency of conversion given the dangers of her times, and felt the obligation to prepare the ground for a (re-)Christianization of society. She tried to show Christianity’s universality by revealing the presence of Christian intuitions in ancient societies. Furthermore, through her interpretations of classical Greek texts she attempted to convey certain Christian ideas, as my analysis has made clear. The question now remains as to how convincing her approach is, and how successful she is as an apologist.
Wittgenstein and Frege ‘s Logical Investigations
Authors: Künne Wolfgang
Published: November 2023

During the three years preceding the First World War, Wittgenstein paid several visits to Frege. They met in Jena, where Frege worked as a decidedly unpopular ordentlicher Honorarprofessor of mathematics, and in Brunshaupten, a small town on the Baltic Sea coast, where Frege used to spend his holidays. It is remarkable that Wittgenstein sought Frege ‘s acquaintance, for at that time Frege was still little known, and the few who knew him tended to regard him, to use Husserl ‘s shamefully ungrateful turn of phrase, as ‘an oddball, shrewd, but not fruitful either as a mathematician or as a philosopher ‘. Who or what had made Wittgenstein aware of Frege ‘s intellectual stature? Nobody knows for sure.
Analytic Truths and Grammatical Propositions
Authors: Schroeder Severin
Published: November 2023

There is a well-known view that analytic statements are true simply in virtue of the meanings of the ingredient words. They are typically used as linguistic explanations. The two sentences have the same use, fulfil the same function in language, and hence have the same meaning. A statement of (1) is true because the word ‘cygnet ‘ does mean a young swan. That is to say, (1) is true in virtue of the meaning of the word ‘cygnet ‘. But as (1) functions in the same way as the corresponding analytic statement (2), the same can be said about (2). This too can be verified simply by looking up the meaning of the word ‘cygnet ‘ in a dictionary. Of course the truth of (1) and (2) is dependent not only on the meaning of the word ‘cygnet ‘, but also on the meanings of their other words. If, for example, the word ‘young ‘ meant: black, the statements would be false. So just like (1), (2) is true in virtue of the meaning of the whole sentence. However, this account of analyticity is widely regarded as untenable owing to a number of objections. I shall consider them in turn.
The Private Language Argument
Authors: Rundle Bede
Published: November 2023

Wittgenstein disowned any concern to advance theories, his avowed aim being to describe rather than to explain or justify. His readers have not always been convinced. Some of his observations on mathematics have seemed counter-intuitive, to both mathematicians and non-mathematicians; certainly not to be mere rearrangements of what we have always known (PI, 109). His understanding of religion has struck many as idiosyncratic, and his account of dreaming appears to be at odds with common belief. In the philosophy of psychology more generally we find observations which, being distinctly verificationist in character, go beyond this limited descriptive task. Thus, when treating of what we might call the ‘laws of evidence ‘ of the mental, he maintains that psychological ascriptions to others are grounded in behaviour, to such a point that evidence for a psychological state is always evidence for a further ‘outer ‘ condition, never for something somehow ‘behind ‘ what we observe. Wittgenstein is not a behaviourist, in that he allows that our mental lives may, on a given occasion, be in no way apparent to others, but there is nothing that may not in principle enter the public domain, which means, in this context, nothing which cannot be manifested in behaviour, verbal or non-verbal. We may well have an opposing picture whereby a person ‘s mental state could be unfathomable to others, that there should be no behaviour that might clinch a hypothesis concerning that state, but without prejudice to the fact that he himself should know all along how things stood. I do not wish to suggest that Wittgenstein is wrong in his analysis, only to query whether his description of what he is doing applies in this instance.
Shem’s ‘Cyclewheeling History’ (185.27– 186.10)
Authors: Fordham Finn
Published: November 2023

Book I Chapter 7, known as ‘Shem the Penman’, describes ‘Shem-Ham-Cain- Egan etc and his penmanship’ according to Joyce. I have chosen a passage from this chapter to start with, because its basic intentions are quite easily inferred: it is a Portrait of the Writer as an Inadequate Human drawn by his brother Shaun. The passage in question here offers us a vision of the writer’s project and, since the reader is led to suspect that Shem is James Joyce and the project is Finnegans Wake, we can trace the evolution of what seems to describe the project of the Wake itself.
Anna Livia’s ‘very first time’ (203.17– 204.05)
Authors: Fordham Finn
Published: November 2023

The first draft of ‘Shem the penman’ ended, as would the final version, with Shem announcing the presence of ‘little oldfashioned mummy’ (194.32 – 34). Joyce had previously drafted the woman’s letter that attempts to defend HCE, and now, after drafting Shem, he developed the signatory of the letter herself: ALP, HCE’s wife and mother of the twins we just encountered. Any naturalistic provenance she had is fused to make her a mythical and environmental figure, the river Liffey that flows through Dublin, ironically dignified and Italianized into Anna Livia Plurabelle. This was a momentous decision, providing a geological or elemental level for the work: HCE, in all his rising grandeur, became a mountain; Shem, a tree; Shaun a stone. Issy (not developed in draft at this point except as Isolde) would become a cloud and the early stages of the water cycle.
Socially intelligent robots: dimensions of human–robot interaction
Authors: Dautenhahn Kerstin
Published: November 2023

Social intelligence in robots has a quite recent history in artificial intelligence and robotics. However, it has become increasingly apparent that social and interactive skills are necessary requirements in many application areas and contexts where robots need to interact and collaborate with other robots or humans. Research on human–robot interaction (HRI) poses many challenges regarding the nature of interactivity and ‘social behaviour’ in robot and humans. The first part of this paper addresses dimensions of HRI, discussing requirements on social skills for robots and introducing the conceptual space of HRI studies. In order to illustrate these concepts, two examples of HRI research are presented.
Introduction
Authors: Dalley Stephanie
Published: November 2023

Three centuries before Artaxerxes I in whose reign the Hebrew story of Esther is set, Assyrian campaigns to Palestine, and the resultant deportations of some 40,810 people from the leading families of Israelite Hebrews to Assyrian cities, set in train a tradition of writings that contributed eventually to the Hebrew story. The aim of this book is to show how and why that biblical book arose from a distant background in the Late Assyrian period and some of the conditions under which it remained popular in northern Iraq in subsequent times.

Evidence comes from a variety of sources and periods, presenting quite a complex interweaving of threads in rather long strands.
Assyrian Words, Phrases, and Customs in the Hebrew Story of Esther
Authors: Dalley Stephanie
Published: November 2023

This chapter includes arguments based on particular words, phrases, customs, and stylistic devices to show connections between Assyria in the seventh century and the Hebrew text of the Esther story. It adds to the evidence of other kinds that has been described in preceding chapters. Readers who do not know some or any of the languages involved should be able to follow the main points, and to appreciate the interest and importance of the examples.

Akkadian is a broad term encompassing all dialects of east Semitic written in Mesopotamia over the very long span of time between about 2,300 bc and the time of Christ.
Links between Seventh-Century Assyria and the Hebrew Story of Esther
Authors: Dalley Stephanie
Published: November 2023

The assemblies of Christian theologians who met at various times in the first century AD to discuss which writings should be included in the Bible, agreed easily upon many of them, but controversy raged around Esther. Many wanted to reject it. Even among Jews the book was controversial for its bloodthirsty heroine who does not observe Jewish customs. Ostensibly it belonged to a genre of court narrative which related how deported Hebrews made good and overcame extraordinary obstacles in the service of foreign kings. To some extent, therefore, such stories were admirable in giving Jews of the diaspora a model for their own behaviour.
From History into Myth: Evolution of a Story
Authors: Dalley Stephanie
Published: November 2023

With a historical core of events in seventh-century Assyria identified at the heart of the Hebrew book of Esther, several stages in the evolution of the story, and the different writings incorporated into it, can be identified or proposed. The main shifts are: from a description of the deeds of mortals to a myth of divine actions; from a myth to a pseudo-historical tale of mortals; from an Assyrian tale to a Hebrew story with a supposed Israelite background. Changes in ostensible historical background are contrasted with the supernatural longevity of the hero and heroine. An analysis of subsequent Aramaic and Greek translations, with an extraordinary number of additions to and subtractions from the Hebrew text, helps to identify some redactions of the story, illustrating some ways in which it was altered to make it relevant to later historical events. Possible involvement of Samaritans in the acceptance of the Hebrew version is suggested from some pieces of indirect evidence.
Mapping the Text
Authors: Jowett John
Published: November 2023

When an editor describes the manufacture, make-up, and mode of circulation of the printed book that presents the play, he or she is writing as a bibliographer, and is likely to attend to the bibliographical codes operating in the typography and layout matters that have been touched on in the earlier discussions in this book of Quarto and Folio Troilus and Cressida and the Folio as a whole. This focus is essential for understanding the book as a physical object and its relation to the world in which it was made, sold, and read. In contrast, for the purposes of establishing the text the editor will focus on the content of the book, its words, and their meaning. The book is now the repository for a text, a vehicle within a semiotic process of complex origin and multiple outcomes. Inked letters are now regarded as the constituents of words as signifiers. The code is linguistic. The material artefact of the book is now examined not as an object in its own right, but as a conveyor of meaning. The editor’s activity is textual criticism.
Versification and Stage Directions
Authors: Jowett John
Published: November 2023

Owing to the troubled interface between play manuscript and print in the early modern period, and to the intermixing of verse and prose within plays, establishing the verse in plays presents challenges to the editor in ways that are not typical of non-dramatic poetry. Distinguishing between verse and prose, and affirming line endings, are as subjective and delicate tasks as any in editing. Like the editorial regulation of stage directions, this area of intervention has a marked effect on the text. More is at issue than the formalities of presentation, for metre is the vital pulse of poetic language. Some practitioners, such as the theatre director Peter Hall, have urged that actors should emphasize the verse line-ends in performance. Even if one rejects this strong view, the layout of verse on the page offers an important guide to rhythms of verse and their modulation with and against the flow of semantically oriented speech.
The first civil war, 1642–1645
Authors: Morrill John
Published: November 2023

In the high summer of 1642 king and parliament were increasingly provoking one another into trial by battle. The Rubicon was finally crossed when Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham on 22 August. He had written on 25 July to the vice-chancellor of Cambridge University inviting the colleges to assist him by the ‘loan’ of their plate. Cromwell was sent down by the Commons to prevent them from doing so. On 10 August, accompanied by perhaps 200 lightly armed countrymen who had volunteered to help him, he blocked the exit road from Cambridge that led to the Great North Road. He went on to intimidate his way into Cambridge Castle and to seize the arms stored there, and halt the movement of silver. At a time when most Englishmen were dithering and waiting upon events, it was a bold and unhesitating act.
Through Thick And Thin
Authors: Kohn Marek
Published: November 2023

The child thanks the shopkeeper and walks out of the door, his loaf under his arm. As he leaves, a man steps across the threshold. He ignores the stock and does not make his business immediately clear, but the shopkeeper has a good idea what it is. The man has a proposition to make. There are threatening characters in the area, he says, who are liable to rob or wreck business premises such as the shop in which he is standing. For a regular payment, in cash, the organization which the man represents will protect the shop against such assaults.
The Goodwill Of The People
Authors: Kohn Marek
Published: November 2023

One morning in March 1985, a group of people assembled outside a small house in the capital city of a small European country, and began planting trees. This was a coup for the musicians’ organization that occupied the house, and a bravura display of bridging social capital, for the party included the novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr and an entourage of diplomats from the American embassy. Vonnegut planted a tree, and a couple of months later John Updike did likewise. But this being communist Czechoslovakia, the government cut down the trees, and several of the organization’s leading figures were jailed the following year.
Leaving The Door Unlocked
Authors: Kohn Marek
Published: November 2023

G’ enerally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?’ Generally speaking, this question is the instrument that social scientists rely upon to measure what they call generalized or social trust. While other questions come and go from the US National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, the trust question is a constant. But what does it mean to the people who answer it? Would they say that most people could be trusted to give them directions, or to mind their bags, or with their cash machine identification numbers? Are they thinking of most people they know, most people they pass in the street, or most people in the world? Curiously, one investigation found that they might actually be thinking of themselves.
Rebuildings
Authors: Orlin Lena Cowen
Published: November 2023

At least since 1577, when William Harrison remarked that ‘every man almost is a builder ’, Tudor England has been known to have experienced a housing revolution. Our own understanding of the nature of that revolution has taken its shape from the near-seamless merge of two different approaches to the topic. First, from the fields of social and economic history, W. G. Hoskins recognized quantitative archaeological evidence for extraordinary improvements in standards of living at the vernacular level. Hoskins documented so much new construction in the period and so many modernization projects that he termed 1570 to 1640 the years of a ‘Great Rebuilding ‘. He described medieval houses transformed by their vertical segmentation, with old, open interiors divided into two stories and with the prolific addition of stairs, chimneys, windows, and fuller fittings and furnishings.
Boundaries
Authors: Orlin Lena Cowen
Published: November 2023

In 1599 Thomas Towne, a Kentish weaver, was presented at the Consistory Court of Canterbury for committing adultery with his maidservant, Elizabeth Preston. Word had come to the court ’s officers that Tobias Robinson was an eyewitness to ‘the act of incontinency ‘. Towne denied the charge and then went one step further, accusing Robinson of slandering him. When called, his neighbors impugned Robinson ’s character and credibility. Robinson was ‘an alehouse haunter and an idle fellow ’, said one; ‘outrageous ’, ‘lewd ’, ‘brutish ’, ‘drunken ’, and ‘unhonest ’, according to another. John Wisdom, a husbandman, testified that he had seen Robinson ‘pull down his breeches and turn up his shirt and show his beastly parts ’ publicly. Wisdom also recalled an incident when Robinson had dropped a ‘horseturd ’ into the breeches of a stranger. Sara Tripple, who worked in a victualling house, said that twice in the past year Robinson had ‘much abused ’ her, grabbing her by ‘the privy parts ’ and ‘most beastly attempting her chastity ‘. He had suggested they play a game of ‘nimbletrick ’, allegedly adding derisively that ‘if he got her with child he would give her a halfpenny worth of pins towards the keeping of it ’. Robinson exposed himself to her, too, at which she ‘burned his breech with a firebrand ’.